Monday, December 14, 2015

Gender is a performance, gender is a pattern.

Gender is a performance, gender is a pattern. 

As an example, the girls start to wear cute, tight, heeled shoes. The kind that pinch your toes, leave blisters if you walk too far, but they look beautiful. The girls happily suffer for fashion because the ultimate goal of the girls is to look cute while they do whatever it is they are doing. (Yes, they want to be doctors and scientists and artists, but they need to look cute at the same time.) They wear a skirt and tights, it looks adorable. They are relatively comfortable, a little constricted. They might see the boys chasing each other and jumping over a fence. You cannot jump over a fence wearing heels and a skirt. So the performance becomes a pattern, as the less you jump over fences, the more you get out of the habit until horse-play is not something you do, and you become a gentle, feminized person. So did the girl choose the shoes because she is a girl, or did the shoes make the girl more likely to act like a girl?

Of course you can't remove social influences from the question, but if you try a thought-experiment and ask yourself if, in the wild, the female of a species would purposefully want to hinder her physical abilities to not only attract a male, but to appear pleasing to all the other males she isn't even trying to attract, I'd say it sounds like a conspiracy. It seems like it would a good bit of propaganda to get a whole half of a species to limit itself and boost the other half.

My personal experience as a youth was thinking, why would I wear heels, what if I want to run? What if I need to run... away from someone? (Who wants to hurt me, or worse....) I'm not letting these feminine trappings make me feel unsafe. It's not worth it to look like a cute angel with tiny delicate unicorn feet, even though I do want that, because I've been told I want that, I've been shown how cute it is. I want to be cute. My giant feet look big enough on their own, but I strap on hiking boots and I kick ass and I tell myself I don't care if it's not feminine. It's my right as a living breathing being with a body to not have my body be in pain all the time, to let my body move the way it was meant to. (This could also apply to bras but that's a whole 'nother story....)

I'm getting sick of feeling torn inside, sick of feeling like it's more important to look good than to get shit done. I want to be so darn awesome at stuff that I look good for that reason, not because I'm sexually attractive. I am attractive but I am also strong, and while looks do fade, inner strength won't fade if you let it grow. And there is a wild, rare beauty in a person who follows their own path.

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