liberate me!

This is a picture of a woman who won the London Marathon yesterday. Yep, look closely. She has underarm hair. Now I know she's from China, and maybe social expectations are different than they are here, but I wonder how the media in posh London accepted this free-spirited soul.

And it makes me think of other situations where women either intentionally or unintentionally brush up against expectations we sometimes have for them. Tiffkin and I saw an article last month from a woman who was teaching young girls that bras were medically dangerous and demeaning, and how she wished we had a world where we didn't need them. That's similar to the valedictorian of my high school class, who told us in her graduation speech that she hadn't shaved her legs in two years.

Now on the complete opposite end, in Mexico we saw a woman who was the epitome of a self-made goddess: long, cotton blonde hair; an obvious breast augmentation; a tummy tuck; a constant string of "elegant" cigarettes; a wealthy, snoody man at her side; and the most telling feature: a deep deep suntan that only was enhanced through the hours she spent laying outside. The tan was the thing that kept getting us, like she was scoffing at the sun and the world, defying the danger and throwing caution to the wind. She was brown on the outside, brown on the inside, plastic, inflated and dyed. In some ways, I guess she is completely free from outside expectations, or you could say that she was even more submissive to them.

We're often judged by how we change who we are when we relate to different groups of people. What is the definition of healthy liberation?