You Can't Touch My Hair

by Phoebe Robinson

  Remember on Grey’s Anatomy when Izzie stole a heart for Denny, a heart transplant patient she fell in love with, but he died anyway? It was all very sad, but then things got ri-Donkey-Kong-ulous because months later, she started having sex with his ghost. Many fans of the show were like, “The Lord is testing me with this story line. I’m out.” Not I! I was like, “The Lord is testing me? Well, good thing I brought my TI-83 calc and number two pencil. Let’s do this.” I kept watching Grey’s in spite of all the gintercourse, aka ghost intercourse. I’m not overwhelmingly proud about that level of commitment, but, nevertheless, I deserve some props for sticking with this crazy plot. I mean, I stuck it out past the Izzie-lighting-scented-candles-for-sex-with-what-is-essentially-recycled-air-from-her-home’s-central-cooling-system scene. I overlooked her and Ghost Denny’s “O” faces. And finally, when it was revealed that the gintercourse was actually her hallucinating due to a brain tumor, I didn’t dive out my window because I wasted several weeks on this story line—instead, I watched two more seasons rather than do something productive, like getting my student loan payments in order. #Priorities. The point is, Future Female President, when it came to Grey’s, I gave it my all because I’m a ride-or-die chick. And more importantly, I want to be a ride-or-die chick for you.

  However, in order for that to happen, you have to take care of a few things for me (and all women). So, without further ado, here’s my list of demands that should be super easy for you to conquer:

  1. Make a law that requires all the magazine writers, bloggers, and entertainment news journalists who insist on perpetuating the thigh-gap obsession to forever be forced to own a brand-new iPhone that doesn’t fit the old charger. Forever ever? Forever ever. That way, they can’t give their phone some juice and will have to live with the nightmare of their phones dying midtext, resulting in that ellipses bubble appearing on their friends’ phone screens before vanishing like a David Blaine magic trick. Harsh punishment? Probs, but it seems fitting for this thigh-gap obsession they created to make women feel bad about themselves.

  1A. I’m not saying thigh gap, or lack thereof, should never be discussed. Half the time I’m walking, I’m contemplating turning the heat from my thighs rubbing together into a mobile BYOSI—Bring Your Own S’mores Ingredients—station where I charge people $5 to warm up their s’mores. Now that I mention it, it seems like a good idea to try to turn this into a possible business venture with any and all of the Shark Tank investors. I’m thinking we can call the company Still I Thigh. It would only be open during Black History Month, and while customers cook their s’mores, I’d recite the Maya Angelou poem “Still I Rise.” #BlackExcellence.

  1B. In all seriousness, my problem with the thigh-gap craze is that a completely unimportant physical trait has now morphed into something that women need to aspire toward, and if they are unable to “achieve” the thigh gap, they have, in some way, failed as women. This is evident in entertainment magazines and pop culture blogs where paparazzi photos of actresses are analyzed. Generally, a circle is drawn around the space (or lack of space) between her legs, and a positive “You go, girl” or a snarky “Get your life together, you garbage Dumpster of a person” is the caption. I mean, is that all it takes to deem a woman worthy or not worthy? Thankfully, the answer is no. However, if we elaborate on the answer, we will see there are other completely superficial things that women now have to be concerned with.

  There’s now thighbrow (the fold that resembles an eyebrow and appears where your thigh and pelvis meet when you kneel). Before that, there was Fight Club torso, aka Brad Pitt’s extremely fit body in the aforementioned movie. This level of fitness was universally celebrated on Pitt but, naturally, deemed fifty shades of gross and unfeminine when a woman, such as the singer P!nk, was that in shape. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the original subject of discussion and obsession: boobs. Literally any and all boobs because it seems whatever kind of boobs a woman has is always somehow the wrong kind OR if she is that rare woman who is #Blessed with the perfect tatas, the Internet is a-counting down to the day that age and gravity catches up to this woman and her breasts sag like a pair of Lil Wayne’s jeans. In other words, the avalanche of criticism toward women’s bodies seems to be a national pastime, and it just so happens that thigh gap is having its moment in the sun. And it’s a moment that’s contributing to women hating their bodies. Women shouldn’t do that! I spent my high school years hating how skinny I was—because people used to tease me by calling me names like Sticks!—which is so unfortunate because if my current stomach was as flat as it was in high school, I’d be running down the streets of NYC, topless, offering my abs as a charcuterie board for housewarming parties. Hmm, maybe that can be a business, too. Man, I really need to talk to Mark Cuban because these business ideas are just flowing out of me! Anyway, Future Female President, please make these dum-dums in the media pay for making women feel bad about their bodies and I will be forever yours.

