Glamour Magazine has an interesting article on the popularity of blow jobs, which they put down several factors:
- Bad sex education in the US. We teach kids that coitus can lead to STDs, but don’t explicitly state that oral sex can, too, so some kids go away thinking oral is safe, or at least safer. Adding to this is the idea many evangelical kids have developed in the absence of quality adult guidance: that oral sex isn’t really sex (thanks, Bill Clinton), so they can do that before marriage without Baby Jesus weeping.
- Porn. Porn, the article contends, has created a blase attitude that leads to men asking, “Well, if you don’t feel like having sex, can you at least give me a blow job?” I mean, they’re entitled, right? And women feel that pressure.
- Empowerment. Oh, god, here we go again. Somehow, women have got it worked around in their minds that blow jobs are for their own pleasure and empowerment, not his. And hate is love and freedom is slavery. By the way, these women are talking about the obligatory first-date blow job, not long-term relationship blow jobs.
I’ve got to tackle this empowerment bullshit once and for all, because I just cannot stand it. What these women are saying is this: “When I give someone an orgasm with no consideration for my own pleasure, I find it empowering.” In that case, please immediately PayPal me as much money as you can afford. I’ll be thrilled, you’ll get nothing – won’t that be empowering for you! How lucky you are!
No, no, no and no. [ETA: I later wrote an article explaining clearly what "empowerment" actually means. It's not just "feeling powerful."]
If you’re in a relationship where there’s give and take on various levels, giving your partner an orgasm without any expectation of reciprocity can be a nice thing. Not empowering – nice, pleasurable, enjoyable. Not empowering. Outside of an established relationship, in that early dating phase where you’re still trying to work out whether this person has anything to offer you, offering a blow job screams, “Please, take from me! I like being used!” Empowering, my ass. It’s like prostitution, except you forgot to charge. He’s the empowered one, not you. He’s learning from you that he’s entitled to pressure every woman he dates to perform this service for him, no matter how she feels, no matter what she wants, no matter how completely incapable he may be of providing anyone but himself an orgasm to save his life.
I’m not saying oral sex is bad, or that there are no reasons for a woman to enjoy performing it. But seriously? Empowering? Under no circumstances is it empowering. He’s not grateful. He doesn’t feel he owes you. He’s not bewitched by you, since half the other chicks in the bar would do the same, and tops of heads all look pretty much alike. Where’s the power?
I think women are so confused about sexuality and their rights to it that they somehow (mistakenly) think blow jobs carry all the benefits of intercourse without the potential unwanted side effects, and performing blow jobs makes them fully sexual not-prudes who are in charge of and comfortable with their own sexuality.
I think you need only look at the behavior of men to see how far off the mark that is. Men don’t derive power from giving women orgasms. Sometimes they derive power from other men based on how many women have given them orgasms, but women having orgasms never enters into any part of the equation. True empowerment would be saying, “Well, if you don’t feel like having sex, could you at least go down on me, lover boy?” Now there’s a sex act that’s “safer” than the ones involving male ejaculation. There’s a sex act that involves whatshisname Mr. Friday Night on his knees, and little worry of repercussions for you.
I think a lot of people just don’t understand what power actually is. Really, the whole idea that sex has anything to do with power is a product of rape culture.
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Jennifer, I think you should edit the original post and add this is in big, bold text so everyone sees it and gets where you’re coming from, once and for all.
Cinnabar(Quote) (Reply)
I think a problem here is that (in our individualist, highly commodified society) we tend to conflate empowerment with personal feelings, when it has nothing to do with our internal processes, and everything to do with how people treat us outside of our control.
There are a lot of messages out there (and sold to us) about how having or enjoying a great number of things will empower us, but the reality is no matter how gratified or confident a thing might make one feel, it’s not the same as being made stronger, more in control, or better respected.
It is important not to define sex or sexual acts as debasing or inherently demeaning, but saying they aren’t empowering shouldn’t suggest that.
If you find oral sex rewarding, you should feel completely free to enjoy it. If you are less inclined towards it, you shouldn’t feel that it will earn you social standing you wouldn’t have other wise. or what have you.
