We are watching that shift
Very good point.
The current crisis raises some very important questions when it comes to feminism and the Global North/Global South divide. We cannot have a women's rights movement that denounces breast ironing of brown and black girls but supports breast binding for white girls, as "a right".
— RaquelRosarioSánchez (@8RosarioSanchez) December 2, 2018
Women's organisations and feminists in Global North can't act shocked when feminists are jailed and prevented from speaking "in developing countries" when we are seeing leftist politicians and political parties in the Global North veer towards making feminism a hate crime…
— RaquelRosarioSánchez (@8RosarioSanchez) December 2, 2018
And feminist like #MeghanMurphy in Canada or @Womans_Place_UK in UK, face onslaughts of abuse for having meetings. If you ever wondered, "wow, how does a society gets to a point were jailing feminists becomes accepted?" then, this is it. We are watching that shift, as we speak.
— RaquelRosarioSánchez (@8RosarioSanchez) December 2, 2018
FGM…footbinding…corsets…Jimmy Choo shoes…breast inserts…Brazilians…anorexia…and binders: it’s all the same shit, it’s all about treating women as mindless clay that needs to be shaped and pinched and peeled and sculpted to be any good for anything.
I think the whole trans obsession is very much like warped ideas about menstruation and female genitalia: it’s equally based in fantasy, equally impervious to reason, equally prone to maiming, equally destructive. Feminists disagree with it because the way out is not to mutilate your body or take leave of your mind but to change the rules: keep the body you have but refuse to accept that your body means you have to either submit or dominate. Move sideways: refuse to accept your place in a hierarchy: blow the hierarchy up. See it as a political issue, not a medical or cosmetic one.
While we can decry the forces that would make women want to do some of those things, surely there’s a huge difference between a woman being forced to submit to FGM and one making her own fashion and grooming decisions, no matter how unfortunate.
Oh, so the binders are for trans males wanting to hide their breasts and UK trans support groups are giving them out to minors without parental notification or consent, even though they can cause permanent damage. Yeah, that’s bad.
Skeletor, do women really make their own fashion and grooming decisions? Yes, women are intelligent, capable beings with agency. No, they are not children. But…women are raised to crave high heels, the higher the better, with little pointy toes that squeeze the reality-shaped toes into an unnatural, uncomfortable shape. I was looking for shoes for myself recently, and was surprised to find how drawn I often was to some of those shoes. Oh, I won’t buy them, because my intellect kicks in and says “Hey, you don’t want to wear something that hurts so damn much and makes you unable to walk”. I still see them through eyes that have been trained by mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and ex-husbands.
It isn’t denying women their choice or their agency or their intellect to admit that in many ways our choices are not our own, even when they feel like our own. They are shaped by decades of intense, rigorous training in how to be a woman. The TV and movies show us the desirable women (and the bad women, which are often roles to die for) wearing spike heels, and our brains take in the message. I used to wear spike heels, even though I knew better, because it was what I thought of as being a woman. It was what my ex thought of as being a woman (I didn’t realize I was a trophy wife until many years after he walked out because my anorexia had made me much less of a trophy).
These seem like choices I made, and they were. But they were not really. They were choices that were made by society, and imposed on me, so that when it came time for me to make my own choices, I had bad information to work with. I am one of the fortunate ones; I didn’t wear them for so long that my feet were permanently ruined. I was fortunate that when my husband walked out the door, I threw the spike heels in the trash and learned to be myself. Not all women are so fortunate, because the penalty for transgressing society’s norms is often severe. Oh, it may not seem so to you, especially if you are not a woman, but in many ways, big and small, women are given the messages, and we hear. Because we are not stupid, we learn what is expected if we want to succeed.
It also doesn’t hurt that I shifted from my goal of being a lawyer, where it seems most women wear bad shoes, to being a scientist, where comfortable shoes are the norm.
Adding to iknklast’s comment #3 – there can be relentless policing of one’s grooming and clothes from other women. In high school we had uniforms, but from the time I became a postgrad straight out of my degree, until now as a middle-aged woman who has gone back to school to change fields, I pay as much attention to my clothes and grooming as my male peers (on average). Which is to say – not much. My clothing is not feminine, my clothes and shoes are chosen primarily for comfort, and – gasp – I don’t shave my body hair. I’ve always gotten alot of grief about this from a subset of other women. I’ve felt part of the reason was that seeing another woman refuse to care about ‘feminine’ grooming choices – and not be penalized in the male attention stakes – not that I invited that attention! – made them feel uncomfortable and a bit resentful about their own choices.
Recently, this approach to my appearance, together with my being bullied by a group of younger women I was doing a project with, had me labelled as having ‘autistic traits’ by the female school counselor.
For the love of God! Is this where we are now? There’s reasons other than being autistic for a woman ‘failing’ to conform to general (1) and specific (2) expectations of feminine behaviour.
(1) Women of all ages should pay alot of attention to cultivating a feminine grooming and dress style
(2) Middle-aged ladies should act like a Mum toward entitled younger people – ie. be a servant and let themselves be exploited. Oh, and if a young woman has founded a fair chunk of her identity on being the ‘smartest girl’ in the room, don’t dare injure that perception by being knowledgeable or, worst of all, unmistakably clever and original. Because dontcha know, the feminism of the wokest generation is only for those under 35.
Girls are bombarded from birth with the message that they must be pretty, and that they can achieve this by doing things to their bodies, wearing certain things, and behaving in certain ways. And when you are brainwashed into thinking that somewhere between part of your value and all of your value as a human being is dependent on conforming to an ever-shifting, unrealistic, and often downright harmful beauty standard, these are your choices: Play along, succeed, and reap the benefits of having reached the pinnacle of femininity; or don’t bother, and suffer the scorn society pours on women who fail at beauty.
But here’s the kicker: because beauty is a large number of moving targets, you can never get it right. One person’s hot trend in beauty is someone else’s “unfortunate fashion and grooming decision” and guess what, the ridicule reserved for women who try, and fail, to conform to the beauty mandate is often worse than that which is heaped on those who don’t bother. We can’t fucking win. And while we’re trying to just get by in a world that only values our looks, we’re too bloody busy making choices about things men think are frivolous to notice that our male colleagues are getting paid more, and our clothes don’t have pockets, and FGM is happening elsewhere, and someone else gets to decide what happens to the contents our uterus and hang on, how are we the ones who have to stop sexual assault happening?
It really is all the same shit. Nobody is going to argue that silly shoes and FGM are exactly the same thing. But they have the same purpose, which is to shape women into something desirable for men.
I was going to yell at Skeletor for being so fucking literal yet again, but then I read the replies and decided it was all worth it.
But still. Jeezus, Skeletor – I know there’s a difference between FGM and high heels, but my point was – as I spelled out very explicitly – that both spring from this same root problem of seeing the female human as being All Wrong in her natural state.
It’s as if you think I’ve hired you as a copy editor, and you happen to be a very bad one.
Here are a few examples about how so-called “fashion choices” can actually be conditions of employment:
https://www.vocativ.com/202127/israel-high-heels-airline-flats/index.html
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/programs/metromorning/bier-markt-human-rights-complaint-1.3303461
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-dress-codes-earls-1.3483432