Baby Thongs?

About a week ago I was visiting one of my best friends when she told me I had to see something because I would "appreciate it". Immediately I knew I was going to angry very soon. First thing to understand is that Dez is a mother of two, a 2 year old girl and a 5 month old boy(my Godson). The little girl was recently potty trained and as is prone to happen occasionally has accidents.

The one day Dez was in the mall with her kids and the little girl had an accident. Not having any spare undies for her, Dez ran into Krazy 8 and bought some underwear. The ones for a 2 year old looked a little small so Dez bought the next size up. It is important to note that these little girl underwear were in a 4 pack so Dez couldn't see the exact size and since she was just trying to get her daughter into dry clothes she didn't put too much thought into it. Once she took the underwear out and placed them on her daughter, she realized these weren't normal little girls' underwear. 

The underwear that she had unknowingly bought for her 2 year old is designed to look like adult women's panties. What does this mean? Her little butt cheeks hangout. Why on earth would someone think this was a good idea? Did a pedophile design these? Because that is the only reason why someone would be in favor of having a 2 year old's butt cheeks hanging out of their underwear. 

Here is the sexualized underwear placed on top of the regular little girls underwear. You can clearly see the size difference in the photo although in person it is a more stark difference. 

Needless to say, my niece will not be wearing "underwear" from this store ever again. Her mother was pretty disgusted and rightfully so. I mean, I have seen a lot of crazy things for little girls to wear, including high heels for little girls just trying to learn to walk. Don't get me started on that one. But this underwear fiasco is not even trying to hide it's agenda. What's next toddler thongs? How about corsets for infants? That one has a nice ring to it doesn't it?

 Actually Abecrombie and Fitch has already made little girl thongs. And oh wait! Someone already thought that it was a great idea to make something along the lines of baby corsets. I actually googled toddler thongs and infant corsets after jokingly writing the above paragraph because I had the disturbing realization that some creepo probably already invited that shit. Sometimes I hate being right. I truly hope that no parent would ever buy this crap for their kids. Also I worry because the extreme sexualization of children and infants makes things that sexualize them on a smaller scale seem not as bad because we become desensitized. That butt cheek underwear starts to seem not so bad next to the child thong. But it is still horrible and should not exist. I find it extremely disconcerting that at a time when everyone is focusing on the sexualization of women in the media we are sexualizing little girls and infants. So how do we combat this? Unfortunately the only thing that can be done is simply not buying these products. By standing up and saying "No! Children are children and not sex objects." *Adults aren't either but that's another topic*  

Surviving Father's Day

My father died when I was 18 during my first semester of college. Like anyone who has ever lost a parent, I wonder what my Dad would think of me now. I wonder especially because I was not a self-proclaimed feminist, nor was my concentration on violence against women and children. My father always encouraged me to be a strong woman. He always told me that he knew I would go to college and graduate. He never worried about me succeeding. So with that aspect of my life I know he would be proud. But it became clear to me in Graduate school that if my father were still alive I would have a lot of hard-hitting questions for him. The biggest being, he not have accepted any man abusing his daughters, so why did he abuse other people's daughters? 

My Dad had a long history of domestic violence and with a combination of PTSD from two voluntary tours of Vietnam, alcoholism, and growing up with violence in the household my Dad was a prime candidate to repeat the cycle. My Dad gave up drinking before I was born; he just stopped one day. No rehab. No nothing. Cigarettes were something he was never able to give up no matter how many times he tried and it ultimately contributed to his death. But the violence seemed to have stopped when he stopped drinking, with the exception of my mother. Now my parents were divorced by the time I was 2.5 years old so I don't remember any violence consciously. Although I do exhibit signs, quieter ones, of someone who saw abuse or was abused. Fun fact: When someone is abused their brain chemistry is altered. You want to know if someone has been abused? Do a brain scan, it'll all be right there. Children who witness abuse but who are never physically abused themselves have the same brain chemistry of a child who is physically abused. My parents divorced because my father was beating my mother and cheating on her. Somewhere there is a file lurking around that also has toddler Sabrina with hand marks on her little arms; the man had a firm grip. My mother said that when my father was abusing her, he wasn't mentally there. He simply snapped. He didn't recall anything and nothing she did to inflict pain on him worked. But once my parents divorced the violence stopped. 

