28th
Hello Kitty the New Che Guevara
On our last visit to Singapore* I wanted to get myself a Hello Kitty cell phone charm, but the Peanut (a.k.a. Fareen, the P. Kitty, Puwee-wee, my sweet and loving wife), talked me out of it. She was concerned it might come across too feminine.
I appreciate her concern, but I have often wondered why it seems okay for women to be “tom-boys” or have great enthusiasm for more traditionally masculine interests (such as college football or power drills) than it is for men to get in touch with their more feminine side.
Let it be known, I am very confident in my manhood (and not only because of my adequately-haired-chest or my love for beer). I’ve never really had any sort of sexual-identity crisis nor have I ever resented my gender.
I’m happy being me. Though, side note here, if I could get re-shuffled back into the soul-deck I might request being born a West-African woman (but that’s more for social and political reasons, plus, I don’t believe in reincarnation anyway).
So you ask, what’s the deal with my Hello Kitty Myspace page?
Just the other day an old friend (if you know our secrets then you’d recognize him as the renegade formerly know as the “Dread Wheedle”) wrote to me mentioning that some believe Hello Kitty’s designers originally drew her without a mouth because at that time in Japan, society preferred women not to be heard (if even seen). That’s sad. And yet, seems like in some ways society hasn’t progressed much. Now it’s a subtle effort to silence “manly-men” who want to embrace their love for Hello Kitty.
So here’s the deal. My love for Hello Kitty is not only an affectionate yearning to love something that I think is really cute (remember, this is coming from someone with hobbit-like feet complete with little tufts of black hair and crunchy toenails), but now is also a sign and symbol of my solidarity with all the silenced women of our time.
I now consider Hello Kitty a symbol of my protest, fighting for the rights of women everywhere. In fact, I’m thinking of replacing all my Che Guevara shirts with Hello Kitty t-shirts to help generate some momentum for the movement.
Hello Kitty is my new way of sticking it to the man!
I close with a quote from an old issue of Adbusters. Little did the author realize when writing this, there would be a direct correlation to the coming revolution of Hello Kitty,
The rebellion, when it begins in the 21rst century, will be unfamiliar. It will not be Marxist or Communist, and will have only any indirect ancestry in socialism. It will be in some sense for equality and against privilege. But my guess is that it will not talk the language of majorities and will instead be a guerrilla struggle conducted by inchoate, unstructured groups of highly qualified people who can disrupt institutions, corporations, communications, even cities. These groups will form coalitions, and will sometimes seek to enlist the excluded victims of the system**.
Long live Hello Kitty and down with gender repression!
* Sorry to recycle a post on you all, this was written back in August 2006 and originally appeared on my Myspace page, I’ve slightly modified this version of this post.
**Adbusters (vol. 9, no 1) no. 33 Jan/Feb 01, pg. 50.
