Screwed and screwed and screwed

After that trip to Istanbul last year I wrote about feeling some moral discomfort about getting naked and then getting a deliciously decadent rubdown from another woman, but committed to going to a hammam in case it was just the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement at the five star where I was staying that was killing my buzz. It turns out it was. I've been going to Le Riad in the immigrant district next to the Gare de Nord regularly for a few months and I'll keep going at least once a month until I leave. It is ace, and nothing, NOTHING like the thing in Istanbul. Communal (kids get in free and were running around all over the place, having waterfights in the rubdown room), loud (when I was there Saturday a wedding party came in and ululated, which I'd never heard in the flesh before), friendly (helpful attendants running around telling me what to do, since my hammam etiquette isn't down yet, and slapping everybody's asses) and unintimidating.

Anyways. I was there on a busy Ladies' Saturday (most days of the week, women only get half the hours, with men the other half) and the steam room and rubdown slabs were over-capacity, so I was waiting in the nice warm, sunny lounging space upstairs, wrapped in a sarong, sipping a complimentary mint tea and reading Colin Tudge's charming The Secret Life of Birds, when a lady came in to start threading eyebrows. Mine were badly overgrown so when she started loudly complaining of a cancellation, I stuck my hand up to be trimmed. I'd never been threaded before, never even seen it until I started going to the hammam and seeing these women seemingly only having threads ran across their face and emerging hairless, so I was curious.

Which brings me to the point of this post, such as it is. The lady reduced my viciously rambunctious eyebrows to a state of civilization in two minutes. It didn't hurt nearly as much as waxing or plucking and the skin wasn't irritated. It cost six euros. I had no idea who she'd done it, so I came home and read this and watched this. I got a length of darning thread, practiced for ten minutes, and then did my upper lip, which I usually bleach, but in my paranoiac hippiedom I'm sick of smearing myself with chemicals so I've been looking for an alternative that doesn't involve accepting my manly side. It worked; it hurt a bit, but not much, and even with my unpractised hands it only took a few minutes to do the lot.

Now look. This is nice, but at the same time it is absolute BULLSHIT. Let me write it once again: I used a length of darning thread. I used about 50 centimetres of a 20 metre spool of darning thread that cost less than 2 euros to take care of the hair on my face that millions of women shit themselves over, spending a great deal of time and money on; that many women in my family (of whom I'm one of the less sasquatchy members and I'm still quite sasquatchy) have decided they would handle with electrolysis due to the time, mess, expense and trouble involved in waxing. I'm not saying I was ripped off by the lady at the hammam, absolutely not; despite how easy the incredibly beautiful girl in the instructional video above makes it look, I'm more than happy to have somebody else do precision work like eyebrow plucking for me (versus upper lip when you just want it ALL off, though I did give myself an amusing half-hour walking around the house with a Hitler moustache) and I would happily pay her more than six euros, even though her overhead costs for the work she did on me probably ran about 5 centimes. But I AM saying this shit makes me absolutely sick.

Women get screwed, man. They get screwed and screwed. When you can use 5 centimes worth of darning thread to get a result that's better than what you get with with something exponentially more expensive, like waxing or one of these fucking montrosities, that's all I can conclude: we are screwed and screwed and screwed. Not just screwed by notions of beauty involving hairlessness, which is such a common theme across so many cultures that I don't see any real point to objecting to it any more, but really, unforgivably screwed in terms of how bastards try to get our money off us for stupid shit that not only do we not need, but is worse for us than the exponentially cheaper alternatives. On a slightly smaller scale, it's like the flannelette rag towels versus the disposable ones all over again. Just so - fucking - ARGH. Fuck. I really don't think men have the experience to appreciate how structurally screwed women are, on things like this, these little day-to-day things - I mean, I don't blame men, because a lot of this screwing is being carried out by other women; I would just like to communicate to men how structurally screwed we are so they can understand where we're coming from. I love being a woman but my beloved history teacher who blew his brains out a few years back was right: in economic terms women in overdeveloped countries are the aborigines of the modern age, being exploited by cynical profiteers and trading our wealth for shit.

