Gingembre

When I was eight or nine, my science teacher, whom I idolized, looked with fondness at my copper locks, saying "Habitual, never dye your hair."  This is a hell of a trip to put on a prepubescent girl.  She herself was rocking a salt-and-pepper ponytail that had never seen dye, so I can't say she wasn't practicing what she preached.  Nevertheless, when the onset of adult hormones darkened and dulled my hair a few years later, I started looking for something that would give me that feeling I had when my science teacher looked at me.

What grows out of my head today is a fairly deep greenish-brown with gold and copper highlights.  It's pretty fine in texture, with a smirk-worthy Veronica Lake wave.  Mostly I do nothing with it, not even putting it up unless I feel like it's going to stick to my face or get caught in a thresher or something.  Until quite recently, I was ruthless about burning it with peroxide and getting it all chopped off every month.  I believed it was my enemy. 

It's not difficult to have the wrong kind of hair; there are so many of them.  In my case, I had Nerd Hair.  This style is marked by a disinterest in whatever bullshit products people are currently using on their hair.  Nerd hair can be easily obtained by a scrupulous daily washing with an over-drying shampoo, inattention to dandruff, and a reluctance ever to cut the hair, leading to a gentle taper at the ends.  Mine was limp, yet frizzy, like an ironed cloud. 

The only thing that prevents me from having nerd hair now (debatable!) is henna.  Mashing a paste of this leaf and some acid into my scalp every six months or so gives me the hair I always imagined I had before I looked in the mirror.  I wouldn't be growing it out to this rather absurd length without henna.

My hair now is nice and shiny and silken to the touch, but I'll be damned if I can run my fingers through it.  The henna gives it "body", which as far as I can tell means "a high frictional coefficient". 

I have no pretensions about appearing "natural" (though I do on occasion like to have no roots).  I suppose I have some bias toward a plant-based rather than chemical dye, or a small plucky company over a big evil conglomerate, but what mainly keeps me on the henna is that it is permanent, more than any "permanent" dye or treatment I've heard of.  The color I have on the third day is the color I have on the 300th day. 

So that's why henna, but I feel the more important question is: why red?  When hair color is a choice, it's as good a psychological test as any other costly signal.  If I can simplify the rather complicated sexual politics of women's hair color for a moment here, I'll give you an answer.  Of course the follicles that grow out of your head have no intention, but moving from their color to another (or sticking at a time when everyone else is dyeing) can carry these meanings.

To go blonde is to create yourself as a sexual object: the way you look to a partner will be most important to you when you fuck.  To go brunette is to conceal your sexuality from the public eye, to make yourself a "serious" woman instead of a sexual one.  But to go red is to make yourself a sexual subject, and foreground your own desire.  Like blush, like lipstick, like anger, you're wearing that rush of blood outside for all to see. 

Often I find myself wishing there were subject/red versions of other female signifiers--say, a ginger size of tits.  Oh, also I wish applying henna to long hair by my lonesome wasn't such a bastard--I managed to rip out a whole bunch of hair this time. 

 The red brows, lips and dolly cheeks of this post were inspired by Johanna Öst.

Acnepostin'

I'll stop after this, I just had to document this one.  It's a doozy.

Okay, so they're always a bit more impressive in my imagination. 

It's always difficult not to bust their delicate skin, especially when vigorously scrubbing my face. 

Now that I'm a woman people keep trying to impregnate me with Satan's baby

Wearing sunscreen causes me to break out.

And who are we when we have a big angry forehead zit?  That's right: the Lady Amalthea.

The Last Unicorn is, among other things, a film about how spending time in a woman's body makes you weak and confused and death-prone, but highly lovable.  Unlike the approximately infinite number of other narratives where a strong, independent virgin falls in love and suddenly gets weak ankles (e.g. Rocky, Susan from the Narnia books), Amalthea gets to keep her own body and strength and sense of self, but loses her love.  While I would of course prefer a film where you can have sex without destroying your personality, this one has Christopher Lee, and is therefore recommended.

