Femininity (13 page)

Gays nevertheless have had a marked effect on men’s fashions, chiefly because the
new emphasis on slim-line jackets and close-fitting pants has reopened the question
of pocketbooks and pockets. Women’s clothes are rarely designed with functional pockets
(the nineteenth-century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote passionately about
this) because the necessary objects a real pocket might be expected to hold—money,
keys, comb, eyeglasses, pen and all the feminine etceteras—would spoil the graceful,
smooth line. Influenced in part by European designers, a pioneering number of American
men have persuaded themselves that it might not be too great a blow to their masculinity
if they carried a shoulderstrap bag. Not a clutch or a handbag—that would be too feminine
and inconvenient—but a neat, tailored carryall that is flat and unobtrusive. Perhaps
the day may arrive when the pocketbook ceases to be a feminine symbol (how will the
Freudians cope with that?), or perhaps this brave new accessory will prove too encumbering
for general masculine appeal. Realistically, it is harder to imagine legions of women
without their pocketbooks than legions of men with
them, for men have a definite biological advantage when it comes to stowing a pack
of cigarettes and a wallet. An inside breast pocket, or an outside breast pocket for
that matter, is no place for a woman to carry anything.

If dolls are given to little girls to train them for motherhood, they also train little
girls to become fashion consumers. Blissful hours spent dressing and undressing a
Barbie Doll with her wondrous costumes are preparation for little except the department
store and the shopping mall, the dreamy, habit-forming world where the adult woman
is encouraged to feast on the sensuality of texture, shape and color and bring into
her life the romance and illusion she is expected to embody: a trench coat suffused
with foreign intrigue, a negligee of satin and feathers for the romantic, candlelit
evening, an après-ski suit even if one doesn’t ski. Shopping is indeed the woman’s
opiate, yet the economy would suffer a new crisis if the American woman dropped her
feminine interest in clothes and ceased to be a conspicuous consumer.

As far back as the Bible and the writings of the early Christians, women were denounced
as prideful and whorish for indulging in the extravagance of fashion. Entire he-man
industries—baleen whaling, fur trapping and the like—were built on a woman’s need
to look feminine and appealing, and yet when the fashion peaked or the supply was
exhausted, the conceit of womanhood was blamed. Women were blamed for the annihilation
of whales to make stays for their corsets, women were blamed for the near-extinction
of egrets to put feathers in their hats. Women were blamed for the miserable conditions
of the Belgian lacemakers and the Japanese silkworm workers, and women are blamed
today for the murder of baby seals and rare leopards. Yet the point of it all was
usually to please a man, for it accrued to his success that his woman was arrayed
in such majestic finery.

Few women today are in a position to exempt themselves from productive labor, but
none of us is exempt from a standard of feminine dressing that still includes evidence
of conspicuous consumption. A hardworking woman who pays her own bills now puts aside
some money or sets up a charge account to treat
herself to the fur coat or piece of jewelry that a husband or lover might have bestowed
on her in an earlier age. Lillian Hellman poses in
The New Yorker
for Blackglama mink and Lauren Bacall exhibits the gold bracelets and diamonds she
bought for herself in a Fifth Avenue store. Are these superficial values or an enviable
example of American success, a tribute to the financially independent woman? Probably
neither. So long as society measures a woman’s status by the evidence of luxury on
her person, no individual woman may be faulted—or applauded—for hankering after jewelry
and fur. But neither will it be understood automatically that her finery was hardwon
by her honest labor.

A woman “dripping in fur” is still perceived as a woman who has acquired an expensive
gift, and the credit is thought to reside with her devoted, successful husband or
in her liberally bestowed sexual favors. The sable and the mink are known to breed
a masculine fantasy: a desire to make mad, passionate love to a naked woman wrapped
loosely in fur. Indeed, a fur coat possesses a sexual aura that is not entirely the
product of its warmth or luxuriant softness. There is a history to women in fur: mistresses’
opening the gaily wrapped gift box with squeals of joy, “Take Back Your Mink,” fluffy
white bear throws and tigerskin rugs, chorus girls and stage door Johnnies, “I’d rather
sin with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin than err with her on any other fur,” and there
is even a pornographic classic,
Venus in Fur
by Masoch of sadomasochistic fame. There is, as well, a moral probity attached to
not wearing fur. Accused of financial wrongdoing in his 1952 Vice-Presidential campaign,
Richard Nixon assured the nation in his Checkers speech that wife Pat wore a “good
Republican cloth coat.”

