Gendered Clothing – Why is This a Thing?
Before I dive into the meat of this post, a brief update on how Oranje is doing. I got the first proof read back last week, with less changes than I expected and even a smiley face in the comments, which made me very happy. I made the necessary changes and sent it back for the 2nd proof read which should hopefully take around a week.
Which means, dun dun dun! Oranje should be released within a week, which is super exciting and terrifying at the same time (oh, if anyone wonders how to pronounce Oranje, let me point you here).
I’ve also finished the outline of book 2, Choices, and work will begin on the first draft for that tomorrow. I’ve added it to the progress page.
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Okay time to start on the main part of this post. The issue of gendered clothing is something that’s been on my mind for a while, but shopping for a new watch after Christmas brought it to the fore again.
Going into a watch store and browsing through the different style reminded me just how much we treat the two genders as being completely different. The mens watches you could break down into two real styles. Simple, with clean dials and leather/metal straps, or dial-heavy, where there is single/multiple dials on the watch. Both styles tend to be quite large.
You compare those to the womens, where it goes from chunky and ‘practical’ (no one needs that many dials), to ‘quirky’ and ‘cute’. Most humans have wrists, and there is no inherent difference between the genders in that area. So why, instead of organising them by style, do we insist on dividing them based on what we expect the genders to like.
This reinforcing of supposed gender ideals happens everywhere with clothing, shoes and accessories. Mens being practical and chunky, womens being quirky and designed far more for looks. Shoes are a great example of this, women are generally expected to contort themselves into high heels to look great, but us men can get away with boring loafers.
Fashion is obviously a lot more complicated than that, with grey areas where the fashion trends overlap, but there is very clearly a big difference in how clothes for men and women are designed and marketed, and those are based on the traditional view of each genre.
None of this makes sense to me. A shoe is a shoe, most people have feet so shoes shouldn’t be defined by gender. Neither should clothes. We come in a huge range of shapes and sizes, surely that should be the basis for how clothes are categorised, rather than what sex we are.
This is a great example of how sexism is still alive and well in our society. There’s no way you can say it’s something that now lives in the past when just your gender is meant to decide how you dress. There is nothing inherent to women that means they have to wear skirts, skin tight tops or high heels, just like there is nothing inherent to men that means they need big chunky watches or have to wear sensible shirts.
Surely, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t force these pre-existing notions of what men and women wear onto people, and someone could wear whatever the hell they wanted to. That has to be the end goal with gender quality. It’s not about making women equal to what men already have, but making everything equal for both, challenging and removing the gender assumptions that in-grained in our society.
That’s my rambling thoughts on the matter. I know other people have written about issues like this in much greater depth and detail than me, but it’s something that’s been on my mind I wanted to talk about.