Quib(Quote) (Reply)
Anne,
However, the person giving the blowjob is also in a very compromised position power-wise. They could not see an attack coming. What if the receiver of the blowjob has their hair? What if they are on their knees and could not run away easily? What if they’ve been threatened or feel they have, or coerced, etc? There are gives and takes of power when it come to blowjobs, but I would not consider (personally) the act of having a small amount of control over a penis that is going into my mouth to be empowering just because I could potentially hurt the guy and don’t.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
The Other Anne,
I feel I have to clarify real quick: I would not think it’s empowering because idobt thunk he’s giving any power to the person giving the blowjob. The BJ might be taking place in a room, house, car, alley, wherever, but if you’re alone with him in a situation you might have difficulty getting away from with a man. You might not be able to escape if you hurt him during the BJ, is that really empowerment? I’d say no. Maybe if I had no fear of retaliation if something happened, accidentally or not, but I’ve been pretty conditioned not to hurt men and their sensitive bits as well as trained to fear what men might do to me. So, in the context o this not being a LTR where I really trust the guy, I would bot consider it empowerment and if it were a LTR I would hope the power balances out so that neither of us had to be empowered during any sexual act. I’m not into power stuff in sex.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
I dunno, Cinnabar. Look at Anne’s comment above yours, which is essentially: “Okay, fine, let’s go by that definition. While I’m doing a bj, I have all this temporary control over a piece of my environment.” Which doesn’t even come close to meeting the definition I posted here, but she obviously thinks it does. It’s boggling my mind, this thread.
I’m just waiting for the mod to have a look at all this. I know she will tell me if I need to edit the original post, as well as deciding what of the comments should be posted and/or deleted. My staff is as tough on me as they are on commenters – that’s why I love ‘em.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Holy clusterfuck, Batman.
I need people to read over our discussion guidelines, which are linked above the little box you use to reply. I need this because we specifically don’t allow straw-men arguments (where you extrapolate a discussion based on your feelings about what Jenn said, instead of the content of the post). Criticizing Jenn personally as well as other posters is NOT ALLOWED. You can’t DEMAND a reply from a poster OR ANOTHER COMMENTER. Moreover, don’t assume Jenn’s suggesting that no one EVER give a BJ, because critique is not censorship.
Jenn is not saying you can’t give head. She IS saying head isn’t NECESSARILY empowering.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Sorry to comment so much on here, everyone. -_-
But I thought of something else: sometimes, I’ll do a gender flip to see if something seems critique-worthy from a feminist standpoint. In this case, can I even imagine a man saying that giving his gf head “empowers” him? I can’t even imagine the word coming out of his mouth. Sure, he might say he loves it (or not), or that’s it’s hot. But empowering?
Which leads me to think that perhaps this empowering racket is a bunch of smoke and mirrors used to placate women into expressing their “power” only when it pleases guys. Who needs equal wages and reproductive rights when we can make men slaves to our mad sex skillz? Except abuse and rape is still rampant. You and I could have the most loving, egalitarian BJs ever, but it still doesn’t change the fact that in much of the world being with a man sexually opens a woman up to violence and control. And biting his dick during a BJ doesn’t necessarily mean you have power on a wider scale. What if you live in a country where doing that would get you jailed or killed by the penal sytem? And even here in the US; can you imagine the backlash if a woman bit a man’s junk? It would stir up all the Lorena Bobbit tropes and she’d get slut shamed so bad (and be an evil castrating bitch on top of a slut). The Other Anne is absolutely correct that women are strongly socialized to view the junk as sacred area; never hurt! Not even if he’s murdering you because then he’ll just get angrier and stronger like the Hulk or something!
JT(Quote) (Reply)
Quib,
Very well said. Also kudos to JT for making very good points in various replies. Feeling good is important, but what society sells as feel-good to women is often the opposite of empowerment, IMO. It’s important to point that out, IMO the backlash against women’s right is still so strong on many levels. Also count me among those who didn’t read this article as an attack on oral sex as a whole but rather on the unholy duality of pressure and entitlement that seems so prevalent in many sexual situations. It’s sad that any criticism of anything sex-related, no matter how accurate, is frequently met with hostility.
On a personal level, I’m just very glad I’m as good as asexual.
Korva(Quote) (Reply)
I really fucking hate men who feel entitled to sex. A friend of mine told me that whenever she was on her period, her (now ex-) boyfriend would piss and moan and magnanimously settle for a blowjob. “Because we can’t have sex, he should get a blowjob,” was how she phrased it to me. And the reason they couldn’t have PIV sex was because he was grossed out by menstrual fluids. (I promise you, folks, it’s supposed to bleed; you’re not doing anything wrong.)
I also really hate how blowjobs are shown as a lesser form of sex. Because there are all kinds of people who don’t have PIV sex (and I’m not just talking about QUILTBAGs). Not having and/or not wanting PIV sex doesn’t make one’s sexual practices “lesser”. Yeah, most guys probably derive more pleasure from vaginal than from oral; how is that relevant to every single person out there, again? “Most guys” /= “all people”.
