Why You Should Hate Compulsory Femininity

One day in high school, one of THE hottest girls in our grade according to every guy I knew walked into first period math class about twenty minutes late.

I almost didn't recognize her. Her normally straight hair was curly, her eyeliner-drenched eyes & bronzed everything were bare of makeup, and she was wearing glasses; the only thing that was the same as usual was her extremely tan skin. For once, she hadn't had time to transform herself into the girl we normally saw, and seeing the difference was striking to me.

Why? Because she so consistently changed everything about her natural appearance that I had always assumed her fake look WAS her natural one. As a male classmate joked that SOMEONE clearly hadn't had time to get ready, as she ducked her head & mumbled in an embarrassed way that indeed she hadn't, as he laughed and smiled and said, "Aww, c'mere" and gave her a hug, I felt in that moment a flash of pure rage. Our suburban high school placed a lot of pressure on us to perform and get into good colleges, and this poor girl on top of her huge courseload had to spend God knows how long transforming herself into the hot look of the moment on top of all that?!

As you can imagine, my rage was not abated by the fact that the popular guy hugging her had curly hair & a hoodie on. No loss of sleep for the sake of beauty for this guy.

Half a year later, another hot popular girl I took English with gave an extra credit presentation on her personal version of hell. You know what she said? That hell was a more intense version of all the pressure there was on girls to be thin and pretty, "like ten times worse".

In other words, her hell was THIS reality. As she spoke I remembered a time in Spanish she had refused tiny toffee bars handed out to our class as a treat, asking instead if she could split with someone. I remembered how many salads I had seen her eating at lunch, all veggies & the kind of low-calorie vinaigrette that made our teacher complain about the smell when she brought them into the room. I remembered how often I had seen her obsessively blotting her face & touching up her makeup in the bathroom mirror between classes. I also remembered a crush of mine calling her the hottest girl in our grade, but it was impossible to feel jealous of someone like this; once again, I felt nothing but anger on her behalf. Here was a girl seemingly every guy desired; the cost of that desire was more than I personally could have beared.

For me, high school was not a hell. The look at our school was straight hair, tan skin, and lots of makeup; I had curly hair, very pale skin, and at best a casual but definitely not committed relationship with makeup. Why? Because between AP & honors courses & all my extracurriculars, I couldn't imagine losing a precious 45 minutes or more of sleep every morning to straightening my hair & painting my face. I didn't feel motivated to hit the tanning salon a few times a week. Sure, I didn't date, but I'd never seen the point of that in high school anyway: weren't we all leaving in a few years for college anyway, making relationships kind of pointless, and weren't we all so busy that there wasn't any time?

Apparently not, at least if you wanted to be one of the hot & popular girls.

My own wave of paradise ended after college when I took a business-to-business sales job in downtown Chicago. Though straightening my hair & tanning my skin were still largely optional - I've always loved my God-given curls & porcelain skin - I was at that point wearing makeup on a more or less daily basis. Because my commute from the suburbs was literally two hours, however, and because the job had no dress code due to us conducting business entirely on the phone, I began to stop bothering with makeup on certain days because I desperately needed sleep (that commute was two hours ONE WAY).

That was when it happened. Half the time I came in without makeup, my boss or his wife who helped run things in the office would comment on my appearance, asking if I was tired or had been out the night before. No matter how many times I chipperly explained that I just wasn't wearing makeup, the questions never stopped. I got the impression that my bosses thought I looked worn down or ragged simply because I hadn't painted my face that day. Meanwhile, a male co-worker who consistently walked into the office sporting a hoodie & an ever-growing five o'clock shadow - his shaving pattern seemed as about consistent as my makeup routine at that point - never had a word said to him about it. It got to the point that I wanted to snap at my bosses to please pretend I had a dick so they could focus on my work performance and not my appearance, but I feared that might be out of line.

