I consider myself reasonably difficult to offend. More often than not if someone’s made a particularly insensitive comment, it’s bound to have come from me.

However, a few weeks ago I was appalled to see a picture that a certain SMU student had posted on Facebook. The picture itself was hardly graphic: it was a cell-phone shot of a middle-aged man at a nail salon getting a pedicure.

What shocked me was the caption this person had posted to go along with this picture. She suggested that the man in the picture had lost his “man card” and lamented seeing him in this salon as if it were some sort of tragedy.

Moreover, she suggested that we should “leave the nail salons to the women.”

Such a comment reflects an atrocious understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman. This person had no idea why the man was at the salon.

Perhaps he was an athlete giving his tired feet a much-needed respite after an entire season of workouts and conditioning. Maybe he was there with a wife or girlfriend as a sort of bonding experience.

Or, shockingly enough, maybe he just likes getting pedicures, and we can hardly form any judgment about him one way or the other from that fact alone. Over the weekend a friend of mine took me to a nail salon to get a pedicure of my own.

I’d never had one before so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. By the time it was over I wondered why I’d never thought to go sooner. It’s a legitimately fun and cathartic experience, and, barring the steep price, I can understand why people would enjoy getting them.

I can honestly say that I enjoy pedicures. I’m also a heterosexual male. There’s hardly an element of mutual exclusivity that goes along with those elements of my identity.

Enjoying someone taking care of my feet does not make me “womanly” or “manly,” “queer” or “straight.”

It’s just something that goes along with being human, and I defy anyone to tell me that getting a pedicure makes me any less of a man.

I don’t personally claim to be an expert on gender studies (though admittedly a bit of proficiency ought to come with the territory of being an English major).

I don’t doubt that there are significant genetic and biological implications that go along with the existence of some gender binaries. However, enjoying the services a nail salon offers is not one of those distinctions. Stigmas like the one I experienced are societally constructed, pure and simple.

The notion that my choice to get pedicures has any sort of bearing on my gender, sex, or sexuality is utterly fallacious. Or, perhaps there’s a degree of truth to what this random student on Facebook said.

Maybe we should leave the nail salons to the women (never mind the fact that gender and sex are two totally different categories). However, in the words of one of my best friends, if we’re going to do that, we might as well be consistent and leave the jobs and employment to the men. It’s only fair, right?

Brandon is a sophomore majoring in English and history.