Like the religious moralists before them, New Left radicals of the Sixties used the
expensively dressed woman as a hated symbol of selfish disregard for the ills of the
world. What one chooses to wear may well be an indication of economic status, class
aspirations and political and moral values, but the woman’s situation is doubly complicated
by the feminine goal of appearing expensive, frivolous, sexy, vulnerable and refined
in one package. Some women of the Old Left doggedly wore their fur coats at demonstrations
in the Sixties against the Vietnam war
because they wanted to show a doubting nation that the peace movement was filled with
people of substance. A decade later and at the other end of the political spectrum,
Fascinating Womanhood groups encouraged their members to surprise and delight their
husbands when they came home for supper by dressing up like floozies. Whatever a woman
puts on, it is likely to be a costume, whether it is fur, white lace, a denim skirt
or black leather pants.

Serious women have a difficult time with clothes, not necessarily because they lack
a developed sense of style, but because feminine clothes are not designed to project
a serious demeanor. Part of the reason many people find old photographs of parading
“suffragettes” so funny is that their elaborate dresses seem at odds with marching
in unison down the street. Team spirit has always relied on a uniform dress code for
maximum effect, as generals and bohemians well know. Despite the proliferation of
advice manuals on what the up-and-coming young female executive should wear to the
office, dressing feminine remains incompatible with looking corporate, credible and
competent, and no dress-for-success book has been able to resolve the inherent contradictions,
or provide the extra time and money that maintaining a feminine wardrobe requires.

Men resigned themselves to a lack of individuality in clothes a long time ago, but
women still hold out the hope for clothes that are comfortable, feminine and appropriate
for work in one all-purpose outfit. Major airlines periodically commission top designers
to perform this feat for their flight attendants with mixed, and often peculiar, results.
The U.S. Army has yet to resolve the weighty matter of the right kind of shoe for
its female recruits. In tradition-minded occupations where women are breaking employment
bars, an appropriate dress code seems particularly elusive. How should a woman dress
for her job in a symphony orchestra where the men perform in regulation black tuxedos?
At one concert I attended, the flutist wore a floor-length black skirt, the violinist
wore a knee-length black skirt, and the cellist opted for black trousers. They managed
to play harmoniously, and that was important.

In corporate law and finance, two conservative fields where
ambitious women have established a tenuous foothold, the conventional uniform for
the new female executive is the dull-colored jacket and matching knee-length skirt,
suggesting a gentlemanly aspect on top and a ladylike aspect down below. Pants are
not worn, except by an occasional secretary, for they lack an established tradition,
and bright colors do not signal efficiency, responsibility and steadiness on the job.
Calling attention to the breasts by wearing a sweater or a silk shirt without a jacket
is unprofessional on the executive level, especially since men persist in wearing
regulation suit jackets to show their gentleman status. Few think it odd that the
brave new careerist must obscure her breasts and display her legs in order to prove
she can function in a masculine world and yet retain some familiar, comforting aspect
of the feminine difference. Tradition in clothes may well outlast tradition in occupation.
When Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first woman to serve on the United States
Supreme Court, there was no mistaking which one she was in the formal group picture.
Eight smiling justices wore trousers and long black judicial robes that came to the
ankles and one smiling justice wore a specially hemmed robe that came to the knees.
Justice O’Connor was the one in nylon stockings.

*
Woolf’s autobiographical pieces, published for the first time in 1976, reveal a woman
who felt terror when buying a new dress—from “looking-glass shame” in the fitting
room to self-consciousness and dread when she finally wore it. Miss Virginia Stephen
had come from a family of famous beauties. Within the rules of Victorian manners that
she and her sister followed, “During daylight one could wear overalls; work,” but
in the evening in her father’s drawing room, “Dress and hair-doing became far more
important than pictures and Greek.”

