Empowering Women Through Blue Lipstick

One of our sons recently turned me on to Shark Tank. It's a show where panel of 5 venture capitalists are pitched ideas by entrepreneurs. It's loads of fun.

One of the recent shows featured a pair of girls who had come up with a new line of lipsticks, most in non-traditional colors. One of the girls was wearing a blue-green lipstick. Your eyes naturally bled the color into her teeth, possibly through reflection, giving them that just-ate-handfuls-of-raw-seaweed look.

Hideous.

The girls talked about how their lipsticks would empower women by allowing them to transgress the unwritten rules of fashion and express themselves freely. I couldn't understand this at all. I thought the whole idea of lipstick, makeup and fashion was to empower women by emotionally subjugating men. How being deliberately ugly was going to improve on this was a mystery to me.

The interesting thing here is that our notions of beauty are designed to empower women by telling them what men want. Men want to be emotionally subjugated. We want women to be given power over us through sexual attraction. That's why there is a standard of beauty, so we can get more of what we want which is, effectively, the empowerment of women.

My wife and I teach the remarriage class for the Diocese of San Diego. The class always starts with each couple standing up and telling their love story. Every guy we've ever had and I mean every guy has talked about how hot he thought his fiancee was. That was why they proposed in the first place. How much more empowerment can you get than some dude offering you his life?

These days that's not empowerment, I guess. Like I said yesterday, I'm going through life in a constant state of confusion lately.

Raw power. Or is that rawwwrrrr power?