As far as biting the penis during a BJ, in cases where a survivor bites her rapist I’ve noticed that if the survivor didn’t know the rapist and has all the socially approved criteria of being a good girl, the press will report the case as “Brave woman protects herself from rapist by literally emasculating him! Haha, that idiot got hoist by his petard.” Whereas if she happened to know the man raping her or doesn’t meet all the criteria of rich White virgin (etc., etc.), suddenly it’s reported as “Psycho bitch attacks innocent boyfriend in uncontrollable rage! What can be done to protect our menfolk from these marauding feminazis?! Here, have three paragraphs on how much everyone loves this poor man.”
So even if you feel safe enough to exercise this option (which many, many survivors do not fight back because in their assessment it will escalate the violence) and even if you manage to wound the man enough to get away from him, the incident will be framed in terms of factors outside your control.
If the control in a BJ rested with the giver, we wouldn’t see this social phenomenon. Putting your dick in an unwilling person’s mouth would always be framed as the height of stupidity, akin to putting your dick in a cigar cutter or something. Instead, in cases where society has deemed the survivor should not have power, it’s framed as the survivor’s fault, not the rapist’s.
(No, I am not saying that all blowjobs are inherently rape. But the fact that blowjobs can be used to rape says a lot about the power dynamic there.)
^ This. Because if cheerleading makes you feel good, then go for it! Best of luck to you. But you won’t receive as much prestige, respect or money as the football players. A professional cheerleading squad brings in an estimated one million dollars of revenue; each cheerleader earns about $50 per game. Personally, there may be benefits that outweigh that to you; that doesn’t change the fact that professionally, your status is closer to exploited than empowered. I’m not saying this to “shame” cheerleaders; I’m saying this because I believe cheerleaders should receive equal pay for equal work. If you see an analogy in this, that’s not accidental.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler, power is a complicated thing; there are all different kinds of power. I don’t like to nitpick, but the definition you gave is simple because it punts on all the difficult issues by using the word “power”, whose definition is decidedly complex – it has sixteen possible definitions, as a noun, in the dictionary you used. Most of them aren’t relevant, but there are enough subtleties in the word for this to be an argument over definitions. Personally, I think, to choose a less-charged analogy, that the staff in a restaurant has power over the customers – if the chef chooses to stub out his cigarette in your soup, or overcook your meal, or the wait staff chooses to let it get cold, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Of course you have power over them too, because you’re paying, and you decide at the end how much to tip. Power is a complicated business, and comes in all different kinds. If you want to know who has “more” power, you have to balance different kinds against each other. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that giving head does give the giver a certain kind of power, and I suspect that that’s one of the things people mean when they talk about giving head as being empowering. (And yes, men talk that way too. At least some do.)
If you want to talk purely about physical might, well, a woman giving a blow job to a man may well be able to physically overpower him, particularly if she is bigger, stronger, and has martial arts training. I just don’t think that’s the relevant kind of power in most social situations, and in particular not in many sexual situations.
Anne(Quote) (Reply)
OMG the blow job wars of ’06! Jennifer, were you around for them at I Blame the Patriarchy? I suck (see what I did there?) at linking but the post was “Judgmental Sex Pedantry” and it was a total shit-storm. Your post pointed out that bjs have nothing to do with being empowered but Twisty’s post said they were inherently gross. You would think that the reaction to the two posts would be different, but no, not on the subject of blow jobs. I don’t understand it, but I’m no longer surprised.
OlderThanDirt(Quote) (Reply)
Anne,
This has been dealt with by other commenters already. What can you do with this great power you have for a couple of minutes? Get yourself a better job? Ensure the Republicans won’t further curtail your reproductive rights? No, wait – you’re right, it’s silly to expect social changes from a personal encounter. So, what, then? You’re not actually going to bite his junk, because (a) you’re not cruel and (b) it would buy you far more trouble than it would be worth, even if you were that cruel or that provoked. So, what will you be doing with this power? Can you use it to make him do something for you? Or not do something to you? Not really. It’s a totally impotent power, which makes it not a power at all.