This hasn't been a good day for Lir.

On The Perils Of Representation

 I borrowed this PSA poster--yes, let's say borrowed, I am definitely one day going to return to that university and replace that poster--from a bathroom stall at a university, because I think it is a poetic bit of propaganda.  It allows for a fair depth of deconstruction, which I like in an image.  Before reading on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the ideas of literary and film criticism, particularly the concept of a "reading" of a text.  I don't want to have to delete a bunch of comments going "you're wrong because that's not what the creators meant" like I did when I said Disney's The Little Mermaid was about interracial relationships. 

So: what are our elements?  Black hand, money, white hand, disease.  I say that this will extend to metaphors about black people, white people, commerce, and all varieties of malady.  So: White imperialists come to black nations with the promise of enriching commerce, but instead blight them with poverty and disease.  Or a corruption affects all commerce, poisoning black and white alike.  Or the green bugs are not pathologies, but the "germ" of new life, created by the flow of currency.  Or money is germy.  Or black people are germy.  Note that this last (and maybe the first if we're being picky) is racist.  Indeed, there are several racist readings of the text of this image, even without getting into the positioning with respect to the viewer and who is accepting what and so on. 

Let us consider two hypothetical images like this, one with two black hands, and one with two white hands.  Because race, like most human categories, has a marked and an unmarked (or default) status, only one will appear to the casual observer (particularly a casual observer from a default category) to be dealing directly with race.  This problem is a Known Issue with race.  What are some of the proposed solutions (i.e. ways to avoid being called racist while portraying non-whites in media) and what are the possible drawbacks to each one?

• Always ignore race
Maybe a noble thought, but the problem is that people can't actually do this.  Largely it boils down to ignoring the fact that everyone in your portrayal is white due to the consequences of some unstated assumptions.

• Harp on race constantly
Annoying and exhausting for anti-racists, racists, and people who feel that not much caring puts them more in the former group than the latter.  Leads to films like Crash. 

 • Be black
Wait, hear me out.  In media contexts, people from marginalized groups tend to be granted more latitude to express opinions only on the matter of their specific group's relation to the mainstream, on the grounds that people from marked categories are likelier to be expert on these subjects than people from default categories.   More comprehensibly, on tv, black people get to talk shit about black and white people and no one except racists or academics or racist academics will really take exception.  Of course, there is a firmly-established political culture dedicated to catering to upset racists, so this is still a bit dicey.  Other possible drawbacks: society won't just let you become black for some bullshit reason.  And, I don't know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there are disadvantages to being black in America that outweigh the notional pleasure of knowing that you could still potentially be on tv if you use the word "nigger" extensively. 

 • Tokenism/Diversity Checklist casting
Regardless of their level of racial savvy, pretty much everyone can tell if you're doing this.  The impulses that drive this style of character creation (a bid for universal appeal) usually also preclude fully humanizing any characters, and because the desire to have "one of each kind" of cast member need not spring from any actual political awareness, it's easy for it to be accompanied by a bunch of racial stereotypes or for Ma-Ti to not really have any good powers. 

 • Use only white people
Don't...don't actually do this, as a strategy or otherwise.  Besides being patently inhumane, people do eventually notice, and then you either have to justify it (questionable) or change (difficult).   

 • Stop depicting humans
This can backfire pretty easily.  Certain suites of characteristics you might wish to portray with a non-human character, George Lucas, are already associated with poisonous racial stereotypes and whether or not you meant them that way everyone will assume the worst.  Also, people generally need to be involved at some stage, whether in voice, character design, general aesthetic, writing, or premise, and any of these people can have unexamined racial biases or ignorance that make their way into the final product. 

