This and That
Bowser said:
I've actually talked to women about this very subject.
As have I.
Women, as I have been told, dress for themselves, not for men. And yes, I have been told that it does affect their self-esteem.
My charming story about this has to do with what I refer to as "cake frosting lingerie", and other such "sexy" intimate wear that just doesn't look comfortable. I've asked women about this, and received three general answers:
• For their partners.
• For themselves.
• For each other.
I've never been certain just how dangeorus it is to psychoanalyze that. However, at some point it came to be that instead of trying to generalize it seemed quite obvious the real answer was to each their own.
However, the question of self-esteem only begs the question of metric.
That is to say, against what does anyone measure their self-esteem?
Or, more bluntly, why is
sexy a standard?
Answering that question requires exploring how it works, and therein we tread near the heart of the problem. Self-esteem isn't just about sexy, it's also about not standing out in a negative way. And if part of the cultural affirmation is that women should be sexy, we're staring straight at the problem.
And, yes, a woman's sex appeal
is part of the cultural standard for her validation and affirmation; that much is self-evident.
Trying not to break the rules...again
Yeah, that was a clerical error. Again, my apologies.
As a personal observation, the women in my house have closets filled with clothing; whereas, I have three pairs of jeans, a stack of t-shirts, some boxers, and a pair of shoes--all of which can be stacked on my dresser.
I know the feeling; but it's also part of the standard. Among my cohort I've known women who would love to be able to survive on a "men's style" wardrobe, but professional and societal expectations intervene. Women face higher expectations just to participate in society at the same level as men, and this is part of it.
To the other, I will tell you this: Yeah, I was happy to finally start wearing skirts, but one thing I didn't expect was the
natural comfort. I swear unto you, I could easily spend the rest of my life in full-length "gypsy" skirts. So, yeah, it'll change your life, man. But it also complicates the hell out of your wardrobe. These days it's the same thing; I have four skirts, two pairs of full-length tights, and three pairs of calf-length leggings, and if I chose I could rotate between the same three button-down shirts, two turtlenecks, handful of t-shirts, and two flannels that make reasonable color matches. I'm a dude; I can actually get by like this, and where I live nobody is going to say a thing. A woman lives on this sort of wardrobe and she's usually looked at in some manner at least mildly notorious; you know, hippie, granola, feminist, ugly, &c.
But I also feel the itch; next up I intend to conquer autumn gold―oh, and I still haven't found a top to go with the gorgeous floral skirt my stepmother gave me. The upside of not having that much spare cash around is that I don't overturn my entire wardrobe with a manic shopping spree.
And as funny and queer as this all sounds, I still don't get to claim any real kinship with women, or even stereotypes thereof; at the end of the day, I'm still a dude. Insofar as we might consider the metrics of self-esteem, I'm willing to extrapolate from the small handful of explicit declarations I've heard and assert that most women would trade places with me in a heartbeat; in the De Beauvoir juxtaposition, I still answer the "human beings" (
i.e., masculine) standard, not the unspeakably heavier and more complicated "women" standard.
It's one thing, sir, that we men should consider the differences in our drawers and closets compared to women, but the manner in which people measure self esteem is the functionally important distinction.
† † †
Billvon said:
And in the 1950's, the gyrations of Elvis were used to support the same conclusion. Sex had become trivial; popular musicians were even "doing it" on stage.
It seems worth recalling the 1999 film
American Pie, which was in popular lore the
Porky's of its generation. I came up in the '80s; the string of T&A comedies through the decade―
Up the Creek,
Hamburger: The Motion Picture,
Police Academy,
Revenge of the Nerds―are at the heart of my local cohort's coming of age in popular culture.
I actually made a weird joke about it yesterday after my daughter popped off with a random, ill-conceived marijuana punchline.
Because one of the things that gets me about some of these claims to have never witnessed, or to not recall, various elements of misogyny in our societal history that contribute to rape culture is that it really does seem impossible to not remember.
