We were talking the other day about an especially popular Manosphere fairy tale — you know, the one in which evil women in their “prime” years in their twenties have lots of sex with charming assholes (and none with hard-working decent nice guys), only to panic when they hit the age of thirty or so and suddenly become ugly monsters.
Well, apparently the evil women have come up with a technical solution to that whole “getting old and ugly” problem. I have uncovered secret evidence in the form of a pamphlet or leaflet that the women of the world evidently circulate amongst themselves.
Very clever of these sneaky women to call this magical age-defying balm “Toilet Soap,” to make us men think it’s a product only used for cleaning toilets, which is something women apparently do on a regular basis. But no, they put this so-called “Toilet Soap” on their faces!
I have been unable to find any of this “Lux Toilet Soap” at the local grocery store. So I’ve been trying out other toilet cleaners to see if they have the same age-retarding effects. So far I have had little luck. The Clorox Toilet Wand is harsh and awkward to use. Lime-A-Way Toilet Bowl Cleaner gave me a rash. The less said about my experience with the Scrubbing Bubbles Toilet Cleaning Gel, the better. I have not yet tried Lysol’s Power Toilet Bowl Cleaner, as I am pretty sure Lysol is intended only for vaginas.
Also, fellas, I don’t want to alarm you, but I have been doing reasearch on yet another way women try to trick us into thinking that they’re hotter than they really are. It’s apparently called “make-up.” I will fill you in on the details as I learn more about it.
@tomBcat
O_o Holy hell that school sounds annoying.
@historophilia
🙁 on that boy. No one gave me shit about mine, and I still felt selfconcious about it. I didn’t remove it though, because I wasn’t sure how to, I brought it up once or twice though. But I’m not removing mine cuz I’m too lazy and I’ve grown attached to it. XD And I’m kinda dialing down on body hair removing atm. If I follow through with stopping shaving my lower legs (got too lazy for the upper ones years ago) I’ll only be shaving my pits. /tmi?
Wow, that got rambly, but for some reason some beauty things seem more annoying to me than others. I like putting on make up but viewed shaving as a ‘necessary evil’ (obviously it wasn’t necessary, but I did start in junior high because everyone else was doing it and I was feeling self conscious about it.) /rambling.
Ah sorry, my brain is dead. I can’t understand what that means.
hangs head in shame,too
Wow, this thread got very fast all of a sudden
@Marie
It makes complete sense. It’s nice to learn how to move in a skirt if that’s something you are interested in, might make you feel more comfortable. It’s something different to be told like it is a must-know for everyone, like there is something wrong with not doing ‘like a lady’.
Almost forgot that, but you and Fade are sisters, right?
@Historophilia
of course it’s nice to know how to keep the skin healthy. There’s just always this bitter taste that goes with it.
It’s my own contradictions. I like my skin smooth, but I also don’t want to conform to beauty standards, makes me feel like I feed the stereotypes. I had a phase where I did everything to look as ugly as I could, just because fuck them.
Besides, being a woman should be whatever a woman wants it to be. I don’t think much about my own gender, but when these moments come where I just feel very womanly and someone tells me that what I do or look like is in their mind something else, that’s just stupid.
They mean it as a compliment. Like ‘You’re not a real woman because you are like a male buddy’ – no. Just no. My image of a lady always was one of a strong woman, someone with dignity when others want to embarrass her, but that’s my image and not one I should preach to others.
Stupid stereotypes ruining fun things.
:S Wow, that’s creepy of that principal. And “salacious?” Of all words?
I wear skirts (kilts are skirts; sorry dudes what get all offended. They aren’t dresses, but they are skirts). It changes a bit of how I sit.
But I don’t obsess about it. Someone who really wants to take a look is going to try, and maybe they succeed, but I refuse to make my life revolve around whether or not someone can look up my skirt.
Because, by and large, that’s on them.
The funny thing is, pants for men weren’t even the norm until the spread of influence from the Persian empire.
