Dawn Treader New Idea: Organise my goals using Maslow's hierarchy of needs
I totally respect your comment, but as someone who's been wrestling with a desire to dress up as a girl since I was 8
...it’s always bemused me that there is an under-current in society of a man in a dress being viewed as not respectful of others, or even to be ridiculed (which you were absolutely not doing:-)), when women freely walk around in trousers without any kind of comment at all.
Surely equality works both ways?
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This reminds me of lyrics by Madonna:
“Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
‘Cause it’s OK to be a boy
But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
‘Cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like
Wouldn’t you
What it feels like for a girl”
Once I was watching a film (sorry can’t remember which) and the protagonist used a couple of those lines in her dialogue as regular speech. Madonna does put her finger on it.
Men often refer to behaviour they witness in other men that isn’t considered stereotypically masculine and describe it in a negative way, calling them women in some form on another.
We once discussed this on random questions and people came up with a lot of examples of it. can’t remember off hand, but the tone tends to certainly be derogatory.
And as I love Madonna’s glossing image of what being a female is to her I’ll continue:
“Silky smooth
Lips as sweet as candy, baby
Tight blue jeans
Skin that shows in patches”
She seems to get a kick out of being a girl and dressing up in all its paraphernalia in a way I never did. To me it’s all pressure.
Dawn Treader New Idea: Organise my goals using Maslow's hierarchy of needs
I really appreciated you making this comment - I'm curious what others think...
I’ll probably come back to why at least a couple of times, but for me the most fundamental point, whatever I choose to be right for me, is that
A) I adore women who choose to be feminine, and there are a whole variety of ways to interpret what that means, and I love most of them – it’s mostly the creativity rather than the stereotype that gets me. Having said that, like a good jazz standard, it’s creativity within a framework, and it’s good to reflect on whether the framework is truly healthy, so…
B) I think you have a great point about men’s ridiculing of men who choose with experimenting with a more feminine style.
Having tried it, I can say that there are some fundamental physical obstacles. A lot of feminine styling is there to draw the eye to feminine physical characteristics – eyebrow shape, cheeks and cheek bones, lips, shoulders, breasts, waists, hips, legs…
And if you’re wearing something that’s designed to draw attention to some part of all that and you’re not that shape, then you easily become a visual joke or parody.
Of course, there are some women that have that problem too…
Curious what others think, more later….
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This observation I find very interesting, obviously true but hadn’t occurred to me:
“A lot of feminine styling is there to draw the eye to feminine physical characteristics…
..And if you’re wearing something that’s designed to draw attention to some part of all that and you’re not that shape, then you easily become a visual joke or parody.”
Yes. Reflecting back this might help explain why women get away with wearing much of what’s traditionally ‘male clothing’. (Male clothing tends to be designed around practicality rather than purely for flattering. So different issues.)
Or maybe because trousers and much of male clothing was more practical with time those types of clothing has become neutral.
Point B) above. yes. Also I was talking further than just physical appearances, meaning how it’s deeper rooted, evident in attitudes that effect even our speech. How men can/do insult any weakness in character or strength that they witness in another man with derogatory terms which imply they are ‘womenly’ in one way or another. (A while back on 43T we came up with a whole list of these.)