To wit, I ended up telling my daughter a brief story about a band called Muscial Youth. I referred to Madonna, who actually arrived two years later, but the point still holds; society was supposed to be outraged about Madonna singing about enjoying womanhood. It's not like these complaints were new, of course, especially recalling your point about Elvis. This strain is what my corner of the poltiical market derisively denounces as the Guardians of Female Chastity; Elvis was bad for tempting innocent young girls, and Madonna was bad for suggesting women could enjoy their own sexualities.
There was a lot of that stuff going on. And in the middle of this, well, frankly I just don't remember a huge public fracas―then again, I was
nine, and only a couple of years politically aware―over the idea of a
bunch of kids singing about smoking pot as a counterpoint to living in poverty↱.
Seriously; that was Musical Youth's big hit in the U.S.
But it might also be that we've seen the slow death of certain tropes.
American Pie is poignantly funny to me
because it is essentially a satirical compilation of what my generation learned about sex, sexuality, and society. Well, all but the piehumping; that was innovative.
In the early nineties, for instance, I worked pizza. Consider a big steel bowl full of pizza dough made from fifty pounds of flour. You dump it onto a steel table in a massive blob. Now, it's not a good joke, but I remember the first time I saw a guy stab a knife straight into the blob and withdraw it, make a vagina joke, and then proceed to two-finger the hole. Eight years later, humping a pie is blessedly lighthearted.
American Pie was a century's-end tribute to a generation of T&A comedies.
And, you know, I also think about this one particular bit on
Family Guy, circa 2000, when Quagmire hides in order to peep on a slumber party of high school girls.
Honestly, I knew exactly what that bit was about. And this is what puzzles me:
Among my age peers and cultural cohort, how in the world does it happen that this makes me somehow unusual?
I was just thinking about that in terms of self-esteem and trying to not psychoanalyze the bit about women and their underwear. You know, is there solidarity? Competition? I mean, what's going on in that guys' fantasy about girls' sleepovers? And yet, I'm not at all certain the question makes sense to men of my generation anymore. Because it's not just Bowser or Milkweed; there are plenty of men I know in life who ought to be able to remember their own experiences, but apparently have no idea.
It really is a toxic nostalgia, though; perhaps I ought to be more understanding. But I swear, it is really unnatural to hear someone laugh and say, "Yeah, but who really acts like that?" when the answer is, "Dude, that was
us twenty-five years ago."
It's kind of like I have this one friend who pretends he never masturbates. I don't know, it's been over twenty years since that weird conversation, but come on, nobody believed him. Nor does it really matter, in the end, but it offers a functional juxtapostion to a bit
I noted at the outset↑―
It seems strange, in the age of #NotAllMen and #JustNotMe, how many of my peers seem a bit cloudy on the issue of how important it was for guys to get laid―by a girl!―when we were younger. And it’s one thing to invoke ego defense, but, really, what drives such suppression? Can self-indictment really be so powerful? Because, I swear, they’re not all running from memories of evils committed. And just how many self-inflicted wounds, such as it is, could they possibly visit upon themselves? Or is it possible that we really have been wandering so catastrophically astray for so long without even knowing it? The proposition seems unrealistic for both magnitude and necessary complexity. Yet one point at least remains occulted: How can we possibly forget?
―because it is such a difficult pretense to believe.
For so much of what I need to tell my daughter about the world, I would be lying if I told her I didn't know the reason why I know what I know about what I need to tell her.
Yeah, a bunch of this shit I loathe? That was me. That was my generation. That was my friends and peers. That was our culture. And a lot of people, apparently, have forgotten; or, at least, so I am apparently expected to believe.
Part of what puzzles me about this whole discussion is the square-zero demand to remind people of history they lived through. I mean, sure, if one was born in '94, they might not know what a bunch of this stuff means. But, you know, the thirtysomethings and older? Oh, come on. How can they not remember?