 • Alien casting method
Maybe you know the story, but the scriptwriters for Alien supposedly specified that all the characters were "unisex", and encouraged the casting of actors of whatever gender to play any of them, except Ripley, who was definitely going to be a dude.  While a favored technique of mine, this can only work in situations where race and gender are genuinely interchangeable, and as such is limited in its capacity to tell stories in which these are meaningful dynamics. 

 • God, this is tricky.  What would Solomon do?  

 Oh goddamit it Solomon.

Today in unintended reactions to pharmacy promotional material

Keep your beak out of my birth control pills, Denny, you creepy leering ghoul.

Third Wave Feminism

In Defense of MSG

I'm a vegetarian and a semi-avid cook, and I like MSG.  Not only do I like its meaty, savory taste in food, but I like it as a metaphor for how we deal with different kinds of social problems. 

MSG, or monosodium glutamate, or hydrolysed yeast protein, or yeast extract powder, or malt extract, or Parmesan, or Bragg's Liquid Aminos, is a food additive, one of a group of substances added to food to make it more in line with qualities we prize in foods.  There are too many food additives to count, with varying levels of harmfulness, but perhaps the most harmful of these is salt.  What I find reading people's offhand conversations--I read a lot of people's offhand conversations--on food forums and the like, is that salt is vaguely understood to be bad, but unless a doctor has directly told someone that they will die it is not really thought of as a harmful component of food so much as a basic taste.  MSG, by contrast, is widely understood to be Bad News if it occurs in a dish or on a label, and is resolutely to be avoided. 

Information on reducing your salt intake can be found online at sites like the Mayo Clinic, the American Heart Association, and the Center For Science In The Public Interest.  Information on reducing your MSG intake can be found online at sites like MSGTruth.org, Curezone, Holisticmed, and TruthInLabeling.org.  I advocate for the removal of neither sodium nor MSG from the diet, but for the monitoring and reasonable intake of each.  What interests me is the different reputation of each of these substances.  You don't see Alton Brown or Heston Blumenthal suggesting you glutamine your thanksgiving/christmas turkey, for example. 

MSG occurs as free glutamates in most savory foods as well as grapes and tomatoes, but it is very much viewed as a foreign menace which reached our shores from sinister Asia and immediately started killing people who ate at Chinese restaurants.  It is unusual among food additives for being quite heavily studied, due to a late-70s hysteria over Chinese food.  Glutamate is an amino acid and neurotransmitter which can, if overloaded into the brain, cause nerve death.  However, we do have this whole blood-brain barrier thing going specifically to prevent this type of death.  Consumption of MSG alone can briefly cause headaches, increased heart rate, and flushed skin in some people, but in double-blind studies taken with food, this effect can't be replicated either.  A recent study shows a small but positive correlation between heavy MSG use (over 150 mg per day) and overweight in Chinese housewives, with heavy MSG users consuming more calories overall and a greater proportion of their calories from animal sources.  Incidentally, MSG is a salt compound, and all of these results--neurotoxicity, headache, rapid heartbeat and dizziness, obesity--have been demonstrated much more reliably in studies linking them to salt.

Study upon study links high salt consumption to high blood pressure, contributing to heart disease and stroke, the primary killers of people.  Salt is additionally dangerous because we all need a little of it to survive--it's an essential electrolyte that helps us keep our nerves conductive.  Salt was thin on the ground when we were evolving, and consequently we have such a taste for it that we will gorge ourselves on salty foods when the opportunity presents itself. It is a taste sensation, to be sure, but the reason it is in most processed food is its qualities as a preservative (think of salt pork, pickles, preserved lemons, or kippers), as well as its use to make food with terrible ingredients taste less shitty. 

