“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
The athletic wear company announced the release of the “pro hijab,” Al Arabiya English reported on Monday.
“The Nike Pro Hijab may have been more than a year in the making, but its impetus can be traced much further back, to an ongoing cultural shift that has seen more women than ever embracing sport,” a statement from Nike said, according to Al Arabiya English.
The “pro hijab” is set to be released in spring 2018. Its creation follows years of controversy regarding Muslim women keeping their hair covered during athletic competitions. Read more (3/7/17 11:10 AM)
Asiya Sport did it first. They also manufacture all their products in the USA, meaning they are an ethical company that doesn’t just use the idea of inclusivity and female empowerment to sell products made from the exploited, outsourced, cheap labour of vulnerable women and girls.
Let’s support ethical Muslim companies before we reward opportunistic companies that have finally caught on to the money they can make from considering muslim women valuable consumer markets. Shop Here.
^^^
Asiya was the first to do this and they are a Minneapolis company!
^Which makes so much sense considering the sizeable Muslim community we have here! Love it. Please spread this post with the added commentary y’all.
It’s incredible how much women do behind the scenes. I know a realtor who relies strongly on his girlfriend’s charisma, beauty and personality to gain clients.
I’ve just been reading The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, about the Harvard women who supported the bulk of astronomy research there over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of them did receive public and academic credit as well as pay – although the university always resisted making any of them faculty until the 1950s – almost all the male astronomers featured were married to accomplished women in their own right, many of them scientists, and you can bet their husbands weren’t putting them on all their papers.
Which has bled into the modern academic world, where many people are expected to do what was essentially a two-person job (filled by male academic + wife) by themselves, or while married to someone else trying to do the same thing. The lack of acknowledgement of women’s work fucks everybody over.
#people who want a return to the mythical prior era #when women did not work #do not want women to stop working #they want them to stop getting credit and pay for it
This reminds me of how early film history, it was always the male director’s wife who did the editing of the films, because the cutting and connecting of film strips was considered a lot like sewing. Of course, anyone who knows anything about film and editing can tell you it changes how good a movie is very easily.
Don’t believe me? Look at the differences between the famous Jaws as the public’s release of it (insisted upon by the female editor) and spielberg, the male director’s version of it (missing basic suspense methods, shows the phony shark too much, etc). Same goes for almost every tarantino film. Editing makes or breaks a film and even today, you can bet your socks editing “the invisible art” was pioneered and is still pushed by women.
^^^^^^ This is so true! And once film editing began to be recognized as an actual art form, women were shoved out of the editing room so that men could be artistic or whatever.
Also Tarantino referred to his favorite editor as being kind of like his mom or something and I swear to god the more I see of him, the less I like him.
The “female editor” for Jaws was Verna Hellman Fields, who cut many other notable films, including American Graffiti along with Marcia Lucas.
Tarantino’s “favorite editor” was Sally JoAnne Menke who edited all of Tarantino’s films until she died.
Because naming and credit is important, especially when you’re talking about women not getting credit and recognition of their work as named individuals.
If you want to know more about women in early filmmaking (emphasis American) and the sociology of how different roles were divided, gendered, and re-gendered in the first decades, I highly recommend Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar.
There are a number of other books to follow that, but it’s 2am and I’m tired so hit me up later for them.
You know what happens when women type? They EDIT. It is a service they are expected to provide invisibly – not to let a mistake or imperfection show to their husband’s audience, but also not to intrude upon his sense that this is all his ideas and his labor. Wives are the unacknowledged story and script doctors, and often co-authors for so many supposedly male-authored works.
Also, I second Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Mahar was my history prof for three or four courses and she is incredibly knowledgeable and engaging.
Speaking anecdotally, there are a good number of rockstar PhD candidates in my program who are only able to put in the hours that they do because their wives function as personal assistants/editors/housekeepers/chefs while they finish up their degrees. I’m not knocking the folks who choose to do this, but the labor of their silent partner is rarely acknowledged and it’s just assumed that they’re preternaturally talented or dedicated. I’ve rarely (never) seen this dynamic reversed, and I’m in a field with a fairly equitable gender ratio.
