Appearance politics: does this dress say I’m easy?

So true.

As a woman, I am constantly frustrated by how no matter what I wear things are being read onto it. (I do think that this happens to men as well, just differently. Less about sexual availability, but about sexuality, socio-economic situation, etc. I’d love to hear how the men on this site feel about it.) As a large-breasted woman, it’s just absurd. I am so sick of things I wear being considered “immodest” or “slutty” because they don’t cover as much of my skin as they would on a smaller woman, or because they cover everything but are stretched out in a “provocative” way. Especially in a climate as hot and sticky as the one I live in for a large part of the year, tank tops aren’t to be flirty, they’re to avoid heatstroke. If my best friend and I wear the same style clothing, she gets compliments and I get leers — what she is praised for wearing to work, it is suggested that I cover with a sweater.

I dunno, maybe I just know enough women who dress in a range of styles that the first one doesn’t suggest sexual availability to me, although it does suggest a certain willingness to “dress sexy” whether available or not–that is, the people I know who dress like that do it all the time because that’s their style. Not sluttiness, just confidence or some other reason to look particularly femme.

I come from a weird part of academia where dress up in any way, whether you’re male or female, will get you attention. Attention like, “Are you going somewhere formal after this?”, as if it’s abnormal to wear anything other than jeans and a t-shirt at any time. I decided that I want my students to take me seriously, so on the days when I teach, I wear business casual wear, like a button-down shirt and nice pants, and I always get weird looks for that around my department. On the other hand, casual observation has told me that my students are more willing to push my boundaries if I dress casually, so I attempt a degree of formality so they’ll turn stuff in on time. (I think it’s more likely that I am more willing to enforce my own rules if I feel like a grown-up. Not sure.)

As an early possessor of said huge knockers it is not the men’s assumption of me being hyper-sexual that bothers me at this point so much as it is the judgment of women. Add to that that I am black and have assets on the bottom half, too, and my body is essentially everything our culture hates. And no one hates it more than women. If I didn’t know that it was a no-win fool’s errand, I could have sued almost every company I have ever worked for not due to what the men have said but due to what the women have said…and done. Strangers poke my breasts on the street (I have witnesses), they accuse me of walking like a prostitute (what dat look like?), and all around assume that they have the right to discuss my body like an object. All because they think it comes with some kind of advantage. Mind you, I’m a writer, a scholar, and a nerd — on the inside. It is not my fault that my outside doesn’t match. Nor is it my fault that they are seen as ill-suited for each other. What is this rule that women are just as culpable of perpetuating that says a sexual woman cannot be a thinking woman?

In my old age (30s!) I find I care less and less. I can, indeed, have bother killer cleavage and a killer thesis. And I do, often. Simultaneously. Now I enjoy pissing women off and scaring the boys. If this form is going to come with all this baggage one may as well get to enjoy themselves.

I agree with all of this. I think the more comparable male example though would be seeing a guy in the grocery store with skin tight pants and his shirt most of the way unbuttoned, maybe with a gold chain or something. It still doesn’t send the same message of availability, but it does at least have some kind of strong sexual message encoded in it, much more so than the gorgeous suit and great haircut. And it’s probably seen as more threatening, either because it’s seen as low class (revealing clothes are seen as low class for both men and women, but maybe even more so for men?) or because a man showing off his body in tight clothes must be gay.

But I absolutely agree with your main point, that trying to dress well as a woman involves all kinds of issues that men just don’t have to deal with, because a lot more is read into what a woman wears.

I have a normal breast size for my body weight, but the thing is that most shirts fit me too tightly around the chest (while being overly baggy in the stomach area — and these clothes are supposedly “fitted”. I think it’s because I’ve got a good shape in a dress size in which clothes designers think all wearers are shaped like sausages. Even though none of us are). All my shirts get stretched in that area, and the button-down shirts create revealing gaps between the buttons. I always feel like some sort of whore when I don’t wear something over the shirt because I’ve been conditioned to think that only girls who want that kind of attention dress so distractingly. I always feel chained to jackets which make me feel like an unfenimine, unattractive slacker. So I feel like I’ve lost control of how confident I’m allowed to feel in my femininity. Why can’t I wear what I feel good in without feeling like a prostitute? All I’m showing are my arms, my face, and my neck! I’m not even that curvaceous!

Can only agree with what others said: as a large-breasted 12y.old I got hit on by a 50-something, which was way creepy. Still get sometimes hit on by men who look clearly 20-30 years older than me, but at least now I look myself like an adult. Another stereotype I encountered was when I had my interview for the apprenticeship. There were four people, one of them a woman. Two years later, when we had our practical course in the personnel department (it was part of the apprenticeship, that we had a course in every department, so we could decide later on where to specialise) we could have a look in our personnel files. I found out, that the only one who voted against me was the woman – and her explanation? That I looked too bland. I didn’t need to ask her what she meant, because after two years I knew exactly what her problem with me was – I didn’t dress fashionably (because as an overweight teenager living on benefits it is nearly impossible to find brand clothes that fit you, look nice and don’t cost you an arm and a leg) and I didn’t wear makeup. The funny thing is, there were no regulations what was considered appropriate for work at that time, so a lot of the old guard would look like wannabe-rockstars of the 70s, with leather pants and long stringy hair and a sweater, that looked as if it was made in 70s – and washed as rarely as their hair was cut.

I have the same problem as Towanda but for a different reason. As a plus-size girl, men usually do not look at me as an object of sexual desire no matter how provocatively I dress.

And as a woman who enjoys occasionally dressing up just for the fun of it, I make no assumptions about other women who do so.

Katran: I must have overread that before, but as a teacher, I also choose to wear formal suits to class. My friends first looked at me like I was crazy because I usually wear leather pants and a shirt, but it’s like dressing up for me, too – I put on teacher clothes to be the rule-enforcing teacher, not the cool guy I am terribly sure I am

“But he can’t dress that way in all the places a woman can dress as I described, i.e. the grocery store. And men tend to interpret that look as “gay” so again, it’s about sexual availability to men, not women.”

But that’s my point. You constructed your scenario using the dress associated with signaling sexual availability in Western cultures, and contrasted it not with what Western cultures consider to be male sexual-signalling dress, but rather what Western cultures consider to be power dressing.

You didn’t choose to start your description with a woman smeared with a mixture of butter-fat and red ochre (which is what Himba women in Namibia consider to be beautifying), nor did you contrast it with a man in a turban that covers his face (which is what Tuareg men do to signal status and power). You chose certain types of dress from Western cultures, but just inequivalent ones.

When a woman is dressed in pouty lips and stilletos,* she _is_ invoking culturally-constructed sexual signals. A nice suit and flattering hair-cut is *not* the culturally-constructed sexual signals amongst Western cultures for men, hence the analogy is not equivalent.

The issue then becomes not why women are perceived to be sexually available if they dress in a way that invokes sexual signals, but rather why do women have more license to dress in sexually-stimulating ways than men do. And that, is because it serves the powerholders in Western patriarchal cultures: White, hetrosexual men.

Thus, when an individual woman wears pouty lips and stillettos in public, she is not striking a blow for individual freedom, she is participating in how her culture constructs female sexuality and its currency in public.

“wearing pouty lips” no I mean, putting on red lipstick to give the appearance of blood stimulation to the lips, particularly if they have been rimmed with lipliner.