Salt is something of an intractable social ill because it is bound up with so many other aspects of our food system.  It's necessary for pre-prepared food to be well-preserved because it travels long distances and often sits for long periods on shelves or in refrigerators.  And it's necessary for food to be well-seasoned because profitability demands that food be made from the cheapest possible ingredients, which can be awful.  Dramatically decreasing salt would create problems which would necessitate a radical reshuffling of the organization and priorities of prepared food producers, and no one ever wants to do that. 
MSG also solves problems for processed food producers, by allowing them to create delicious, moreish snacks out of sawdust and paint chips.  No recommended daily intake has been established, and so no quantities must be shown on labels.  Although the additive is widely reviled, it occurs in enough forms that it can be swapped for a synonym with ease--for example, the chicken broth in my mother's cabinet proclaims "No MSG * " with the addendum " * except for that which occurs naturally in autolysed yeast extract".  A can of chicken broth has 80% of the recommended daily allowance of sodium, and the reduced-sodium version has 50%. 

So to recap, what we have here is two substances, both enjoyable, and both with some potential harm.  One of them is more harmful, and is overused by everybody despite dire warnings by health officials, because it undergirds the basic fabric of our way of life.  The other is less harmful, is feared all out of proportion with its objective health effects, has a reputation as dangerous substance due in part to its early association with shifty foreigners, and has been driven into hiding despite the fact that almost everyone uses it at some point during their lives.

That's why I like MSG.

every pair of shoes in the place

Fucking...SHOES.  Look, I like shoes, I do.  But the amount of shoes I have is unconscionable.  I do not like shoes to this extent.  Indeed, I never wear most of these shoes, due to bad fit (I order online) or because I dislike the style.  Note that the 56 pairs of shoes depicted here do not represent my entire shoe collection; another 15 or so pairs (ones I like better) are in my partner's house. 

I've seen some bloggers--lightweights--simply take pictures of all their shoes lined up against a wall, and then say "lol, I have a shoe problem".  How these wretches hope to solve their problems without rigorous psychological analysis, examining the history of each shoe, its problems, and the emotional response it creates, is beyond me. 

Black Lipliner

God, the past, amiright?  What an awful time for fashion.  People all walking around, wearing things we now know are terrible, leavened with only a few things we now know are perennial classics--and they didn't seem to know the difference!  It was an era without debate, in which people (far more innocent and credulous than the sophisticates of today) uncritically swallowed ridiculous new trends.   And how readily they embraced quaint beauty technology, like sugaring, or dry shampoo, or sonic face brushes, or haircuts!  In our wisdom, we can look back on them and shake our heads, and smile.

But oh, the past.  What elegance!  Back then, people knew how to dress.  Effortless style was everywhere--just look at the old pictures!  We didn't have this treadmill culture of beauty products and endlessly rotating fashions, but instead everything stayed the same year to year, and everyone was comfortable, knowing just how to put themselves forward.  People took better care of themselves, too--without all this stress, they could just focus on keeping healthy and happy, and that was always in style!  It all added up to a genuine, classic look that made you proud to be just who you were. 

Ally Sheedy Makes Over Molly Ringwald

Okay, I admit it--besides just trying to put hair in my face, this look is an attempt at Noomi Rapace's dyke-punk style from Män Som Hatar Kvinnor.  Rapace is a dead ringer for Gillian Anderson.  The movie...well.  Suffice to say I have mixed feelings.  It's well-styled and well-constructed, and people seem to think it's feminist in some way.  I guess they mean Rapace's haircut, because otherwise I don't see how it's much more feminist than, say, Taken.

if they say I never loved you / you know they are a liar

I'm quite petty, and I love convincing people who think intelligence is important that I'm smarter than they are.  From this, you might assume that I would be a big grammar nazi, perpetrating systematic, IBM-assisted genocide on unclean participles.  I find I can derive more immediate pleasure and greater satisfaction, however, from using my love of intellectually dominating towards rocking the pillars of faith that buttress grammar snobs' shaky feelings of superiority.  This is easy.  Here's your guide. 

Step 1:
Wait for the grammar snob to overhear something that compels him or her to make a meaningless correction.  You won't be waiting long.  They're on hair triggers. 

