#just. the implication i Ought to have Longer Hair and Look More Feminine. makes me wanna scratch my skin off

[mejomonster]

I genuinely like long hair. I aspire to have long hair and look like a lot of men whos looks i admire.

I got compliments on looking so feminine and pretty recently

I cannot tell u how urgently i desired to shave all my fucking hair off. How unpleasant it felt to just Bam get reminded the way i intepret my own choice for wanting to look Any particular way in this world is always overshadowed by anyone outside me deciding theyd Prefer me a certain way for their own reasons

[lesbianfeminists]

“March was women's History Month, and in the wake of the graduation-dress debate, Marlborough confronted self-image with a special all-school assembly featuring Dr. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor at Cornell University. Dr. Brumberg had written two books about the collision between cultural pressures and a girl's sense of herself, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, and The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. The title of her speech was 'From Corsets to Body Piercing.'

…

She started out with a rattling set of statistics: By the age of seventeen, according to her research, 78 percent of American girls reported that they disliked their bodies. Girls as young as eight and nine complained to their pediatricians that they were fat and needed to go on a diet.

Teenage girls had become 'appearance junkies, valuing their appearance over creativity, intelligence, generosity, kindness,' said Dr. Brumberg. 'And there's anecdotal evidence, though its not yet established in the literature, that it's worse in southern California than anywhere else in the country.’

There was in this country an epidemic of what she called 'bad body fever,' and she believed that they only way to eradicate it was to confront it. To bolster her argument, she read excerpts about New Year's resolutions from two different girls' diaries. The first spoke purely in terms of personality traits she wanted to improve, while the second girl wrote about how she wanted to look and what she hoped to buy. 'One diary projects good works,' said Dr. Brumberg. 'The other projects good looks.' The first diary, one of the ones she had collected for The Body Project, was from 1892; the second, the one that focused on appearance, was from 1982. The implication was that today's young women had replaced moral concerns with a narcissistic set of desires. 'So what's happened?' Dr. Brumberg asked her audience. 'Can we blame it all on Calvin Klein, on advertising? Can we blame Hollywood? MTV? Are you the first generation to feel this way? What was it like in the past to get your period, to develop acne, to start to feel sexual?'

She presented a slide show of 20th-century photographs and advertisements, designed to illustrate how the media defined femininity. She wanted the girls to see just how aggressive the message was, how pervasive the cult of physical beauty. If they understood the pressure they were under, they would be better able to defend themselves against it. 

…

Katie Tower and her friend Lisl came because they were furious. To them, all this talk of 'bad body fever' was a colossal insult, no better than a racial or religious slur. What right did a stranger have to suggest every girl in the auditorium was neurotic about her appearance? 

For the first ten minutes, the lunchtime session was a polite round of agreeable sentiment: Several girls wanted to talk about advertisements they hated, and one devoutly embraced the idea of 'being more aware of ourselves." Dr. Brumberg referred to herself as 'unlean,' and the girls chuckled. Dr. Morgan and Les Klein hovered in the background with a parent who had offered to serve as Dr. Brumberg's chaperone for the day.

Finally, Lisl could stand it no longer. She had strict criteria for true gender equality, and she saw insidious threats where most of her friends did not. She believed in hygiene-- her long, straight strawberry blond hair was always shiny and clean-- but beyond that, she took an almost belligerent stance about her appearance. She rarely bothered to tuck in her uniform shirt, and she preferred dark slacks to the more popular short skirt over boys' boxer shorts. She often wore a school blazer, as though happy for the extra camouflage, and favored heavy, lug-soled shoes. 

To her, all this talk about looks was somebody else's problem. It had nothing to do with her life. She was going to Brown University and intended to become an engineer. Gender and looks were irrelevant to that. In fact, she found Dr. Brumberg's presentation to be condescending-- a double standard masquerading as a commitment to equality.

'Using the terms like bad body fever and stuff, I think you're really emphasizing negative aspects,' Lisl said. 'Putting all this emphasis on how the female appears, and what the teenage girl appears to be. My question to you would be, Do you think you're adding to it? When you speak so fervently about how we have to stop this, or look at the impact-- don't you think you're simply adding to it?'

Dr. Brumberg was startled by Lisl's question. She picked her words carefully. 'I'm a historian,' she said, 'and I'm reporting on what the clinical establishment is saying. Do you follow what I'm saying? I didn't do the research. The data show-- and it may not be your problem, all right?-- that women in America are dissatisfied with themselves, and that they're more demanding about physical appearance than any other aspect of their lives: their creativity, their athleticism, their sociability, their relationships.'

