It's a Killer

I have been glued to a website, called Killer Strands, dedicated to providing women with high quality professional information about haircare. The woman who started it, KC, was a professional hair stylist with a thriving business, but became too sick to work. However, she is committed to empowering the public with her hard earned insider wisdom. It's been several days now, and every chance I get, I am perusing her blog. Now I have plenty of other things to do, like plan classes, choreograph and edit sections of Big M, practice my piano, get some reading done. Each time I sit down at the computer for the sheer pleasure of logging onto this website, I tell myself I will only read for 10 minutes. Ok. Maximum one half hour. But I lie. Two hours later I have to tear myself away. I go to wash my face, brush my teeth, oil my hair. I tell myself that's enough for tonight. I can have another 10 minutes tomorrow. Then I go to check an email and before I know it there I am again -- checking out color, shampoo ingredients, and amazing deep treatments.

Being female is profoundly baffling to me. I like to think that I am old enough to know better. I am smart with a good wit and plenty of intellectual muscle. And yet, I can happily spend days on end reading and researching how to get longer eyelashes, beautiful skin, cut muscles, and of course great hair. Though I want to accuse myself of being horribly shallow, I resist. I know for a fact that women far less femme than I share these superficial beauty concerns and obsessions to some degree or another; women who are political powerhouses, formidable educators and innovative thinkers. How can it be that here I am in 2009, having survived 1970's radical feminism, still feeling guilty about indulging in anything having to do with my girlie nature. I still feel like I have to defend these girlie values against my own private assumption that I must be just a little bit brain dead. What gives? I'm getting to old for this kind of narrow thinking. If as a woman of the 21st century I can have it all, isn't it about time that I can also be it all: Butch, femme, straight, bi, prissy, funky, loud, sensitive, beautiful, awkward, confident, horribly insecure, and powerful all in the same breath? Or at least in the same flesh?