Don't Judge My High heels - After All, They Can Crush You.

    After reading Jennifer Baumgardney and Amy Richards’ feminism and femininity I started to think about the idea of “girlie” culture and why women are put down for being and appearing feminine. I want to take a look back to 2^nd and 3^rd wave feminists. During their time and culture, fighting for women’s rights was a tough and uphill battle. We were not only fighting for basic human rights such as voting but we were fighting to make a place for ourselves in a world full of men and individuals who told us “you can’t do that.”

    Once women in the late 1900’s started making progress, they saw a lot of changes around the mentality of how women should act, dress, think and present themselves to others. “The world in which girls grew up in deprived them of access to male things and enforced their participation in female things. This left them to assume and thus promote the notion that to be a “good girl” you had to master “boy things.” (Feminism and Femininity pg. 2).

    Essentially, girls were told that hey, you’re a girl and to prove your worth you NEED to go out and play sports. You NEED to pick up that hammer and put some nails into the wall. They were told to aspire to be engineers and astronauts. What they were also told was: you can do all these “boy things” You really can! BUT; we think you should do this in a none feminine way. Don’t wear pink and hair bows while playing sports. Leave your makeup in your bathroom drawer, why wear it when your hammering nails? Girls were basically told, yes; prove your point that girls can go participate in “boy things” but do so while masking the fact that you are feminine.

    A modern day example I can think of relating to making yourself less feminine to “do things a boy can do” is Katy Perry’s music video for Part of Me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuwfgXD8qV8

    In the music video Katy essentially breaks up with her boyfriend, cuts all her hair off, binds her chest and joins the marines. She is shown doing tough exercises, wading in water and fighting other females in training. During this whole training process, she is transformed into a woman whose feminine side is suppressed. She is singing about not letting someone else take parts away from her, yet she is suppressing her feminine side of herself to be a marine? She is essentially making herself appear “tougher” to do the tough things marines do. 

    The idea that you cannot “be girlie” to do “boy things” and the idea that this is encouraged made me laugh. Because on one hand you’re encouraging girls to be all that they can possibly be, but you’re also telling them to suppress apart of their self expression. You’re telling them by being feminine they cannot play sports or work engineering jobs. You’re saying that to be feminine means to be weak and to be feminine means no one will take you seriously.

    On the flip side, Richards and Baumgardney state in their book, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000) that “Girlie says we are not broken, that our desires aren’t simply booby traps set by the patriarchy.”

    To be “girlie” does not mean to say that I am not tough (just as these authors are trying to prove). I can very well dress in heels, a nice dress, have my hair done and go into a board room meeting and shut it down. I do not believe that by appearing and being feminine that I am less able to perform my job duties. Let’s bring a sports example in. If I am very well trained and educated to play flag football, and I just so happen to have my nails painted, do you think this would affect the way I perform? No. Because I am focused on the game. My nail color does not affect my overall athletic performance. Just as if I were to wear a hair bow on the field. My performance will not be affected.

I want to pull in a new ad campaign that I spotted on Facebook this week that better illustrates what I am trying to say. This ad is from H&M and it illustrates to them “What a Lady Should Be.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-RY6fWVrQ0

    One of my favorite parts from this ad is when the woman in the beginning walks into the board room, looking stylish and fierce and she throws the binder onto the table. Notice, she is surrounded by men and women and she is UNAFRAID to stand in front of them. This to me is so powerful. The overall ad was extremely encouraging. I also think this ad campaign does a great job of showing a wide diverse range of women. There are women of color, all different ages, sizes, etc.

    One more point I want to make is that masculine women can feel oppression to different jobs, hobbies and activities too. Just as a woman in a dress and heels may feel like people do not take her seriously in the board room, a masculine woman in a pant suit may feel she is not taken seriously because “she does not look like the standard woman.” Many masculine women are bullied and attacked because they look like men; but isn’t society telling girls that they cannot be feminine? So when they appear less “girlie”, like society says they should, why are they attacked?

    

    Where is the fine line? You don’t want us to be “girlie” because this means we cannot get things done but you also want us to have enough eye appeal so we can keep your attention and make you feel like we are worth something.

I think my overall question I had to this reading was:

    Why do women feel like in order to be powerful and amazing, they have to do so while lacking “girly-ness” and “femininity”? How come when a woman wears heels and a dress to work she can be seen as uneducated? Why do we tell girls that if they want to play soccer and softball they should do so without hair bows?

    Overall, girls are bad-asses. We have fought oppression and stereotypes that we are dumb, airheaded, only fit for household work, birthing children and baking pies. We have come a long way from the early 1900’s when the idea that women could have rights and a say in the world was radical. Even though the idea of “girlie” culture was placed among the late 1900’s, I still see signs of this today throughout my everyday life. I see examples of women thinking they need to suppress their femininity for the sport, job, hobby, etc. that they are involved in. Being feminine does not define how well you can do a job or how well educated you may be. It is apart of who you are. Whether you are feminine or not you should embrace your self expression and let the world see you for who you truly are.

Richards, Amy. “Feminism and Femininity: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thong.” Feminism and Femininity. By Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. P. 59-67. Print.