I’m sure, if you haven’t been in a cave this past month or so, you’ve heard about the “racy” or even the “nude” pictures of Miley Cyrus somewhere on the pop culture news. Yes, folks, Disney superstar, fifteen-year-old icon for preteens everywhere is actually a “whore” by some bloggers, a “slut” by others, and, on a late night E! countdown of “Girls Gone Bad” a “Girl About to Go Bad”.

Clearly, everyone should be outraged, and Cyrus should apologize for someone hacking into her phone and putting the pictures of her online. Especially since, in all of these “racy pictures”, none of her is actually showing.

Anyone that blames Cyrus for these pictures, reiterating the whole “you’re too young for your age” rant obviously knows nothing about today’s teenaged girls. A quick look around Facebook or Myspace shows that many other teens seem to have similar pictures on their not-so-private profiles. Pretending to be sexy in front of a camera is pretty much what most teenage girls do.

So let’s take a look at all of the possible misdemeanors here:

-posing sexily for camera

-hacking phone of fifteen year-old girl

-putting sexy pictures of fifteen year-old girl all over internet

-calling fifteen year-old girl you don’t actually know a “slut” a “whore” and a whole other slew of fun things

Ignoring most of the real crimes, pop-culture shows victim blaming at its finest and blames the fifteen year-old girl.

Why is it that they never make bathing suits for girls and women that cover the hair down there region? Even before the age where it’s assumed that everyone’s having sex, it’s expected that – even though no one is presumably viewing this region, girls are waxing/shaving/sugaring regularly.

This really bothers me. You can’t even get some athletic speedo thing without the cut being super narrow in those areas where you would want a little more coverage.

Why is this hair removal necessary? I’m refusing to believe that there is some sort of woman-hood self-confidence benefit. And if it is really for guy viewing, why is it that girls just hitting puberty have to shave in time for bathing suit season?

Bathing suit compagnies, please. A little extra material in the crotch area. It can’t be that hard.

Not that I’m surprised. While looking for pictures for my previous post I came across  this:

Arsenault, who pronounces more times than one cares to recall “I might not be a woman, but I am a lady” or words to similar effect, would have made her case a little more persuasively with a decent pedicure on her not-so-dainty feet. (One toe appears to have an ill-used Band-Aid.) Her voice contains a trace of that tell-tale quack one hears when boys play girls and her delivery is at times not particularly mellifluous.

Not only is it misogynist to comment on the state of an actor’s feet instead of their performance and sexist to insult Arsenault’s manner of speaking because she is transexual, but it proves that the reviewer has nothing intelligent to say.

A few days ago, I saw Ladylike, a play in the Toronto Fringe Festival featuring famous transexual Nina Arsenault, and although the play itself wasn’t amazing, it really made me think of what it means to be a woman.

Ignoring Arsenault’s penis, you could probably argue that she’s more of a woman than I am. When it comes to the physicals, she certainly has done her part to look the female archetype, and when it comes to personality, she does have the stereotypical girl-thing down pat (or the script makes it appear as though she does).

For a while, I feel that there has been a sort of pressure on girls to become more masculine. On the more personal level, whenever there is some sort of statistic announcing that there are more guys than girls in some sort of role/emotional state/ profession, I feel as though I should strive to take on the masculine role to help eliminate this inequality. Maybe this is just me, after all, I did grow up going to camps like ACTUA , the girls-only engineering camp. But Arsenault strove to become the “female archetype”, as she put it, it felt surreal, like that extreme femininity was what made her less believable as a woman.

It really made me think when the show mentioned the “has she gone too far” aspect of Arsenault’s surgery, among other things. A lot of the time things like boob jobs and facelifts seem insulting the uncut portion of us, like, is the female body not good enough as it is? In other ways, the overanalytical part of me jumps to the women in the quiverfull movement (you know – have all the kids you can possible have because God wants you to) that have been denounced as “anti-feminist”. What if that’s honestly what makes these people happy? Do we have the right to condemn this, especially in the name of accepting the freedoms of different female identities?

If people like Nina Arsenault can be nice to their inner woman, I should be able to, too. In a world where guys are afraid of being girls and girls are afraid of being too girly, sometimes it’s nice to get a clear perspective from someone who isn’t technically a woman but who is proud of being ladylike.

I never thought guidance at my school was very useful. When I ask for university advice, they refer me to a standard Ontario universities webpage, and tell me non-truths such as “art schools mainly look at your report card marks” and “you can’t get into an Ivy league; your marks aren’t high enough” (my guidance counselor didn’t actually say this, but sort of shook his head while muttering when I asked him if he thought I could get into Yale. Into the arts program. When their main claim is that they don’t really look at your average as a main indicator. I porbably won’t get into Yale, but still).

Yes, guidance counselors are useless, but now I am really pissed off.

A close friend of mine failed math. Barely. Needing 50% to pass, she failed by 5% (or something like that). The only help her guidance counselor provided was telling her that the school started a day later than it actually did start. Well, I guess they told her the location of the school. Gotta give them credit for something.

It turns out there is no follow-up call for summer school. Which is unfortunate as guidance did not have the courtesy to tell her the time the school started. When the principal of the program finally called back, it was to say that the school had already started, and she had missed one more day than the cut off three days she was allowed to miss.

So really, I’m not just pissed off at guidance, but at the whole school/summer-school system.

What really gets me is the attitude displayed towards my friend. It seems that far from being accomodating, or attempting to be sympathetic, to the school system, a failing student is someone to be looked down apon and punished rather than helped out. After visiting guidance in an attempt to open up some dialogue between the school system and the summer school system, my friend was met with contempt and told bulshit such as “You know, summer school really isn’t good for your academic career.” Really. And I suppose repeating a course is.

A guidance program, in my opinion, should be for three things. First of all they have to do the basics, and make sure courses that students take allow them to have a working schedule. Secondly, they need to advise kids on their careers and futures beyond school, and, lastly they need to help those having real difficulties at school. So far, I only see evidence of the first. For universities, guidance seems to have established this method of advising where they refer students to a website/book without knowing anything themselves. For students struggling, the bare minimum is done.

Unfortunately, in the schooling system, those that need the most help get the least. If a student is struggling, or failing a course, it is vaguely seen that this student is a bad student/lazy/not worth spending time on… generally someone to treat with contempt. If a pupil has a learning disability, difficulty grasping a subject, or for some reason or other is falling behind in their work, accomidations are as few as the effort made to reach out to them.

True, there are students that are generally lazy and don’t care about their progress. Another one of my friends played video games in the back of the math classroom the entire year. What I am saying is that it is unfair to assume that all failing students are like this.

Linking this back to my friend, had the schools had a different opinion of her, they would have believed that her guidance counselor told her the wrong date, or would have attempted to make some sort of accomidation. As it is, guidance was rude to her and proceded to further screw her over.

Now, perhaps this is all just a misunderstanding. After all, both the guidance programme and the summer school principal did not break any rules, go against the constitution, or anything like that. But wouldn’t it be nice if guidance counselors actually pretended to care for the students that need them the most?