Guest post: Girls’ skirts exist for boys to look under or flip up
Originally a comment by maddog1129 on TRANSlation.
I can’t dress in the “approved for women” way, either. With me, it starts with the shoes. I simply can’t wear the foot-binding torture devices that are assigned to women. I haven’t always had bilateral plantar fasciitis, but I’ve had the condition for several decades. In my 20’s, I could wear soft-soled oxfords; now I need all-black cushioned athletic shoes. Starting from that foundation, pants suit or pants and blazer are as close as I can get to appropriate business wear. Luckily, I didn’t have to actually go to court very often.
If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational.
But it’s not irrational at all. First, there is actual, physical discomfort. Women’s clothes are designed for looks (in the male gaze kind of way) rather than for the comfort of the wearer. They put scratchy lace in undergarments. It’s torture. The designs are often restrictive of movement. I’ve worn puffy sleeves and cuffs that literally prevented me from moving my arms freely. Pencil skirts hobble the stride. There aren’t any damn pockets. The clothes are objectively un-comfortable. It’s not a bit irrational to feel uncomfortable in them.
There are other ways in which women’s clothes are uncomfortable, and that’s not irrational either. I’ve known since I was old enough to talk that the clothes assigned to women and girls are ooky. Girls’ skirts exist for boys to look under or flip up. Girls are sitting duck targets for male sexualized aggression. When girls hit puberty, the footwear for girls changes to articles designed to prevent girls from running away, even if their life depended on it. Girls are trapped. Of course it feels ooky. Clothing for women and girls is designed to keep females vulnerable, subordinate, compliant — and fearful. The clothing carries an inherent, and perhaps not-so-subtle, rape threat. No wonder many girls and women hate female clothing. No wonder many suffer something very like gender dysphoria. It really does something to your psyche to be under siege and in danger 100% of the time, because of your sex. And the danger is itself sexual. Women and girls are vulnerable to a particular risk of male violence that males just simply aren’t. Yes, male bodies can be sexually violated, but they never suffer the added risk of parasitic takeover.
So, yeah, I (and many other women) know all about gender dysphoria. It sucks to be the subordinate sex, the unfree sex.
Just an additional thought about Maoist communist workers’ uniforms: were the uniforms identical? Did they, for example, all button up the same way, or did they keep the clothing industry standard of buttoning men’s shirts and jackets one way, and buttoning the women’s shirts and jackets the other way?
I did a quick google search on the topic of Maoist suits. Nothing authoritative, but pictures from the early days suggests that women simply wore the same uniforms as men. I didn’t look for later styles.
Haha we’ve all been looking at old photos of Chinese people, haven’t we? I’ve been zooming in on crowds. I noticed women sometimes wore a belt where men didn’t, but I have no idea if it was due to the natural feminine tendency to accessorize, or something else. (Joking, obvs)
My wife and I went to China as guests of the Academia Sinica for a month in April 1983 when she was expecting our daughter, born in August. At that time the Gang of Four was a fairly recent memory. In Pekin, where we spent most of the time, the people, women and men, all wore exactly the same blue outfits and came to work on bicycles (including Tsou Chen-lu, our very distinguished host in Pekin, who lived in a much fancier house than average, a gift from the government to his father-in-law, who had created the Chinese oil industry). However, in Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou the dress was much less uniform — the same general style, but with more variety in colour, but whether this was due to more relaxed application of the rules or for some other reason we didn’t find out. The Chinese were of course familiar with pregnant Chinese women, and with overweight western tourists, but this appeared to be the first time they had seen a pregnant western woman, and they were obviously puzzled. On an outing to the West Lake (near Hangzhou) there were lots of groups of little children, and one little boy was sufficiently puzzled to lift my wife’s skirt to see what was underneath (immediately stopped by his teacher, of course). Anyway, the dress code for children was much less strict than for adults.
So-called feminine clothing is totally uncomfortable, as maddog said. I dress in a way most people would recognize as feminine, but would not have in my youth. I always buy my pants in the same style, partially because they have pockets, and the cut isn’t obviously a “feminine” cut, but they are styled to a woman’s body. I do accessorize for fun, with scarves and hats, but nothing that restrains me or gets in my way.
When I am not at work, I’m slopping around in blue jeans and t-shirts. Most of my t-shirts are in a male cut, because I don’t like fitted clothes. Even back when I had a figure, I wore clothes that were either a size too big, or that had a cut that didn’t reveal my form. I didn’t want men staring at it.
When I was little, up until my first year of high school, we were required to wear dresses…in junior high, they amended the dress code to allow females to wear pantsuits – matching, not coordinates. It wasn’t until high school I was allowed to wear blue jeans. I discovered how much more comfortable and practical they are.
And if someone does look up your skirt, and the perpetrator is caught, found guilty in court and sentenced, that sentence might be overturned on appeal because voyeurism is a mental illness that diminishes the perpetrator’s culpability:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/upskirting-teacher-avoids-prison-due-to-voyeur-disorder-20230921-p5e6m1.html#:~:text=A%20Sydney%20teacher%20who%20was,better%20treated%20in%20the%20community.
Argghh!!
Thre’s also general safety concerns with women’s clothing.
I am not going to totter around in heels in a chemistry lab. My job involves some heavy lifting. Some of that heavy lifting involves hazardous materials.
I remember reading about some of the first women students at MIT. They pushed against wearing the typical women’s clothing of the day – billowing skirts, puffy sleeves – in laboratory classes. The risk of knocking glassware over, getting caught in equipment, catching fire.
In the movie Hidden Figures there was a scene where one of the women character’s heel got caught in the floor grate in a wind tunnel.
Winter boots with heels and little, if any, traction – not easy negotiating ice and slush in those. And no insulation in the soles, so nothing limiting heat transfer between feet and cold ground. My feet were always cold when I had to wear them. Regular old running shoes did a much better job of keeping my feet warm, even in the middle of Wisconsin winters.
Also in Hidden Figures that part where Dorothy Vaughan has to sprint from one building to another in the run-up to a launch, in high heels.
On the subject of Maoist outfitting in the China of the 1970s, I am still uncertain whether there is any truth behind the story about the two young political officers on the staff of the British Embassy tasked with trawling through each day’s output from the Cultural Revolution committees to produce a daily political report. Suposedly, once they learnt that all the Ambassador needed to know was whether the radicals or the moderates were in the ascendency, they realised that the same information could be far more pleasantly and reliably ascertained by going out into the street and counting the relative numbers of young women who had braided their hair with plain brown elastic bands or coloured ones respectively.
I am sure that rhe sign off line, that all the other ambassadors were mystified as to the quality of British political intelligence, was added in the telling but it would be nice to know whether the story has a basis in reality or was a whole cloth invention.