Women coming forward in this moment are not the ones squeezing the nuance out of their stories. That’s happening in the public narrative. When critics imply that the only valid #MeToo stories are those that would hold up in court, they are not only ignoring survivors’ varied motivations for speaking up, but they are also condemning most survivors to suffer in silence.
There are as many ways to deal with abuse as there are types of abuse. Women should be able to speak about the unwelcome things that men have done to them — and employers and audiences should be free to adjust their estimation of those men accordingly — even when the behavior in question is immoral but not illegal. This is what survivors are asking for. And we should all be listening.
she is so adorable and has such great expressions I sometimes forget she is a pin up girl
She is sexy as fuck.
THIS BODY IS SEXY AS FUCK.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
*softly with feeling* she’s beautiful
This has to be Depression era WW2. She’s wearing bikinis made from flour sacks, which people made clothes from because they were shit poor and companies decided to put floral prints and colors on their bags to make those improvised clothes.
You also have to appreciate that she’s a hard worker, growing her own food, fixing her own plumbing and still retaining her femininity. That’s definitely a sign of the times.
There’s another post about Hilda I can’t find right now, but yeah, it’s spot on, she was popular during the war and was created to be more a “girl next door” type.
@blackteaandbones FOUND IT. This is the series we were goin’ on about on the way to Kingston.
what I love best about Hilda is that you can learn this about her personality just from a handful of moments with her and you can’t help but love her. She’s kind and indulgent and sweet and has a good sense of humor
no offence but let yourself be ugly!! you don’t have to fix your hair if you’re not going anywhere you don’t have to cover up ur spots or change out of your lounge pants to go buy milk like damn we really gotta let ourselves be comfortable without constantly apologising for just looking normal and it’s hard but i think we need to practice looking in the mirror and saying i look ugly af today and that’s okay!! tru self care is letting urself be ugly tbh
I love this version of self-love because it’s much more feasible for people who are self-conscious. Like it takes years of powerful reconditioning to convince yourself that your flaws, like stretch marks or acne or cellulitis, are attractive. It’s basically impossible for most people.
But learning to say “so what, I’m ugly, there’s more to life” not only overwrites this narrative that we have to feel attractive in some way (which is bs) but also reroutes your actual attention to just, living, instead of examining, evaluating, and judging your appearance
I’ve always found the marketing message “all women are beautiful!” or whatever to be so insidiously harmful, because it still implies being beautiful is the most important thing a woman can be.
You see it in those self-congratulatory Dove ads.
I’ve always wanted to create a new soap company called something like Pigeon Soap.
Pigeon Soap: you may be ugly, but at least you’ll smell good.
Cut to some pigeons flapping around a person who closes her eyes and envisions swirling rose petals. Cut back to busy NYC street, pigeons flapping around feet of determined woman in a power suit and no makeup who squares her shoulders and goes in to work.
It’s uh….well it starts with the rape of a minor and keeps going from there, delving into slavery, physical and mental abuse, forced bestiality as a form of torture (the cat! with the butter! !!!!) and enforced pony play punishment. Oh and more rape. Lots of rape.
And before anyone starts with me over Beauty’s age being irrelevant because “that’s how things were back then”, idgaf. It creeps me the fuck out, and anyone that uses “historical accuracy” to stand by their ephebophilia fetish needs to like, leave. Immediately. Without the bread sticks. I’m keeping those.
And that’s not even actually “how things were back then.” I’ve taken a few classes on medieval literature, and we delved into the history a bit. In reality, the average age of marriage for women outside the nobility was 23-25, and most women of the nobility married around age 18. There were occasionally earlier marriages among royalty, but it was rare because it was understood that it was healthier to wait until the woman was a full adult.
how terrifying, to be aging and girl. at 18 i was told by men that i was “the perfect age,” and i still thought it was a compliment. is it because at 20 i figured out how sharp those words were. i felt old at 21, felt like if grey hairs came and my spine cracked i was done for. how scary. i am reminded constantly by “realistic” ideas in fantasy novels that i should have five kids.
my life feels short. like it is squeezed into my twenties. like at 30 i become ghost, just another mother or hard worker or both, just another background character. like if i am not settled and making a difference by 27 i should just give up already. is this something men feel? like a clock is painted on their back, one hand warning: your beauty is something you are valued for and it is something you cannot get back.
and why was i only beautiful, i wonder, at 18 on a riverbank. i’m told often my childish face is a blessing. that i shouldn’t want to look older. one told me i was a trap falling: “you look young but you’re not” he said to me, “it kind of led me on”. am i not young?
maybe i am wrong. maybe it’s just how we all feel, getting old, like time is slipping from us. maybe men do worry that they will be alone forever if they don’t settle by thirty, maybe it’s even because they think they’ll turn ugly. maybe we all squish our lives into that incredibly young decade. what do i know. i’m still learning.
