Reasons why men should pay for things

Before all the men roll their eyes and call me a “Femi-nazi”, and all the independent I-don’t-need-a-man-to-make-me-whole women label me ‘princess’ and ship me off to Sea World in a box marked ‘Shark Bait’ – hear me out.

I recently found a job, which is great, but I’m painfully broke, which is not so great. Much to my disappointment, they don’t pay you simply for turning up on your first day and I need to wait until the end of the month before I can start reaping the benefits of being employed; all whilst I still need to go shopping and, you know, live.

Shopping when you have money and when you don’t are two very different experiences. One has you playing fast and loose with your basket, picking up mozzarella because you might fancy it on Wednesday, you might not, but that’s just how you roll because you’re a Maverick. The other has your “spree” turning into a military precise shop with a very specific list of carefully chosen “essentials”.

I was currently on the latter. And I have to tell you – I found things were more expensive than I remembered. I’d go so far as to say I was mildly taken aback by some of the discrepancies I found.

Morrisons (which was where I was shopping at the time)

– Women’s razors:

Generic “value” razors = £1

– Men’s razors :

Generic “value” razors = £1

I know. You might be thinking “and?”

I did too, I thought “oh hey, well at least there’s this”. Until I looked closer.

Women: £1 for a pack of five.

Men: £1 for a pack of ten. 

… Sorry what?

Okay. Maybe that was just a fluke.

– Women’s cream:

This time I used Nivea as the control brand.

Nivea Cream Care for Women = £3

– Men’s cream:

Nivea Cream Care for Men = £2

Leaving my actual shopping basket to the wayside, I started looking at everything that had “male” and “female” versions and the winner for more expensive always seemed to end up in the female court. Hey ladies – quit your whining, at least we’re winning something.

In fact, there’s a whole referendum in place just about tampons. They’re referred to as “Non-essential” and “luxury items” by the HMRC and are now taxed at 5% *.

*As an update to this – the tax has now been removed – however I’m continuing what I wanted to say about this (a year ago.. what? so it took me a while to get around to posting. So much so the freakin’ law has changed..) because it is still relevant to how women are viewed, the tax still exists in other countries and, more importantly, it is not just menstrual items that are taxed at 5%..

Non-essential? or more laughable – luxury? It’s lumped in with “edible flowers” and “exotic meats”.  I know at least half the population do not have periods so let me be the first to inform you there are definitely no edible flowers or exotic meats involved in this process. I’m, also, not going out swimming and joyfully eating salad, as the Always ad’s seem to insinuate. I’m more likely sitting in a dark room with something warm wrapped around my abdomen, rocking back and forth muttering and longing for the sweet peace of unconsciousness.

Non- essential. Well of course, It’s not like I really need them or anything. It’s not like once a month I run the risk of turning my white trousers into the Japanese flag because I sat down for too long. Not at all.

I’m just making a fuss so people will give me chocolate. Obviously.

Not so chuffed about your pink Venus Lady Razor now are you? (To avoid a libel suit, other brands are available. And they are just as expensive.)

I did some background reading, out of curiosity and found that I had missed out on a whole movement in regards to female tax. Apparently I’m not the only one who was outraged at the fact that because I have ovaries I’m destined to pay at least £1 more than my testicular-ly engineered counterparts. Doesn’t sound like much but it ends up working out to about £500,000 extra a year. Clearly I had missed out on a mass media uproar about my lady products!

As far as the argument goes, it’s true – women don’t have to buy the ridiculously gendered products. I have to admit, I just use men’s razors. It doesn’t bother me which gender the razor I use is intended for, what bothers me is that anything aimed at women (hair products, facial products, even dry cleaning apparently) is decidedly more expensive to the point of exploitation. Just because I’m in a target market group that likes to smell like 12 different types of coconut whilst remaining completely hairless as I’m doing it doesn’t mean that should be taken advantage of so blatantly. And, frankly speaking, that target market isn’t just made up of women.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand brands can be expensive, but what I’m talking about is the fact that, from a government point of view, I live in a society where it’s okay to charge me a few quid extra because either I a) don’t pay enough attention or b) will pay for it regardless because my definition of “non-essential” is clearly different to yours. That I don’t matter. My demographic still isn’t looked at like a functioning limb – my demographic is an appendix. Not quite sure what to do with it or what it does, seems pretty harmless and useless until it explodes and kills you for unbeknownst reasons. My demographic is labelled either passively benign or explosively dangerous.

Should I forgo buying the products that are aimed at my gender and opt for the slightly less coconut-ty, rugged “boy” products? Or should I pay a price equivalent to the soul of my first born purely because, as far as I can tell, it comes in more colour and fragrance options?

So all in all, guys, I’m sorry about this but you’re going to have to start paying for me when we go out because apparently I’m spending all my money on non-essential razors and tampons.

Deal with it.

 

 

Reasons why being a woman is like being a letterbox

I am not a typically beautiful woman.

Before you get all up in arms, this statement is not supposed to derive pity or throw lines out in the world for compliments about my appearance. The fact that this thought is one that even a percentage of people reading this would have, is the reason for the below.

As I was saying, I am not conventionally beautiful. I am not Michelle Pfeiffer hot nor am I horribly disfigured. My one defining feature would be that I’m over-weight. Still not enough to gain comment or require someone to look extra hard at me to figure out how I fit in a seat, but for all intents and purposes normal enough that either gender would use me merely as a degree in the barometer of attractiveness of females in my general vicinity.

