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.
While I completely agree on every point made here, I want to talk about the male perspective on societal norms and what is expected of us. Although, it is sad how most men expect women to look a certain way, men are expected to behave a certain way towards women. We are expected to be chivalrous at all times. In my opinion, like many outdated traditions (ex: dueling, concubines, the Old Testament…) chivalry is dead. Please don’t assume I mean good behavior and “manners” are no longer expected of men because that is not what I’m inferring at all. I mean that men should no longer be expected to perform many of the acts that were expected of us a long time ago. We shouldn’t have to hold a door open for a woman because we are men and it is the “gentlemanly” thing to do. We shouldn’t be expected to plan and organize every event that involves the other gender. We shouldn’t be expected to take the awkward front seat in the taxi. We shouldn’t be expected to insist you order first at a restaurant. We should do these things because we are well-mannered individuals who are doing something nice for someone else. ALL human beings should be held to this same standard in regards to how they are expected to act towards one another in public.
ReplyDeleteAnother point I wanted to bring up is the topic of money. Long ago, women earned a lower salary than men who had similar jobs with similar education, training, experience, etc. In several parts of the U.S. this hasn’t changed. However, in major cities like Chicago, New York, and LA, women and men earn the same salary for doing the same job. Actually, it is illegal to discriminate against gender when it comes to salary or wages in Illinois. Yet, many women still expect men to cover the majority of the cost on “a night out with friends”. I’m not talking about dating at all but strictly plutonic friendships between men and women. I can’t count how many times I’ve gone out on a Saturday night with a group of friends that include both men and women, and the men end up feeling obligated to pick up the cab fare or the tab at a bar. I have absolutely no problem buying a round of drinks or shots at a bar, but when I’m buying ALL of a girl’s drinks (who I am strictly friends with and have been “just friends” with for years) this is a problem. If men and women are entitled to the same education/job/ salary and I’m buying all their drinks without any compensation (whether it be you paying for the cab or paying for drinks another night) this is a problem. Not only is it rude for girls to impose this expectation upon men, but it shows how these women really view, value, and categorize men. We’re dating and you expect us to pay; however, you “friend-zone” us (whether mutual or not) and you STILL expect us to pay. It’s a double standard, and it’s unjustifiable.
A hundred years ago, men and women had very different roles in society. Most women stayed at home to care for the children and the hearth while men brought in the only income for the family. Men bought everything because they were the only ones allowed to have money. Today, men and women are on par with one another in terms of what each is allowed to accomplish in society, yet the expectations surrounding the two genders have changed very little. Women want equal pay, equal opportunities, and equal rights overall (which I am definitely all for), yet there are still some women out there who expect men to adhere to the traditional gender roles they once held in the past.
Please do not assume I believe all women think or act this way as this applies to only a select portion of women in our society. Regardless, this does still happen today, it is a big deal, it actually destabilizes gender equality, and it needs to stop. Men should hold a door open for a woman because he is a nice person, not because it is “chivalrous” and “expected of him”. Men should pay for a girl on a date because he is kind, respectful, and good-natured, not because he feels he has to based on outdated principles that should have been buried during the last century.
Water Baby,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for starting this conversation. I will comment to this post and the previous one together, because they deal with different aspects of the same problem: the way that women allow themselves to be trapped by traditional gender roles which don't necessarily benefit anyone anymore (if they ever did).
I agree with every single point you made. My only comment is to express my surprise and disappointment (as a forty three year old male) that young women still to wage these same old battles. I'm especially surprised that the "good girl/bad girl" stereotype you describe in the last essay is still current. I am in awe of how much more enlightened your generation is (in general) than mine was in regard to sexual orientation and race. Have we really made so little progress on gender equality?
When sex was inseparable from reproduction, everyone needed to act more cautiously. However, men, being a step removed from the consequences, were still often reckless, and women owed it to their own self protection to be more guarded in their sexuality. With the advent of reliable contraception, we are free to pursue personal fulfillment, personal choice and interpersonal sharing. Both men and women should be able to follow their personal choices without moral judgement, so long as they practice honestly and responsibly.
Gender roles are complicated because (based on my both my personal experience and what I as a layperson have read about biology), I believe there are differences in the natural tendencies that guide men and women's thinking and behavior. Hormones do matter. Understanding those tendencies will improve our relationships. But, understanding tendencies is very, very, very different from imposing them or putting a moral value on them.
My experience (and, again my limited reading of the biological sciences) has taught me that the differences between individuals is much more important than the tendencies of groups. Let us study gender differences to improve understanding, not to tell any individual who or what they "should" be. Indeed, there are some natural tendencies (such as the tendency of young males toward violence) that we should actively resist. Many of the people I most admire, both in my own life and in history are "effeminate" men or "masculine" women. Perhaps it is because their ability to cross barriers allows them to draw on the powers inherent in masculinity and femininity.
I agree for the most part with the comment posted by annonymous9999. Rigid gender roles are a trap for men as much as for women. We should all be encouraged to be generous and kind, not to "be a man" or "be a woman." That said, annon is jumping the gun a bit to declare economic opportunities equal. While employment discrimination is illegal throughout the United States (not just in Illinois), the wage data proves that it still very much exists. I hope that Water Baby will address this issue in one of her upcoming essays.