(NOTE: TODAY’S BLOG IS A VERY ANGRY RANT. HARSH LANGUAGE LIES AHEAD.) Oh, I wish I had not seen this news story, about waitresses at Resorts Casino who were fired because they are too “old and unattractive” to wear the skimpy new uniforms.
I know I get worked up by these things, that it’s one of my personal issues that not everyone agrees with. Therefore, I’ve learned to just look elsewhere, because I’m powerless to stop the rest of the world from doing what it wants to do. In fact, it’s not even my place to deprive someone else of their karmic storylines. In that way, I get it. We all learn from experience, and this is the experience they are choosing. So I try to ignore it. But I cannot ignore this one. There must be women who share my views or this wouldn’t be a news story.
There’s an insidious Beast running a segment of our society, a beast that feeds on the bodies, minds and spirits of our young women. This Beast tells them that they are valued primarily for their beauty and their sexuality. It tells them that they should give their bodies up freely to any man who wants it, or he’ll just find someone else who will. It convinces them that they should lift their shirts in exchange for beads or a shot of booze during spring break, and never mind the video camera or drooling cameraman. It persuades them that the voices of older women who try to tell them to STOP feeding the Beast are just old and envious because no one wants to look at them anymore.
This Beast tells them that they should wear almost nothing while selling cocktails or wear tight t-shirts to sell burgers. It tells them that they should dance on poles and have anal sex, even if they don’t want to, because all the porno girls are doing it. It convinces them that this is the way to get rich and famous. And it believes that it can have its cake and eat it too.
Unfortunately, it’s right: the girls are its cake and they are being devoured. There are countless young women out there right now who are degrading themselves in this way, who have been taught to believe that people who think like me are full of crap and just jealous.
The result? Second graders having oral sex in the back of a California classroom. Channels that used to be geared toward children now showing bitchy, slutty girls competing for boys’ attention. Neighbor girls showing my granddaughter how Girls Gone Wild act, because they see it on TV, and teaching her that this is what big girls do.
Maybe the reason this really has my ass chapped today is because I’m writing a book with a woman whose father started raping her when she was four. I’ve been trying to get into the headspace of what that must have been like for her, and it’s a horrible place to be. I see little girls at the grocery store, and wonder how long they’ll get to keep their precious innocence. I saw an adorable little girl today wearing fairy wings, holding her daddy’s hand, and wondered how long it would be before the Beast brutally nails her because it detests her glittering girlyness.* But, hey, that’s what girls are for, right?
That’s the Beast, right there. It hates girls and teaches girls to hate themselves; it hates what girls can become (mature women who don’t tolerate that nonsense) if they’re not crushed by the weight of such extreme pressure. I was going to say “sexual pressure,” but this isn’t sex. Sex, to me, is fun and mutually enjoyable. This garbage isn’t sex, nor is it sexuality. It’s stealing the souls of half of our population and I’m pissed.
So yeah, young cocktail waitresses at the Resorts Casino, go ahead and wear the skimpy uniforms and triumphantly push aside the older waitresses who trained you to do the job and then got fired because they don’t “look good” in the bits of fabric they’ve been given. Go ahead and be flattered by the attention you’re getting because you do look “good” in them. Go ahead and feed that Beast. I just hope you survive with a little bit of dignity intact when they’re through with you. And when you’re done, we “old and ugly” elder women will be here to help you reconnect with your soul.
* Just to make this clear, because that line really infuriated a male reader, I wasn’t talking about the DAD abusing the daughter, I was talking about the allegorical “Beast” that I’m writing about in this blog.
And, just for the record, I’m not even talking about men in this post, because women participate, too. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be an issue. “The Beast” in this post is the societal pressure that feels, to many women, like it says: “Every female must be a sexpot or they are unworthy of existence.”
Lisa Bonnice is an award-winning, best-selling author and editor/manuscript doctor (and former stand-up comedienne—is there anything she can’t do???). Her current passion-project is a series of metaphysical comedy novels. The first in the series is Be Careful What You Witch For!, a modern-day fairy tale about Lola Garnett, a bored housewife, mom and office drone who wakes up with unexpected psychic abilities, and no instruction manual, and Twink, the reluctant, sarcastic faery assigned to assist and educate her.
Here's you a blog ... 