How long it takes to be a woman
Sep. 28th, 2016 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI found this post quite interesting. It's a video put out by Glamour (one of those magazines that tells women to be anxious about wearing the wrong foundation) about men and women's hygiene routines, and how long each take. It's pretty gender essentialist (I imagine trans woman and trans men have a vastly different experience, to point out the obvious) and an overgeneralization (after spending time in Mexico City with rationed water, I do know how to take a fast shower) but I think the point still stands—the performance of femininity robs you of time. Like, a lot of time.
What's interesting is the comments. BoingBoing skews white male, and there are dudes lining up to say that, no, my wife doesn't do that, or this is just about people being vain and doing what society expects, as if women don't face serious financial penalties for non-compliance. As if there isn't an election on where one candidate looks like a puffy orange bezoar and the other looks like a regular woman who pushed an illegal war in Iraq, and all the media emphasis is on her appearance and whether she smiles enough.
Nowhere did I see a woman pop on and say, "nope, this doesn't describe me." The women are all like, "yeah it takes longer in the bathroom because you guys can just whip it out and we have to sit, how is this rocket science?"
At a certain point, I feel like people are deliberately not getting it. Not just with gender, but with any site of oppression. You get the same with "colourblind" anti-BLM folks, who just want to pretzel-logic their way around the obvious, which is that black people are getting killed and jailed en masse. It's exhausting.
What's interesting is the comments. BoingBoing skews white male, and there are dudes lining up to say that, no, my wife doesn't do that, or this is just about people being vain and doing what society expects, as if women don't face serious financial penalties for non-compliance. As if there isn't an election on where one candidate looks like a puffy orange bezoar and the other looks like a regular woman who pushed an illegal war in Iraq, and all the media emphasis is on her appearance and whether she smiles enough.
Nowhere did I see a woman pop on and say, "nope, this doesn't describe me." The women are all like, "yeah it takes longer in the bathroom because you guys can just whip it out and we have to sit, how is this rocket science?"
At a certain point, I feel like people are deliberately not getting it. Not just with gender, but with any site of oppression. You get the same with "colourblind" anti-BLM folks, who just want to pretzel-logic their way around the obvious, which is that black people are getting killed and jailed en masse. It's exhausting.
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Date: 2016-09-28 03:45 pm (UTC)I'll be honest. Until I moved to Charlotte and started meeting business people a few years ago, I had no idea that women in offices had different dress codes to the men, as in having to wear makeup, heels, and changing clothes more often. I was blown away when I learned. It's not just a time issue, but an unfair money issue as well. As that's a much bigger investment than men have to do.
In my own experience, I used to get a lot of social pressure to wear a bra, until I finally caved. And then I found out it actually entices men to see a hint of 'women' nipples, so I always make sure they're hidden now, and it is such a pain in my ass. I still get grief for not removing my body hair, but that's a hard line for me, and people usually leave me alone after the first salvo.
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Date: 2016-09-28 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 10:48 pm (UTC)But this too is a function of privilege because I have "good" skin and don't need foundation. That'll probably change when I get old.
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Date: 2016-09-30 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-30 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-01 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 10:19 pm (UTC)At 12, I was overweight and, uh, well-developed. To this day, there is barely a button-down shirt that will fit over my boobs and look flattering, and with more limited shopping options back then, there were exactly zero. I ended up looking naturally more dishevelled and slovenly than the other children in the band. Since then, I was aware of just how "neutral" dress codes are intensely gendered, and how much harder it is for women to appear professional.
And I'm now a medium-sized cis white lady, albeit an "ethnic" one. For larger women, women of colour, trans women, the standard is basically impossible.
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Date: 2016-09-30 05:01 pm (UTC)I've usually been underweight, which has different problems, but not nearly as many I'd guess. Certainly not as much social disapproval :-/
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Date: 2016-09-30 09:27 pm (UTC)It's fine now because I live in a city and have internet and can throw money at the problem instead of being stuck with whatever's cheapest at the one mall in town. But for preteen and teenage girls built like me—of which there are an increasing population, owing to earlier onset puberty—it's a nightmare, especially where school dress codes are enforced. There's practically nothing a busty girl can find that's modest, flattering, and affordable.