No fat chicks, or meat

Last night Derek Jarrett introduced me to Frances Cobbe, who invented Freudianism long before Freud, equal in many details besides that of being ass-backwards, much more appealing and I suspect potentially a great deal more useful in terms of the treatment of mental disorders. But, you know, Frances being a chick, and a fairly fat chick at that, nobody cared and generations of men and women have been confidently informed they'd really like to fuck their parents if they could. You can read about it from here. I'm sick and working from home so no monster posting today.

Also last night I was already starting to feel like ass, but the F-word took me out for dinner just coz anyways to our favourite vegetarian place here, a little shopfront called L'Element Terre. Get it? Get it? Isn't it beautifully twee? Every time we go I think I'd like to open a restaurant just like it with the same name in the city we settle down in, but my guess is that if we do so in Australia we'll get gay-bashed. Anyways, it's Belgian vegetarian, which means lots of cheese and fish, I don't think there was more than three or four vegan options on the menu, but that's alright for us. For the second time - first was at the Berber place further up the same road - I had harira. Man, that is a fucking good soup concept. I think I'll make some today.

My one bitch was that everything, while delicious and made with obviously excellent ingredients - fresh, fresh, fresh - was fucking inundated with salt, just like it is at every veggie restaurant I ever go to. Why is that the choice - meat or salt? Why is the assumption that if you dump great big piles of salt into food people will forget they're not eating meat? And why is it important to forget you're not eating meat? Sigh. Oh well. I guess as far as humanitarian tragedies go it's no worse than everybody paying attention to a crackhead narcissicist like Freud instead of a fat chick who had all Freud's good ideas first and few of his bad ones.

In which I give vent to overweening emotional racism

Rodelinda and her fiancé have gone ppphhhht. They'd been facing a bit of a doozy of a situation, nothing worse than millions of other couples face, but quite aside from the wierd alchemy of personalities whose explosions and transformations are so unpredictable, it's my personal opinion they ran into some cultural problems, him being a limey and her being Canadian. Europeans are really hard to have relationships with, in my experience, and thinking back over all of my newworlders who have tried, they've failed spectacularly. Me included, and not even particularly, and mine failed fucking ferociously*.

When it comes to love Europeans seem to have such set ideas about how things are done, about the patterns of existence, and that causes the biggest problems when they try to make it with newworlders, who seem to have a greater tendency - romantic, unrealistic maybe, but certainly there, and quite frankly I wouldn't want to feel any other way - that every new relationship is like a special and unique snowflake that could lead in fascinating new directions that have never been explored before.

Maybe my feeling that way is like accent-deafness (when you can hear how weird everyone else is talking, but can't comprehend that the way you're talking is also quite weird). Maybe it's down to the friends who I'm able to have in-depth emotional talks with being like me, so I have a skewed view of my own background. Or maybe it's part and parcel of how hostile I feel these days about all the negative implications of culture and tradition - because I do see European gender dynamics west and south of here, in Belgium, as impossibly fucking sexist.

So sexist that newworld men get alienated. The behavioural expectations placed on them by French or Italian chicks that I've witnessed, for example, are just fucking ridiculous. Living in those two countries for a few years really made me realize the degree to which the new worlds' women's liberation movements were general liberation movements that have benefitted men enormously. Try telling them that though. Some of them just don't get it until they've been well and truly smothered by a couple of years of cohabitation with some perpetually angry French chick.

Speaking of guys not getting it but on a different topic altogether, here's one who does. I stumbled across this while I was looking at a bunch of things on a fat-acceptance website a nutritionist friend who's not fat posted on Facebook. I wish I had know there were fat-acceptance websites back when I was fat. As it is, I'm bookmarking it for after I have children, when I expect to get enormous, and in the meantime it's nice to read a fairly militant slice of pop-feminism. Anyways, that particular thing by Chris Clarke struck a chord because I've had so many conversations with nice men about why women who don't know them treat them like dangerous scum. I understand it hurts. But, you know. Other things hurt worse.

*I should point out my experience, while embarassingly broad, doesn't encompass the Iberian peninsula, nor Scandinavia, Germany, or points east. Until you get well into Asia.