An Open Letter to the Young Women Of North America...

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Gloria Steinem)

Britney Spears lied to you. At least her handlers did.

I guarantee that, if you're the average North American 20-something, you don't have as much time in your day to spend on appearance as Britney does. Ergo, unless you've been genetically blessed to the point of being Naomi Campbell or her ilk, you don't have the body to pull off Britney's clothes. Besides, she's taped, pushed, pulled, and posed to look reasonable. You don't have a stylist following you...well...most of you don't, so stop it.

The truth is that those super low tight pants you're wearing...they push up your hip fat and make your butt look really tiny. So...what you've ended up with is a bottom half that looks like your top half is being poured through a funnel. Into big shoes.

Say that I am aging and jealous. Say that I'm jiggly in the buttock and thigh region. Say that I long for the days I could go out barely dressed and look reasonable. All those may be true. Whatever. They all pale next to the fact that I'm telling you the truth. You all look like freshly scrubbed whores.

Those outfits may get you laid at the bar. And if they do, good for you! You accomplished your goal and far be it from me to tell you what to wear when you're on the prowl with your heavily perfumed compadres. However, is it too much to ask that you don't serve my lunch with your gut hanging over your pants? Because, the amazing part is, you don't ~have~ a gut! By any woman's standards, you're usually a tiny little thing. It's the pants! There is magical pixie gut-dust in the fibers! Look in a damn mirror!

Which brings me to restaurants, since it was a girl like that who served me my food the other day.

I work downtown. The old, rich oil men in my city who like to look at women that have barely been weened from their mother's teat go to restaurants downtown. I know 1 + 1 makes 2 and I know that the board meeting to decide to hire pretty young girls dressed in clothes that don't really cover ~anything~ probably didn't go like this:

"We need more traffic. Research shows that oil men have lots of money. Now, if you look at this pie chart, research also shows that these oil men are centered around the downtown area, near our downtown location. If I may direct your attention to this diagram, the X-axis shows the age and wealth of the average oil man. The Y-axis shows the youth and hotness of women. You can see at this point here *smacking chart* that young hot women in very little clothes really interest old, balding men with lots of money. I mean, it skyrockets. What do you make of this? Jenkins?"

"I know, Sir! We need to hire young, pretty women who will wear slutty clothes to serve our rich oilmen customers."

"Dagnabbit, Jenkins, you're gonna go far in this company. Now go to the highschools and see if any of those pretty young things are looking to buy a car. And while you're out, pick up my drycleaning. And stay away from my daughter!"

When I was that age I worked at a coffee shop and we girls learned purdy quickly that the tighter our shirts were, the higher our tips would go. It would make the difference between leaving with $2.45 or leaving with $15 extra in our pockets. However, we ~did~ have to dress reasonably and not as if we were Las Vegas showgirls. And we weren't ~encouraged~ by our management. We weren't ~deterred~ either, and lets face it, even we knew why our bosses hired almost all young women but this wasn't a situation in which we were all dressed uniformly in a chain restaurant.

I could now launch into my rant about the backlash that has occured against feminism, but....well...hell, I'm gunna:

Over the past decade or so, I've noticed a serious reaction to feminism in North America in which, like a Phoenix from it's ashes, "The Lout" has risen to become profitable and sexy once again.

Women my age (early 30s) might recall the feminism of our mothers that wound itself into our every thought when we were coming of age in the late 80s/early 90s. But it was ~their~ generation's brand of feminism and when Camile Paglia came out kicking, screaming and foaming at the mouth we all rushed out to buy her book because it was what we needed. We felt we had been denied our sexuality and resented the 'earth mother' that morphed from the feminism we had known. Camile Paglia liked porn, she liked loud noises, she was unreasonable and we felt redeemed.

Not sure when the Riot Grrls came into the scene...but it was about this time. So, them too.

Anyway...so, we finally got to hold our heads high and march, arms linked and heeled high, out into the night to get drunk in our miniskirts, pick up (or be picked up by) whomever we wanted and call it 'reclaiming our control'...or whatever we said it was at the time. We refused to be 'victims' anymore...we were taking responsibility for our choices. We became aggressive, garish, loud, obnoxious, blatant...and other adjectives. We became lout-ish...but with eye makeup and a purpose.

I think men liked it...but mostly because we were being brash with our sexuality. When we used to yell at them, I think they liked it less.

What happened, though...the Spice Girls. They took it, put a bit more sugar in to counter the spice (no pun) and we had 'Girl Power (tm)' . *Whammy!* it was marketable. Girl Power (tm) is cutesy nauseating, but sorta useful, I guess. It's good that young girls and women wake up in the morning with the 'girl power' mantra floating in their heads. Whatever makes them feel powerful is a good thing. But...ugh.

On the other foot, though, the male backlash to all this feminist activity swirling around them was to take the sexuality but ditch the aggression. So, now the pinups they've always loved of Pam Anderson...they were nothing to be ashamed of. And strip clubs were something to be celebrated. Women get the message that no matter how much you work, how much you try to educate yourself , how much yoga you do or how much herbal tea you drink, a man with whom you are in love actually ~wants~ to be with his buddies being served cold beer by chicks with big tits and have nothing more to say than, 'Want more?', 'Bet your wife doesn't do this.' and 'Have you met my twin sister?'

Let me say here that I actually have no beef against strippers or anything. These women choose to do what they're doing and it's profitable...so whatever. My problem is that it went from 'just a thing' to a celebration of men's rights to be pigs...and pride in chauvinistic attitudes.

I used to believe it, too. The Lout's lie. That men had base instincts that had been denied them and now they can fulfill them to their hearts content. Men ~are~ visual creatures and ~do~ gawk a little more than women do, but I've come to understand that their lack of grace and manners are their ~own~ fault. Men don't ~have~ to be The Lout. Men don't ~have~ to watch strippers with their buddies and try to feel up the waitress because they have the choice to be decent and mature. And not all men choose that for their entertainment. Men don't ~have~ to go glassy-eyed and drooly and don't have to 'juggle women' (or pretend to) to feel masculine. Men can ~want~ to be with their imperfect girlfriend/wife and appreciate her thoughts and actions ~without~ stating loudly their right to go out with the boys, get drunk and dump water on some girl in a white t-shirt.

The Man Show, beer commercials, Spike television, Maxim...everywhere you look there's men reclaiming the reclamation women celebrated just years before. The difference is, we celebrated a furtherment in our emancipation. The Lout celebrates taking that back.

And ~that's~ why these restaurants gave themselves the green light to hire an almost exclusively young, hot, and female serving staff, clothed in garments that are irritatingly slutty, and encourage them to be cute and flirty with the customers. The Lout is a big spender and now he feels he's owed.

I went to one of these places with my mother for dinner recently and the waitress interrupted us, in her cute and flirty way, a few times during a very indepth mother/daughter conversation. My god! At least review your customer profile! Flirting with my mother isn't going to get you any more tips!

I'm not sure this is what the Suffragettes had in mind.