Femininity (10 page)

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Do-does-did-done suffices for a wide range of practices that are performed in the
name of cosmetic improvement. One’s hair and nails are “done” in a beauty salon; one’s
nose, eyes and entire face may be “done” by a plastic surgeon. The “done” look is
sought after in the first category, but not in the second.

W
HO WOULD DENY THAT
dressing feminine can be quite creative? A woman with a closetful of clothes for
different moods and occasions is an amateur actress and a wily practitioner of the
visual arts. A grand sense of theater reposes on that rack of hangers, offering a
choice of imaginative roles from sexy vixen to old-fashioned, romantic lady. Children
of both sexes love to dress up in their mother’s costumes, complete with lipstick,
handbag and high heels, because they adore the game of “Let’s pretend.” Feminine clothing
induces the body to strut about in small, restrained yet show-offy ways. Feminine
clothing produces its special feminine sounds: the staccato clickety-click of the
heels, the musical jangle of bracelets, the soft rustle of silk, or, in an earlier
era, the whisper of petticoats, the snap of a fan. And the finishing touches, the
makeup and perfume, create a distinctive, sweet feminine smell.

And then there are the compliments, the ultimate reward, for men are known to be highly
appreciative when a woman has taken the trouble to create an entire human being who
looks and acts and smells so different from them.

Every wave of feminism has foundered on the question of dress reform. I suppose it
is asking too much of women to give up their chief outward expression of the feminine
difference, their continuing reassurance to men and to themselves that a male is a
male because a female dresses and looks and acts like another sort of creature.

Dressing in the Fifties meant a commitment to white gloves. Worn with a strand of
cultured pearls they represented impeccable refinement and upward mobility. From Elsie
de Wolfe, the
socialite decorator who became Lady Mendl, to Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, who became
a Hollywood star and married the Prince of Monaco, the little white glove stood for
class. Naturally one needed many pairs, for carrying the morning paper to work wreaked
havoc on their pristine whiteness. Walking to the office was also excessively stressful
on the
de rigueur
shoe with its narrow, pinched toe and spindly heel that almost invariably got stuck
in a sidewalk grating. Accessories were important in the Fifties and Sixties, for
they added formal grace notes to the basic dress with its hemline adjusted precisely
to the middle of the calf … precisely to the knee … precisely to mid-thigh … with
nervous attention to Eugenia Sheppard. Of undergarments, too, there had to be a proper
complement: wired bras, backless bras, full slips, half slips, elastic girdles with
garter tabs, and a drawer inevitably stuffed with snagged and mismatched nylon stockings.

Along with many others, my conversion to pants at the start of the Seventies was slow
but complete, accompanied by a sense of relief and relaxation. When blue jeans became
the emblem of hip sophistication, I didn’t understand I was riding a very short wave.
Suddenly it was all right to wear pants. Then it became a feminist statement to wear
pants. Never again would most women wear skirts, I thought, in the way that friends
of mine have thought that the revolution was just around the corner. And here it is,
well into the Eighties, and a woman who wears nothing but pants is a holdout, a stick-in-the-mud,
a fashion reactionary with no sense of style.

My exile from the world of the fashionable might be easier to bear if some of those
closest to me hadn’t become backsliders, apologizing for their slide with the argument
that they need to wear skirts for their careers because it is, after all, still a
man’s world and they are but feminists in it. I would never underestimate the value
of skirts and dresses as effective camouflage for those who fear that their femininity
or their politics may be open to question, but I don’t believe that’s the entire story.
I think my friends returned to dresses because they felt that life was getting gray
without some whimsical indulgence in the feminine esthetic. They missed the frivolous
gaiety of personal adornment, they missed the public display of vulnerability and
sexual flirtation, and they missed the promised change in
appearance that a new dress—and only a new dress—can hold. Some of them had thrived
on the newsiness of fashion, the keeping up, the competition. They longed to try the
current look. Some of them longed to show off their legs again, and some of them,
I know, missed shopping.