@Aaliyah
salacious is the best translation I could find. But basically meaning is was a sexual way of sitting.
@tomBcat
Yeah, me and Fade are sisters 🙂
@pecunium
YES. QFT.
Wait… You are in a dojo which has gender different seiza? That’s cracked. Seiza is a position from which one moves. Closing the posture makes it harder. It’s also not traditional (women were trained to use naginata and the postures they were trained for were basically seiza).
Aikido sits seiza. Same for everyone. Because there are some things which might cause clothing to become strained across the body (in particular the rump), some dojos have a tradition of women wearing hakama from the beginning (others, the one’s I have been in only give the privilege of hakama to more advanced students, either just before, or at dan). Where it’s done it has an odd effect (and one I don’t like; and which I am sure is why the dojos I’ve been in have not done it) of making the very new women seem more skilled (which isn’t good for them) and the not-quite dan women seem a bit less skilled (which isn’t good for them).
I really need to get back to the mat.
That’s what I don’t get about many of the religious groups around me (living in a reddish state). There’s nothing inherently feminine about skirts and nothing inerently masculine about trousers.
@Fade, sorry of that didn’t make sense.
Basically what I was saying is that regardless of what genitals you have, martial arts gear won’t show anything.
Women sitting in seiza or doing sonkyo differently than men makes zero difference. No-one is seeing anything in a hakama (the long loose pleated trousers that you wear for kendo).
“@Aaliyah
salacious is the best translation I could find. But basically meaning is was a sexual way of sitting.”
Ah. I see. Well I wouldn’t be surprised if an old-school principal was so creepy as to use that particular word for a 10-year-old girl.
@Historophiliaj
Okay, now I understand you. XD
I’m hoping we stop in a couple years. We might, considering the women used to have to bow more formally (where your hands come together when you bow as opposed to hands at your sides), but they took that out a couple years ago. So… *shrug*
@Aaliyah(getting your name right is a challenge every time 🙂 )
She wasn’t ten, she was 15, but it doesn’t matter, she slouched a bit, just like the boys, but as a girl it was suddenly something sexual because her legs were open.
I’m not sure, maybe I used the wrong words for school and stuff, we have a different system and I always found it confusing. It’s more or less equivalent to high school, I guess?
We go to one school for 4 years, then when we are about ten we get divided in three categories, depending on our grades and what the parents want. Only from one(Gymnasium) of them you can get to a university, though there is some second-chance education that can get you in, but it’s pretty hard, depending where you start.
Not sure why I’m telling this, maybe it explains why I find it a little confusing.
There’s a lot more different kind of schools, but they work on a different system.
*or rather they are a little outside the system.*
Regarding eyebrows, I’ve always had naturally thin brows, never plucked them. Once though I shaved them off. There was this girl frequenting the same clubs as me, and she had no eyebrow hairs, just painted-on brows that looked really dramatic and cool. I wanted to imitate her brows, so I shaved mine off and painted similarly dramatic shapes with eye-liner. However, soon after I realized that with shaved-off brows you look like an overgrown fetus or an alien without make-up, so you gotta use it everyday, not just when you feel like it. Next time I met this girl I asked how fast brows grow. She said she didn’t know since she DIDN’T shave hers; it’s just that she’d been plucking them too hard when she was younger and now they refused to grow back. So I just had to wait… turns out it takes a month for shaved-off brows to grow back. Or at least they did for me.
Historophilia:
While shoes can aggravate bunions, they don’t really cause them, it’s more of a genetic thing. I have them, but thankfully they don’t hurt. My mom does and had surgery twice, so she was always hypervigilant about proper footwear when I was growing up.
LOL to her thing on short dudes in the workplace. Yeah, some guys have the Napoleon complex, but most are chill.
