My name's Ali and I am every woman. I'm twenty years old and I am a junior in college, where I am a member of Sigma Kappa sorority. I'm a Graphic Design major; it's a love/hate relationship. My other hobby is writing, something I have been doing for much longer. I also love to read. But most of all, I love to love, and I love to laugh. I'm what you might call a purist in terms of what it means to be human. I don't believe in censoring myself, but I do believe in always being honest, and always trying to be a better person. I'm not perfect in any way. I constantly make mistakes. I'm a surly, intellectual graphic design snob, a fangirling supernerd, someone who values friendship, loyalty, and companionship above almost all else. I'm a girl who doubts herself and others often, cries during TV shows, movies, songs, books, and also commercials that show reunions of people and overcoming adversity. I am not the girl who can lead a charge, but I am a girl who can last a siege.
♥ Harry Potter. Doctor Who. The Hunger Games. Supernatural. Fullmetal Alchemist (Brotherhood). Internet culture. Video games. Spongebob. My cat Muffin. My family. My Sigma Kappa sisters. Sleeping. Eating. Jeopardy. Rompers. Lack of pants. Bare feet. Dictionary.com. Truth.
Ever notice how the women in Cosmopolitan magazine so often look like they’re a hair’s breath from an orgasm? This goes for the ads as well as the editorials. Have you ever wondered: hmm, isn’t it sort of weird that a women’s magazine that is itself sold to women and is simultaneously trying to sell things to women should be filled with other women staring out of the pages making the kinds of dull-witted sexyfaces you’d expect them to be making at men whose attentions they were seeking? Why are women being instructed to look at women who are ostensibly looking at invisible men? The magazine is showing you women via the male gaze. The magazine is also training you to see yourself via the male gaze, and to put more currency in how you look to the outside observer, or how you look in a mirror, as opposed to how you look at the world, as a person seeing. The message is that women don’t see; they are only seen. You want a man? You wear these clothes, stand in this posture, make this sexyface: these are the symbols of the straight female. In a heteronormative, male-driven world, this what it means to be beautiful, or at least sexually available.