On bad days I mourn my old dresses. I miss the graceful flow of fabric, the gentle,
gathered shapes and pretty colors. Straight-legged pants are boring. One cannot take
on a new identity by changing trousers.

Then why do I persist in not wearing skirts? Because I don’t like this artificial
gender distinction. Because I don’t wish to start shaving my legs again. Because I
don’t want to return to the expense and aggravation of nylons. Because I will not
reacquaint myself with the discomfort of feminine shoes. Because I’m at peace with
the freedom and comfort of trousers. Because it costs a lot less to wear nothing but
pants. Because I remember how cold I used to feel in the winter wearing a short skirt
and. sheer stockings. Because I can still call to mind the ugly look of splattered
rain water on the back of my exposed legs. Because I recall the anguish of an unraveled
hem. Because I remember resenting the enormous amount of thinking time I used to pour
into superficial upkeep concerns, and because the nature of feminine dressing is superficial
in essence—even my objections seem superficial as I write them down. But that is the
point. To care about feminine fashion, and do it well, is to be obsessively involved
in inconsequential details on a serious basis. There is no relief. To not be involved
is to risk looking eccentric and peculiar, or sloppy and uncared for, or mannish and
manhating, or all of the above.

Who said that clothes make a statement? What an understatement that was. Clothes never
shut up. They gabble on endlessly, making their intentional and unintentional points.

It is written in Deuteronomy that “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth
unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment,” and the reason given refers
to the strongest displeasure of the highest authority. Failure to abide by a sex-distinctive
dress code is an “abomination unto the Lord thy God.”

Why should the Lord have cared so intensely about clothes?
Was it to keep the sexes firmly apart and discourage promiscuity? Was it to reinforce
the homosexual taboo? Was it a way of saying that women were not to be soldiers and
that warriors were not to sneak about in women’s clothes as a ruse to fool the enemy?
I’ve read these differing explanations and while they all may apply to some extent,
they avoid the basic point. Naked as He created them, Adam and Eve could not be mistaken.
Dressed in fig leaves and animal skins after they came to know shame, their gender
differences were partially obscured. A sex-distinctive dress code (a loincloth for
Adam, a sarong for Eve; a striped tie for Adam, a pair of high heels for Eve) created
an emblematic polarity that satisfied a societal need for unambiguous division, neat
categories and stable order.

When a child is asked by its parents whether the naked person in the picture is a
man or a woman and the child replies, “I can’t tell because they’re not wearing clothes,”
the joke is really quite profound. In a clothed culture the eye depends on artificial
externals for its visual cues. When the cues are absent or conflicting, the psychological
disturbance in the observer can be enormous. A blurring of the sartorial signposts
can inspire hostility and rage. To mistake a man for a woman, or vice versa, is dangerous.
An entire range of responses may be inappropriately misdirected. One’s own sexual
identity may be thrown into confusion, for how can we know who we are unless we are
fairly certain who is the other?

Skirt and pants stand juxtaposed as the Western world’s symbolic Great Divide. A traveler
who does not speak a word of a foreign language can locate the male or female restroom
in an international airport by seeking out a recognizable logo. A painted stick figure
with a triangular skirt leads unquestionably to the women’s lounge; a stick figure
without a skirt is where the men should enter. I, in my pants, am grateful to know
where to go—to the door with the skirt. Am I, is the world, prepared for the real
basics? Stick figures with or without a triangular penis? Signposts with a pair of
circular breasts?

A New Jersey NOW chapter once commissioned an educational poster showing boys and
girls playing a friendly, equal game of Softball, but the artist couldn’t figure out
how to
illustrate the concept unless she put the girls in skirts. Or in pigtails and ribbons.

In certain remote parts of the globe where people are not completely influenced by
Western values, trousers still carry a sex-free neutrality similar to the robes and
tunics worn by the ancient Mayas and the Greeks, and of course there is the fiercely
nationalistic Scotsman who doggedly hangs onto his ceremonial kilts. But there is
no point in stressing the exceptions. To the Western mind the grouping of men in trousers
and women in skirts is something akin to a natural order, as basic to the covenant
of masculine/feminine difference as the short hair/long hair proposition. Trousers
are practical. They cover the lower half of the body without nonsense and permit the
freest of natural movements. And therein lies their unfeminine danger.

