Today in Spanish we celebrated the Day of the Dead, a holiday in the spanish culture the celebrates those who have passed. As skulls are the most well known symbol for this holiday, we were instructed to color paper skulls as is traditionally done on spanish speaking countries on this day. My skull consisted of various colors, dots and random lines. I have my skull eyelashes and a moustache. A classmate looked over at my desk and apparantly only saw the eyelashes and said, "oh you made a girl skull". This surprised me as I did not think about making my skull a specific gender. I lifted the skull to show her the full face and she saw the moustache and said, "oh I'm sorry I guess I just assumed the eyelashes made the skull a girl".
Why does our culture assume that eyelashes are feminine? Everyone has eyelashes and generally, men are the only ones who purposely grow moustaches but it is curious to think that eyelashes signify being a woman.
I was there, otherwise this would be a most absurd connection to Day of the Dead...
ReplyDeleteI suppose the reason for allocating prominent eyelashes to women is the fact that women wear mascara on their eyelashes to make them more prominent, and even have worn fake eyelashes. The reason for this is unclear to me. I don't see the appeal of prominent eyelashes. Mascara and a moustache...always a winning combo.