Step 2:
"Actually"
Beginning with this lets people know that they have been laboring under a misapprehension.  Keep your voice conversational, as though you were telling them an interesting thing you heard about naked mole rats rather than bringing them up short for doing something annoying. 

Strep 3:
Just say that the point they're correcting is perfectly acceptable English, "attested" (I enjoy using this word, as it suggests data) since Shakespeare.  This is almost always true; Shakespeare was quite free and loose with his words, famously.  If the person is more concerned about being correct in the future than being correct in this instance, this will often defuse them.  You'll have to repeat this tactic every time it comes up, though. 

Step 4:
If the amateur grammarian refuses to accept your authority on this matter simply because you can speak in an authoritative tone, escalate your rhetoric while retaining the same flat, disinterested air.  You know, because you are exceptionally well-read on matters of linguistics, that languages exist in a state of flux, and efforts to preserve them in a fixed state are not merely doomed, but laughably wrongheaded.  Ask them if they understood the sentence in which the grammatical "error" occured, and what the problem is if it communicated clearly to them. 

Step 5:
If your interlocutor still won't relent--and they probably won't, as by this point they have invested quite a bit of their self-worth into the conversation--use shame.  It is pretty trivial to construct an argument concerning class, race, the prestige of different regional speech patterns, access to education, and shibboleths, and so I leave it as an excercise to the reader.  Let them know that by correcting others, they are not educating them, but merely perpetuating an injustice based on the circumstances of their birth and early childhood.  Wither them.  If they are liberal, this should plunge them into a vertiginous shame spiral.  If they are conservative, they are a terrible person.

Step 6:
Repeat as desired, or until you no longer have friends who will talk to you about words.

Did you know they have July 4th in England, too?

I'm sorry, it's simply a ridiculous notion--independence.  It's practically Randian.  Imagine a man who has systematically cut himself off from other men, made himself self-sufficient and self-contained.  Ignore entirely the man's history of dependence on mother, medicine, family, food system, schools, transportation infrastructure, societal stability, all technology and recorded knowledge that came before--now the man is alone, by his own choice, feeding himself and living for himself.  Would this man be characterized, in any narrative, as healthy?  As admirable?  What use is he, except as a psychological curiosity?  What about him is still human? 

I think the definition familiar to the Founding Fathers comes from the Cavaliers--the power to rule over others just as you like, and never to be subject to them. 

On Wearing Not-Makeup

"Women shouldn't wear makeup because they look better without it" is right up there on the list of sentiments that keep my eyes rolling like a Kit-Cat clock with "Women shouldn't shave their pubes because I have a deep concern for feminism, and not at all because I long to press my face into a dense bush and reckon I have the authority to order women to comport themselves in a manner befitting my circa 1972 sexual fantasies."

Women have shit going on in their lives that doesn't revolve around you.  If you find yourself saying something along these lines, be aware that you sound like a tool, exactly as much as if you were saying that you should have the right not to be subjected to women's awful bare faces. 

There's a number of rationales people have for feeling like they can demand the paint come off.  Many express outrage or discomfort with the idea of a falsified face, tinged with varying degrees of jealousy or misogyny.  Some cite political or aesthetic objections to beauty standards that women feel compelled to approximate in their makeup.  Many of these, I've learned, habitually confuse people wearing natural-look makeup with people who don't wear makeup, and so believe that the most heavy-handed applications are representative.  A few simply have impossibly high standards for the skill involved in application, and so believe people shouldn't even try if they're not making up at a professional level. 

I also sense, in some of men's objections, a feeling of being unnerved that someone has gone to additional trouble to look pleasing, when they are strongly discouraged from reciprocating in kind.  Makeup seems to make these guys feel like more is expected from them, an implicit contract they didn't have the chance to agree to.

