Women aren’t the main enforcers of femininity, but...
I’ve seen several claims going around that most external pressure to be feminine comes from other women. I acknowledge that it does happen, I have personally experienced it, but I do have a problem with the qualifier ‘most’.
It might be more overt in the way your mother tells you to shave your legs or to put on a little make-up, but there are many (male) sources in society which imply the same thing and enforce worse consequences than your mother being disappointed with you.
I think it’s easy to overlook the pressure men put on women of any sexuality to be feminine, because they say one thing and do another. Furthermore, a lot of the pressure from males already starts in primary school and I think many of us have forgotten that.
Men claim to hate femininity, because it’s high maintenance and time consuming to keep it up. They say they prefer it when women are natural, yet they don’t seem to realize that no woman is naturally feminine the way they want her to be. They hold contradictory beliefs, without being completely aware of it.
One of the most well known examples of this, is the fact that when men say they prefer ‘no-make up’, they mean no make-up make-up. They might not immediately call you a man for genuinely not wearing make-up, but they will put pressure on you by theorizing whether you’re sick or tired.
These aren’t throwaway comments with no meaning or effect on our lives. They hit us right in the wallet. Employers view make-up as an important aspect of self-care and a sign that you’ll take care of them too.
This belief is visible in statistics.
This hasn’t changed since the lockdowns and seems to have become more overt.
In some countries, like Malaysia, this has been part of government guidelines.
Ceasing the performing of femininity is pathologized.
The lack of performing femininity is viewed by many so-called mental health professionals as warning signs of mental illness. Women who have spent time in psychiatric hospitals or have visited therapists in the past, might be familiar with this phenomenon.
The fact that the lack of performing femininity has historically been pathologized is on its own enough evidence that women aren’t the sole enforcers of femininity, considering that it’s only been fairly recent that the majority of mental health professionals in several countries are female. This belief is stil enforced today in psychiatry, this is sometimes justified with the idea that it’s only a warning sign if someone used to wear make-up or shave, but now doesn’t anymore. Which seems to suggest that if you find radical feminism and cease to perform femininity, you are showing signs of mental illness, which seems like the old misogynistic fable that feminists are simply ‘hysterical’.
This is visible too in anti feminist propaganda, where feminists are portrayed as gender nonconforming, passionate and it’s implied that this is a bad thing. Sometimes this likes to mask itself as feminist media, where the message is ‘Good feminists are feminine, bad feminists are non conforming.’ With feminine not necessarily meaning that a woman is emulating barbie, but that she’s still performing enough femininity to be appealing. Typical liberal ‘’feminism’’.
The ceasing of performing femininity is further pathologized with the concept of transgender. Many of the supposed signs of gender dysphoria are characterized by the act of doing nothing.
You might argue: but we accept tomboys! The problem with the concept of tomboyism, is that there is the implicit expectation that the girl will grow out of her non conforming ways. When she doesn’t, this is quickly seen as a sign of deviance and nowadays of being trans.
The idea of female childhood nonconformity is not new and used to be encouraged for nefarious reasons.
“During the 1840s and ’50s, when the abolition of slavery began in the U.K. (the U.S. would follow in the 1860s), social elites became concerned about the physical health of white women due to restrictive clothing and a lack of exercise. Amid fears that white people would become a minority as more immigrants arrived and abolition neared, white women were encouraged to lead more active, outdoorsy lifestyles. The tomboy became a perfect cure for white malaise. It would, in theory, better prepare young white women “for the physical and psychological demands of marriage and motherhood,” as Abate writes, and further ensure that the white race would not die out. “
Which doesn’t mean that there is any problem with female childhood nonconformity, but there’s been a trend for over a century now that nonconformity is something to be left behind during our journey to adulthood.This is also why even some conservative fathers have no problem with their tomboy daughters, until she reaches an age at which he deems she should find a man.