The fact that it makes you FEEL POWERFUL is something else entirely. It’s psychology – it’s happening inside your head, and others are not necessarily aware of it, and typically aren’t affected by it. It’s like self-esteem – it’s a good thing, and it can make your life richer, but it doesn’t change the power dynamics in your life. A woman with great self-esteem can be just as oppressed as a woman with low self-esteem, because it’s outside forces unaffected by her inner landscape doing it to her.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler, you can control whether he has fun or not. I wish now I hadn’t mentioned the physical vulnerability, because it’s a red herring, distracting from my main point. The more interesting kind of power is that you’re setting the pace, style, and quality of the encounter. As you say, it’s silly to expect world-changing importance from a personal encounter, but at least this part of a personal encounter is under your control. If you don’t think this kind of power is important, well, fine. But do keep in mind that there’s an old picture of sex where the woman is more or less passive and doesn’t really have much control of whether it’s fun or not: she just lies there and he hammers away at whatever pace he likes. If this is the image of sex you picked up somewhere, taking the pace of the encounter into your own hands is giving you more power in the encounter. And some people do feel that this kind of power is valuable, and those people can rightly say that blow jobs give them that power.
Anne(Quote) (Reply)
Anne,
But, he’s the one ultimately deriving pleasure from the experience, not you. So you’re still essentially lying back thinking of England, just in a more active way.
Megan(Quote) (Reply)
There used to be a cultural subgroup of lesbians (might still be, for all I know), which were identified in Buffalo (although they may well have existed elsewhere), called “stone butches.”
The stone butch took on stereotypically masculine traits. She dressed in men’s clothing, she eschewed any appearance of femininity, and she expressed her sexuality pretty much entirely by giving her partner an orgasm.
The lesbians who had stone butches for lovers (who were generally femmes, according to the paper I read, because this whole dynamic seems to have been saturated in gender stereotyping) were generally very interested in experiencing physical pleasure, knew what they wanted, and were willing to experiment (in other words, they weren’t typically fearful of their own pleasure because of internalized slut-shaming). The stone butches themselves, however, would not allow their lovers to pleasure them.
So apparently there were women who found giving their partners physical pleasure empowering, to the extent that they would not relinquish that “power” by allowing their powers to reciprocate. They took on stereotypically masculine traits and were usually observed to be “dominant” in their relationships (which who knows what that means, because I don’t know how much the writers of the paper might have been influenced by heteronormative stereotyping, but given that they were more or less modeling male-female dynamics, I suspect that their public personas, at least, *did* have the stone butches appearing to be dominant over the femmes.) And yet they thought that their “power” as the “man” in the relationship was expressed by giving their lovers orgasms, and refusing to allow their lovers to reciprocate.
Obligatory bjs are not empowering, because obligatory anything is never empowering. If you cannot refuse to do something, you have no power. But the thing about sexual pleasure is that sexual pleasure makes us vulnerable, even as it is something we desire. Power *can* be expressed by making someone else vulnerable and submissive to something they desire, just as power *can* be expressed by taking pleasure from someone who is sufficiently under your control that you don’t feel vulnerable. And feeling a sense of power over someone else *is* empowerment, because power is pretty much entirely about *feeling* as if you are in control, whether you actually are or not.
(And for the record, I’m not sure why this widespread image of “woman on her knees” is the only image that comes to mind when we think of bjs; based on my experience, I think of a man lying down, and a woman on top of him, possibly pinning him down and interfering with his ability to get away if he wanted to. Which he probably doesn’t want to, but it still doesn’t mean she’s vulnerable and submissive; *he’s* in the more vulnerable position.)
Alara Rogers(Quote) (Reply)
OlderThanDirt,
Never profane people’s sacred cows, I guess. I really thought we were beyond this?
This.
There’s so much concern in this thread about how important it is that I recognize that some people experience short-lived feelings of power while performing bjs. Where’s the concern for all the women who do not want to be having sex of any kind, or in particular that kind, but feel pressured into it because freakin’ third wave feminists have just spent the 90s telling them, “It’ll empower you.” Where’s the concern for young women getting lied to, doing the deed, and then wondering why they feel worse than before?
I think where this thread went horribly wrong is this: the only way you could think the momentary control you have during a bj (which can be revoked by the very partner who granted it to you ANYTIME he chooses) constitutes real power is if you’ve never had any real power. Then, the article might strike you as an attempt to take away your power. The problem is, I’m not taking anything away – that was never “REAL power” to begin with. Regardless of how it makes you feel, it is not authorizing you to change anything in your life. It may “feel powerful”, but it’s not remotely “empowering” by any standard that would be applied on a fem-crit site.