Fade: I’m hoping we stop in a couple years. We might, considering the women used to have to bow more formally (where your hands come together when you bow as opposed to hands at your sides), but they took that out a couple years ago. So… *shrug*
Wow…. I think I’m glad I started in a feminist dojo, in a more inclusive art (the dojo I started in was founded by a woman who wasn’t happy with the sort of latent sexism in Aikido in the late 60s)
The thing is, how one moves out of seiza matters; at least in Kendo/Iado/Akido. All bow the same, more or less, and when we open a training session the bows are all the same (in seiza, with a diamond pattern of hands under the forehead, sitting ; so one is cushioned if attacked while bowing).
The idea of different behaviors by gender just seems odd, to the point of wrong.
Acting like a lady is a class distinction signal. It goes back to the sumptuary laws that restricted what different classes of people could wear to indicate to others how they must be or should be treated. Who bows to whom and who takes precedence over whom. Who you can rape with impunity and who you cannot. Misjudging the class of another person is a standard element in stories. Faking your status by dressing above your class is another. (Princess and the pea, eh)
So acting like a lady in public becomes all the things you have to do in order to avoid being set upon by ruffians. It doesn’t work, but they teach it to us generation after generation anyway.
@Pecunium.
yeah, that is my least favorite thing about the dojo.
I remember one of our senseis was talking about an older guy in the same style, and how he didn’t let women train in the dojo at all because “you have to wear the same uniform, and if women wore bras it would not be the same uniform, and if they didn’t wear bras they would be distracting”. He said it in a like “thank god we’re different now, way”, but all I can think was “wait… this is a guy everyone acts like we’re supposed to respect?”
I mean, I get you can still respect someone’s abilities while thinking their policies are abhorrent, but when I hear if I tried to start karate in this style thirty years earlier I wouldn’t have been allowed, I just get mad.
I would secretly like to be able to find a more feminist friendly dojo. The one you described sounds like a dream. the only thing is I’ve been going to this one since I was eleven (I didn’t really get what was problematic back then) and everyone I know is here.
I just read pretty much the entire AMA that Erin Pizzey did over on Reddit. (I will never get that 45 minutes back — why did I do that?) Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that she believes that men are just better than women at science and women just naturally prefer to take care of children, (TRIGGER WARNING) nearly all women want to be “taken” by a man sexually, she hopes that feminism can be classed as a hate movement so that they can force feminists out of jobs in government and education, etc., and that she really doesn’t know who shot her dog. (MRAs constantly claim that feminists shot her dog.)
All of those comments got a significant number of upvotes.
@Cloudiah
that’s disgusting. I hate it when people do that, because they almost always add “and the people who are saying they don’t want this WANT IT BUT JUST WON’T ADMIT IT”
@cloudiah
Holy hell she sounds like a terrible person. May she step on all the legos.
@Hellkell, that’s interesting to know, in which case I’ll keep a close eye on my feet in case I’ve inherited the tendency.
About dojo’s, I started with my University club (we don’t have a Sensei every session, we have to go off campus sessions at another dojo once a week) and I’m lucky in that it’s genuinely one of the most Feminist/Feminist friendly spaces I’ve ever encountered.
And this being a group of mostly guys. I think it’s partly because two of the most senior Kendoka are self-declared Feminists (the good type of male Feminist as well) and they’ve had a strong influence on the atmosphere of the club.
Though with the atmosphere of other Dojos I’ve visited and other Kendoka I’ve met I wonder if it’s something more than that.
Outside of Japan and Korea, the number of people who practice Kendo is so small that men and women train and even compete against each other at lower levels (University taikai’s for instance). So you just can’t do kendo if you lack respect for women and don’t see them as worthy opponents and training partners and you also have to be willing to be taught by them as there are many women who are Sensei’s.
So I think it either attracts a certain kind of people (ie. not sexists) or whittles out the mysoginists at an early stage.
From women I know who do other martial arts like Judo it is a common complaint that men will refuse to fight and train with them. Within those larger, more popular martial arts, they can continue as there are enough people that they can solely fight men and the competitions are divided by gender.
But in kendo if you refused to fight and train with women you’d be stuffed, you simply couldn’t practice it or compete.