There is no best shampoo: why a Marxist loves Trader Joe’s

Left of lipstick: Speak about it, seriously: Putting an end to sexual assault

You’ve probably heard about Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia student who is carrying her mattress around until her rapist is expelled.
California just passed a new “yes means yes” law stating that there is a burden of proof for “affirmative” consent, not simply an absence of a no. It is fitting that in this environment of anti-sexual assault action, Bowdoin hired a Director of Gender Violence Prevention and Education, Benje Douglas.
Last Monday I sat down with Benje to talk about the second part of his job title: education. Benje is friendly and keeps a pile of candy on his desk. He handed me a strawberry flavored Dum Dum which I chewed (yes, chewed, sorry) as I thought about how to frame my question. Benje patiently smiled as I stumbled my way through some semi-relevant stuff about Oedipus and the Soviet Union and ignorance and responsibility that I definitely lifted from Milan Kundera until I got to the meat of my question: who is responsible for preventing sexual assault or, framed differently, where is the burden of education about consent? Is it governments? Institutions (read: colleges)? Families? Individuals?
Benje started by giving me a history of his field. Twenty years ago, around the time we were all born, the conversation around sexual assault prevention started in earnest. Originally, it was viewed through a heteronormative, moral lens: “Men, that’s bad, don’t do it to women.” Now the movement has recognized that sexual assault can happen to anyone by anyone, and is growing to recognize that true solution will be a communal undertaking, not targeted moralizing.
The 1990s focus was on risk reduction—action like advising women (remember, it was a heteronormative conversation at the time) to carry pepper spray and take self defense lessons—the kind of things that parents feel compelled to say and that teenagers feel compelled to roll their eyes at before sticking a can of mace in in their glove compartment.
But this approach doesn’t scale up beyond parental advice for two reasons: one, it tips into victim-blaming when directed at people who have experienced sexual violence; and two, it’s simply not effective enough at preventing assault. What the sexual violence prevention community is now trying to do is stage a primary or universal intervention. That is, to change the culture so that sexual assault is simply not a thing that is done, or, if it is done, it is anomalous.
Recent efforts to this end have included the enthusiastic-consent movement which frames consent in sex-positive terms, as opposed to an absence of a no; the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network’s (RAINN) law and order approach of emphasizing criminal accountability, the Center for Disease Control’s Rape Prevention and Education program, and public awareness campaigns, like the White House’s “1 is 2 Many” campaign.
It is clear that governmental and institutional changes are happening. But the stickiest idea that Benje left me with as I unwrapped a pack of Smarties and ambled from 24 College Street to Moulton Union is that the hardest and most important work we can do is to use our relationships. Deep-rooted change happens because people are moved by empathy. This is a current conversation, and this is an important conversation. We need to have it, to actually say the words, it in our closest relationships where it may be the most uncomfortable.
Part of this conversation, I suggest, is to address our relationship with ownership. Sexual assault—rape—is the ultimate objectification of another human. It is turning a self with a consciousness into a thing for pleasure. A self cannot own another self. All humans are subjects in their own lives and should not—must not—be reduced to objects.
You can share that on-point article about rape culture on Facebook and cram your Twitter feed with feminist sound bites—I sure as hell do—but the real work of culture change is person-to-person. So tomorrow I’m going to call up my brother and talk about sexual assault and it will probably be awkward or tense or emotional, but that’s the point. Maybe the next day he’ll talk to his roommate and his roommate will talk to his teammate and he will think differently about his actions. It’s not glamorous, it’s not an epiphany, but it is necessary.

Left of lipstick: Hair or Nair? Embracing self-grooming as a form of self-expression

The first time the topic of pubic hair as public conversation graced my tender ears was in 2004 at a luncheon for people who volunteered at the local library. I was ten years old and mostly went for the rolls and chocolate cream pie. Everyone else at my table was at least 200 years old, except my mom, who was 44. There was a particularly ancient lady across me, and I remember three things about her: she was wearing some sort of leopard-print blouse, she had lipstick on her teeth, and apropos of nothing she said, “Can you believe it, apparently girls these days are shaving it all off down there!” I blushed, my mom blushed—we all blushed.
Eight years later, my friend D. told me my eyebrows were the texture of pubic hair. I blushed, she apologized, then she blushed.
In February of my first year at Bowdoin, I got drunk (off Sunset Blush) with my best friend, O., after the Vagina Monologues. We spent the night running around Mac House during the Cold War party, encouraging our fellow Coleman lady friends to “Let it grooow!” They were horrified; we were empowered. But the empowerment faded when the hangover set in, and I blushed when I ran into my avid pro-grooming floormate brushing her teeth.
It’s clear from my careful data gathering (a.k.a. living) that there are more options than the totally shaved look or going au natural. It’s not a binary—it’s not even a spectrum. It’s whatever you want it to be.
Last summer D. and I, friendship repaired, decided to get bikini waxes together, “cause you never know, E. said she actually liked how it felt.” After 20 minutes (or five hours, not sure which) of stinging, ripping, why-the-hell-am-I-paying-someone-to-do-this-to-me pain, it was done. Shawna, our technician, sent us away with a smile and some wisdom, “Don’t worry if you feel like a plucked chicken for a couple days, that’ll go away!” A familiar warmth creeped into my cheeks—did that woman just compare my vulva to poultry?
My no-bullshit friend N. confessed to me that she bought a beard trimmer to use on her pubic hair because she’s “not into the full bush, but [doesn’t] want a bald child-vagina either.” A month later, my friend J. described to me (in detail, while drunk) a 53-step shaving method she saw on Reddit which was guaranteed to prevent little red bumps. It had something to do with baby oil and exfoliation—I will never be meticulous enough to try it.
Turns out real peer-reviewed data matches my sloppy life data pretty closely. The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Texas conducted a survey about the pubic hair grooming habits in 2011 of 1,677 women ages 16 to 40 years old. Just over 8 percent of women had never groomed their pubic hair at all.
Of the 91.4 percent of women who had at some point groomed their pubic hair, 77 percent had shaved, 23 percent had trimmed with scissors, 19 percent had used hair-removal cream, 16 percent had waxed and 2 percent had used “pubic hair dye” (not sure what that is, but it sounds fun). These numbers add up to more than 100 percent because many women had used more than one method.
These data sets, though insightful, don’t get at the why. Why is there a hegemony for grooming? Certainly the “beauty” industry stands to profit from habitual hair removal—its existence is predicated on instilling and exploiting physical insecurities. But there are also arguments to be made for other causes, like porn or dance or sports or sex. Or maybe it’s just a question of genuine aesthetic preference.
To complicate matters further, there are a handful of reasons to think the trend might be on the wane. In January, Emer O’Toole wrote an article published in the Guardian proclaiming 2014 “the year of the bush.” Additionally Cameron Diaz, hardly a crunchy bra-burner, said publicly that she has stopped shaving her vulva.
So my advice is this: give a nod to the social, political and economic forces scheming to influence your decision to groom your pubic hair, then fuck ’em. Shave it, trim it, Nair it, wax it, dye it, braid it or let it grow. Embrace the human panorama of possibilities.