  2. Right-click and send to Trash all the women who say they’re a Carrie. Even if the woman who says this is Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, one of the most important activists of our time. No one is a Carrie. I repeat, NO ONE IS A CARRIE. And why would anyone want to be? She kind of sucks (hello, her entire relationship with Aidan), she seemingly worked about three hours a week and was surprised that she didn’t have money, and after Mr. Big, her on-again, off-again beau, stated he’s tired of New York so he’s moving to Napa Valley, she replied, “When you’re tired, you take a nap-a, you don’t move to NAP-A.” The puns, you guys. THE GODDAMN PUNS. They were endless and ridiculous as if she was constantly competing on that game show @midnight and no woman I know is about that Chris Hardwick life. So let’s be real. At best, us ladies are just a bunch of Mirandas with a slightly better wardrobe and at worst, we’re a bunch of Magdas, aka Miranda’s housekeeper, which means we’re a bunch of nosy bitches who rifle through people’s belongings and let them know they masturbate too much.

  3. OK, this is probably my most important request on the list, so if you can only do one thing, I beg of you that it’s this: When you get sworn into office, yell, “I’m a feminist,” and then throw your fist in the air like you’re Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club.

  3A. I get that this may seem super aggressive and that politicians are not supposed to ruffle feathers, but this would be the ultimate gesture to let women know you have their backs. Now, FFP, if you’re Hillary Clinton, you’re probably like, “Can’t people tell I’m a feminist because I wear Talbots pantsuits on the regs?” 1. Please don’t say “regs.” So not your style, and 2. No, because, your wardrobe screams “very fancy judge at a chili cook-off in Minnesota” more than it does “feminist,” so we need you to actually drop the F-bomb into the microphone. And when you do, so many crazy old white dudes are going to freak out that it’ll seem like someone just told them there are only seven tickets remaining on StubHub for a Steely Dan concert.

  If you’re not Hillary Clinton, but some other white lady like Elizabeth Warren (I know she has said she doesn’t want to run, but I can dream), you’re probably like, “I’m different than HRC. I don’t wear pantsuits.” We. Do. Not. Have. Time. For. These. Games, Future Female President. There’s too much in this country that needs fixing to waste time debating the obvious. A sensible pantsuit is the older white-woman political uniform the way short shorts and a headband is the uniform for the least athletic kid with the most heart on a middle school kickball team.

  Now, if you’re not a white lady but a woman of color who ends up being President of the United States? First of all, holy cannoli! I did not see this coming. Congrats! You achieved what seemed like the impossible and I look forward to the day when HBO makes an epic miniseries about you. Secondly, and this is going to be a bummer in the summer, but I’m going to need you to chill out. You are a woman of color (and in the coolest of cool worlds, an LGBT woman of color) and that is already enough to stress some
people out/make them hypercritical of every single thing you do. So you cannot be out in these streets, scaring people by pumping your fists and screaming, “I’m a feminist,” the way Al Pacino yelled, “Attica!” in Dog Day Afternoon. You need to be hella low key about your feminism, at least during the first term. This sucks, but them’s the breaks, Madam President.

  3B. With that said, don’t be trifling about being a feminist. It really infuriates me when high-profile people in your position self-identity as feminists just because it’s trendy at the moment and then don’t do any of the, you know, actual work of trying to make things equal for everybody. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty in order to create a society that takes women as seriously as the men. The type that encourages us to not define ourselves by who we go to bed with at night, but by who and what we see reflected back at us in the mirror in the morning. The type that recognizes that women are not a monolith and that they have wildly different experiences informed by their race and/or sexuality. Be that beacon of light that we can look toward. Be the feminist who will help normalize the idea of Feminism for society. Be the feminist everyone needs. No presh.

