#GirlsShitToo

Internal Makeup

I started working on my vlog Sunday evening, after two hours of calculus homework and an hour of procrastinating looking at Instagram. Bouquets of flowers filled my feed, reminding me what holiday it was. Valerie had posted an image of a bouquet of gag-me-pink roses, captioned: "I have the sweetest boyfriend! @Chad_Anderson22." Ugh.

Internal Makeup

Published on February 14, 2015

Youtube Video Transcript:

Dallas here, with Girls Drool Too.

I'll start out by saying, Happy Valentine's Day! Not. This is like the worst holiday ever, where girls everywhere are convinced they need a bouquet of roses to feel appreciated and loved. Does anyone else realize that bouquets of roses are just flower corpses? I mean, that's pretty metal, but I'm not on board with spending fifty plus dollars on corpses. Just so you all know—no girl received flowers from me. No girl will ever receive flowers from me. I don't understand why flowers should appeal so much to our feminine sides, anyway. Because they look and smell pretty even though they're dying? Femininity makes no sense. Most girls are convinced that in order to be feminine, we need to look and smell pretty until we die. I disagree.

Which is why I'm agreeing to take Adree's challenge, where I let go of my urges to follow the script to look and smell pretty. This won't be hard for me, considering I'm already not that feminine.

But there's no way I'm cutting my hair. Long hair isn't just feminine—it's metal. Founding fathers, vikings, and metal-band metal. And I'm metal, too. Way more metal than rotting flower corpses.

Adree was right when she said girls spend time and money on their appearances to feel good about themselves, because feeling good about ourselves gives us confidence, which helps us to function well in society.

I understand how feeling good about our appearance can give us confidence. However, I would like to point out that we are still falling prey to society's gendered standards when we build confidence this way. Because in our society, the building of girls' confidence is largely reliant on our looks, while the building of boys' confidence is largely reliant on their skills. I will repeat that for emphasis: Girls are nurtured to build our confidence through our looks using society's messed up beauty standards, while boys are nurtured to build their confidence through their skills.

So, we can choose to go up the social ladder that's been built for us, or we can call on our own skills sets to rebuild that stupid ladder. Do girls want to continue building our confidence through makeup? Or do we want to rebuild our internal makeup, and start to see how confident showing off our skills can make us?

Skills are awesome. Why shouldn't we opt to improve our skills?

And skills should be valued above appearance. Some girls need to change their ingrained attitudes about appearances, and to change their internal makeup so that the building of their confidence is reliant on their skills.

So, fellow girl supporters, I hope you'll accept the #letgoofyourfemininity challenge with me. Stop caring about how you look for a while, and start caring about what you do. Stop looking in the mirror so much, start exercising your skill sets. Stop taking look at me! selfies, and instead take pictures of the awesome, skillful stuff you are doing.

Post those pictures using the #LOOKWhatICanDo hashtag, and build some confidence! Dudes, feel free to join in too!

Here's my picture!