Fellas yall ok with ya girl going out the way she wants to?
For the longest of time hypocritical sexuality has been the influenced topic of today’s society. There has been a mentality that many conservative and non-conservative people surprisingly seem to follow. This could be a man watching porn, but being disgusted when his wife wants to wear a sleeveless top or it could be a guy wanting to sleep around as much as he wants, but saying he would never date a girl who has more than five partners.
Coming home after a long day of school I decide to open up my twitter to de-stress with some hilarious memes, but instead I came across this tweet.
This tweet received a lot of negative responses from women, but a lot of positive responses from men. Most of the men said they would never let their woman leave the house exposing cleavage, stomach, or thighs. Other men mentioned that women who dress like this do it for other reason than for the attention of men or because they’re insecure. This targeted me because whenever I go out with my girls we typically dress like this. However, I’m a very confident woman and I definitely hate getting cat-called, but this really made me think why do I dress like this?
I always thought about this when my friend would complain about how her boyfriend would overshadow her while she would shop for clothes and restrict her for wearing certain things and she would just agree. He told her he did want her dressing like a “Thot,” which according to urban dictionary is equivalent to a hoe, which again is an easy woman. I do not at all believe the way you dress could determine whether you are “hard” or “easy” might as well say you judge a book by its cover if you do such shallow thinking.
Foucault begins his article “The History of Sexuality” with a very relevant reference to Victorian regime, “For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.” Women back in the day often hid their bodies, but wore uncomfortable corsets to accentuate their hour glass figures. So why did they do that?
Why do I wear shirts that make me look good? Is it because I am insecure? Confident? In between? Will I feel beautiful if a man approaches me while wearing a crop top. Or will I always just have to assume he liked how sexy I looked in the crop top and thats the reason he decided to pursue approaching me. If I have to dress a certain way to feel beautiful, what exactly does that imply? These are the types of questions that were running through my head that I simply just couldn’t comprehend. If I dress a certain way, hoe. If I use a filter on snapchat, hoe. If I squat at the gym, hoe. If I study feminist theologies, hoe. If I defend myself, I must be a hoe.
But the main idea here is why are men dogging women so hard for simply being a woman? Why are they continuously attacking us instead of just allowing us to conjoin teams? My classmate Maria Castaneda brings a great deal of necessary attention to this in her article titled, “You drive like a girl!” she mentions this phrase as a gender divider and begins by going into how we often dehumanize the opposite gender. It often feels like we have to do the most to be considered equal to our gender when we shouldn’t even have to compete for something that should already exist. In Maya Angelou’s poem equality her first stance is a relatable source of how many women may feel when they are looked down on by men. It feels like we have to argue so many topics that shouldn’t even be arguable, but as different genders we never see things the same way.
When men say things about how women dress and about how they do it for specific reasons, they’re not being a team player. Instead, when men do this they are putting us through a great deal of unnecessary stress of questioning our every outfit and reasoning behind choosing it.
Some men may feel like we’re preaching to the choir but all these goes back to bell hooks when she brings up feminism, evil of feminism and the bad feminists. She refers to “they” as feminist who are generalized by many people in society. So it may be, that trying to get a point across with facts turns us into feminists. And in that case, wanting to wear a bra in public without getting cat called may classify us as feminists by those as well. it’s gone as far as mocking us for sticking up for ourselves. A twitter account was created to mock feminist and it was named “the menisist.”Instead of using this twitter to stand up for themselves, it was used to mocked feminism.
On our last day of class you asked us what we chose to do with the inequalities of the world? We are exposed to them, but how will we keep our self-compassion? I thought about that a lot while contemplating this tweet. This made me think a lot. Should I just deal with men like this because their always going to be around or should I protest their ideas. Well, I believe one of the biggest pathways to change in learning and though many may not want to be educated, I am and my ideas are continuously growing and evolving. I want to believe one day this evolvement will eventually change the mind of many modern men.