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Date: 2016-09-28 08:06 pm (UTC)People are indeed deliberately not getting it, partly because it's so terrifying. I know SO many women who truly, deeply believe that they are ugly without makeup to "fix" them. Yet no one I know says they are doing it for men. They say they are doing it for themselves. I believe them and actually find this troubling. Altering your appearance for an exciting moment or special event -- sounds fun. Doing something at the expense of your own convenience for love and/or attraction -- most of us do that, it makes its own sense. But to alter your face every day because your relationship with your own self is not at peace until you do, that is nothing to blame women for but it is absolutely the hard work of patriarchy bearing fruit.
Once I was teaching the laws of Shabbat to a little group. What to me is one of the more interesting facets of Shabbat is that signs and performances of class and gender are prohibited. One may not indicate one's profession (e.g. a tradesperson going out with a tool even if they do not intend to use it). One may not carry weapons, even decorative ones, or signs of male authority such as signet rings. In the days of the Talmud it was the fashion for wealthy women to wear little, non-functional gold chains that chained their two feet together. That was prohibited on Shabbat. Braids and makeup are also prohibited. Ritual roles which were classically gender-specific also cease to function on Shabbat. The idea is that for one day a week, the community encounters one another as humans rather than the roles which are inevitably foisted on to us.
One of the women in the group became very upset when she heard about the makeup issue. "The rabbis clearly hated women, since they wanted us to look like witches!" she told me (the wording really stuck in my mind). So women without makeup = witches (not YOU, as people will always hastily add, you don't NEED it) and it is an abuse of power to separate them from the only means they have of hiding their shame. For one day a week.
By contrast, in Sweden perhaps a majority of women did not wear daily makeup. Few aging women dye their hair. I can't really convey what that was like to experience, to actually see women's ordinary faces as a matter of course. There's a lot I never internalised until I felt it for myself there. Yet it is not a fear of a feminine paradigm either: all genders wore bright colours, floral prints, men's suits were tight and cinched at the waist, etc. Literally everyone who met my baby, whether he was wearing cars and trucks on a grey onesie, or pink with frills and a print of shoes, asked me first: "Boy or girl?" Even the elderly had no sense that gender was reliably inferable from clothing style.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 10:45 pm (UTC)I think your community is much more progressive and affirming than any Jewish community I've ever encountered. If anything, my experience has been that gender roles were much more rigidly enforced than in the secular world. I mean, I grew up with my grandmother routinely calling me a dyke—and not in a cute or neutral way—for preferring short hair, no makeup, and jeans over dresses when I was a teenager. The root cause of why I was never a practicing Jew has to do with gender, not politics. (That's a whole other long story.)
I won't say that I wear makeup for my own self, but I'm also not doing it just for men. I'm also doing it for women, and I do find the experience of performing gender as I do it to be liberating. I suspect if I were to dress in very masculine clothes, but pull it off (I can't) I'd have a similar satisfaction. It amounts to makeup being part of the armour I use to be able to face the world, in the same way I dye my hair bright colours.
I didn't notice women in Sweden not wearing makeup, but I did notice that they tended to be a lot more conventionally attractive and fit than the average woman in Canada or the US. Which leads me to my other ramble.
So when I was a teenager, I had this sort-of friend who was very beautiful. Even the gay boys wanted her. Retrospectively, I feel quite bad for her because she was constantly being harassed and having her boundaries crossed, but of course back then I was jealous. She was very slim and had blond hair. She was a loud and proud feminist and stopped shaving and stopped wearing makeup.
And I just remember being pissed. Because it was one thing for her to not shave—she was blond and pretty and you couldn't even tell. Whereas I got thick, dark hair everywhere, and I'd have had even less of a chance of dating than I already did. Her choice—which, don't get me wrong, I respect—to not wear makeup and not to shave and still be able to get summer jobs and boyfriends and have her teachers think she was a nice, smart girl was a factor of white, thin privilege.
