Neo-Feminist Rant 1.0/ Book Review

I work at a book store. I am surrounded by books and many, many delightful little distractions that keep me busy while I probably should be, oh I don’t know: cleaning something, or paying attention to customers.  Anyway, while I was making myself look busy, I ran across this book: Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. Needless to say, it kept me adequately distracted for most of my shift this week.

Flow, explains centuries of practices surrounding the PERIOD. It also highlights the most crazy and scary products marketed to women I have ever seen. For example: Did you know that Lysol used to market itself not only as something to freshen your bathroom with but also as a douche/form of birth control? Yeah! Wrap your head around that one.

What really blew me away though was, after reading through the section on the invention of the adhesive strip (Thank GOD for that little piece of technology) I realized that feminine hygiene products,  somehow set apart from other hygiene products like toilet paper, paper towels and hand soap, are seen as “luxury items” and therefore subject to tax.  If you also hadn’t noticed, they are not given out freely like other hygiene products in public bathrooms.

I have to wonder why? How is a period , different from any other excretion of the human body? It happens less often than most of the other ones, but it happens to nearly all women, more than half of the population of the earth might I add, and yet the availability of products that assist women in staying clean and healthy are select and are overall, more expensive than their urine and feces cleaning counterparts. (Run-on, deal with it. )

It angers my slightly.

It angers me even more though, that this points out that we still, as a society, have not come to grips with the idea of the period. It happens people, get over it. If it didn’t you wouldn’t be reading this.

Two bitter posts. I must be getting my period.

Lindsay

The Sociology of Retail

So in my many adventures in the wacky world of retail, I’ve discovered (didn’t take me long) that people are, on average, pretty ignorant of the those around them. I’m going to take a guess that it’s not out of malice that I get treated like a vending machine for 6 hours at a time, but that people simply just don’t care.  I conducted a tiny experiment this last week while I was serving up Starbucks, and when asking for a customer’s order, I looked directly into their eyes and greeted them with a “hello!” or what have you.   It was amazing to see the varying expressions I received. Like I said, on average people are jerks, so on occasion, I did recieve a mirrored smile and stare and we’d share a moment. But more often than not, my greeting was mumbled in return or simply ignored and the menu above me was the chosen visual target.

Now, I’m not saying that I want people to stare at me and tell me their hopes and dreams, when I know damn well all they want is a latte and to get the hell out of the store. But it would be nice to somehow know that this person knows customer service people are making an effort to give them a personable experience, that we are in fact people. That we  go home at night and after hours of talking to people like brick walls, it drives us a little insane, and yet, we do it with a smile on our faces day in and day out.

I also have noticed a superiority complex that exists among some individuals who seem to get their jollies from pushing around us surfs who are obligated to treat them nicely as they “are always right”. Not cool people, not cool.

To wrap up my whining, I don’t know about anyone else’s mothers, but I was always taught to say “hello”, “please” and “thank you” no matter what the situation or how much better you may think you are.

Jeesh.

Enough complaining for now.

Lindsay