> Aww, come on Cat. I was having fun reading the discussion and being
invisible, like being a spider in a web in the corner of the buoys'
locker room. Now they're all going to shove their hands in the pockets
-- or roll their eyes heavenward -- and start whistlin'.
Not me. I spent too much of my late teen and early adult years around variously expressed sexuality to not talk about it, even when I probably shouldn't.
(I was kind of hoping putting the one subject line "Free to Choose to Conform" up might get a notice, but it didn't. I waste a lot of effort on subject lines.) Objectification of the body is a serious question for me--having overheard women gossiping about mine gave me a clue about what it's like as a person to be valued by other people in terms of the virtues of your body parts, though I'm not under the illusion that's the same thing as being a member of a group subject to similar societal pressures--but I think it's not a problem of the objectification of the body but a question of who designs and controls the object. I'd like to know what the author says about make-up versus tattoos, or about bearded females and depilated men. (I've known both.) Some of what leaked through in the review didn't jibe with what some radically sexual women I've known say and do--I'm curious about that, too.
All I can really talk about with authenticity is myself, what I've seen, and what I've known, though.
That's going to be things like earrings, permed hair (when I wore it short), shirts and vests that buttoned on the wrong side (like I wasn't going to wear that paisley vest because of that?), my nails (I not only like the way they look, but the way they sound and feel, and it has gotten me talked about at the office)--all the various feminine signifiers that have, at various times, adorned this straight boy and confused many of those who knew him.
I do have one recent anecdote. At the job I'm no longer at, one of the women I knew best told me that there was dissatisfaction in the groups on her side of the department (we'd been split and were under two directors) with the new management, who'd made it as clear as they safely could that they didn't think much of women in the work force. I was on the outside of that in two different ways, so I didn't see that, but I had noticed something different--that all the particularly sexily-dressing women in those groups had been let go under that new management. The ones I knew well enough to have opinions about were highly competent--above average for the group. I never broached this directly with the one of those members of management I knew well enough to chat with, but I did talk with him enough to say that he was (depending on how you view it) either old-fashioned or a traditionalist.
(If you'd like to gripe about the fact that I'd been paying dog-like attention to a human situation, well, that's a fair point on the omission, so be my guest right now. I'll wait to go on till you're done.)
That's interesting to me: The same management that didn't like women in the workplace especially didn't like women who ornamented their bodies in a sexual way.
But Kelley, if you'd rather hear about those leather belt limpdicks--is that strictly a south/southwestern thing? Haven't any of the rest of you seen that fashion--well, that's pretty interesting, too.