Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men.
And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain.
It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.
Greta Christina
I have to admit, I’ve been guilty of that myself. It doesn’t help that I always thought of myself to have the fashion sense of a salted slug.
It began to change after I started designing fashion for my characters. Siendes, for example, dresses very high end in her civilian life – entirely for poltical reasons. That eventually got into my head that caring about how you look isn’t necessary about being shallow.
Took a while, though, because it’s the whole “it’s for girls and so it suck” things is insideous and everywhere – especially since so many people and companies use “it’s for girls/women” as excuse to go “eh, quality’s expensive, why bother, it’s good enough for girls/women”. It feeds itself.
Take toys and compare the quality of barby with the quality of bionicle, for example. Or kid tv shows; if they targeted at girls they tend to suck, MLP:FIM is the only exeption I can think of and that’s more meet with “that CAN’T be that good, it’s for little girls!” Or videogames. Young boys get Professor Clayton and other fantastic puzzle games, Girls get cheaply made, buggy dress up dolls and nintendo-pets knockoffs. Even the production values The Sims, prolly the only high end computer game series aimed at women, got cheaper and cheaper over time, especially when you compare the quality of the early Sims 2 expension packs with late ones – or, god beware, Sims 3.
Take Shoes. On average, shoes for women are more expensive and of far shittier quality. I’m lucky if they survive a YEAR and I tend to pay far more than my father and brother, who wears theirs for four years and more before they even have to think about replacing them.. And I haven’t started on the comfort factor yet.
Clothes. Great Chaos, the quality of clothes.
Yes, women have more variation in style, but it comes in a huge cost of quality. For some odd reason C&A and co think that cheap, falls apart after one washing t-shirts are appropiate for women. Or the sizes come misslabeled. I once had a pair of pants where one leg was four centimetres longer than the other one. You don’t find that kind of crap on the men’s floor, which is why I do my t-shirt shopping there. But if you’re a woman strapped for cash like most are, you’ve got a problem. Have fun spending more time sifting out bad quality stuff than testing if things fit.
Classic female professions still pay far less that classic male ones.
It’s everywhere: Even in small things like razors – I use the classic Gillette ones, simply because the “feminized” versions are shitty, wobbly things of pink plastic. I used to have one of the pink ones – the handles are better shaped for legs – but it kept breaking apart.
No wonder that people still associate femine with shallow and worth less than the male counterparts.