Bifurcation describes the phenomenon of forking or splitting, but in the Victorian
and Edwardian eras it was a euphemism for the pair of legs that women were not supposed
to admit they possessed. Women’s legs, or limbs (the latter term was more polite),
were not perceived as an anatomical arrangement for supporting the body and for walking,
but as blatant arrows that pointed the way to the seat of sex and other functions.
Men might display their legs with nonchalance, but from pulpit and press there was
unanimous agreement that the sight of a bifurcated woman was immodest, ungodly and
sinful. The only way to avoid bifurcation was to wear a long skirt that brushed the
floor.

As with most things that are categorized as masculine or feminine, it is impossible
to separate longstanding concepts of sexual morality from longstanding concepts of
esthetics and fashion. Once both sexes wore fairly similar robes and tunics, but even
in Greece and Rome men customarily displayed their bare legs under a tunic that came
to the knees while women wore a longer, fuller drape. Leafing through illustrated
histories of European costume and fashion (which, need we be reminded, are chiefly
a record of what the upper class wore) it is amusing to note that during the Middle
Ages men of nobility proudly showed off their muscular, shapely legs, sometimes augmented
by padded stockings, while women appeared to have no legs at
all. In fact, as wearing apparel was refined and embellished over a period of several
hundred years, men’s clothes were cut to show off their legs and thighs and where
they were joined at the crotch, while women’s clothes hid the legs and revealed some
portion of the upper body—arms, shoulders, throat and sometimes even the breasts.
A tight-fitted bodice and a long and flowing skirt was the standard feminine silhouette.

Straight-cut long pants, the modern pair of trousers, came into fashion for men at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, to replace the customary knee breeches and
stockings. The male retained his bifurcated masculinity, a matter of pride as well
as comfort, but the shape of his legs was no longer on view. When skirts broke the
floor-length barrier in the 1920s, the historic reversal was complete. Now women’s
legs were on public display—a distinctive new sign of the feminine.

The evolution from long skirts to short in the 1920s was an important advance in the
history of women’s rights. By a cut of the scissors in a dressmaker’s salon, women
were able to walk and move with greater freedom than they had been allowed for centuries.
Gone was the dragging weight of several layers of petticoats, and yards of heavy fabric
that swirled around the ankles were thrown aside in a single stroke of fashion. From
breast to thighs, the torso was liberated from the restraining corset. But the transformation
of women’s legs from a bodily part that was hidden in modesty to a glamorous appendage
that was whistled at and admired may not have been a remarkable gain. Both extremes
of fashion derived from a belief in the seductive nature of female sexuality, and
both sought to minimize the true function of legs.

A major purpose of femininity is to mystify or minimize the functional aspects of
a woman’s mind and body that are indistinguishable from a man’s, and our legs have
borne the brunt of this more than we care to acknowledge. Quentin Bell makes the point
in his discourse
On Human Finery
that voluminous hoop skirts of the 1860s made it close to impossible for a lady to
climb a narrow staircase, while hobble skirts of the 1880s were so tight that she
was even more poorly equipped to mount a steep flight of steps. One hundred years
later, miniskirts presented a
similar problem, but in our day the inhibition was a matter of exposure—what a voyeur
might see from his vantage point down below.

A man I had some political dealings with once challenged me by questioning why my
pants had a fly front. I hadn’t actually thought about that before. When I was a teenager
(and never wore pants except for a pair of dungarees that I rolled to mid-calf) women’s
slacks always zippered up the side or back. I imagine today’s designers feel that
pants simply fit better with a frontal close. But I hadn’t given two seconds’ worth
of thought to the meaning behind the fly until I was challenged by somebody who obviously
felt it had great meaning to him as a facilitator of sex and urination. Did he suppose
I was pretending to have a penis?