And y’all know this – you just don’t want to hear it, because if bjs aren’t powerful, then what in your life is? So, in response we get walls of text, chock full of strawmen! Semantic arguments that carefully ignore the many comments that have already dissected them into oblivion! Personal accusations! It’s not arguing, it’s a knee-jerk “la la la i can’t hear you.”
From now on, at least until the comment mods decide how to deal with this trainwreck, all comments will be moderated.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
THIS.
Megan(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
Yeah, some people will always take these things the wrong way and feel like it’s a personal attack when it isn’t. I don’t know if spelling it out plainly will reduce that number or not. I think Azzy’s comment it spot on:
I’ve seen this same thing happen a couple of years ago on Pandagon when Amanda Marcotte made pretty much the same point about men coming on women’s faces. The comments section erupted into a frenzy there too – “How dare you tell me what to feel? I love having men come on my face!”, “What if it’s BDSM and he’s subbing? What if it falls on my face accidentally? HUH HUH? ANSWER ME THAT.”
It was ridiculous. She was right, of course, and so are you. It isn’t about telling someone what to feel or not about the things they do personally, and I wish more people would understand that. Come to think of it, this is what happens when you point out that taking your husband’s surname is an unnecessary patriarchal tradition too. OH LORDY you can see the shitstorm ‘abrewing miles away.
Cinnabar(Quote) (Reply)
Alara Rogers,
That’s an illusion. You are all suggesting this fantasy that it’s easy for a woman to physically overpower a man. Bull fucking shit, and please stop spreading this bullshit to young women who don’t know better. MEN ARE FUCKING STRONG. You always hear this from assaulted women, and yet it’s a shock the first time a man holds you down – maybe just as horseplay, not necessarily with bad intents – and you realize, holy shit, you really can’t get up until he decides you can. And while that’s fine in horseplay with someone who’d never hurt you, it’s a terrifying realization in the context of rape culture.
You’re getting off on an illusion of power. Fine, great, whatever. But it’s not true power, since the typical woman is NOT going to be able to keep her partner from getting up and leaving.
THE ONLY POWER WOMEN EVER HAVE OVER MEN IS THE POWERS THEY TEMPORARILY GRANT US, and whatever political clout we have in some countries that keeps them from treating us worse than they do. Okay? Can’t deal with it? Get therapy, because that is the reality.
I always wondered how other people coped with the reality of rape culture, and now I know: they don’t. They just go into denial.
Welcome to radical feminism, folks. No denial allowed.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
FYI, y’all, I just deleted those comments. They were hanging like a pall. I didn’t do it because they were disagreeing, I did it because they weren’t playing by the rules and posting them would further derail this comment thread.
When Jenn said giving head on a first date out of pressure or “obligation” and that it was like saying, “Use me!” or like prostitution without pay – she was NOT slut shaming. What she was talking about in the whole article was this system we’ve got in place where men = entitled and empowered and women = not so much. She was talking about men’s perceptions in those situations, not judging the women in them because of the system/meme/whatever that ultimately put them there. Grand scheme. Not individual choice (because why DO we make the choices we make, hmmm?).
Give as many blowjobs as you want, in any given context. I assure you, no one here is judging your pleasure. Generally speaking, blowjobs are not a large scale power play for women and proclaiming them as empowering does not help women. Really.
(Edited to tweak the last sentence.)
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
sbg,
{{{{{hugs}}}}} Thank you for doing it, and that’s exactly right.
Additionally, when I talked about giving bjs to men who don’t know you well yet, I was trying to get across that the men receiving them certainly aren’t going to know you find it empowering, and that’s probably the last possibility that will enter their minds. According to the Glamour article, guys are all, “I didn’t do anything for it, unless you count buying dinner.” They have NO IDEA where all the lovely bjs are coming from, but damn, they sure have grabbed that bull by the horns and feel entitled to them now. Feeling entitled isn’t a bit like feeling submissive or vulnerable. It’s really just not. So you may have an illusory feeling of power, but chances are the guy is feeling pretty powerful, too. And that’s why I made the distinction against established relationships, in which hopefully there’s already mutual respect and power sharing.
I think the distinction got lost because people saw “Outside of an established relationship”, got angry, stopped reading, and finished in their minds with, “Jesus will smite you down for giving head.” I was talking about how power dynamics shift as relationships mature, not what you should or shouldn’t do sexually, since that’s an entirely personal choice and it’s all morally neutral IMO as long as everyone’s fit to consent.
