How Feminine Am I?
If I wasn't so busy writing several things I've promised out -- Gibson's Passion and Its Relationship to Medieval Affective Piety! Traveling Professional Players in the Medieval Fens! The Incalculable Importance of Reconstructed Performance to the Critical History of Medieval Drama! -- I'd take a new project on, but I can't, so I want somebody else to do it, and then tell me about it.
Fellow Pittsblogger Rachel discovered, in some box over at her folks' house, a Horrifying Pamphlet used in her high school home ec course, in an attempt to indoctrinate her into Proper Feminine Behavior (which, I gather, did not take).
So, go on over and peruse the thing, and be sure not to miss -- scroll down -- the final page, which asks the important question, "How Feminine Am I?"
Now, there are MANY things to say about this pamphlet. Here are the two I want to mention.
1) Rachel was handed this bit of terror in 1992. 1992! No, really! 1992! That was, I believe, yesterday.
2) Notice, in the list of non-feminine behaviors on the aforesaid page, "How Feminine Am I?" that, though there is only one model of feminine behavior (nicely identified in the drawing on the right; apparently it involves getting kitted out for a square dance), there are three ways in which a girl can become Non-Feminine, two of which contradict each other. She can become antisocial (are you domineering? explosive? do you hold grudges?), she can become what the pamphlet calls "mannish" (are you wearing pants? smoking? cutting your hair short?), or she can become a slut (got too much makeup? cut your skirts too short?). Now, I'm pretty sure that while it's possible to be antisocial and EITHER "mannish" or the school slut, it's going to be really difficult to manage both of those last at once, at least in the terms that the pamphlet conceives of them. It's hard to dress mannishly while you're trying to pull your skirt down over your butt. Also, I note that though the writers are concerned with high school girls wearing their skirts too short, they're MUCH more concerned with high school girls cutting their hair off and wearing jeans, which I know because the drawing of the "non-feminine" girl, q.v. on the left of the page, makes that Very Clear. She is clearly meant to be She Whom You Should Not Become.
Also! Now that I notice it -- will somebody explain to me how it is that the opposite of "soft, clean hair" is a "mannish, short hairdo"? These things are not opposites! There's a logic underlying this pamphlet, and especially this list of cautionary opposites, but it's obscure and multilayered.
Anyway. SOMEBODY write on this pamphlet, please, cause I've got to deal with that Mel Gibson and his version of a Franciscan meditation on the death of Jesus. And I have to stop reading this pamphlet, anyway, because it's beginning to give me flashbacks.
Fellow Pittsblogger Rachel discovered, in some box over at her folks' house, a Horrifying Pamphlet used in her high school home ec course, in an attempt to indoctrinate her into Proper Feminine Behavior (which, I gather, did not take).
So, go on over and peruse the thing, and be sure not to miss -- scroll down -- the final page, which asks the important question, "How Feminine Am I?"
Now, there are MANY things to say about this pamphlet. Here are the two I want to mention.
1) Rachel was handed this bit of terror in 1992. 1992! No, really! 1992! That was, I believe, yesterday.
2) Notice, in the list of non-feminine behaviors on the aforesaid page, "How Feminine Am I?" that, though there is only one model of feminine behavior (nicely identified in the drawing on the right; apparently it involves getting kitted out for a square dance), there are three ways in which a girl can become Non-Feminine, two of which contradict each other. She can become antisocial (are you domineering? explosive? do you hold grudges?), she can become what the pamphlet calls "mannish" (are you wearing pants? smoking? cutting your hair short?), or she can become a slut (got too much makeup? cut your skirts too short?). Now, I'm pretty sure that while it's possible to be antisocial and EITHER "mannish" or the school slut, it's going to be really difficult to manage both of those last at once, at least in the terms that the pamphlet conceives of them. It's hard to dress mannishly while you're trying to pull your skirt down over your butt. Also, I note that though the writers are concerned with high school girls wearing their skirts too short, they're MUCH more concerned with high school girls cutting their hair off and wearing jeans, which I know because the drawing of the "non-feminine" girl, q.v. on the left of the page, makes that Very Clear. She is clearly meant to be She Whom You Should Not Become.
Also! Now that I notice it -- will somebody explain to me how it is that the opposite of "soft, clean hair" is a "mannish, short hairdo"? These things are not opposites! There's a logic underlying this pamphlet, and especially this list of cautionary opposites, but it's obscure and multilayered.
Anyway. SOMEBODY write on this pamphlet, please, cause I've got to deal with that Mel Gibson and his version of a Franciscan meditation on the death of Jesus. And I have to stop reading this pamphlet, anyway, because it's beginning to give me flashbacks.
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