Tuesday, December 04, 2007

The Smackdown of Red Lipstick


Notice: In this picture, I am the one with the red lipstick on...the other girl..beleive it or not, is not even related.
Nobody’s Opinion; I wear red lipstick. My mother wore red lipstick. Her mother wore pink lipstick and lots of face powder which she kept on her private bathroom’s vanity table.

My grandmother’s bathroom was magnificent. She kept the most wonderful smelling powders. I have glorious memories of sneaking into her bathroom when I was five, climbing up on her pink cushioned chair, looking at myself in her huge magical mirror, and carefully opening her colorful canisters of bath power and lipsticks.

I would deliciously float into a sensual Valhalla of womanhood. The smells of lilacs, roses, lavenders, and gardenias---it was as if the Garden of Eden was rushing up my nose.

It was heaven. It was innocence. It was timeless.

In the mirror, I would dare to put a dab of pink lipstick on. Someday I too would be “pretty” like my grandmother.

I would even put it on my cheeks, something I still do to this day.

I loved to sneak in and watch my grandmother’s morning ritual of “putting on her face.” My grandmother was a very beautiful woman without makeup, but with her powder and pink lipstick on, she became a goddess. In the world of horses, she would have been a Lipizzan. She could have walked the ivy-league parties of Boston and put them all to shame with her beauty. She always wore beautiful suits from the best department stores. She had big blue eyes, thin aristocratic lips, and she could have given the Queen herself lessons in how to stand and sit.

I wanted to grow up to be just like her---a grand lady.

Before I was born, the earth trembled with World Wars and bright red lipstick came into style. All the women wore it. The movie stars were never seen without pouted red lips.

Revlon wasn’t stupid. They knew that a little red lipstick could make even the homeliest woman appealing to a man who had been around a little too much death. The great capitalistic American makeup industry was born, which helped produce the baby boom.

The WWII women put on the red lipstick and went off to work. They got married and did not take off their red lipstick, which is why I suppose my mother wore red lipstick up until the day she had her stroke. It made her feel pretty.

Obviously, my mother must have sat in that same pink cushion chair, just like I did. The fine tradition if “putting your face on” was a family tradition. It was a loving gesture to not only ourselves but to the men we loved.

It may come as a surprise to compare, but I think the ritual of fathers buying their young sons their first guns or rifles is a good comparison.

These were timeless gifts of passage at one time in our society.

When I was growing up, makeup, yes, even red lipstick was NOT, let me repeat, not the mark of a whore. Mothers wore it everywhere.

Then along came Marilyn Monroe: A woman so voluptuous that Hugh Hefner launched a whole empire of porn off her naked body and red lipstick alone.

The innocence of womanhood was rearranged.

So, red lipstick became associated with the mark of an “easy” woman.” Makeup became the mark of a ‘slut.’ Pornography and prostitution was brought into mainstream America to stay.

The art of makeup was an art no more.

Now, not only is pornography one of America’s biggest grossing industries; it also creeps into almost everything we see and hear.

Just this morning I was glancing at a copy of Esquire. a magazine which used to have the finest writers, writers like Hemmingway. Now it seems obsessed with soft porn, and writers who, although think they’re very clever, read just like sixteen-year-olds making stupid adolescent remarks about their penises.

In Letters to the Editor, a man corrected another man on his love of the mons veneris, not the vulva.

So glad to clear that up.

Another short piece was written by a father who went through a $500 dollar, 30-pound Playboy book of old porn pictures with his seventeen-year-old son. He was so proud when his genius son made this comment on an old porn picture from the 1950’s:
“She’s not naked and she’s doing her nails. That’s stupid.”

Right---smart kid you’re raising there dad.

Then there was an article on the Attack of Marriage by Steven Alderman, a man wanting to legitimize polygamy…something that seems to be on the liberal agenda at the moment. This guy actually looked at women as not much more above the evolutionary level of a goat.

So what happened here? Did the whole pornification (as Laura Ingram calls it) of women as nothing but sex objects helped to fuel the ridiculous women’s revolution that followed?

This then caused a whole generation of men to backlash right back at them with, “Damn it, we like to look at all the skin. Forget the lipstick---just show us more tits and ass. After all, you took us to the cleaners.”

(Sigh)

Now, big lips are in. Our Marilyn Monroe is Angelia Jolie. She doesn’t need red lips, because she has her lips pumped up to ungodly proportions. She looks like she could suck the nipples off an elephant. And instead of a seven dollar lipstick, you now pay a plastic surgeon thousands.

But, here comes my big red lipstick smackdown, which cost me over a thousand dollars.

I have a product which I have had problems getting a prototype for. I had been corresponding with a man who said he could actually make me my prototype, and not only that, he would become partners with me in a start-up business. He would contribute his expertise.

Being as nobody in St. Louis had been able to make my prototype so far, I was pretty excited.

Patent drawings aside…when the cost of a mold for production can cost up to $50,000 dollars, I knew I needed to hold the prototype in my hand before I spent that kind of money. I needed to be with this man in his “lab” to feel the final product. He promised me that I would get to come to his house, and see what he had been working on.

I was planning on just an overnight trip, but he suggested I come for a convention he was going to be talking at near his home.

That should have been my first warning.

The other warning was he had seen my picture on my blog. He said he liked my red lipstick, and women didn’t wear it anymore. The man is 68, and married, so I figured it was just a simple observation. He presented himself as an intellectual…above that sort of thing.

That should have been my second warning.

He also said, since he knew I was going to be putting all the money into “our partnership” and was coming up to see him; he would foot the bill for my hotel.

Okay, stupid is too mild a word. Try “retarded slug.”

Of course, you can all guess what happened. I got up to Connecticut, waited around for three days in this “expensive” hotel he insisted I stay in, which I knew I couldn’t afford, that he kept assuring me he had already paid for…

And then, at a dinner in the lobby the last night I was there having waited patiently to go to his “lab”…he said:

“So, are we going to make love or not?” in a rather disgusted voice. He had no intention of making a prototype or a partnership. He lied.

He also didn’t get laid, therefore I got the bill.

I should have laid him out in the lobby for this horrible deception with a big kick in the groin, but unfortunately, I am my grandmother’s protégé.

How could I have been so stupid? Taking a man, who by all accounts had an excellent business reputation, at his word?

Has my habit of red lipstick caused an unbeknownst brain tumor?

I am fighting to NOT learn this lesson…that the days of most men respecting women are over. And this breakdown of respect for women has hurt our nation and our future.

And all these past wasted years of men and women hating each other, are just filling the coffers of liberal democratic politicians who get big cash contributions from divorce lawyers. Porn, hatred, and lack of respect is very good for business, not to mention the liberal agenda of state controlled mindless citizens.

In Saudi Arabia, millions of women are considered whores if they even show their face. But that doesn’t stop them from going to the local malls and buying the latest shade of Revlon red lipstick in the malls of Dubai to wear under their burke’s.

And me? I’m still in a red lipstick smackdown meltdown.

Nevertheless, I still wear red lipstick for the same reason that I wave the American Flag.

It’s a family tradition. Pass the silicone to Angelina Jolie.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Doug said...

Holy cow this is a good piece! Loved it... in a sort of sad way in some parts.

A "lab"? So that's what we're calling it now? Okay then, well, I've got to run along now and put my beeker on the Bunsen burner up in the "lab"...

7:59 PM  

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