the my-little-pony post

What a sweet, normal-looking pony. (image by seller “carolmcniel” at ebay.)

Yes, I had a bunch of important and meaningful things to write about today and the list just keeps getting longer.  But I’ve found myself inadvertently sucked into a strange new world and, to avoid using any kind of willpower whatsoever, I’m going to indulge in and blog about my latest obsessive-compulsive side tour, all thanks to the wackiness that is ebay.

Here’s what happened: Sola discovered My Little Ponies at the YMCA’s child center. She’s probably especially taken with them because I haven’t bought her any new toys in her first 2 1/2 years amongst this consumer-driven culture we’re part of. (I’ve gotten her some dress-up clothes and tutus, which I count as something….)

So, before going to the Y, she’s been making do with the boys’ old train set, a basket of Hot Wheels, and a tub of dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong; she seems to enjoy them well enough, and we have other things: art supplies, dance music, and sometimes I give her empty toilet paper rolls. She sleeps with a couple of baby dolls her grandparents gave her, but I’ve never seen her play with anything like she plays with these ponies. She loves the ponies. She lines them up, carries them around, gets very sad when we have to leave.

I guess this is sort of like air-brushing? (image: ponylandtours.com)

So I looked into getting her a few My Little Ponies to have at home. And, for those of you who haven’t been My Little Pony shopping since 1984 (or EVER), let me tell you: the new ones are pretty slutty-looking. It’s disturbing, really. They have these longer, leaner legs, Angelina Jolie alien-eyes, and their hindquarters (they are HORSES, after all) are raised up and bumped out in a way that seems more appropriate for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue than the “ponies” section of Toys r Us.

Okay. Call me old-fashioned, but I refuse to board slutty-looking ponies in my home. I did a search to find out where I could get the originals I played with as a girl, and of course ended up on ebay. This is where things get emotional. I had forgotten, until the past few days, how much I LOVED my My Little Ponies when I was young. When I started weeding through the options for Sola and ran into their names—Bowtie, Blossom, Bluebell—it all came flooding back. I remember now which ones I had and which ones I wanted; the way my sister and I got lost in Pony Land for hours; the way we lined them up and carried them around and cried when we had to put them away, just as my daughter does now.

And I don’t mean to offend MLP collectors out there, but…well…I thought I was a bit obsessive. Some of these people not only know the names of the ponies, but the year they were produced, whether they are “flat foot” or “concave foot,” and disclose whether they have “tail rust” in the seller description. (Even after spending gratuitous amounts of time looking at images of plastic, pastel pony-butts, I have yet to understand what “tail rust” is.)

And then I came across this description:

THESE ARE VINTAGE PONIES ALMOST 30 YEARS OLD!! IM NOT GOING TO NOTE EVERY TINY LITTLE SPECKLE, WE SHOULD BE GLAD TO FIND THEM IN GREAT CONDITION THESE DAYS

SOME MIGHT SHOW THEIR AGE MORE THEN OTHERS…HEADS MAY OR MAY NOT TURN…some might rattle..ALL PONIES ARE SUBJECT TO HAVE A VERY VERY SMALL DOT SIZED SPOTS /MARKS, RUBS, OR STAIN…

ALSO I DO NOT COUNT FACTORY DEFECTS AS FLAWS SINCE YOU’D GET THAT EVEN IF THE PONY WAS NEW OUT OF THE BOX!

So now I’m feeling a little self-conscious. After all, these were MY toys. My manufacture date precedes theirs. (By how many years, I’ll never tell.) (Three.) If they are vintage, I am vintage.

Some might show their age more than others. Some may rattle. Some have flaws that you’d get even if they were new out of the box.

