Dressing Down

The comments thread on this Pandagon post that smacks down a WaPo article hyperventilating over the sexiness factor of teen girl fashions inspired this post-- I was just going to leave a comment but realized I had a rant in the works, so I moved it here.

The whole "weep for how the girls are dressing today"/"Female Chauvinist" etc apocalyptic debates that crop up from time to time completely grate on me because of an important point that almost always seems to get missed.

Namely, that girls who are "dressing modestly" or "appropriately" are NO LESS dressing according to our sexual mores than girls who dress "trashy".

If you think girls shouldn't show so much skin or wear such tight fitting things, you are still buying into the notion that being a "virtuous" girl of "good character" depends on dressing the part, and more specifically doing so in a way that equates chastity with "good" and sexuality with "evil".

If you think girls should wear more boyish clothes (a la the eternal butch/femme struggles in the bi/lesbian community), you are still buying into the notion that masculinity is "better" than femininity and that any kind of feminine sexuality is "bad".

If you are in favor of girls wearing androgynous, utilitarian clothing, you are still buying into the notion that expressing your sexuality through clothing (and that sexuality itself) is "bad", and that traditionally feminine clothing is bad because it is "frivolous" (Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise had a wonderful take recently on the assumption that only women's trivial passions are frivolous).

I challenge anyone to find *any* style of clothing for women that is not the object of nor a reaction to the political and cultural value judgments placed on women's sexuality in some way. Yes, some are more obvious than others, but it's pretty impossible to draw a line saying "this amount of sexual politicization is ok, but that is unacceptable". So to say "women shouldn't wear X because it is (too sexy, too prudish, remnant of Victorian oppression, reminiscent of the Taliban, too feminine, too unfeminine, too skimpy, too impractical, too ugly, etc)" pretty much takes you down a road where you end up with *nothing* that is objectively "acceptable" for women to wear on all sociopolitical levels.

And it's bullshit. For anyone to sit here and talk about what's ok for women to wear vs. what constitutes a betrayal of (insert your political or religious belief)-- and anyway why is it only women's clothing that constitutes a "betrayal" of any given values?-- no matter what end of the spectrum you're on, goes straight into "I know what's best for you better than you do" territory and the infantilization of women that pisses me off no matter who it comes from.

I will say that I think there's some legitimate criticism for the notion of someone dressing a certain way not because they like it or feel comfortable in it, but because they feel like they have to in order to be accepted by some other group-- but I will add that we *all* do that to some extent, whether it's the hippie-at-heart who reluctantly wears a tie to work or the goth kid who wouldn't dare wear a polo shirt around her friends. So, the criticism really needs to be limited to the question of whether it is a more or a less acceptable thing to sacrifice one's own preferences in order to seek sexual approval, as opposed to doing it for job approval or friend approval or political approval or what have you. Personally I'd argue that it's no worse to dress for sexual approval than any other type, and that the *real* measure should be whether one feels uncomfortably compromised by dressing for a particular type of approval, sexual or otherwise. And that's got to be a personal judgment, not an external one.

I'm all for educating young people about the choices they will face and the history/social implications of the things they will wear, and I roll my eyes at a lot of this "preserving the innocence of youth" mythology crap. I'm all for living as consciously as possible. But at some point you have to realize that when it comes to clothing, pretty much any choice a girl can make is so loaded with associations and value judgments that your best bet is to encourage her not to lose sight of the relevance to her life of fighting against a cultural value system that tries to equate her appearance with her morality.

I get just as sick of the brand of feminists who tell me I'm a bad feminist or a sellout if I wear heels or a corset or lipstick (especially when it's said in the context of "you can't *choose* to wear those things because you're too brain-controlled by The Patriarchy"-- fuck YOU I "can't choose", and anyway which of us seems more obsessed with the opinions of The Man?) as I do of those rightwingers who think my push-up bra makes Baby Jesus cry or conversely that my baggy jeans and combat boots make me a "militant man-hater" or "unfeminine".

(On an interesting side note is the fact that the only really equivalent debate on this topic for men is whether a particular style of clothing is too "gay", an argument which invariably equates male gayness to "girlyness" and gets right back into the "male is superior to female" BS.)

The problem with the argument about teen girls' clothing (which seems to be cropping up many places lately) is that you can't debate whether a given style is or isn't appropriate for teenagers without buying into the premise, which is that we have a right to tell girls which choices we want them to make rather than empowering them to make and stand by their own choices-- and to assume that they don't "understand" what they're wearing and that we need to instruct them. And that buys into the larger cultural assumption that women's bodies and women's choices are not entitled to privacy considerations but are automatically available for any old Joe or Jane to pin their value judgments on with the expectation that the woman being judged is obliged to consider or care about those judgments (ie, the casual discussion of popular actresses' weight and how hot they are or aren't, and the entirety of the abortion and birth control "debate"). If we truly wanted to empower teen girls, we'd stop fussing over whether their t-shirt says "porn star" and ask ourselves why we're all so anxious to appropriate their bodies to serve as billboards for our political agendas. (Naturally I accuse the right wing of doing this far more, and taking it much farther, than the progressive movements, but our hands aren't clean either.)