Left of lipstick

There is no best shampoo: why a Marxist loves Trader Joe’s

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Julia Mead

Columnist

October 23, 2014

I love Trader Joe’s. I probably went there every other day this summer. The sliding doors would open to the kind of music my dad and I like, maybe James Taylor or Emmylou Harris, and a Hawaiian shirt-clad kid I went to high school with. He would greet me by name.

We got a Trader Joe’s down the street the summer before I left for college, and it almost made me want to stay. Why go to Maine when you could buy cookie butter at whim? The closest one used to be in Cincinnati, so whenever my family went up to go to the art museum or a concert or a professional sporting event (you can’t really do these things in Kentucky), we would stop by and get oatmeal cranberry dunkers. It was fucking special.

“Man, Trader Joe’s is the shit,” I sighed, spraying crumbs of blue corn chips across my brother’s dash on our way home from a TJ’s stop.

“Julia, people don’t say that anymore. You’re so lame,” he said, swigging French berry lemonade from the curvy, glass bottle. “Also I thought you were a communist now.”

“Yeah, but those little fancy-ass pigs-in-a-blanket are so good.”

“Aren’t you a vegetarian now too?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make the pigs-in-a-blanket less good.”

Clearly he didn’t get it. I like Trader Joe’s because I’m a communist. He was probably worried that I was going to put a Lenin statue on my desk or drop out of college to move “off the grid.” But what anti-capitalism (or communism if you like) means to me is to look at our economic system, see who it’s hurting and how, and figure out how we can do it better.

A few weeks ago, I was in the Portland Trader Joe’s with my roommate Olivia. We strolled through the aisles and felt our type-A minds unwind.

“Liv, I feel…relaxed.”

“Me too. It’s weird. Do we need more tea?”

“Yeah, let’s get some ginger pear. And possibly some mint?”

Trader Joe’s is great because there’s only one kind of anything. We didn’t have to choose between ten brands of mint tea, ultimately deciding on the one with the most appealing packaging but wondering if maybe we should have gone with Tazo or Celestial Seasonings.
We escaped what Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice. It’s a quirk of consumer capitalism we’ve all experienced. You’re standing in the shampoo aisle at the drug store where there are so many options it makes it difficult to choose. You pace down the aisle, double back, pace some more as variables tumble through your head: price, scent, packaging aesthetics, your past experience, what your roommate uses, advertisements you’ve seen, until you glance at the time and realize you’ve been stuck for five minutes—paralysis.

The shampoo aisle scenario provides a preponderance of choice. Does A, B, or C suit my needs better? In reality, there is negligible difference between the dozens of options. The whole shampoo aisle is owned by Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson (seriously, look it up). And let’s face it: how much do these consumer choices—Dove vs. Secret, Patagonia vs. Mountain Hardware, PBR vs. Rolling Rock—matter to the cores of our lives?

The ideology of choice preaches that people can make themselves happy by making the right choices, consumer and otherwise. You have the power to choose your own path: college, career, life partner. This logic works in reverse as well. If you’re unhappy, you must have made the wrong choices.

But no choices exist in a vacuum. Social pressure, explicit or internalized, affects every choice. Despite the myriad and disparate factors influencing choice, we strive to make an ideal one. But when you’re choosing laundry detergent, there is no best choice.

So that’s why this baby Marxist (shoutout to Professor Gouda for the label) loves her some TJ’s. We live in a world with too many kinds of shampoo, and critical ideology can help us understand it. I guess a full-grown Marxist wouldn’t want corporations at all, but that shining, elusive, ever-distant vision doesn’t do much for me. I am thankful for a quick decision made confidently and without regrets. I am thankful for the respite from paralysis. I love Trader Joe’s.

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