Her voice tightened up. 'I didn't make that up, okay? I'm trying to explain why we might have come to that position. I'm not chastising you."

Lisl refused to yield. 'Doesn't dissatisfaction create change, though? So wouldn't that be beneficial change? Maybe we're in sort of a time of change.'

Dr. Brumberg cut Lisl off. How could anyone consider a negative self-image to be a tool of progress? 'Dissatisfaction about your body,' she said, incredulous. 'You think that is going to generate social change?'

'About whatever,' said Lisl. 'Any dissatisfaction moves people to change things.' She accused Dr. Brumberg of acting as though beauty were a bad thing, and attention to hygiene and athletics, evidence of a superficial nature. Perhaps girls were simply being practical about how the world worked. She brandished a magazine ad that touted yogurt. 'Look at this,' Lisl said. 'It says, 'You need yogurt or else you're not going to get a date.' In some ways isn't that true?' The girls Lisl knew who had boyfriends were slimmer and prettier than the other girls. Maybe the ads were merely a reflection of reality, not an attempt to define it.

Dr. Brumberg and the teachers hardly expected such antagonism, and Lisl was not finished. What really infuriated her was the implicit suggestion that Marlborough girls were no different that anyone else.

'We heard you say that external appearance came in lieu of good deeds and actions and stuff,' she said. 'I don't think you can say that vanity has totally disappeared from Marlborough's campus, but we're heavily motived people here. Its hard for us to look at somebody who's omitting that part of our life and saying--'

Dr. Brumberg cut her off. 'You're taking the thesis of my book as somewhat of an insult,' she said. 

'I'm not,' said Lisl. 'I'm just explaining to you, since you seem rather surprised-’

'You regard it as a charge that women of your generation are shallow.'

'Its personal,' said Katie. 'Maybe I feel better in makeup or certain clothes.'

'What's wrong with enjoying it?' chimed in another girl.

'There's nothing wrong with enjoying it,' replied Dr. Brumberg.

'That's the way you're coming off,' said Lisl.

Dr. Brumberg appealed to Dr. Morgan, who had arranged for her visit. 'In fairness to me,' she said, ' have these people read my book?'

Dr. Morgan sighed. One assigned chapter.

Dr. Brumberg decided to make her case one last time. 'The book is about the way in which in the twentieth century, not just young women but everybody, regards the body as perfectible,' she said. 'That's a change in our intellectual psyche. If you deny that the body is a critical piece of your self-identity, I think you're being pretty defensive. Your parents watch their cholesterol. Your grandparents may be counting their fat grams. This is the kind of culture in which we live. My charge is not that you're shallow and you don't have other interests. What I'm telling you is that if you looked at these diaries the way I have, from the 1830s to the 1980s, you'll find there is a big difference in the way girls think about themselves.'

Her stern tone of voice was a warning. As the session drew to a close, she would not tolerate interruption.

'This is not an argument against makeup, against earrings, against getting dressed up and taking care of yourself,' she said. 'But you are a little blind and a little defensive if you can't admit that there are people in this culture who become appearance junkies. I'm not saying you are all like that. I'm not saying you can't do wonderful things….I'm just telling you that girls beat themselves up today about appearance in ways they didn't in the nineteenth century. That's the thesis. If that is threatening and upsetting to you, I'm quite surprised.'

…

Her audience was plainly skeptical. For six years, they had lived in a world that considered them capable. The last thing they needed to hear, as they waited out the final weeks before the college letters arrived, was that they carried an internalized flaw, like a damaged gene, that rendered them not quite good enough: lacking in depth, concerned with frivolous things.

Their nerves were too raw to appreciate Dr. Brumberg's study. All they heard was a middle-aged woman telling them that they were narcissists. She was the universal bad mother, wagging a disapproving finger in their faces, and they simply did not want to hear what she had to say.

Erica's friend Chrissy, a gracious, soft-spoken girl, tried to lower the temperature in the room with a confession. People were always telling her she was not thin enough, or needed more makeup, or ought to color her hair, 'and they say its not for yourself-- its so a boy will like you.'

One of the other girls cut her off. There was no way to rid the world of people who said stupid things, but a smart girl refused to listen-- and she surrounded herself with like-minded people. A Marlborough girl did not need instruction. She just needed other girls who understood.

'You need a friend to say, 'No, no, you're plenty thin,' said one senior. 'Girls need to say that.'”

All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters, Karen Stabiner. 2002.