Lipstick feminism

>> Cathryn Michon propels the Grrl Genius cause

by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

In case you were wondering, feminism hasn't become completely irrelevant. It's just splintered into a thousand hybrids. You got your feminist-anarcho-ecologists, your riot grrrls, your post-feminists etc. And now, introducing (drum roll, please), your Grrl Geniuses.

Never heard of them? According to their leader, comic, writer, actress and author Cathryn Michon, they're growing in numbers, and she is rabid about further recruiting. So lock up your daughters, or give them her book, The Grrl Genius Guide to Life: A 12-Step Program.

"It's a movement and a revolution," says Michon, sounding very perky on the line from Philadelphia. "I think it's terrible that people don't want to call themselves feminists anymore because they think you hate men. Being a Grrl Genius is the same thing as being a feminist, but you can wear cute outfits and nobody's mad at you. It's kind of like the Vagina Monologues, like saying, 'We're beautiful, every single part of us, including our vaginas--yay our vaginas!'"

Riiight. So, it's about loving ourselves and accepting our gorgeous bods and showing them off if we so choose. But are "cute outfits" a prerequisite to acceptance? No, babe, it's just part of living in L.A.

"I don't deny it, my perspective is very mainstream-Hollywood, that's who I write for," Michon admits unabashedly. "Makeup and fashion are a joke, a goof, a little mask you wear. When did everything get so politically correct? If men want to wear lipstick, then yay for them!"

The Grrl Genius Guide includes such "herstory" tidbits as Einstein's wife being a brilliant mathematician who co-wrote the E=MC2 paper, or that Mozart's talented younger sister may have co-written his early symphonies. "No one ever told me that in music school," chirps Michon. "That would have fuelled me for weeks!" And though she advocates the joyful and devoted use of lipstick and other cosmetics, she begs women to stop comparing themselves to those airbrushed beauties in magazines.

"God bless supermodels, but they're genetic freaks," says Michon. "There are four billion women on earth and eight of them are supermodels. There are 35 million hermaphrodites on planet earth, but nobody goes around saying 'Oh my God, I feel so terrible about myself, I don't have the genitalia of both sexes.' We do it to ourselves. If we accept that we're supposed to be some ridiculous ideal that no one can be, then we are our own jailer, we're jangling our own cell-door key."

Of course, this is territory well covered by first-wave feminists and more recently in the mid-'90s by Naomi Wolf and her controversial Beauty Myth (Michon's book contains passages of it). "I wanted to kill myself after reading that book, but I thought it was great," says Michon. "But I can call myself whatever I like and it's not condescending. I love the riot grrrls and I'm also a big fan of the Guerilla Girls in New York, who would wear gorilla masks, go to galleries and say 'Why aren't you showing women artists?' I loved them because it was both serious and funny, which I'm trying to do with my book."

Cathryn Michon performs in An Evening at Eve's Tavern at Kola Note, July 20, 7pm, $21.50