I want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.
That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.
Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants.
The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.
Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.
Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.
This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.
So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.
My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt.
They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.
A prime example of how gender is socially enforced.
I remember a prolonged battle at primary school, with petitions and numerous near riotous PTA meetings before girls were allowed to wear trousers. In the late 1990s/early 2000s. In Scotland. A country which now (rightly, for the most part) prides itself on its progressiveness. Please don’t ever take these things for granted, and don’t assume that it’s only far flung places that you have nothing in common with that took so long to catch up. We’re all still fighting, little by little, for every apparently trivial victory that mounts up until we can reach the non-trivial ones. And we can’t afford to stop.
At my private Catholic high school, girls were only given the green light to wear pants the year before I began attending.
In 1992.
Yeah, 1991, forced to wear dresses in school. Got detention once because after school was over while waiting for my ride outside I took off the dress that was over my button down shirt and normal-kids-shorts-length shorts because it was Louisiana degrees outside and I was 7.
Teachers were forced to wear skirts for years. And heels. My mother’s feet are still high heel shaped when she takes off her shoes. She had to wear a skirt till I was well into junior high.
I was expecting to enjoy She-Ra and the Princesses of Power , but I did not expect it to further my love for my favorite character from another beloved series: Mai from Avatar: the Last Airbender. This particular aspect of her character and story were always fairly obvious, but I never saw the full scope of it until after I saw the differences between Adora and Catra’s responses to the Horde’s evils.
To put it simply: Mai never sees the Fire Nation as an evil force because she is never exposed to its atrocities. We can assume that her first journey beyond the borders of the Fire Nation was her trip to Omashu–a city that was conquered without bloodshed or ruin. There was no debris to clean up, no funerals for the dead, no wailing widows or starving orphans…especially none that would cross her sight. She was the daughter of Omashu’s new governor; she would never have to walk through alleyways containing refugees or find herself in the middle of an opposition rally (in fact, her only exposure was a failed assassination attempt!).
Likewise, when she reached Ba Sing Se, she and her companions were brought straight to the royal hall of the Earth King. There, she was able to witness the splendor of the King’s court and listen in on the gossip of the palace–people excitedly talking about how a war with the Fire Nation had been kept secret, nobles questioning if this was just a new trick, guards worrying about whether or not they were prepared for an attack. Everything she heard would only confirm suspicions and propaganda: the Earth Kingdom didn’t care about its soldiers in the field, and it deserved to fall. Any of its subjects she might have seen suffering on the way in or in her subsequent date with Zuko in the market square (still in the middle-to-upper ring!) could simply be categorized under a column reading “Oppressed because their leaders don’t care”.
So she returned home with Zuko believing that they had successfully overthrown a regime that didn’t care about its subjects–she had seen not one, but two cities that were taken simply through subterfuge and intimidation, rather than by long, drawn-out war. The Fire Nation’s propaganda machine was clearly correct: the Earth Kingdom was vile, corrupt, and weak.
Then one day Zuko just ran away and said “I’m going to join the Avatar, don’t come with me, I’m a rebel now.” Her mind must have snapped. Zuko always worried about whether or not he belonged in the Fire Nation because of his abusive father and the nation’s apathy toward his departure–I’m sure Mister “I’ll Leave a Note So She Doesn’t Worry” never spoke to Mai about the suffering he had witnessed firsthand…suffering so extreme that even rescuing a village from thugs and robbers had earned him nothing but hatred and scorn. Zuko understood how evil the Fire Nation was, but Mai had no comparison.
And yet, when he told her that he saw it differently, and that he believed the Fire Nation was truly the nation in the wrong, she trusted him. She pulled out her weapons against her own nation and threw herself headlong into danger, death, and prison simply because she believed Zuko when he said “We’re actually the bad guys.” She didn’t ask for proof, he didn’t have to take her to a decimated village, and she didn’t befriend anyone from the other side through some harrowing adventure. She simply listened and decided “Well, I love this guy, and I trust him.”
If I'm your savior, then you're mine. 