The father might not like the mother try to teach you how to put on mascara or ask you to wear a dress, but he will show his distaste for nonconformity in adult women around you. Daughters will internalize these messages, even though they might not have a clear memory of these instances, unlike her experiences with her mother being a direct enforcer of femininity.
This continues in school. Boys hear their fathers say these things too and start to police girls in school. They will point out the first signs of female secondary sex characteristics, including bodyhair, implying or directly stating that it’s unhygienic. This can lead to a girl coming home crying from school, asking her mother what to do and her mother will teach her what was taught to herself at one point. These girls will go to school and start to police other girls, after internalizing these messages.
Not acknowledging the males who play a vital role in this cycle, is pure misogyny, not unlike the idea that all women are “catty mean girls”. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy fueled by rumors originating from men.
Where did the mother get the idea from? Was father disillusioned with her body hair after being exposed to copious amounts of pornography? Waxed, airbrushed skin on pages and videos? Or is it caused by what evolutionary psychologists like to posit, that men are simply attracted to pre/peripubescent features due to “signaling youth and peak fertility”, even though prepubescent and peak fertility are two contradictory concepts. Whatever the cause might be, this phenomenon shows that men are an important source of enforcing femininity.
Men universally enforce femininity implicitly from our childhoods, throughout all our lifestages. Many do it explicitly and especially heterosexual women receive the brunt of this. Yet same sex partnered bisexual and homosexual women are not spared, considering this still happens during our careers and when we reach out for help with our mental health. Nevermind the fact that gender nonconformity is seen as a sign of homosexuality, which is not completely unjustified, but often encourages negative or downright lesbophobic responses from more conforming individuals when meeting gender nonconforming individuals. Not being appealing to men is for some reason the worst insult many men can think of.
The reason why fewer heterosexual women are gender nonconforming, may play a role in wanting to attract a man. Even if this is subconsciously. Media and social pressure makes the message clear: femininity is required to attract men. Even though ceasing the performance of femininity doesn’t stop men from harassing women.The message might be even more amplified ever since the advent of liberal feminism, which posits that performing femininity is empowering. This instead of acknowledging that it’s financially draining, time wasting and restricting women’s movement and can’t be a true choice in current society.
Even when opposite sex attracted women choose to not date men, they might still feel the need to perform femininity, due to the entanglement of beauty and hygiene. Women not shaving is seen as unhygienic, not for any objective reasons, but due to men’s personal aesthetic preferences. It might not always result from heterosexual men for sexual reasons; much of it has resulted simply from the wish to not only market razors to men, but also to women.
King Camp Gillette was the man behind the lady razor and the one to thank for adding an extra 15 minutes to our shower time. Prior to 1915, body hair on a woman was seen as a non-issue thanks to the straight-laced styles of the Victorian era — with women draped and buttoned up to the chin, shaving your armpits was as odd and unnecessary as shaving off your eyebrows. But when Gillette realized he could double his profits by doubling his customers and introducing women as shoppers, he got to working on how to bring blades into powder rooms. “Gillette was very canny about increasing consumption of his products, and targeting women was one part of that strategy,” Rebecca M. Herzig, author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal , shares in an email interview with Bustle.
The key in making women buy the product was to make shaving a new but unmistakable part of womanhood. Gillette knew that, and so he and his publishers used polarizing words in their ads, drawing a hard line between what it meant to be a man and a woman. “As the first company to introduce the concept of shaving to women, Gillette was cautious not to be too modern. In their early advertisements for women, Gillette did not to use the word ‘shaving’ but the word ‘smoothing’ instead. ‘Shaving’ was an activity men engaged in; ‘smoothing’ was more feminine,” Kirsten Hansen, a graduate of women’s liberal arts school Barnard College, explained in her senior thesis. “Very few Gillette ads for women used words like ‘shave’ or ‘razor’ or ‘blade’ at all. The cultural association between men and blades was so deep and so old that they had to worry about making their products seem ‘feminine’ enough,” Herzig confirms.