I used to feel like women’s issues did not apply to me, because as far as I was concerned, that was an experience that was only really had by exceptionally attractive women, or women who weren’t me. I felt untouched by this. I was very wrong. So very wrong.

Every time that I used “I have a boyfriend” or felt a pang of discomfort riddle my body when walking past a group of men, I was feeling the effects of a society that envisioned women as ‘things’. Every time I absentmindedly grabbed my phone tighter or walked a little faster I was conforming to the ideal that I was as inanimate an object as a letterbox: I was public property to be used for its purpose or to pee on when you get drunk.

It started to dawn on me that it didn’t matter what I looked like, it didn’t matter what any woman looked like. Even the “she was asking for it, look at how she’s dressed” line was not about appearance, it was about gender. It didn’t matter what she was dressed like, the true meaning of that line is “she was asking for it, she’s a woman.” This is not a conscious decision, those choices are birthed from a lesson that is taught from the age you learn that fire is hot.

It becomes a universal truth that defines all responses to all situations to this particular stimulus from that point onwards. Liken it to the basic rules of algebra – once you have those you can solve any equation you are presented with.

That’s the fundamental problem.

The rules about what women are, how they should be treated and what they represent to society are wrong.

Women are things, there is no emotion to that – it is a hard fact to most men, and ironically, women – and to go against that is to go against their nature. This was something I could only understand, truly, after I questioned my own nature.

Recently I’ve been questioning a number of things in my life: why do I have a job that I clearly don’t like and why am I okay with it? Why are there a number of things about social interactions that I don’t agree with and will leave parts of me feeling like I failed my moral compass – and why am I okay with it? Why do I feel, an increasing amount of the time, that I am letting myself down with my actions?

Most of these questions were answered simply by: because I’m not doing what I want to do. I’m doing what I’ve been told to do.

Everyone does it. Why do you not wear a poncho,  ride a unicycle and declare yourself president of lizards? Because you’re not supposed to. It’s not how you do things. No – what you actually mean is you’re not supposed to because those are the rules.

There are lots of different limitations that people automatically inflict on themselves because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Perhaps this worked well before, but everything about our world is changing at such a speedy rate; we’re reconsidering everything from how we power our houses to the kinds of lightbulbs we buy to the types of foods we eat – why aren’t we doing the same with how we interact?

Needless to say, after my sudden query about everything in my life, I left my job. It felt like such a huge thing to do at the time. I’ve come to realise it wasn’t. It was the smallest of steps towards feeding the reality of who I was – that part of me who was constantly nudging and waving frantically at every interaction where I, against better judgement, bent to rules that had been ingrained in me. This part had a mini Mardi Gras in my soul the day I left my job.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a Disney Princess movie that ended up with me working my dream job and suddenly everything in my world was right. Far from. But the emotional journey of discovery of my true identity was well worth it.

In the following months I completely broke down.

My world fell brick by brick around me as suddenly everything felt wrong. It wasn’t just my job that I was lying to myself with – it was my whole way of being. This is a harsh reality to come to terms with. Imagine everything you understand about who you are, truly are, and the world in which you have spent the past 26 years of life living in and creating; all of that was a complete lie. The basis of who you were, who you thought you were, you weren’t living – you were expressing only in thought. I thought and felt one way, but acted completely differently.

I was basically full of shit.

I spent the next three months living in a bubble of depression. Not “man my show got cancelled, that’s so depressing.” But “I see myself for what I truly am, I am a fraud, I am worthless and do not deserve to live. I do not see the point of living.”

Some would say it sounds like clinical depression. I say it is a very steep learning curve – because that makes me feel more positive about it.

There were days I would be comatose in my room, there were others I wouldn’t be able to go outside because the sound of birds, the sounds of life, hurt me. Hurt me physically, deeply, even the wind on my skin felt like an acid wash. My world had been stripped to its bare wires and I was feeling every inch of it in its entirety and I couldn’t handle it.

To say I am better now would be a lie. I still have days where I don’t want to get out of bed, but – this is a big but – my ray of hope is that nothing is permanent.

Everything changes, is allowed to change – is expected to change – including me.

Hyperbole and a Half has the best comics to describe depression:

(read her comics on depression here)

I identified the fact that I was lying to myself, which led to a domino effect of seeing that lie repeating itself across nearly every aspect of my life. I didn’t like it. So I, voluntarily or not, broke down into pieces and now I’m picking them up and putting them back together in an order and layout that I like; that is true to who I want to be.

This may have seemed like the biggest digression but I’m getting to my point.

In order for society to change how it views, and thereby treats, women, men, sexuality and every other minority-which-is-actually-majority that we sweep under a rug of “social etiquette”, we need to break it down completely.

We are a society that is full of beautiful differences, that we are starting to embrace as individuals. We need to embrace those as a society. Everything about our world is different to how it was even a year ago – but we shackle ourselves by rules that we created for ourselves centuries ago. Smash it with a massive brick into a million pieces and then rebuild it into an image that is true to who we are as a society now. Not yesterday, not 50 years ago, but now.

We all understand these truths. I know I did, understood and absorbed, but I wasn’t living them. Very few of us do because someone else will do it. I don’t need to because someone else will. They won’t.

It’s hard. Breaking down something built in 26 years felt impossible to come back from, breaking down an entire ecosystem that was built in centuries seems completely farcical. Except it’s not. It will take time, but it has to start somewhere – people are already doing it, I’m not saying anything you haven’t heard before. But from someone who spent so long being a casual observer and is now trying to be an active participant I’m asking you to pick up a sledgehammer to your life.

Break the rules.

They’re wrong anyway.