As a feminist, I HATE abusers. I cannot stand to look at them. However, I love my father. The memories I have of him are not of a man of who beat me and my mother. My parents had a dysfunctional friendship when I was growing up. Far more functional than most people after a divorce. My dad was generally very nice to his ex-wives, most likely for his children's sake and because he didn't have custody of most of us. So I have always had a difficult dealing with my Dad, the man I love, and the abuser that I don't know. I have so many questions I wish I would have had the chance to ask him and believe me I would have asked. Once I get a question into my head it does not leave until I blurt it out. So I am stuck with this. 

Dad why was it okay for you to abuse women? Didn't you think about your own daughters and the kind of relationships you were setting us up for? How did you feel when your daughters were in abusive relationships? Do you feel you shoulder at least some of that blame? How do you feel about men that abuse women and children? Are you sorry? And how do you feel about where I stand on these issues?

 I will never have my answers. And I doubt I am the only person out there who is in this position. The only thing that I do know is, it's not my fault, my siblings’, nor any of the women who were abused; we did not make my Dad the way he was. To my brother's credit, he broke the cycle. He did not become an abuser. Being abused does not mean that you yourself will grow up to be a victim or an abuser. But it does mean we can grow up to be survivors.

A Hairy Situation

Being 26, I grew up during the kick off of "the Brazilian" and the "anti female body hair" trend. Even in high school, before my feminist awakening, I always found it strange that the focus of this war on hair was solely focused on the female body. Especially since I find hairy men repulsive, looking at some men it is clear that we evolved from apes. I really found the obsession odd since women are the ones we already associate with being clean and having the better grooming habits. Shouldn't the focus have been on male grooming?

Now I will not be going over my own grooming habits because it's no one else's business, no woman's pubic hair is anyone else's business with maybe the exception of her partner. I honestly don't care about the pubic grooming of other women with few exceptions. Exception 1) Women/girls who go bare without the knowledge that the chances of ingrown hairs, infections(usually fungal) and STDs increase dramatically. With this information if you are having multiple sexual partners you should really consider putting down the razer/wax.

My second exception are women who shave because the man in their lives demand it. Now I'm not talking about both partners having to spice things up. I'm talking about men shaming  women for not being completely hairless like a child. I use the child reference because according to scholars and social scientists such as Gail Dines, the kick off of the female pubic hair witch hunt started with the rise of pornos. Porns started featuring women bare down there right before the Brazilian trickled into the average American woman's life. These porns feature women without pubic hair in hopes to make them appear younger, Barely Legal one might say. Shaming women for not looking like little girls is twisted.

Now if hair makes you itch or whatever and you want to get rid of it, have at it. Shave Batman into it, dye it green, have a blast. But do not let anyone, society included, shame you into hating your hair. And if someone loves you they are not going to care about your pubic hair(unless it smells). Also I have never encountered anyone that demanded I do anything to my lady bits, probably because they fear I would murder them.  

Competitive Book Club

Back at the end of last year, some of my really good friends and I came up with the idea for competitive book club. Here is how it works. We all came up with a list of books we wanted to read this year and we are not reading the same books at the same time. There is a point system based on how many pages you read and you can earn points by reading books others have read and recommended at the monthly meetings. Also if someone reads a book you reviewed you get points for that as well. Now all the books that we are reading have to be first time reads. The person who reads the most per season gets to pick a book that the rest of us have to read by the next season. At the end of the year we are all getting t-shirts with a list of our books that we read on them. The winner does not have to pay for theirs. Obviously this works a lot on the honor system.

For the first two months I was reading like crazy. Now however, I am barely reading. This is due to my schedule change(working 230-11pm) will mess up your schedule. And if I am being honest, most of my reading was done at night before bed and I no longer do that. I am sure to keep reading, usually at work in between calls at night when I'm not working on school work. I have to say that through this book club I have read books that I never would have. And it has pushed me to keep reading even when I really would prefer to watch youtube videos that would drain my brain. I believe firmly that the brain is like any other muscle and if you do not exercise it, you will lose it. That is actually how working on this blog came about. One of the same friends who started C.B.C. also has a blog Does the Poet Choose to Be a Boat?, which I enjoy reading weekly. And through talking with Laurel I decided that it would be to my benefit to start a blog, because lord knows I have enough opinions and a frequent need to share them.