I’m almost 25 and I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.
As a 48 year old lesbian, I offer my perspective on aging, and you all can take it or leave it.
Our understanding of our own aging is very much conditioned by the priorities of straight men, who in the aggregate understand beauty and femininity, indeed women in general, in literally superficial terms. Most of the ads you see for anti-aging products, for instance, focus on its *visible* symptoms: graying hair, wrinkling skin or discolored skin, sagging breasts, changes in body shape, etc. These are the symptoms of female aging that men perceive, and they are the ones that the cosmetics and the larger anti-aging industry therefore target. (Men do have their own anxieties about visibly aging, mostly related to hair loss and body shape; but they are not, for instance, generally terrified by the appearance of wrinkles, unless they work in the entertainment industry.)
But aging is not just something that happens to everyone else’s perception of you; it is something that happens in your own body, at levels deeper than anyone else (especially anyone male) is ever likely to perceive. From my POV the really important thing about aging is how you feel. Your body is where you live; it is for you. Aging is inevitable, but it can to some extent be intentional, in that you can (to some extent; all this is limited by the amount of time and money available to you and the healthfulness of the environments you have lived in and how you did in the DNA lottery) choose to do things that will help preserve the things about your body that make YOU happy to be living there–things like flexibility, strength, and the smooth functioning of your major organs. Generally, if you’re healthy, you don’t think about any of this stuff at 18 or 25; but when you are 40, you will start to take more of an interest as you come to understand how important all of this is to your own ability to enjoy life.
So that sucks, as does menopause, which is the unacknowledged referent of a lot of cultural anxieties about female aging. But the point I want to make is: one of the worst things that the phenomenon described so evocatively by the OP does to girls and young women is to make them so anxious about their own bodies that they are unable to enjoy and appreciate their youth while they have it. And that is theft. It really is. I miss youth, but even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then. I did not appreciate its many excellent qualities, and it was a long time before I allowed myself to accept and act on its desires. At a time when I was beautiful, I thought I was fat and ugly, and that because no man would ever find me attractive, I was doomed to loneliness and isolation. After I met Mrs. Plaidder, her conviction of my beauty eventually passed into me. As a result, I enjoyed my life in general a lot more in my 30s than I did in my teens. I’ve enjoyed my 40s more too, apart from the cancer and the current catastrophe. Age does actually bring experience and knowledge and, to those able to profit from it, wisdom. You do gain, even as you lose.
Catullus, yelling in Latin verse at his lover Lesbia, asks her venomously, “cui videberis bella?” By whom will you be seen to be beautiful? It’s a question that still poisons our sense of self and our understanding of our own possibilities. By myself, asshole, she should have replied; and so may we all, at any age.
Long post, but – my three cents. At 67 I don’t feel old and/or ugly. In fact, I really enjoy myself. I’m happy with how I look – because I got over the brainwashed way we see ourselves. As plaidadder said: “even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then.” BTW, plaidadder – you are STILL beautiful, trust me. The American cult of youth and they way of evaluating women’s beauty as inevitably liked to age is fucking TOXIC. I now live in South America; was complemented ( in a non-creepy way) by two guys less than half my age last week, grey hair & all. Love it here.
You will never feel as old as you do in your late 20s to late 30s. Seriously. Western culture makes the passing of youth into a tragic death and that’s – so fucking sad. Once it has passed and you can no longer reasonably think of yourself as young, no matter how desperately you try to hang on to it – you find yourself in a whole other country, you realize that you’ve lived on one side of a mountain all your life and told there’s nothing beyond it only to discover that there is, in fact, an entire world on the other side. Don’t believe the lie.
I’m just going to reblog all these responses because they’re so solid and right on.
Queer Fiction Writer 