The problem with dresses

THANK

YOU

FEMINISTING

for this post!

About the sexist New York Times article about why women should keep wearing dresses, and many other cultural references to the pressure on women to dress for men and male standards of femininity.

When I was a kid I often fought with my mom and my dad about dressing and acting “girly.” “Why don’t you ever dress like a girl?” my uncle or dad would say. “Why is it so difficult for you to act like a girl, do you think you’re a boy?” My mom would say. “Becky thinks she’s a boy!” I would get from my sister. All of this was along with being in a patriarchal Catholic environment where sex and sexuality were barely acknowledged otherwise. Why so much pressure to “act and look like a girl” when we weren’t supposed to know we had sex organs to begin with? How can you just skip sex and sexuality and jump right to forcing a gender identity onto someone? Fucking Christianity (and I mean that with as much respect as it deserves). So, I have always felt self conscious in dresses.

There was shame. There was self-loathing. And there was a lot of anger and frustration.

I seriously had this look on my face a lot as a kid.

I got to give it to my brother, though, he didn’t seem to mind either way and we had fun playing together growing up, even as I kept stride with him by boycotting leg- and armpit- shaving as well as wearing any clothing resembling “girly” throughout middle school. I’ll thank him for that someday…

Every summer especially, year after year, I was told that since I was a girl certain things were expected of me and certain freedoms and trusts were not granted me. I can barely think about the sexist and prejudice parts of my childhood now without feeling really self conscious and angry, and without it painfully challenging the core of who I now know myself to be. I didn’t wear a dress willingly until I was about 23 years old…why? I had spent the years until 19 or so hearing about how butch I was and how I wasn’t worth much feminine-wise; and then from 19 until 23 I had left home and begun to redefine my world view and expectations of myself. Through this period I dealt heavily with homophobia, sexism, my anger and my own sense of self-worth–as a “tom boy,” a “loud mouth,” a “..oh I thought you were a lesbian or bi or something…” all while still being very much straight and seeking sexual partnerships with men.

I still have problems with dresses, earrings, shoes, really anything “for women” as far as appearance goes, it’s like I don’t believe my identity can actually include those things–I still have a lot of shame about my sexuality and femininity. Last summer I think I hit a record though–I bought at least 8 dresses throughout the season, and mostly I wear them because they are easy and cooler but also I know I look prettier in them. But like Venessa suggests at the beginning of her post on Feministing, plus some, I have HUGE anxieties about wearing dresses– pervs staring at you, people making assumptions about your sexuality, etc. But I keep upping my “girliness” as a healthy exercise in not being bound by childhood oppression and cultural standards. . . and so I can find my comfort zone someday.

But all my ideals and boycotts and loud-mouthed dissenting aside: I still have a horribly invasive desire to look sexy to my partner–a progressive, “Wouldn’t date any woman not a feminist”  dude, and yet still a dude of all dudes, who doesn’t understand, for example, why I got upset by the comment: “Yeah, now that’s the way ladies should look on a bike!” which he said once while we were biking–me in a skirt. He thought it was a compliment–him calling me sexy.

As for me, I’m not sure if it was more about the language: “you SHOULD look a certain way because you are a lady”; or if it was more about my insecurities that if I didn’t “dress like I should,” he would inevitably find some other women who do dress like “they should,” since most women dress like they “should”–I’m pretty sure it’s a mixture of the two, my objection to lady “shoulds” and my insecurities about not “should”ing enough still.