A
BOY’S VOICE BREAKS
in puberty. This celebrated milestone in the pathway toward manhood is reached after
a surge of testosterone has induced a stepped-up division of cells in the thyroid
gland and in the cartilage of the larynx. After the voice box enlarges, the vocal
folds vibrate more slowly. They resonate through the nasal and oral cavities (also
larger in the male) to produce a sound that is deeper and stronger than in women and
children. A girl’s voice also lowers in puberty, but the mild transition may go unnoticed.
Only men have Adam’s apples, those knobby protrusions of cartilage at the front of
the neck. Their absence in women has been celebrated in art, poem and metaphor: a
white swan’s neck with a delicate arch, a smooth expanse of vulnerability. One could
argue that an Adam’s apple looks vulnerable too.

Once the larynx is enlarged, the effects are irreversible, unalterable by physical
castration or large amounts of estrogen. Castration jokes about a suddenly high-pitched
male are unscientific and silly, reflective though they are of masculine fear. Castration
before puberty is another matter, ritualized in music as late as the eighteenth century
by the sweetly singing Italian castrati. An Adam’s apple can be a dead giveaway in
a male-to-female transsexual, for removal of the throat bulge by surgery is a difficult
operation that is usually avoided. A man who wishes to approximate a woman is stuck
with his larger vocal chamber and deeper voice. He must practice like an actor to
pitch his tones high. But since an enlarged voice box is induced at puberty by androgen,
a woman who wishes to approximate a man can
develop an Adam’s apple and a deeper voice through testosterone treatment, just as
she may grow a beard.

On the average, the difference in pitch between men’s and women’s voices is almost
a full octave, a true example of sexual dimorphism that is about as consistent as
size. A typical female sound in conversational speech corresponds to three halftones
below middle C on the piano. A standard male sound registers one octave and a halftone
below middle C. Trained singers can stretch their normal range into upper and lower
reaches from coloratura soprano to basso profundo, but most people have a speaking
range that rarely exceeds one octave. There is a fractional overlap between the usual
male and female tones.

Child, grownup, man, woman: biology gives us fairly reliable auditory clues, and our
ears are attuned to the signals. We expect to hear certain sounds from certain bodies;
we are perplexed when they do not meet our expectations. Failure to identify the sex
of a telephone caller is oddly disturbing, for the information is the first stage
in a subconscious process of naming and placing. Sexual dimorphism in voice is an
important guideline, a reassuring indicator of the natural order. Those whose voices
fall mainly within the overlap are mistaken for the other sex too frequently for comfort.
When audio cues fail, the burden of proving gender lies more heavily on the male,
for the low-voiced female is allowed a trick: she can soften the edge of her tones
with breathiness to make her speech sound sultry. A high-voiced male is given no relief;
he cannot make sexual capital of his vocal situation. Falsetto mimicry is a slander
at manhood, a slur on the testicles, not on the larynx.

Most animals produce sound and communicate in a rudimentary way among themselves,
but interest in signing chimps and chatty dolphins aside, only humans are capable
of true speech. Speech is the distinguishing feature of civilization; language is
the crucial achievement of the Homo sapiens brain. By studying brain-injured people,
neurologists discovered that speech capability, including reading, writing and analytic
functions, is located in the brain’s left hemisphere, while the right sphere holds
the capacity for visual orientation and spatial concepts, which extends to artistic
and musical skills. But there,
perhaps, the matter does not rest. Recently a theory has been put forward claiming
that the human brain itself may also be sexually dimorphic.

Clinical tests show that from infancy onward little girls excel in verbal skills while
boys move ahead in spatial skills during adolescence. Girls begin to talk earlier,
are quicker to speak in fluent sentences. They learn to read sooner, have a larger
preschool vocabulary and perhaps a better memory than boys. When they reach adolescence
the boys become more adept at solving geometry problems and three-dimensional puzzles.
At every age level more males than females stammer and stutter (the ratio is four
to one).