Azzy made one of the best points in this thread (along with JT’s gender flip, which I wish I’d thought to include in the original post):
The 90s were a bad feminist joke. You have to admit, it’s awfully curious that somehow women have decided that an act men have BEGGED FOR SINCE THE START OF TIME is so “empowering” that now MEN EXPECT IT AND FEEL CHEATED IF THEY DON’T GET ONE. It’s awfully curious how stripping is empowering, and how acting in porn is empowering… but how breaking into upper management or the executive wing is all bitchy and man-hating or just an affirmative action kind of thing.
Not that ANY of this should affect your sex life. Like JT said, marriage IS born of some pretty fucked-up patriarchal abusive shit, but that doesn’t mean YOUR marriage is nasty – many are quite the opposite. I don’t advise importing big social issues into your personal life – we are all flawed, and I doubt any of us lives up to our perfect feminist ideals (I think I will never stop being fat phobic; I love makeup; I’m getting laser hair removal on my legs). We can’t do it. We’re human, and we have baggage, and in 80 years, we’re not going to divest ourselves of it all. So please, live the way that works best for you. Just don’t try to pretend it signifies something it doesn’t. That’s all.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
That doesn’t mean we can’t keep discussing fat-phobia/fat-hatred in the media/society at large, right?[/gets oddly nervous and is also fat]
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Casey,
It’s quite possible to participate in something and still be against it, I think. Discussion continues.
But not in this post.
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
Casey,
Exactly! I may never be able to let go of the idea that I need to lose weight and then everything will be perfect in my life, but I can still be an advocate for not passing that sick idea onto the next generation of young women, you know? If we could only talk about the stuff we’ve individually overcome, the species as a whole wouldn’t make much progress,
LOL, and yet I have to note a LOT of people in this thread seem to get a thrill from bjs, and yet they managed to split that off from the question of whether they’re empowering.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I feel like what Jennifer said in post #49 should be like 101-level required reading. It’s scary but it’s the truth and NEEDED to be said.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
Heh, I meant not to talk about the fat phobia stuff. But I kind of didn’t read Casey’s comment 100% clearly (I was mobbed at work).
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
sbg,
Oh, sorry, I misread!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
sbg,
I mis-read your comment too, actually…I thought you meant we weren’t allowed to comment IN THIS THREAD anymore, PERIOD (and yet I still posted a comment >_>V). I shan’t derail with fat-phobic stuff though, naturally.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
I thought of another analogy here. Makeup was mentioned earlier in the thread. As we all know, women are encouraged to wear makeup as part of a rather misogynistic agenda to make us buy shit we can’t afford, spend time on makeup we could instead spend on advanced degrees or working extra hours to maybe eventually break that glass ceiling, stay frantically self-conscious, etc. The pressure to wear makeup is completely uncool and wrong, period. It’s coming from an ugly place.
That said, wearing makeup can cause people to treat you differently. Women perceive you as someone who “keeps herself up” and “hasn’t let herself go.” Men may perceive you as more traditionally attractive, or again, at least as someone who makes a patriarchy-approved effort on her appearance. This may seem TO YOU like empowerment, since without this perception you’ve created of yourself, people might overlook you or even think they can treat you like shit because you obviously “don’t care about yourself.” (Note: the quotes here are all things I’ve heard many people say in relation to whether a woman wears makeup or not.) Maybe wearing makeup vs. not causes a noticeable shift, and you are treated with more of what seems like positive attention.
But you know what? Despite that tiny shift which you may perceive as empowerment, you are not really any better off than any other woman in your demographic. You are still someone who won’t be allowed to advance beyond where men are comfortable with it. You will still be blamed if you are sexually harassed or assaulted. You will still be 100% responsible for the failure or success of your relationships with men – and how your kids turn out. You will still be presumed the cook and housekeeper in your household, no matter how you live. You will still be perceived as a worker who doesn’t “need” her job like a make co-worker who “has a family to support” (yes, it boggles the mind, but I still hear that).
Wearing makeup doesn’t empower you to get beyond any of that crap. Neither does giving blow jobs. The “empowerment” you think you’re getting is merely patriarchal approval. That’s so not empowerment.
Now, some commenters talked about “personal empowerment.” IF you wear makeup or give bjs in defiance of some misogynistic expectation people have pressed on you over the years – say, you were taught bjs/makeup were wrong by people who in hindsight obviously didn’t actually have your best interests at heart and therefore can’t be trusted – you may find bjs/makeup incredibly LIBERATING. Liberation means throwing off something that had power over you, but it’s not quite the same thing as “empowering.”
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
This is my new personal quote. Mind if I pilfer it?
Gabriella(Quote) (Reply)
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