If you know me you can guess the tirade I'm about to jump into. So, here's the abridged version.
Certain nightclubs, ones with widely presumed wealthy clientele looking for casual, often predatory sex and superficial thrills in the form of women cheaply displaying themselves for the male gaze, disgust me.
I don't often find myself in such situations, but every once in a while it happens. At one such club in South Kensington, Amika, I ran for refuge in the toilet to avoid being grabbed and oggled or ramming accidentally into one of the low tables decked out with overpriced alcohol in plastic lit up wells. And that's really where the feminist rant begins.
Women in the bathrooms, already caked in foundation were applying mascara to tarantula eyelashes, redoing their eye liner so that it looked like the paint along the side of a road. Collagen-inspired lips and industrial back-combed hair invaded the space, in stark contrast to the skin-tight leggings and sparkly sequined boob tubes that adorned their essentially bare bodies. This was not a happy place. Women did not converse with each other, or if they did it was on the topic of makeup and lotions. As if these are the only things women are capable of contemplating. Needless to say, there was an added discomfort in the form of a woman, noticeably not one of the clientele by her relatively conservative dress and lack of face paint, who was squeezing soap into the palms of these barbie dolls and handing them paper to dry off their lotioned limbs. This detail added a whole sense of discomfort for me.
Going to wash my hands, I noticed in the sink a little collection of rocks. As if to suggest that the sink was in fact some natural stream in which these women had come to bathe themselves. This suggestion of nature and natural imagery was just the most comical point in comparison to the worship of artifice that surrounded it along the mirrors. I don't think one woman was wearing a natural material. They were decked out in lycra, nylon, polyester, plastic, and who knows what else was in their war paint.
Who comes here and sees this as leisure? What does it mean that women are engaging in these rituals of reapplication in the bathroom, rather than in public. Do they think anyone out there looks and them and thinks they are naturally this way? I wonder what the men's bathroom looks like? Who's there to give them soap and towels? What lotions do they use? What do they talk about and think about?
And does anyone notice this strange collection of rocks in the sink?