A great example of this is the recent flareup on a number of blogs regarding a line of t-shirts by Abercrombie & Fitch, marketed to teen girls, with all kinds of stupid and offensive slogans printed on them like "Who needs to be good at math when you have these?" and "Do I make you look fat?" There was a good debate about whether the shirts sucked because they were stupid and asinine if relatively harmless, or whether they represented a more malevolent push by Corporate America to manipulate girls' self-images, and of course the usual row over whether girls "should" wear such shirts and whether it was harmful if they did. What got lost in the discussion? The fact that the only reason anyone was talking about the stupid shirts in the first place was that there were articles about A&F being boycotted because of these shirts. Boycotted-- by a bunch of the very demographic of teen girls they were targeting with them! But suddenly, it was all about how we all thought teen girls should dress, and no longer about the fact that some of those teen girls were clearly demonstrating that they were capable of making and acting on perfectly well-thought-out decisions on their own. (Interestingly, some media outlets chose to undermine the protesting girls by suggesting that "all they had done" was give A&F free publicity. Because it's never about the girls, only about the people who claim ownership of them.)

Somehow this all made me think about that Jenny Joseph poem "Warning" which begins "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple" and the Red Hat Society that has sprung up from it. I can't help thinking that much of the appeal there comes from the simple sheer rebellious joy, as a woman, of deliberately choosing to wear clothes that don't match or flatter, of flaunting society's expectations of women by flaunting one of its most uncontested rules about our appearances. (I don't think it's a coincidence that society in general finds this poem charming or inspirational considering that it advocates that kind of rebellion only for old women, who are no longer socially thought of as sexual beings.) That, I think, says volumes about the degree to which female expression and spirit is suppressed through restrictive cultural judgments about how we "ought" to look, whenever the rules of dress amount to more than "I will wear what I feel like as I feel comfortable presenting myself". 

Too bad our culture still thinks that women have to be past menopause before we are capable of dressing ourselves, huh?

Comments

[windsong]

Interestingly, often teens (I would not exclude boys on that) only wear certain things because other people are pissed of by it. If they did not bother with getting angry, nobody would bother to wear certain things (of course, this argument is mostly only valid for teens)

windsong

[Deborah]

I also blogged about this post. You can see it here: http://www.deborahlipp.com/wordpress/?p=85

[lee]

“I get just as sick of the brand of feminists who tell me I'm a bad feminist or a sellout if I wear heels or a corset or lipstick (especially when it's said in the context of "you can't *choose* to wear those things because you're too brain-controlled by The Patriarchy" )as I do of those rightwingers who think my push-up bra makes Baby Jesus cry.”

You know what *I* get sick of? The “brand” of feminist who kvetches on as though we flannel-wearing boors are actively trying to restrict her sartorial preferences. Yes, you’re such rebels, wearing all that racy lingerie n’ stuff—what an awful slap in the face to puritan pantsuit-wearing feminist orthodoxy!

Look, I couldn’t give a pig’s left nut whether you truss yourself up in intestine-flattening corsets, or paint your lips with dead horses. Just stop pretending as though there’s a huge feminist conspiracy out to squash any spike-heel-wearing dissenters. Even when I *was* a spike-heel-wearing “rebel”, I NEVER had a feminist tell me I couldn’t wear what I liked due to patriarchal false consciousness. I *did* have quite a few kindly remind me that my choices weren’t made in a sociological vacuum, and sometimes this took the form of a criticism, but you know what? Get used to it. Criticism is a part of life; it enables us to sort the truth from the bullshit, and if you can’t handle your choices being questioned, then you’re obviously either too insecure in them in the first place, or too hung up on the same need for approval you purport to disdain.

On a less angry note:

“If you think girls should wear more boyish clothes, you are still buying into the notion that masculinity is "better" than femininity…”

No, I’d be saying that masculinity & femininity are constructs, and as such a pair of jeans is no more “masculine” than a skirt. Masculine does not “belong” to men any more than feminine
"belongs" to women.

“…and that any kind of feminine sexuality is “bad.” ”

But doesn’t it strike you as just a bit odd that female sexual expression is all about wearing revealing clothes, while male sexual expression is all about looking-at-women-in-revealing-clothes? Why aren’t teenage BOYS freely choosing to wear thongs, or walking around with their asses hanging out of tiny short-shorts?

One final thing: As a young woman who likes to think of herself as human, it pisses me off to no end when people pretend as though “porn-star” shirts and hijaabs are women’s only clothing choices…and then either claim that the former can’t be criticised on the grounds that it’s patronising to question women’s agency, or that the latter can’t be criticised on the grounds of cultural sensitivity. Fuck it: If you don’t want to make “unfeminine” value judgements, there is no shortage of movements willing to make them for you.