Barbie-pink nails

I have been meaning to post about my nail polish for the past week. Yes, I said nail polish. Sounds so trivial, but represents much more to me.

For the first time in years, my nails are painted Barbie-pink. Although the corvette color had been my favorite since I can remember, once I began to realize how I had lived my life blindly accepting culturally imposed mandates for socially idealized women--and began to understand how this had severely disenfranchised my sense of self and autonomy--I cursed the color. It was everything that I no longer wanted to be: senselessly girly, self-unaware, dependent on others, and a typically socialized and oppressed female.

Thus began my abhorrence of Barbie-pink as the very symbol of my oppression and the years I had wasted being terribly misguided and ultimately superficial--and so I traded it for shades of burgundy, brown, black, white, red and the like. I let my polish chip, and would skip manicures all together. But more importantly, I began to avoid the color because I found it shameful and embarrassingly indicative of attributes I did not wish to possess, a lifestyle I wished I had never had, and felt the color would overall mark me as ditsy and otherwise inferior. There I was, a scholar of gender and sex theory, advocating a humanist framework where all are equal and respected--but at the same time, detesting the notion of being "one of them."

These days, I am in a completely different place. My transition from being politically apathetic and self-unaware to discovering that the personal is political, understanding social hierarchies, identifying frameworks of sex and gender, as well as completely rejecting many compulsory cultural mandates first caused a period of self-loathing and confusion. As I kept on learning, discovering, processing, and analyzing, my transition further developed and I understood all parts of my life as critical steps in reaching all of my goals.

Now I am comfortable enough with myself to realize that my nail polish color means nothing about my intelligence, my goals, or who I am as a person. What is more, my sense of shame in associating myself with a particular form of culturally encouraged femininity indicates my own internalized misogyny and sexism in not wanting to be one of "those girls"--essentially that "those girls" are inferior, something to detest, and something to avoid.

A person may look, seem, or act culturally "girly"--but watch out, "girly" means nothing substantive beyond an external descriptive. And once you approach a person with a set of assumptions based on image, you will be disarmed.