By now you can see my point. My experience at that office wasn't at all unique. Not only do women feel the need to modify their appearance to be sexy - which on weekends is actually something I personally quite enjoy! - but our performance of femininity is so expected in society that it can even affect how we're seen at jobs that should have nothing to do with our appearance! This is an outrage, plain and simple. I can already hear people replying that one has to fit into society or that what women have to do to their appearance isn't that bad, but that's precisely why I chose to use stories for this article instead of bullet points: if a woman is saying her personal version of hell is the society we live in, that should be a fucking wake-up call.

Think about it, ladies. In order to be socially acceptable, a woman in our society must at the very least shave off most of her body hair. To be considered desirable, many women feel they must style their hair, pluck or wax their eye brows & any other unwanted facial hair, do their makeup, do their nails, wear heels that harm their bodies in the long-term, wear at least a bra & perhaps a push-up bra, remove some or all of their pubic hair...the list goes on and on.

Here is a list of what men have to do: shower, shave, put on clothing, maybe put product in their hair.

I'm aware some of this is a difference in sexuality between the genders, and I actually don't have a problem with that part. As a (mostly) straight woman, I totally get that urge to slap on heels & a push-up bra & a sexy dress to attract male attention; I don't mind doing those things when I feel like it. The problem is when it becomes compulsory - and for many women, it still is.

If you think this doesn't impact women in a very real & deep way, let me have someone other than me - someone who holds a considerably more demanding job than I ever have - explain how this stuff has affected her. In an article on one of my favorite blogs, Jezebel, entitled "The Price of Getting Pretty: Productivity," a female lawyer detailed how the double standards for outfits & appearance at work negatively affect women like her in the law field.

Even for women with professions that aren't as time-consuming as law, the same concept applies. Performing femininity takes considerable time and money, meaning that women get fewer hours in the day to do things with their lives than men do and less of their own money to enjoy life with. (Sometimes I wonder if this is why we as ladies still want men to pay on dates - to even things out - but that's a topic for a later article.) I'm not the first person to notice this: Naomi Wolf covered this topic extensively in the 1980s book *The Beauty Myth*, but now that our society has declared itself post-feminist, a lot of women don't stop to think about or even believe they shouldn't question the daily modifications they make to their appearance just to feel "normal".

The solution? To demand that performing femininity be a choice we as women make, not a chore society imposes on us. To shut down men who make comments about our lack of heels or need for a push-up bra or our hair or a little stubble on our legs (all comments I've had to deflect - what can I say, I've never quite had the drive to try all that hard unless I feel like it). And, I hope, to one day banish from ALL workplaces the notion that it's acceptable to have two different standards for workplace appearance based on gender. It can only happen if we bother to stand up for ourselves, so let's start. I promise all the fears society has planted in our brains about not being desirable enough aren't real - if the main threat for us is not attracting men, well, I at least can safely say as someone who doesn't bother with a lot of it that men still find us as women attractive just as nature made us.

Why Even Good Girls Lose the Good Girl Game

Many members of our society still believe in a "good girl" vs. "bad girl" system in which good girls only have sex under socially appropriate circumstances while bad girls have sex when they're not "supposed" to.

This is a completely bullshit system. As a woman who has sex when she chooses, I've never had a problem with my friends who choose to wait until they're in a committed relationship before having sex because I think of it as a difference in personal preference, not a difference in morality. I'm not hurting anyone by not waiting & they're not hurting anyone by waiting, so what on earth is the big deal?

At the same time, though, I feel concern for the women who buy into this concept because when you participate in a system that treats your sexuality as a bargaining tool for relationships rather than a personal choice, you are agreeing that you are not fully human: you are a commodity. Even good girls lose the good girl game; the reasons follow.

1. The system of "good girls" vs. "bad girls" is designed to ensure women don't feel particularly comfortable with their sexuality.

I once asked a male acquaintance why he didn't like the idea of being with a woman who'd had a lot of partners, and his response astonished me: he worried that a girl who'd been with multiple guys would inevitably find one of those men better in bed than him, and he didn't want to have to worry about that. He was literally admitting that he would prefer a partner defer sexual pleasure until she met him so that she would think of him as being good in bed. To avoid this, he, like most men I know who worry about that sort of thing, actively shamed women who'd been with multiple people.