Do I think I look like a witch if I don't shave and wear makeup and dress in an obvious femme way? Objectively, no. But it would absolutely hurt my career prospects, my ability to command respect from the kids, my romantic prospects*, in a way that other people might be exempt from. For me, clothes, makeup, shaving, are all equalizers. Not to face myself in a mirror, but to face the world on terms I can possibly win.
*Well, maybe not, but that's down to the people I choose to date.
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Date: 2016-09-29 11:20 pm (UTC)I am not an attractive woman without makeup. I would say that I am pretty mildly ugly. In Israel I get street harassment a LOT for presenting "masculine" and as I've posted about, I need to think and rate people for safety before I ask someone for directions if I get lost. I lose the privileges of appearing Israeli (only American women would dress like this apparently) and of appearing traditionally religious.
BUT. Literally every single time I show my face to anyone, I am making a difference. Every child who ever sees me knows that I am a possibility -- maybe their own future possibility. And those kids will grow up. Everyone who achieves civility even one time with me is practicing being civil to me and to all other "transgressors." It lowers the bar for all the women around me -- in my community in Hamilton I have seen it, since I have come here and grown in influence, the women who come regularly dress down more and one said to me she has had a tie since forever, but never the courage to wear it, but now she thinks she will try it.
What I'm saying is, the costs are huge but the potential is too. One cannot help but make change. I guarantee your hairy hot friend made some of that change too, no matter what her modeliciousness, in weakening the association in straight boys between makeup and beauty. ANY weakening there, in no matter how specific the circumstances, is meaningful in this climate.
We must go farther than thinking, "I hate it, but what can I do?" Again, no one is obliged to put themselves on the line, but neither do I think the fact that women get penalised excuses us from finding a way to change things and support all other women who do. You hear that line I'm sure all the time when it comes to other oppression issues. It's not wrong, just not a place to stop.
My community is not an anomaly. Where I grew up in Saskatoon, the rabbi called me in to tell me concernedly that we had to find a rabbinical school that would be both intellectually rigorous and completely accepting of "the way I am" (in that 90's progressive way he assumed that my bad fashion skills meant I was a lesbian). We had never discussed rabbinical school or my sexuality, he was just looking out for me and trying to find a way to clear a path for me.
In Toronto my community actually had the same-gender-ritual police. They had people that would politely ensure that both men and women were wearing kipot and if they were Jewish talit/tefilin. They realised that without this pressure the community would backslide into old school performances of gender difference.
Both my yeshivot in Jerusalem and another yeshivah I have not been to in New York are ALL about equality of men and women.
Here in Hamilton I have witnessed the community be welcoming and warm to non-binary trans people, which for many is one of the more confusing kinds of gender to encounter. No talking behind the person's back except to clarify to one another what the person's wishes were.
You have not encountered this, because you have no reason in your busy life to seek out such communities. If you ever want I can find one quite close to you I'm sure. But again, your life is ordered as you wish it and that's great.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-28 11:17 pm (UTC)But this definitely impacts my career. Nearly every female partner wears heavy makeup, business-professional jewelry, and is clearly very familiar with hairspray. This is not coincidence. I was told at one point delicately by two partners that for women, unfortunately, appearance matters.
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Date: 2016-09-29 10:46 pm (UTC)I am surprised about the hairspray, mind you. Here, that's really frowned upon, as is perfume. But I don't know how it is in law offices.
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Date: 2016-10-05 10:38 pm (UTC)E.g., this was the main opposing counsel for a case I was on recently:
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.mdla.org/photos/alumni/lg_20160727_090314_25035.jpg
no subject
Date: 2016-09-28 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 10:49 pm (UTC)Link problem
Date: 2016-09-29 06:56 am (UTC)Will read later.
RE: Link problem
Date: 2016-09-29 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 10:50 pm (UTC)I do get catcalled way less, so I guess it evens out?
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Date: 2016-09-29 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-29 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-30 04:06 am (UTC)But I realise I am lucky.
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Date: 2016-09-30 11:41 am (UTC)