The Girly Girl

                                      VS.









A couple of weeks ago, a blogger over at the HuffPo decided to write a little blog about the loss of feminism that she started with the line "Women are girly. Again.." Great. Yet another writer (and a female one at that) buying into the mindset that being a feminist means trying to be a man. She laments that we bake cupcakes*, garden, and knit because instead we should be ditching all that stupid "girly" stuff and learn to hotwire cars, shoot guns, and manipulate our way into bomb shelters. (She didn't really go into the details on this last one, but I suspect it involves cleavage). She even gives us role models- Jane Austen = bad, Sookie Stackhouse = good.  The more I think on this, the more it bothers me, and not just that she couldn't find any real people (who weren't drug addicts) for role models  on what she thinks women should be. If it's tough girls she wants:

• I have butchered, dressed, and cooked any number of chickens (plucking the feathers is the worst part)
• I have helped deliver a lamb. By which I mean my hand was up there pulling because it was the only one small enough. 
• I have cleaned and replaced a prolapsed uterus on a ewe. 
• I have shot a gun
• I know how to change a tire and change my own oil (though I'll happily pay someone to do the later)
• I have a working knowledge of how to use hand tools (both power and not) to build a basic structure. 
• I enjoy hiking, camping (no trailers for me, please), biking, and boating. 

However, I also

• Spin, crochet, cross-stitch,  and sew
• I enjoy cooking from scratch meals for my family
• I like to garden and look forward to have a proper place to do it
• I am married and took my husband's name, with no real thought of not doing so

So, according to Ms. Aloi, I am a girly girl who forgot all about feminism. Well, that's fine, I don't need her approval. However, more than once in her article she mentioned some crazy apocalypse.  I've got news for her. If that happens, I'll be the one munching on the produce and animals I raised while keeping warm in my handmade garments and she'll be the one hungry and cold with nothing useful to bargain with. I think I'll be sticking with Jane then, and not Sookie.



                                                   

Ok. That aside. The fair was the past two weeks. It appears that none of the pieces I took down placed. It will be interesting to see the judges comments on them; there were several things (even in categories I didn't participate in) that made me seriously question the judges. Dustin will be picking them up tomorrow, as I have class all day.

School starts again tomorrow. Part of me is looking forward to it, but part of me is really not. Between classes and work I'm not really going to have any days off. Which means bossman isn't going to find out about days that school is out unless we really need the money, which we likely won't.

Dustin is going to be starting a new job on Friday. I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but it's a pay increase, has benefits, and isn't likely to have any of the slowdowns that we've been forced to become accustomed to. There might be some travel, but we've dealt with that before. We're working on bringing down our total debt and this is a good step in the right direction. (It's a very scary number that just got larger because of this semester's student loans, but I also know that it's less than some people's debt that's just from those student loans.)



*Interestingly, there is a woman of the same name who does blogging about cupcakes. All evidence points to this being the same person. Existential midlife crisis?