Women who buy into this shame learn to think of sex as something they shouldn't desire unless it's a "reward" for men who have invested enough time & often money to "earn" sex. Sex isn't thought of as something that brings pleasure, first and foremost: it's thought of as something that brings shame and derision. It is awfully hard when you think of sex this way to really get in touch with your own desires: after all, you're not even supposed to have or acknowledge them!

We've all seen the results of this in our personal lives. Who doesn't remember an instance where a female friend felt guilty for sleeping with someone "too quickly" and became completely neurotic about the whole thing? Instead of being allowed to enjoy and live our lives, we as women are expectd to maintain constant vigilance when it comes to our sexuality, and it's competely absurd when you think about what it's based upon: male insecurity about THEIR sexuality.

Ladies, I urge you not to let whiny little boys - and that's what "men" like this are - have any kind of impact on YOUR personal choices. If a man like that is my prize for behaving, I sure as hell don't want the prize. I'm not even saying you should or shouldn't wait; I'm just saying it should be YOUR choice, not one influenced by insecure, often relatively sexually inexperienced men. The reason for this is simple: not all men think like this. The men I know who can talk to women easily and who are comfortable in their own sexuality & masculinity strangely never seem to hold these opinions. The next time you meet a guy like that, recognize him for what he is - an insecure loser - and move on to somone who gets that sex isn't a zero-sum winner-takes-all game.

It should be noted, however, that I have no problem with men who prefer to wait for a relationship before they have sex & want a partner who holds similar values: these men are not sexist.

2. A man who holds a double standard for sex before starting a relationship with you is going to hold that same double standard after.

This point is so obvious to me that I find it incredulous many women don't see it. If a guy brags about past conquests but expects a woman he dates to have as little of a past as possible - often using the excuse that he as a man "needs" sexual variety & has an inborn urge to spread his seed - what the hell makes a girl think he's not going to hold that same attitude and use those same tired excuses once he's in a relationship with her? They don't magically go away. Men like this, once they hit that inevitable point in a relationship where infatuation wears off & maintaining a good sex life begins to take actual work & planning, seem far more likely to me to cheat & use the same excuse for doing so that they did for having a past.

I've seen this a lot in my personal life, sadly. Many of my female friends have boyfriends who hold these attitudes, and literally none of them haven't been caught doing something shady with other women: asking for waitresses' phone numbers, making plans to meet up with other women one-on-one, sexting other women. The girls involved all know what's going on but turn a blind eye, probably beceause they have so bought into these men's bullshit about needing to be this way that they actually believe it's true.

If this sounds like a pleasant way to spend life with a partner, by all means, girls, be my guest & date guys like this. Just don't say you haven't been warned.

3. When a man cheats under this system, he is never to blame; only women are.

Under the good girl/bad girl system, men are never really to blame for their sexual actions; only women bear the moral responsibility of making sure sex doesn't happen when it's not supposed to. Why? Because again, men are portrayed in this system as being unable to control their sexual urges, while women are expected to be the gatekeepers of sexuality. It's the primary reason women who find out their men have cheated or acted shady with other women often blame the other women involved, not the men: they have literally been brainwashed to the point that they believe men can't control themselves, so the burden of making sure their partner doesn't cheat falls on *all other women*, not their partner. What an exhausting state of being that must be! Instead of placing the blame on their partner, the person they can and should be able to blame for this, they have to worry instead about countless nameless women they've never met, don't interact with, and have no control over. The number of times I've heard a girl with a boyfriend like this complain about "tarts" or "sluts" daring to respond to their man hitting on them, as opposed to taking the considerably easier route of blaming him for his actions and dumping his ass if he doesn't change his behavior, is astonishing to me.

Funnily enough, the women who don't buy into this system are the ones capable of laying the blame where it should be placed: with their partner who claims to love them & be trustworthy.


The bottom line: don't date guys who hold a double standard toward sex unlesss you want to be actively miserable.