I'm not talking about going out in a dress or shopping at Victoria's Secret or men wearing nail polish or the fact that the makeup tutorials teen girls seem to be watching on the YouTube are posted by men demonstrating on themselves.
I'm talking about the less obvious things. I'll give you some examples. When I hit deodorant age I went through a constant rotation. My mom would buy me one, my underarms would look like someone hit me with hydrochloric acid, after I healed up she'd buy me another brand, same result, and this continued for two years. Finally she told me to try some of the Ban sitting on the sink when I got out of the shower. I asked her if it was hers or my dad's. My dad said they both use it, leading me to believe that it was gender neutral. It worked great. All throughout high school and at the beginning of early adulthood I used it and it was just as safe for me as pure water.
I learned the truth when I got my first job, was out running errands on a day off, remembered I was almost out of deodorant, and stopped off at a pharmacy to buy my own for the first time. I checked the men's section, figured since it was a gender neutral brand it was probably on the border between the two sections, and was shocked to find out that it was right in the middle of the women's deodorant. Right between the Secret and the Lady Speedstick, one shelf down from the Dove (this was years before any place around here carried their men's line of deodorants, body washes, and shampoos).
Fortunately I found some men's deodorants I can wear, at least the aerosol (the stick still gives me problems), so I'm back to smelling like a man. Unfortunately I've entered a pattern that's causing a bit of concern. I'll grow out a beard, get tired of the itching, shave it, get tired of the worse itching from the shaving that I forgot about while wearing my beard, so I'll grow it back and the cycle continues. If you take a razor to a full beard it gets messy, so I used the beard trimmer on my electric razor. It died, so I took the opportunity to go back to blades and decided to get a dedicated beard trimmer.
I was on a bit of a budget so I spent some time shopping around. The beard trimmers were a bit out of my price range, but when I was at work I was stocking and noticed something. First of all, the "pink tax" is a myth. I was hanging some ladies trimmers on pegs, the kind that are meant to be used a fair bit away from the face, and noticed that they were cheaper than the beard trimmers I had been looking at. They do the exact same thing. They cut long hair down to the point where it's manageable with a razor. So on my next day off I went to a store where no one knows me, not even in my store's district so I didn't have to worry about employees there filling in at my store or my coworkers filling in at theirs, and bought one. So now if my decision to shave doesn't coincide with a hair cut, when my mom will use the hair clippers to cut my beard down for me, I use this little pink thing to cut it off.
I've always had problems with callouses on my feet. If I don't sand them down at least once a week it makes for a painful day at work. I use to use sandpaper. Then I bought something that looked like a little cheese grater with a file on the other side. The handle broke and my store keeps selling out of sandpaper before I can take my lunch break (no on the clock shopping) so in desperation I bought something I ran across at Walmart. It's essentially a miniature drum sander. It's the best thing I've ever found for my callouses. It's a lot faster than sandpaper and removes a lot more than the cheese grater thing I had.
The only problem is that it's clearly a women's product. The packaging just has a woman's feet on it. The background and most of the plastic on the actual product is pink (a very light pink, bordering on what Crayola use to call fleshtone, but still pink) and it has rose gold trim. Clearly I'm not part of the target demographic. But the drums that came with mine have worn out and I can't find just the replacements so I'm going to have to get another one.
The question is, when it comes to matters of utility in the privacy of my own home (I don't trim my beard or grind down my callouses just walking down the sidewalk) how far can I go before I have to turn in my man card? Or should I have already run it through the shredder?
I'm talking about the less obvious things. I'll give you some examples. When I hit deodorant age I went through a constant rotation. My mom would buy me one, my underarms would look like someone hit me with hydrochloric acid, after I healed up she'd buy me another brand, same result, and this continued for two years. Finally she told me to try some of the Ban sitting on the sink when I got out of the shower. I asked her if it was hers or my dad's. My dad said they both use it, leading me to believe that it was gender neutral. It worked great. All throughout high school and at the beginning of early adulthood I used it and it was just as safe for me as pure water.
I learned the truth when I got my first job, was out running errands on a day off, remembered I was almost out of deodorant, and stopped off at a pharmacy to buy my own for the first time. I checked the men's section, figured since it was a gender neutral brand it was probably on the border between the two sections, and was shocked to find out that it was right in the middle of the women's deodorant. Right between the Secret and the Lady Speedstick, one shelf down from the Dove (this was years before any place around here carried their men's line of deodorants, body washes, and shampoos).
Fortunately I found some men's deodorants I can wear, at least the aerosol (the stick still gives me problems), so I'm back to smelling like a man. Unfortunately I've entered a pattern that's causing a bit of concern. I'll grow out a beard, get tired of the itching, shave it, get tired of the worse itching from the shaving that I forgot about while wearing my beard, so I'll grow it back and the cycle continues. If you take a razor to a full beard it gets messy, so I used the beard trimmer on my electric razor. It died, so I took the opportunity to go back to blades and decided to get a dedicated beard trimmer.
I was on a bit of a budget so I spent some time shopping around. The beard trimmers were a bit out of my price range, but when I was at work I was stocking and noticed something. First of all, the "pink tax" is a myth. I was hanging some ladies trimmers on pegs, the kind that are meant to be used a fair bit away from the face, and noticed that they were cheaper than the beard trimmers I had been looking at. They do the exact same thing. They cut long hair down to the point where it's manageable with a razor. So on my next day off I went to a store where no one knows me, not even in my store's district so I didn't have to worry about employees there filling in at my store or my coworkers filling in at theirs, and bought one. So now if my decision to shave doesn't coincide with a hair cut, when my mom will use the hair clippers to cut my beard down for me, I use this little pink thing to cut it off.
I've always had problems with callouses on my feet. If I don't sand them down at least once a week it makes for a painful day at work. I use to use sandpaper. Then I bought something that looked like a little cheese grater with a file on the other side. The handle broke and my store keeps selling out of sandpaper before I can take my lunch break (no on the clock shopping) so in desperation I bought something I ran across at Walmart. It's essentially a miniature drum sander. It's the best thing I've ever found for my callouses. It's a lot faster than sandpaper and removes a lot more than the cheese grater thing I had.
The only problem is that it's clearly a women's product. The packaging just has a woman's feet on it. The background and most of the plastic on the actual product is pink (a very light pink, bordering on what Crayola use to call fleshtone, but still pink) and it has rose gold trim. Clearly I'm not part of the target demographic. But the drums that came with mine have worn out and I can't find just the replacements so I'm going to have to get another one.
The question is, when it comes to matters of utility in the privacy of my own home (I don't trim my beard or grind down my callouses just walking down the sidewalk) how far can I go before I have to turn in my man card? Or should I have already run it through the shredder?
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