Dominion Post body-policing drinking game
I always look for ways to make righteous fury fun dull the pain of existing in a misogynist world stop myself going postal too often. Bingo cards, drinking games, with such tools do we activists spike the bullshit that infests our daily lives.
Example: when Amanda at Pickled Think links me to this abomination of “style”-page chaff, I channel my immediate instinct to scream FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU at the top of my voice into imagining just how horrendously pissed I and a select group of friends would get if we did a shot every time they mention:
- Teenage girls with boobs! ZOMG THE SEXUALISATION OF OUR YOUTH SIGN OF DOWNFALL OF MORALITY
- Men in lingerie! PROBABLY GAY AMIRITE?
- “Men dressed as women” because it’s not like we could actually ask people how they identify. And even given the massive problems of gender-defined-by-external-genitalia I’m pretty sure they’d have stopped fitting “men” at the counter if there was any cock on display.
- Old women! With gross underwear! Because they’re old! And gross! And they forget to put on underwear because they’re senile LOL!!!
- Women’s posture is worse because we’re no longer obliged to strap ourselves into horrifically uncomfortable, nay painful, undergarments in order to conform to accepted body shapes! OH BUT I’M JUST WORRIED ABOUT YOUR HEALTH!
- For a chaser, of course, don’t forget that the only alternative to 1960s girdles is LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT like a filthy fucking strumpet.
- And mastectomies! Because once you’ve lost your boobs you are Unwoman but at least you can reclaim some of your natural object-to-be-gazed-upon status with sexy knickers, right? God, do you think they pat their customers on the head for being So Brave while they’re at it?
I think the answer “pretty darn pissed” about cuts it.
I love Stuff articles, I must say. It just wouldn’t be a Stuff “article” without a … completely random tailing-off at the end with no actual conclusion or even investigation into, e.g., why more younger women may be having mastectomies. I guess that would have involved Sarah Young actually doing more than chatting to store personnel on her lunchbreak.
My conclusion? Given how much I’d hate to fill one of the few funny-anecdote niches they appear to have missed – seriously, no “And these days you get a lot more fatties thinking they’re hot”? – I think I’ll avoid ever buying knickers at Kirks ever again. The sounds you can hear are my wallet and class consciousness throwing a party.
Ideologically Impure 
That bit about how now people are wearing g-strings and t shirt bras instead of corsets and girdles, and letting it all hang out, got to me. It was pretty fat-shaming; like, hey fatties, back in the day you would have at least had the decency to wear binding undergarments to suck it all in so as not to offend people with your fatness. How dare you exhibit to others that you have body fat! Blerg. Knowing that they would probs look at me and think I was letting it all hang out is so judgy, and if this was a shop in my city I would withdraw my business from there, most likely.
On some reflection, LN, I don’t see that comment as specifically *fat*-shaming, but just *body*-shaming in that kind of, “ew, we have physical bodies that are squishy and fleshy, and move and roll and aren’t rock-hard Grecian-statue perfect physiques” way – which is shaming/policing for all women who don’t strap everything into a girdle and look like they’ve rolled off an assembly line.
Uh, yeah, apart from how vile they are I would never go there on the basis that the staff have no manners or sense of respecting privacy!
Ta for going into further depth QoT. I ran out of tequila for the intersectional-fucktitude of this one and stuck with the “funny trannies” line.
But yeah, good to know that no matter who you are, the Kirks staff will have a shame for every situation, and it makes for high-larious reporting!