Steve Jobs’ Casual Attire Is A Privilege For White Male Intellectuals
The Power in Being Able to Escape Your Body
Men have the privilege to escape their bodies and be valued for their intellectual minds while women are constantly devalued by their body and appearances. Women must “take care” of their bodies and dress to impress in order to be taken seriously by the media, and our society. So, what does it mean to be able to escape your body, why is it so powerful, and what does Steve Jobs’ jeans have to do with anything?
A lot can be explained about the body. The body is something that can be physically constrained. A body, your body, can be enclosed behinds the walls of schools, factories, and prisons. Essentially, your body can become docile to the systems of power. Those systems of power being: the government, hetero-patriarchy, and white supremacy. This experience is inherently gendered because women’s physical spaces have been constrained to the home — the kitchen. bell hooks explains to a white, male colleague “the person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body”. Men are able to be appreciated for their minds and what comes with that is the ability to practice theory. Creating and naming theory then allows male intellectuals, such as Steve Jobs and Sigmund Freud, to impose standards of what theory is. Once they have created the standards, they are then given the power to essentially devalue work that does not “fit” their standards. Simultaneously, if men are essentially in charge of all the “thinking”, then they, in turn, are allowed to impose their interpretation and definition of a certain theory or practice. This ultimately leads to knowledge that is androcentric and only serves to benefit men. Men have power through monopolizing the modes of communication and knowledge. Having the power to control knowledge production is one of the crucial tools in ultimately being able to control their bodies and deny their bodies whilst women cannot.
So, what does Steve Jobs’ quirky attire have to do with power? It is because his jeans and crew neck are solely viewed as quirky and not as unprofessional. We as a society ignore his body because we know and are able to value him for his revolutionary mind. CEO’s like Jobs and Zuckerberg are notorious for their minimalistic wardrobe because they are too busy using their big brains to run their companies. How their body looks is the least of their concerns. Women, on the other hand, must finely comb through their wardrobe ensuring that something is not too provocative or too conservative. Hillary Clinton has more comments about her wardrobe and why her husband cheated on her than comments about her actual political views. Fashion has always been viewed as feminine which shows that women are clearly not valued for their minds. Half of the population has been constructed through sexist theories that they do not have the intellectual capacity for scholarly thought. Women have been conditioned to not think beyond our bodies. We are not allowed to deny our bodies.
Why aren’t we allowed to deny our bodies? The reason is simply because our bodies are essentially the site of production. We are chained to our breasts and wombs. Not only are women expected to be respectable mothers, we are expected to be obedient wives. It seems as if women’s lives must revolve around men and that men are committed to controlling women’s lives. How do we overcome this unfortunate sequence of events? We must fight theory with theory! Men are able to control knowledge because they are the ones who are encouraged to create theories. However, the only way to combat against their biased, sexist theories about women and the world is to create theories of our own. We must engage in intellectual thinking as men do, we too must deny our bodies and redefine women’s space to be anywhere instead of constrained to the kitchen. Ultimately, we must construct our theories in a way that ANYONE can access it. We must undo the monopolization of knowledge.
