When Life Imitates TV
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Disclaimer: The author chooses to replace the “y” at the end of words with an “i” due to personal taste. It is not a typo. In case you find a “y” at the end of a word, it would be a typo indeed. Please report it to the team. Gracias!
The other night, I was watching an episode of a TV show called “Cold Case”, one of the mani detective style series. The subject of the episode was a teenage girl called Samantha. The events related to her took place in 1963. Samantha had a problem: She “looked and dressed like boys.” She was shoved around and harassed at school. Some boys were even trying to put lipstick on her to “show her what a girl looks like” when the principal walked in and called her to his office, onli to expel her later. Following that her father sent her to a corrective institute for her to learn “how to be a lady.”
The “ladyalisation” process included teaching Samantha, along with other girls who wore their hair short, how to apply lipstick. Lined up like young soldiers, the girls were each given a hand mirror along with a lipstick and ordered to open it and start applying it on.
Medium close-up:
Samantha is holding the mirror in one hand and a bright red colored lipstick in the other.
Time stopped. I saw a mirror image of myself in her. I was holding the red lipstick in my hand and forced to wear it. My stomach turned. I felt nauseated. How could anyone impose such a thing on somebodi else? Who has the right to determine what ladies are supposed to look like and dress as? Was that lipstick supposed to make her attractive? If I wanted my girlfriend to wear such a color I would’ve dated a clown! To this day, mani women find themselves forced to wear make-up and have perfect manicures and pedicures to please their womanizing bosses. Must a woman subject herself to these chemical products and extra expenses to ensure a “professional attire”?
Samantha revolted against the orders and turned the table upside down. She was later subjected to electro shock therapi that sucked the life out of her. In the end, she was left lying in bed as a vegetable, wearing a red dress. Her temples were burnt and scarred. The scars reminded me of Frankenstein’s bolts. People are capable of killing the living as much as they are capable of reviving the dead. Frankenstein and Samantha had both been mutations tailored by ruthless societies to serve the greater good. Both turned out to be enormous failures that caused their protagonists to come to their end.
Samantha wasn’t a lesbian. She had a crush on her male best friend. Would she have identified as a transsexual or a trangendered person? Perhaps. Or maybe she just found it more comfortable to wear pants and shirts and didn’t enjoy cramming her toes in a teeni shoe and walking on stiletto heels. Women aren’t all masochists.
Long shot:
Samantha lived in the United States, in the 1960s. In modern-day Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates in particular, Gulf News featured an article about the “surge” of boyish young women in the countri, commonli referred to as “boyat”, which is originalli derived from the word “boy”. The article Too close for comfort: Homosexuality in schools is homophobic and plain ignorant. Bekhsoos proudli responded to it in Gulfnews.com Propagates Homophobia in the UAE. Google “boyat” and you will find concerns about the issue in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Apparentli, the word diversiti in the Gulf translates into a varieti of cars, wives and other properties with no relation to sexual preference or sexual orientation.
On this side of the world, the road to acceptance seems to be so long. Frankenstein onli wanted love. So did Samantha.
Phoenix is a self-centered and sarcastic soul incarnated, perhaps by accident, in the bodi of a woman. As a writer with a temper, she replaces her "y's with an annoying “i” for aesthetical purposes and lives to crack a joke, at the expense of others. Her paranoid nature makes her sensitive to plants, animals and people. Ironicalli, after making fun of the Meem lesbians for years, she found a warm home there and is now renowned as its veri own emotional pest. She enjoys reading the paper with a hot cup of black tea while nude, more often than not.
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