And, the best? We should be glad to find them in great condition these days…

Well, what am I gonna say now? I bid on Peachy and Tootsie and got them for a steal, and with combined shipping, to boot. Sola—my NEW little girl, in EXCELLENT condition—is looking forward to getting them in the mail. I’ll keep in mind that the further from the manufacture date we get, the more valuable we become….and now I’m going to go check my backside in the mirror for tail rust.

a beautiful letdown

I’m not going to try and cheer you up by telling you you’re good at all those things you feel like you’re not good at right now (even though you are very good at them). That never works—not for me, at least. Instead, I’m going to engage you one of your favorite things: good, old-fashioned feminist theory: pop-culture style.

I’ve been thinking recently about the nature of beauty, especially as it concerns our bodies. (“Our bodies” as in EVERYONE’S bodies, not just “our bodies” as in yours and mine. Cuz everyone knows yours and mine are smokin’.)

Undoubtedly you’ve heard about Samantha Brick, the crazy British woman crying about being so damn pretty. (If you haven’t because you’ve been buried under a pile of your own clothing, here’s the link. ) I don’t want to defend her. If you read her piece, I’m sure you’ll agree that she’s a little delusional and whiny and perhaps a bit too eager to be the “Internet sensation” this has made her. Her point in that way-too-long article is that being beautiful is not all it’s cracked up to be, and she has all these trials and wah, wah, wah. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

On the Today Show the other morning, Ann Curry asked Brick point blank if she realized how arrogant she sounded in her article for calling herself beautiful. And though I am usually a fan of The Ann Curry, that bugged me. (Not as much as it bugged me to see a clip from The View—which, for the record, always bugs me—in which Barbara Walters, like a bratty teenager, remarks that Brick isn’t beautiful at all.) Both of these instances involved empowered, educated female journalists saying things that seemed… I don’t know… lame?

I don’t know when it became arrogant to view yourself as beautiful. If you think you’re smart or capable, that’s not necessarily arrogant. Parents teach their children confidence, smart self-talk, and kind words for both themselves and for others. But if you think you’re pretty, and you actually admit it, you must be a total bitch.

There is some part of me that absolutely rails against this. Lots of parts of me, actually. The high school teacher part. The writer part. The woman part (we’ll just agree that phrase sounds funny, have a little giggle, and move on with being serious, okay? Cuz this is serious and we are all serious people here, not immature junior high kids who will laugh at anything. Especially “lady business” jokes. Right? Did you see that episode of Up All Night?). The mother part. The Christian part.

I was taught to believe that I was made in the very image of God. And then I turned on the television, or went to school, or started talking to people, or glanced through beauty magazines, or basically went through life in this world. And the idea that I was beautiful up and disappeared.

I think I’ve gradually gotten it back. Partly. I try not to be really, really hard on myself, at least.

The problem is that beauty, in the way our culture perceives it, is a game that no woman can ever win. Some people aren’t pretty enough. Some people are too pretty. Some people are probably only pretty because they’ve had work done. Some people are not pretty enough because they don’t work hard enough at it. Some people are pretty, but only because they work too hard at it. Some people need to wake up and realize that being pretty is what it takes to succeed in this world. Some people age gracefully, but they still look old. Some people grow up too fast. Some people are so pretty that it’s probably bad for their health. Some people look so bad that it’s probably bad for their health. What a nightmare.

Here’s an article by Ashley Judd who is, I think most people agree, at least some degree of beautiful. It’s a thoughtful post. It has to do with how our standards of beauty and our measurements regarding the worth of a woman are way the fuck off. (Sorry I wrote fuck, Mom.)

But all anyone has been talking about is whether or not Ashley Judd should whine about being judged for her puffy face. And then they go back to wondering if she’s really had work done or not. Ironically, these discussions prove her point.

I don’t want to go on too much longer, even though there is much much more to say. Perhaps you have thoughts? I’ll end with this:

Genevieve has always been in the 95^th percentile when it comes to weight. She’s six months old and is already larger than at least two one-year-old boys in my circle.

When people hold her, they often remark on how chubby she is. This is okay with me. In fact, I love all those rolls and dimples. I sink my face into them and pretend to eat them and massage them when she’s on her way to sleep.

A few people will remark on her chubbiness and then apologize. This makes me sad.