Others, idiots, appear to believe that attention to one's appearance precludes the ability to think about any other subject, and that such attention signals unbecoming pride in a body one is meant to keep from distracting others.  I feel pretty justified in calling this opinion moronic because I used to hold it before I gave the matter even a second's thought. 

Look, If makeup didn't make you look better, for whatever value of "better" is currently en vogue, it would die out.  Structural functionalism comin' atcha.  But I feel makeup has more to recommend it than mere improvement.  It can transform you, not just into your best you, but into any you you can communicate.  Applying makeup well requires a steady hand and good observation, both of yourself and of the qualities of what you want to create.  And I believe that clear self-reflection, tempered with self-love, is fundamental to maximizing what you get out of the brief few years you spend being an alive human.

Everyone should get to wear makeup.  It's what separates us from the animals (if that's your bag).  At the same time, though it irritates me to have to make this explicit, no one ought to be forced or coerced into wearing makeup (at any moment, in any particular fashion) to keep their employment or permission to act as part of society.  Okay, except maybe screen actors. 

If you'd still like to make a feminist-styled argument that pigments applied to the body deserve to be chucked in the dustbin of history (perhaps because you reify some concept of "natural"), let me give you a quick pointer.  You're going to find a great many feminists curiously unmoved by a precis whose assumptions concerning what would increase social justice hinge on making women look better.

In Every Color And Flavor Too

While I bear men no particular ill will, I do have a reflexive dislike of movies about them.  That is to say, not films in which a character is subject to a central premise or situation, and because there's no compelling reason for that character to be female, he's been defaulted to male.  I'm talking about films where the lead is presented in the preview as a captivatingly, intoxicatingly normal-man male regular-shmoe guy fellow and the film centers around the delightful and meaningful quirks of his precious character.  Usually he is either recently single or becomes so in the opening scenes, so that what little plot there is can center around him getting some girl.  I've seen a ton of these, of course: it's a major genre.  Another one comes down the pike every six hours or so, and it annoys me the same way the latest "His DAUGHTER...is KIDNAPPED by BAD MANS.  now HE...has to BREAK...ALL the LAWS...and EVERYONE'S FACE...TO GET HER BACK" film does.

Let's see if we can get a list going here.

Young guys:
  • The Graduate
  • Youth In Revolt
  • Adventureland
  • Garden State
  • Superbad (though many Judd Apatow films have this "behold, Man!" quality, constantly remarked on by lazy pundits writing on the theme of What's Wrong With The Youth, they often also have interesting premises)

Middle-aged guys (the largest section! this is the age and gender of hollywood screenwriters! "Write what you know", after all!):
  • Punch Drunk Love
  • Lost In Translation (unusual for spending a great deal of time on the inner life of gorgeous uggo Scarlett Johansson, but compensating for this slight originality by being utterly wretched)
  • Greenburg
  • Funny People
  • Sideways
  • Manhattan
  • Annie Hall
  • Marty
  • American Splendor
  • American Beauty
  • Downfall
  • Stranger Than Fiction (A meta example! In this film, which you are to see if you read this, the mancharacter is a creation (?) of female novelist Emma Thompson, which puts a spin on the whole genre that I think necessitates me rewatching it for a new reading)

Old guys:
  • The Wrestler (Debatable. This one has a premise: the dude used to be a wrestler.  If I include it, shouldn't I include Rocky, and Taxi Driver, and Bad Lieutenant, and The Machinist, and The Pianist, and The Professional, and The Driver, and The Horse Whisperer, &c; &c;)
  • As Good As It Gets
  • About Schmidt

These movies vary wildly in quality, like films in any genre, and my initial suspicion is often easily overcome.  My skepticism is based on an idea I have that films dealing with men's personal crises, their "journeys" to use the term of bullshit art, are widely viewed as more serious and more innately worthy than the same films would be if they had female leads and female-specific crises.