  3C. I’m assuming it’s pretty obvious by now that you’ll need a feminist posse by your side, so surround yourself with incredibly brilliant women. Women of color, women from different educational backgrounds, women of various sexual orientations. Create an army of superwomen who have medals in badassery. Use them to effect change, then go home and catch up on The Good Wife. I’m telling you, don’t let all the Julianna Margulies/Archie Panjabi behind-the-scenes drama dissuade you. This show is seriously so good . . . shoot. Hillary, if you’re reading this, you’re probably like, “Uh, hello! The inciting incident in the pilot episode—politico husband cheating on wife—was kind of my life.” And you are correct. Sorry about that. I’m sure you can find reruns of Northern Exposure on the Hallmark Channel or something.

  4. The following is mainly for the Future Black Female President, but if you’re white, feel free to give it the old college try, even though you might not get why the following is super important. Can you please see to it that Scandal’s Olivia Pope gets a black girlfriend? Liv makes a lot of dumb mistakes, like sleeping with the very married president of the United States. And quite frankly, living life as a side piece seems to be making her depressed. She would greatly benefit from having a best black girlfriend who can share beauty products with her, bust out the rap from the Living Single theme song, and also keep it real enough to tell Ms. Pope not to get emotionally attached to a guy whose Tinder-profile bio ought to be “I pass my peen around like moist toilettes at a family cookout.”

  5. Help the world get comfortable with the word vagina. I mean, in 2012, Michigan lawmaker Lisa Brown was straight up silenced after she said it on the House floor when discussing reproductive rights. For some reason, people act like they have ants in their pants when they hear it, which explains why there is an ever-growing list of code words for vagina. My go-to is vajeen, which I’m deathly certain was the original surname for Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, until Victor Hugo rightly assumed that people would fail to see the humor in that in 1862. On TV, Shonda Rhimes introduced vajayjay into the lexicon to make people (and Standards and Practices) more comfortable, even though the word penis can be freely uttered on prime-time TV shows. (Again: Viola Davis uttering the greatest nine-word sentence of all time on How to Get Away with Murder: “Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone?”) There are many more iterations I could list here, but the point is that playful lingo is necessary because calling a vagina by its given anatomical name makes people uncomfortable.

  What I’m even more concerned with are those folks (typically men) who use a litany of pejorative slang for reproductive organs to check the behavior of men and women. I’m sorry, but knowing all the lyrics to Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” or crying when something sad happens does not mean a person is a “pussy.” And calling a woman a “cunt” because she is assertive or exhibits more “masculine” traits as a way to shut her down is nothing but schoolyard bullying. (Note: I’m excluding the Brits’ usage of the word, which is so oft sprinkled into conversation that it seems no more edgy than Americans saying “asshole.”) In both cases, pussy and cunt are ways of shaming someone into arbitrary gender norms: to let women know they shouldn’t be confident and to signal to men that being sensitive is a sign of weakness. And until they unlearn these behaviors, they will be nothing more than a bunch of weak-willed pussies or scary cunts. This is crazy. Pussies, excuse me, vaginas, shouldn’t be the symbol of “bad” behavior; the symbol should be Donald Trump and his Cheetos-dust skin tone. Furthermore, vaginas are not weak or scary. They’re amazingly strong. And they’re self-cleaning. Basically, women have a Whirlpool dishwasher in their pants at all times. That’s some goddamned wizardry! Screw Harry Potter! Why isn’t J. K. Rowling writing a book about the magic of the vajeen and calling it what I call mine: Dolly Parton and the Coat of Many Colors? BTdubs, I call my vagina “Dolly Parton and the Coat of Many Colors”—sorry, you can’t unknow that about me—because vajeens, much like mood rings, change color based on mood and arousal. The more you know!

