My Feminist Fingertips

Nail color: Naughty Nautical by Essie

We ladies who love sparkly or colorful nail polish and other so-called "girly" things are often given a bad rap. We're accused of being a "woman-child" who is romanticizing youth.  And even though we may be helping our friends start businesses or starting companies of our own we're not real adults because we're not knocked up.

Well, this woman child has an aqua green painted middle finger for all those folks buying into that nonsense.

I may have some pastel polish on my nails on any given day but that doesn't make me or my fingertips any less feminist.

This month these feminist fingertips of mine wrote blog posts about balance, BlogHer, e-books, and Beyonce --all with the goal of empowering women. My feminist fingertips typed proposals, promotional material and panel discussion questions and I hosted my very own blogging mini-conference on July 19.


My feminist fingertips wrote an essay for B-Metro magazine on feminist fitness and tackled the question of whether or not it's anti-feminist to want six-pack abs.

And my feminist fingertips wrote a piece for WBHM 90.3 FM (Birmingham's NPR station) about my painful experiences with colorism.

As my pal Carrie Rollwagen once wrote, this "woman-child" business is just plain old chauvinism dressed up as feminism, because it says that what a woman does (like starting a business, honing a talent practicing a craft) is less important than the way she looks while she's doing it."

And don't get me wrong -- I do care about the way I look. As I've said on this blog before, I have some stories and I want to look good while I share them.

But don't judge my work by my wardrobe and don't judge the depth of my feminism by the color of my fingernails.