My vagina has better things to do than to cover your lack of preparation.

[parasitegirl]

I’ve got your finger “symbols” right here, missy.
Cross-posted from my FB costume page because I can't access LJ at work.

I’d never think to start an event listing for, say, a fencing convention with:

Drop your cocks and grab your socks, fencing is coming to the Meda Convention center and, let’s face it, we’re bored this summer. Now, I don’t know if the saber or lance or whatever is a symbol of phallic inadequacy for all fencers, and there is no reason to stop masturbating on my account, but it seems like there is something fairly Freudian about the whole thing….

But, I guess that is why I don’t write for the Dallas Observer.

Nikki Lott, who does have the writing chops the Observer seems to want, did start off an event blurb for the Yaa Halla Y’All bellydance convention in Dallas this way

Vajazzle your jazzler, belly dancing is coming to the Grapevine Convention Center, and let's face it, anything that takes place at a convention center is worth attending. (Even if it's a Flicking Your Bean seminar.) Now I know you don't actually show your vagina during belly dancing and there's no real reason to get it all dolled up, but it seems like you'd want to do something special if you're going to go to the trouble of baring your midriff and sharpening your zill skills. (Zills are finger symbols!) And if you are going to do all that, Yaa Halla, Y'All is the way to go….

http://www.dallasobserver.com/events/yaa-halla-yand-146-all-belly-dancing-festival-2277215/ 

Dear Nikki,

Thank you.

Sometimes I am so wrapped up with training, teaching, enjoying and studying this art form that I forget the important thing…my vagina. I’ve been so focused on the musicality of my, um, finger “symbols” that I’ve neglected to remember that this dance form, like so many fields dominated by women, can be reduced to giggling about my ladybits. Just because I don’t display them, doesn’t take them “off the table” as it were.

Usually we dancers have more subtle issues in regards to how Middle-Eastern Dance is portrayed in the media. Often writers display their own ill-informed ideas about it being a dance intended for seduction by talking extensively about our “writhing hips” and “suggestive costumes.” They wink in the direction of Oscar Wilde’s literary invention of the dance of the seven veils…and then we’re in the uncomfortable position of refuting vague implications in ways that inevitably leave some of us in the comments section refuting what isn’t actually being said outright (that we are strippers, desperate housewives, wanna-be seductresses) in a manner that causes many to wonder if we doth protest too much.

But you, thank you, do not bury the lead…and by lead I mean, yes, our vaginas. You gleefully reduce us to those bits as your lead-in to the event. If you were not a fellow vagina owner (and, may I presume, user) I would think this a crass attention getting ploy to deflect from sub-par writing and a lack of any respect or even wiki-research on the subject…but knowing you’re a V-sister, my lips (wink) are sealed about your “bag” of tricks.

I can only hope that someday the favor is returned to you. That with each accomplishment, with interest you explore, with each interview you have in your life, there is always someone ready to announce you loudly, and proudly, as someone whose every move should be seen through a vagina filter.

-Ozma of Japan, Instructor, dancer, costumer…but most of all…vagina.