The clamp she was driving at my eyes was disturbingly similar to the one in A Clockwork Orange. “What’s that?” I asked in a panic, as it was fixed somewhere on my eyelid. Floating in my mind was a horrific cross between stories of Nazi concentration camps where the eyelids of Holocaust victims were snipped off, and memories of an ophthalmologist turning my eyelids inside out during what I know will be my last ever eye
examination. “Eyelash curler,” came the calm response. The lady doing my makeup, for the rare occasion I prepare my face to meet different faces, turned into the nurse from Stanley
Kubrick’s classic. But that was not to be my
biggest discovery of the day.
When I got back to interaction with humanity, my first question was posed to some men I had relative faith in, “Can you believe such a thing as an eyelash curler exists?” I asked. “Yeah…I’ve heard of it,” one replied, totally uninterested. “I’ve seen one,” another said.
I looked at the third, half expecting him to say, “I’ve used one”. “You’ve never seen one
before?” he enquired, with the sort of look I would sport if someone asked me who Diego Maradona was. Well, nearly as bad. The incident was a natural follow-up to a trend I should have
spotted before.
Just a few weeks earlier, someone I know was staring intently at my hair. Having been brought up by a father who took a couple of days to
notice I had got my hip-length hair cut up to the shoulders when I was in college, I assumed the person in question was trying to figure out what was different about my face.
“I’ve straightened my hair,” I explained, helpfully. “Yeah…I know,” this guy, who got married a couple of years ago, said, with a frown, “you’ve blow-dried it straight, not used an iron?
Because…” and he rotated a hand near about his ear to express himself better, “…it’s sort of beginning to curl up at the ends.”
“Dude! Marriage has turned you gay!” I said, in disgust. I firmly believe that incidents that scare you temporarily must be thrashed out with someone else before they leave their mark on one’s philosophies of life.
My intentions were honourable, to this end, when I told a friend, “dude, this guy I know — he got married like two years ago — could make out my hair was straightened with a hairdryer and not a straightener…”
“Hair iron,” he said, patiently, and then waved an arm in the air by way of explanation, “girlfriend.” Once, a friend of mine, frustrated after a metro ride during which the women asserted their rights to push and prod him when he slipped into their reserved seats, told me he
believes a new movement, Menism or something with a better name, would crop up to rein in women’s advantages.
First, men fight to enter female-dominated arenas like the kitchen, and make themselves known as the James Olivers of the world. Then, they figure out more about makeup. Soon, they’d be burning their underwear at a public square, and then we’ll know Menism-or-something-with-a-better-name is here.