10-year-old me
was humiliated when her mother insisted it was time to invest in a bra. There
had been one too many bra-less soccer games, and her throes-of-puberty body
could not be ignored any longer. She was deeply embarrassed by her body and her
femininity. Ew, boobs!
If someone had
told 10-year-old me she would someday love clothes, cosmetics, hairstyling,
and many stereotypically female and feminine things, she wouldn’t have believed you.
10-year-old me
wore baggy green painter’s pants and an old XL t-shirt with a Newfoundland dog
on it. And so many tracksuits.
More
importantly, 10-year-old me only wanted to play boy roles in make-believe. My
friends and I had extensive and elaborate make-believe narratives and I liked
to be the prince, the warrior, Simba, the monster – mostly male or masculinized
characters.
As I’ve since
come to understand, this had everything to do with the exciting, adventurous
roles I saw boys and men portraying, and nothing to do with not liking being a girl.
I’m taken back
to my childhood only because I’ve been thinking about how we learn what it
means to be masculine or feminine.
One day in junior high I went to sleep the girl on the left
and woke up the girl on the right.
and woke up the girl on the right.
In my early 20s, I would often joke with one of my close friends about how I thought “like a man.” About how I found myself behaving “like a man,” approaching romance and sex “like a man.” For a pop culture example of this concept, I think of the Sex and the City Season 1 episode where Samantha suggests the women should learn to have sex like a man.
Rewatching this
episode more recently, I find it much more problematic than I did a few years
ago. I love the show, but it perpetuated a pretty stagnant and unilateral
suggestion of men’s attitudes towards sex and relationships (which, I feel, the
show later moves well beyond with several different, well developed male
characters). Of course not all men approach sex the same way, as not all women
do either. It was also a completely heteronormative attitude towards gender
roles.
Then one day,
several years ago, something switched in my brain and I no longer saw myself as
a woman who had some masculine
traits, but as a woman, a feminine woman, and these elements were part of my femininity.
I recognize and
appreciate that I can’t undo the legacy of male and female stereotypes and
norms just because I try to personally subvert them. It’s more complicated than
that. And as my partner, the sociology graduate always reminds me, there are
social realities that persist outside my philosophical ideals of undoing gender
assumptions.
Still, I
continue to imagine that femininity doesn’t have to mean one narrow set of
expectations, nor does masculinity. And note I’m saying femininity and masculinity
– not femaleness and maleness. I’m talking about the concepts attributed to
members of either gender.
To borrow from something I wrote for a
class recently: these signifiers – masculine and feminine – denote
characteristics of the male and female sex/gender. And if lots of men love
baking and babies then isn’t that masculine? If lots of women love video games
and beer and weight lifting then isn’t that feminine? There’s a breakdown
between traditional ways of denoting male and female identity/behaviour and how
these identities and behaviours actually play out in reality, in the present,
in any given culture.
I think many
people will quickly get on board with accepting that women don’t have to wear
dresses or make-up to be feminine, but where does society at large stand on
body hair?
Just this week (April 7), Veet released – and has since pulled – a sexist and ridiculous
advertisement with the tagline “Don’t Risk Dudeness,” depicting women with hairy
legs as repellant to men (don’t even get me started on the implicit assumption
that women’s reasons for shaving are rooted in heterosexual relationships,
either).
Beyond the
message that hairy women can’t possibly be feminine or appealing to men, the ad
was outright belittling even in its execution of the “joke.” Unlike the “real”
man, who is slim and conventionally attractive (and, notably, very hairless…),
the dudely woman is meant to be read as an unattractive buffoon – very hairy,
bearded, out of shape. Another, related
commercial, shows a woman transforming into the same hairy man when she goes to
hail a cab and – the horror! – her underarm hair is visible.
To their credit, the Veet marketing people have apologized and were receptive to feedback. I did note, however, that they used the “we're women too and we thought it was funny” approach to legitimize the perspective. Sorry, but sexism by women against women is still sexism.
There was a
tonne of outraged backlash at these ads and the suggestion that women who don’t
shave their legs or underarms – or haven’t shaved today – turn into men. But let’s take it a step further – what was
it saying about women who never shave? Who couldn’t care less about shaving or
waxing body hair and don’t participate in the socially sanctioned practice?
And if leg and
underarm hair are constructed as aberrant, what about untouched sideburns and upper
lip hair on women? Are these women actually men? Why is hair in some areas OK and
other regions outlawed?
To reverse it,
how come men who remove their body hair don’t turn into women? Lots of men
shave their chests, underarms, pubic regions, even legs, for all kinds of
reasons. The man depicted in the first ad is pretty smooth. Is the masculinity of
these men called into question? Or is body hair removal a choice for men and an
imperative for women?
How did such “natural”
elements of the human body, such as body hair, get so twisted up in notions of
what is means to be a woman or a man?
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