without details, this as a point of pride, if only because It is considered “counter- cultural”.

I got into alot of grief over wearing dresses- the fact that I preferred not to AND the fact that I could not wear certian types.

But this was because I was not allowed to in my conservative home. Same thing with straighteing my hair. It was seen as disrespectful to alter “god’s creation”.

As an adult, I do not wear make up becaues it IS a con to sell product in a line. I shun heels becasue they are BAD for your feet. Dresses are for “Dress up” only. Any my hair ( all over my body) stays natural because that’s the way it was meant to be.

I cant seem to find the explanation for why. I can only find elements, but never the full story.

Im sorry if this is long. Its only my view from here.

Um, no. Not naming something means the problem stays nebulous instead of being clearly defined.

That might allow you to have plausible deniability when people try to make you conform…or it might just be another way to pretend to yourself that you’re exceptional, that you’re just more “rational” than the crazy feminazi man-haters. Either way, it’s just, well, trying to lie about reality.

Name names. Define. Specify. Clarify. It’s a lot easier to scoop a turd into a jar than to catch a fart in one.

“When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’ It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?”

Sandi Toksvig

It’s funny how the “norm” is automatically male, not not a neutral gender. I thought the following quote summed up so much about how I (and others) think about the world.

It reminds me that in art, as well as in life, women are so often overlooked, pushed to the back (Ray Eames, Lee Miller, even in the Bible where often the women are just “so -and-so’s wife”). I am so guilty of this.

(Found the quote here)
http://ill-iterate.com/post/11913711059/when-i-was-a-student-at-cambridge-i-remember-an

As such, I have stop caring about trying to attract the opposite sex, and have put on weight, grown a beard and wear comfortable raggy clothes.

Funnily enough, women don’t pay me attention any more. Yet when I worked out, wore designer clothes and fastidiously groomed myself they did.

So I fail to see what the patriarchy has to do with women being forced to keep themselves to a certain aesthetic standard when the same applies to me as a male.

Perhaps I should be writing diatribes blaming the matriarchy for my woes.

When a man dresses up, puts on cologne, gets a haircut, or whatever, and goes to a club, no one tells him that he’s whoring himself out. The desire to meet someone for a short or long term relationship, or just to feel good and look good, are seen as perfectly respectable, even laudable, behaviors. When it’s the same for women, we will have reached equality.

It’s not going to be easy. Some men — and I include myself in this — already have an idea of it, but we’re too few in number to break the grip patriarchy has on men in general. It will take a concerted and continual effort to keep the focus on women being free to make the choices, not on the choices themselves.