And You Thought You Had This Girl Thing Down!

Stick with me here as I try to "structure" this post.

I'm going to start it with an experience I had 199 years ago as a kid and build from there.  In my youth, every friggin year, our vacation was a two week trip up to the area around Toronto, Ontario - Canada. Dad would rent out a fishing cabin on a lake called "Rice Lake" and we would do our best to fish it out. We caught the fish, cleaned the fish, froze the fish and ate them every Friday for a year until it was time for...you guessed it...fish for more.

One year when I was probably 12 or so, we found enough kids in the camp to form a tackle, no pads football game.  Being the overly compensating male kid I was, my hero was a fullback for The Ohio State University and I wanted the ball.  I got the ball all right and was picked up and slammed down on my shoulder.  My collar bone was broken and my Dad temporarily lost an employee. Ironically,  what sticks with me to this day is when the doctor said to my Mom, "well the collarbone is broken, but he won't have to worry about wearing a strapless dress anytime soon."  He was right in a way- it was several years before I did go strapless.

Then! I read this from the "Fashionista" beauty blog..."Everything You Need to Know About Collarbone Contouring!" Dammit! You mean I spent all those years contouring my collar bone "bump" wrong?  Where was the internet when I was a kid and needed it?

Then! Bobbie sent me a link on Facebook to a Greenville Gazette article where a Tracy Spicer gave a talk about the pressures society puts on women to look a certain way. She explains that women spend an average of 3,276 hours of their lives grooming. Men spend a third of that primping themselves.

“Imagine what we could achieve if we weren't beholden to society’s unreasonable expectations about how we should look,” Spicer says. In the amount of time it takes every year grooming, women could learn another language or get a degree. The sky is the limit to what women could accomplish with that time.   

DUH!

No big surprise there Tracy! What she didn't say was how much of that pressure comes from within the women's sandbox. Who do women dress for first, men or women? Personally, I feel if I present well and blend with the women I'm around I can move around in the world with less potential problems. In other words, I'm passing the girl's "sandbox test".  It's a tough crowd in "the box" though and I'm sure proper contouring of my collar bone would have given me a bit more respect from the "A" listers - if I had only known!

Thanks Bobbie! Here's my second book plug recently (making me feel like Dr. Phil) but there is quite the discussion of the "girl's sandbox" in one of the chapters of "Stiletto's on Thin Ice."