I'm sure such films are kicking around somewhere...let's see...oh, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, that's a good example...Waitress and the whole raft of cute preganancy movies that came up with it, Juno, Knocked Up...Sherrybaby, if anyone's heard of that.  I'm sure a variety of Meryl Streep movies must focus on how she is aging and what that must be like.  And of course romantic comedies often play as "normal lady with issues that mean she can't land a man" films.  And there's Lifetime. 

Come to think of it, I reflexively dislike Manproblem Cinema more when it centers around women.  It just doesn't come up as often.  Man-films, with their seriousness, can attract a lot more talent and money and subtlety at every stage of production, and it shows.  Moreover, for myself the idea of being older, and male, and somewhat more free, is at the very least escapist.  Women's pictures are more like psychological horror.

Solipsist

Perhaps one of the reasons I am so godawful as a lesbian--why I fell so fast and so hard for cock--is that I can't get the makeup down.  I heard the "lesbian look" described (of pre-outcoming Mary Cheney and Candace Gingrich; perhaps it would be more accurate to call this look "passing spinster"), in something I read in the early 2000s -- maybe a memoir of  Ron Reagan Jr. -- as little to nothing around the eyes or on the cheeks, with plain lipstick, viz.:

Pearls optional, unless you're in politics.  

I kind of have something against lipstick.  While my eyes continue to get flashier and madder, lipstick still codes as Trying Too Hard to the buried high school butch in me who still judges all my outfits.  Also, I have mildly asymmetrical lips, and applying a color to them inflames my OCD something terrible.  Wait, not OCD.  What's the one where you self-diagnose with psychiatric disorders?  Oh yes--hypochondria.  But never wearing something has certainly not stopped me from hoarding it, and so I have many lipsticks, nail polishes, pieces of jewelry, pairs of high-ass heels, belts, purses, bits of string, and the like.  These next pictures represent the portion of that collection I could be arsed to apply and quickly snap two photos of.

My lips with nothing on top.

Glosses:

Clear (maybe slightly red?) apple-flavored lip gloss.  Mmmm.

Some drugstore frosted gloss.  Unimpressive-looking, sticky, overpoweringly vanilla-scented.

These are some of my favorites, from Medusa's Makeup--magenta (Smooch) and red (Talk Talk), both with gold and copper sparks.  The purple somehow manages to match my lip color beautifully, and the red is just right for looking sexy but not overdone.  They smell pretty bad and the wands are difficult to work with. 

This one was a freebie from Everyday Minerals, some kind of tube of orange-hued chapstick.  This is another thing I object to about lipstick: my choice of hues, if I want to maintain some self-respect, is limited to the chunk of the spectrum between orange and purple, and that's dull to me.

Liners:

A frosty pink Barry M pencil I mainly use to highlight around the eyes.  Alarmingly metallic, but good under a translucent colored gloss. 

Another orange tone, this brick-colored drugstore pencil is soft and slightly emollient, making it a terrible choice as a liner. 

This looked to me like it would match my lips, but in fact it is dreadful.

Lipsticks:

This one is sort of a medium brown in the tube, called "Divine Wine."  Dark lipstick supposedly makes you look older.  I still think I would make a pretty good goth.

My best Elena Kagan.

 Another sort of matchy berry bronzey metallic thing. I am falling asleep.

Now, this is my favorite thing to do to my lips.  It's just a crimson stain, applied from the center of the mouth and faded outwards.  It makes me feel totally sex.

Also, incidentally, my skin is looking fantastic here, by the standards of my skin.

That Much Is True

I didn't even realize Susie Bright had updated until, while trying to find an old post about the unintentional comedy of Juno and Waitress' depiction of pregnancy, I finally saw this cracking academic essay from Eithne Johnson analyzing feminist anti-porn consciousness-raising slideshows (memorialized in Dykes To Watch Out For as what turned Lois kinky) with the film theory tools of classic exploitation movies.  Check it out.

 

 ©Alison Bechdel, ~1995.  Go buy the Dykes To Watch Out For collections, with money.