Femme Fatale

A few weeks ago one of my friends showed me a post on a blog called gala darling. The post was "Radical Self-Love Bootcamp" (link will be at the end of the post). The next Monday at school I was telling one of my guy friends about it, he's gay, so he's somewhat interested in such things. As I was talking about it, he scoffed a little and looked at my skeptically. "Why on earth does anyone need a self-love bootcamp?" I tried to explain the insecurities women, especially teenage girls, face with the society we live in today; having to live up to countless standards raging from academia to physical appearance to social life, it's easy to get down on yourself. But he just couldn't get it. He said something along the lines of "If y'all just stayed in the kitchen then you wouldn't have to worry about any of that stuff." Ha ha. I understood that he was joking around but he still didn't quite understand how someone could get to the point of such depression and insecurity that they really would need something like this Self-Love Bootcamp. I then remembered another time, I was auditioning for my school's One Act Competition play. The show we were doing was The Love of the Nightingale by Timberlake Wertenbaker, which is a rewrite of the Greek tragedy about Philomele and her big sister Procne. In a nutshell, Procne marries Tereus and after five years of living far from her family, she sends Tereus to go and fetch Philomele. Well, on the boat ride back Philomele falls in love with the ship's captain while Tereus is busy falling in love with her. He tells her this and she is of course repulsed by the idea of sleeping with her brother in law, so, understandably, he rapes her! Then, in a really great monologue, she speaks about how she will tell everyone, all of his people,  about how disgusting and vile and horrid he is. So, naturally, he cuts out her tongue. The story goes on and Procne and Philomele get their revenge but overall it's a very depressing, although still extremely powerful, show. (btw, I got cast as Philomele. nbd :] )  Anyway, I was walking down the hallway with two of my friends, a guy and a girl, and I was going over my monologue for the audition that afternoon. The monologue was slightly feminist, due to the material of the show. My guy friend started complaining in the middle of my monologue, about how women today are constantly complaining about society and men when really they're a lot better off than the women who came before them blah blah blah. Now, I would definitely agree that we have more rights than our ancestors and that we are respected a bit more on the surface. But the fact that women still make something like 77 cents to a man's dollar and that rape victims are often blamed for putting themselves in that position shows that we still have a long way to go to equality. Why can't men see this? Why do they scoff when women talk about struggling to love themselves in a society that is constantly telling them they're too fat, too ugly or just not good enough? And why do they get angry when a girl gets a little bit feminist? I don't mean no-shaving, man-hating, cat-obsessed feminism, it should be about equality not squashing out the male side of our race. But just a pithy comment or two on how men are regarded as higher in many aspects of society. Maybe a lot of it is that I live in Texas, and an extremely conservative part of Texas too, but it seems to me that feminism is constantly being put down or just dismissed as being silly women trying to cause a fuss before going home to make their husbands some meatloaf. I would love your thoughts on the matter. That is, if anyone is even reading this. Is anyone out there? ...Anyone?

xxo taylor

ps. here's the link to the self-love bootcamp! :]

http://galadarling.com/article/radical-self-love-bootcamp-is-live