This association of not performing femininity with being ugly and unhygienic, especially when it comes to bodyhair, is so ingrained in society that even homosexual women are affected by these beliefs. Without ever having to date a man, just existing in patriarchy is enough to feel like you’re ugly or unhygienic for not shaving or wearing make-up. Lesbophobes remind us of it often enough. These feelings end up being internalized and projected on butches, who are sometimes chastised even by other homosexual women for being a higher degree of nonconforming than ‘acceptable’. This can happen the other way around too.
This may seem like evidence that women are the sole source of the enforcement of femininity and that men just “don’t care about all that stuff”, yet whichever route you take to trace back the origin of these beliefs, you end at men.
And not only heterosexual men, we cannot forget that there are many homosexual men in the beauty industry who further propagate these beliefs too. Which women then internalize.
You cannot blame the mass delusion of society, in which we accept men in their natural state as normal, but women have to get rid of secondary sex characteristics and doll themselves up in order to be “normal”, solely on women. Men are the original source and they have to be, because why else would this even happen in societies where women basically had no positions of power?
The trend of hair removal continued into Europe, where Ancient Greek women were expected to remove their pubic hair. A full bush was considered “uncivilized,” Sherrow writes, and the artists of the time did not show signs of pubic hair on statues portraying women.
Or how women in some cultures only started shaving, due to globalization?
But researchers say the study shows how globalization might influence attitudes about the hair, ahem, down under.
For example, the Amhara society’s religious doctrine initially required that men prune their pastures with razors and women by plucking; the reverse was unforgivable. But once the European razor blade was introduced to the Eastern African region, women started shaving and men stopped removing their pubic hair at all.
This is regarding pubic hair, which is usually not visible to other people in one’s day-to-day life, but what I’m trying to get across is that negative attitudes towards female bodyhair are subjective and aren’t a natural result of women interacting with each other. The enforcing coming from women only happens after the concept has been internalized in both society and women, which is mainly done by men.
Since this is such an ubiquitous and insidious problem in our patriarchal society, I again have to advice separatism and examining your reasons for performing femininity. I’m not attacking you for wearing a dress. Simply if you’re doing something which men aren’t, which has no real objective reasons for doing it, it drains you financially and harms your mental health; maybe don’t do it anymore. And yes you might receive flack for it, which is why we need more female-only spaces and womynslands where we can be free and heal.
While we’re not the only enforcers of femininity, unlike what men claim, that doesn’t absolve us or mean we’re not negatively affected by it. It affects our mental health, our self esteem, our wallets, our energy, our time and when we perform femininity we’re just another crab in the bucket. Women benefit from other women being nonconforming, so maybe one day they have the courage to be nonconforming too. We need to normalize it.
This is also why I take issue with the “no woman is conforming” argument. Yes, no woman can fully conform to the prescribed gender role and perform femininity perfectly, but there are degrees to this. It doesn’t mean we can just shrug and say we’re doing enough now already, when many of us still disadvantage ourselves with these practices. It’s also not truly a choice, considering the stigma which still exists today and any attempt at positing it as a choice reeks of liberal feminism.
It also ignores what feminists before us have protested against.
In September 1968, around 400 feminists agreed, protesting the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Demonstrators clogged the storied boardwalk abutting the convention center, picketing the pageant with sardonic signage and a “Freedom Trash Can” into which they tossed objects symbolizing female oppression, including cleaning products, high heel shoes, makeup and hairspray, copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan, girdles, and bras. (This is the origin of the “bra burning” feminist trope, though none of the objects in the trash can were actually set on fire.) At one point protesters crowned a live sheep Miss America, likening the pageant to judging livestock at a county fair.
So while the idea that women are the main enforcers of femininity is misogynistic and demonstrably false, we’re the only ones who are willing to change. We’re the only ones who will encourage women existing naturally. Men aren’t going to, I’ve discussed this in previous posts, nor is the media going to. We can either shrug our shoulders and keep performing, or cease performing and experience a ‘new’ sense of freedom.
