Is it a just another social trend or some other kinda misguided response to happiness, excitement, surprise, dismay, fear…just about anything that requires an emotion-enhancer? Why do women – from beauty contestants (that is to say “bachelorettes”) to school girls – cover their mouths. It’s America and you probably have some sort of dental care, so it’s not your choppers. So you’ve watched the series of movies with the crazy native shirtless werewolves and horny glowing skinned tree-climbers but you’re NOT a vampire with big pointy teeth. So why the mouth cover?
HALITOSIS! IS IT HALITOSIS? Fear of spinach teeth? Is it some kind of attempt at being demure? Maybe one of the Hollywood starlets-of-the-day started it and it was just so damn cute that everyone fell in lockstep. Kinda like that regrettable nerve-fraying phrase that millions of lemmings glommed on to after some post-lobotomy actress uttered, “I KNOW, RIGHT?”
Nearly every youngish woman I see – live or on TV – puts a dainty paw over her mouth as a five-digit exclamation to emphasize emotion. I don’t get it.
Conversation with friends… laughter…hand over the mouth…smiling eyes. Head tipped back slightly.
A squirrel hit on the road….gasp… hand over the mouth…concerned eyes. Slow almost imperceptible head shake to the left and right.
Her surprise party…two muffling hands over the mouth…big surprised-eyes…motionless.
I’m lucky to live with one of the 5% of the female population that does not deploy the five-finger lip shade. And never once have I felt like I was gonna get bit on the neck when she’s surprised.
In reality, very few women look like Shrek when they laugh. I’ve seen a few but I find Shrek kind of endearing so it’s never made me jump back…and…well… cover my mouth in shocked disgust.
Maybe it’s like the bunch of other stuff that I don’t understand right now. Like tights. OK, OK, OK… they’re not tights…. “Leggings.” (Pronounced “leggins” in Westconstin.) I haven’t figured out the difference. Maybe little girls in dance class wear tights and big girls at the gym – OR EVERYWHERE – wear “leggings.”
Here’s the thing – and to be perfectly honest… from a guy’s perspective (and as a dad) – leggings are not clothing. They’re ass paint and inappropriate in most settings. And in the best of cases, only a fraction of the population should ever wear them…at the gym.
And they distract me…us… like chocolate chip cookies and stuff with chrome and big motors. So don’t get edgy if I notice too long!
Imagine if guys wore tights… I mean “leggins.” I have a hard time wrapping my brain around boys in skinny jeans! For me there’s something just silly about men wearing Justin Bieber Barbie pants. Just the thought of men feeling obligated to follow the trend de jour and romp around like a ballet troupe makes my jaw clench. And honestly, none of the guys I know could wear tights without looking like The Curse of Oak Island meets RuPaul’s Drag Race!
“But they’re comfortable.”
REALLY? My Levis are comfortable. I don’t understand how constrictive sweaty tights can be comfortable. But I’m kinda claustrophobic. I don’t need tights, weighted blankets, and body pillows to feel “nestled.”
One more thing at the top of my “baffled” list…ZOMBIES! What’s the fascination with the Walking Dead? I suffered through five minutes because Bek’s a fan. It’s stupid. More than stupid, it’s mindless and implausible. Really? Throngs of of rotting corpses wandering around aimlessly…well… because they don’t have brains… or working organs… or live anything. But yet they can walk around and bite people…to turn THEM into zombies. And the only way to kill a zombie is to cut off it’s head or shoot or stab it in the brain (that isn’t working).
More than once I’ve been jumped from behind by a family member zombie slayer and been stabbed in the skull with an imaginary bowie knife. (Complete with sound effects.)
This is my life.
I overheard a discussion about zombies being a social commentary on the state of homelessness and drug addiction in America. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No it’s not. If that was the case, all we’d have to do to end the zombie apocalypse without decapitation and head-stabbing is remove Narcan from police and emergency response vehicles and flood the “market” with pure product.
“Vince, you’re so simple. Don’t you see that zombies and head-stabbing is a metaphor for the destructive culture of drug abuse.”
Nope, didn’t see that. Just rotting disgusting corpses shuffling around tryin’ to bite people. I blame Michael Jackson. We never woulda had the zombie craze if he hadn’t made the Thriller video. And like everything else in American culture, idiots just took it to the next level… like tights…I mean “leggins.”
I KNOW! RIGHT?
Funny stuff. As a friend of mine said to me once… there are women who should never wear “tights” with nothing over them in public, and then there are women who could wear them but maybe shouldn’t, and finally there are the women that absolutely should wear them!
Not tights. Leggings.
Where to start? As for the mouth covering; all I have to say is that it’s a shame that most people don’t just keep their mouths closed as opposed to covering them. The tights/leggings or yoga pants as they are also referred to as, well, on the right woman…I’m all for it! Hell, on the right woman, I’m all for body paint instead. Unfortunately, very few people should wear them in public. Maybe if a few of them actually took a yoga or zumba class they would be able to pull the look off. It’s difficult to imagine how some women got into the leggings, but judging by the looks of the screaming seams, I’m picturing a high dive or some equivalent. Getting out of them invokes images of the Griswald family Christmas tree just as the constraining rope is cut. Just a tip for anyone who thinks that girdles are a fashion statement; they’re meant to be worn under your clothes! The zombie craze is just plain laziness. This genre has been done o death (no pun intended)! There is no imagination left in Hollywood, they’re just telling the same story with a different twist. If it’s symbolic of anything, zombies are an indictment of our educational system. Colleges keep pumping out mindless hordes of people who depend on the thoughts, ideas and innovations of others in order to survive. Thus the shuffling mobs following each other screaming “brains”; it’s because they have none of their own. Instead of mad scientists in lab coats cooking up their vile concoctions to turn others into mindless followers; they are ponytailed “hipsters” and their bitter angry feminist colleagues twisting the truth, rewriting history and indoctrinating the masses to implement some twisted version of dystopia. After their work is fininshed, they hand the subjects over to the media, Hollywood elitists and socialist politicians to finish the job. They are then sent off to take over every community possible, infecting as many people as possible with their mindlessness. So I respectfully disagree with those who think zombies are a statement of the drug problems in our culture, however, I’ll try not to judge them too harshly. After all, they’re probably just graduates of Zombie U.