  5A. Once we get folks on board with the V-word, then we have to move on to getting people comfortable with vaginas. That’s right, you have to let white dude politicians know that when it comes to women’s bodies and reproductive rights, there’s a new sheriff in town. That sheriff is you, by the way, and I thank you for that, because this sausage fest needed to end a long time ago. Not just because it’s absurd that women are, for the most part, left out of the conversation about their own bodies, but also because most of these clowns don’t actually know how the female body works. We’ve all read the news and watched the reports of male politician after male politician making boneheaded comments about female anatomy, and while I did revel in seeing them skewered on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report or Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, once the laughs subsided, all that remained was the knowledge that uninformed people are in positions of power, and that is scary. Remember Republican representative Todd Akin? The one who actually believes that if a woman is “legitimately raped” (whatever that means), her body will just “shut that thing down” and not get pregnant? Right, Todd. Because a woman’s body is magical and can make unwanted sperm go bye-bye if the woman wishes it away while rubbing a Sacagawea coin. Yes, I’m being flippant here, Future Female President, but I’m not too far off from some of the loony tunes things that these guys have said. So, please, be the voice of reason, be the voice of science, and be the voice for all the other women who aren’t lucky enough to have a seat at the table during the discussion about their bodies.

  6. Add the following sex position to the Kama Sutra: RRM. You know, reverse reverse missionary. I mean, yeah, it’s just the missionary posish, which is my jam, but it sounds way cooler because I added the word reverse to it. Everything sounds better with reverse in the mix. Think about it. Reverse 360-degree dunk? Awesome. Reverse osmosis? Perfect icebreaker for meeting Bill Nye. The movie Memento? Classic because so much of it is told in reverse. So help a sister out, because I’m tired of judgey mofos staring me down when I say I’m #TeamMissionary.

  7. Ban drunk people from singing “Hallelujah” on karaoke night. Listen, it’s an amazing song. I loved it when it was used in a montage on The West Wing. I loved it when American Idol contestants covered it. But karaoke is not the time for slow, introspective, angelic music. It’s for crushing club bangers that’ll make everyone twerk so hard it’s as if they just learned that shaking their butts is going to replace windmills as a viable energy source for planet Earth.

  8. Have the WNBA lower the hoops. Because even though layups get the job done, they’re lame. Seriously, layups look the way Woody Allen talks. Wimpy as fuck. But dunking? Oh, dunking is primal and raw and passionate. It’s an exclamation point, a “Yeah, I did that. What of it
.” Dunking is both joyful and magical, like the feeling you get when you eat a really good piece of ham hock in a bowl of collard greens that was whipped up by a portly ethnic woman in a kitchen that’s a skosh too small and a tad too humid. The point is, so much of basketball is about dunking, and more specifically, about ending up on ESPN’s highlight reel because for whatever reason, everyone loves crotch-to-face interactions in sports. We’re just all like, “Oooh, look how close that one basketball player’s face is to that other player’s nether regions! This can either be the start of fellatio OR this can end with a tender peck like the kind grandparents plant on their grandkid’s knees after the kid’s made a boo-boo OR the player getting dunked on might see something in the crotch like when people swear they see Jesus in a piece of diner toast and decide to change their lives.” When these crotch-to-face moments don’t happen in basketball, the game is basically a professional version of my brother’s thirty-five-and-older YMCA league, which consists of dudes with bad backs and admirable FICO scores. That shit is boring and basically what the WNBA is right now. And the WNBA doesn’t have to be. Let’s help it shine bright like a diamond, or at the very least bright like the players’ skin, because since it’s a mostly black league, they’re all wearing cocoa butter.

  9. Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney. Nick Nolte and Gary Busey. Gabriel Byrne and Peter Gabriel. Quit making so many white men that get confused for each other! Now, Future Female President, I’m not entirely sure how you can fix this, but something must be done because these white dudes with similar names and/or faces are too much. Older black people cannot handle this shit. And I’m tired of spending four-fifths of my Christmas vacation explaining the difference between Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman to my mom.