Recently Jo on A Life Unexamined posed a question which quite took me aback: do
asexuals, generally, seek to appear attractive or generically sexy
despite not wishing to attract a partner? Or in other words, do people present themselves in a sexy manner to conform to
social expectations or out of desire to attract someone? The responses
to her survey were varied and highly interesting, I recommend to anyone
that you check them out.
For myself I really had to
mull this one over. I tend to think that women in general are given so
many cultural messages about how one's basic worth as a human stems from the perception of being
attractive, and there are so many specific and contradictory things we
are supposed to do to balance on the knife's edge of pretty or sexy.
However, this cultural message is packaged as being the things you do to
trap a man (which most queer women translate as appropriate, but the
message doesn't account for non-heterosexuality), and I have found that
deciding I wasn't actually interested in attracting anyone has given me a
tool of resistance. I don't necessarily feel less external pressure,
but I feel like there is a chink in the pressure that I have
internalized. I don't shave me legs anymore. All of my underwear is
comfortable and either in neutral colors or with funny prints. My
personal styling tends towards the fierce or eclectic rather than the
pretty or sexy, but I am still pretty unlikely to run around in yoga
pants and a t-shirt because there is this part of me that still feels
the pressure.
For me, it's not just being a woman.
It's being a fat woman. For a long time I wanted people to want me,
even though I had no interest in them (lots of people, generic people,
any people. It wasn't important) because I felt like as long as someone
wanted to fuck me my body was okay. I will expand on this more later,
but that message isn't absent or even terribly quiet even in fat
acceptance spaces. I personally have grown into acceptance of my own body a lot since then, and I mostly don't really care if anyone wants to fuck me anymore. mostly.
Even now I feel like I would be letting down the
side to leave the house, for anything more than quick grocery runs, in
decidedly unsexy clothes, no makeup, and hair thrown in a braid. I
don't want to be a bad fatty, who has "let herself go" or possibly end up on an obesity epidemic newsreel with no head.
I may not really be fat enough to be a headless fatty, but I still feel
this pressure to be some sort of fat ambassador with well-fitting
clothes and something that might be described as a coiffure. On some level I feel like presenting as attractive can be a big fuck you to a society which would rather I be invisible. On other levels I feel like I owe it to fat acceptance to be the "good fatty" who is neat and well-dressed. None of that is particularly tied to how I feel or what I want.
And then there's this: I worry about being seen as "too" sexy and what that will mean for my personal safety or relationships when I decline any offers of sex. I have been harassed by doodz at bars about why I would dress so sexily if I don't want to sleep with them (apparently the only reason doodz in bars can imagine for wearing a tank top and short skirt to dance enthusiastically in a crowded nightclub in the middle of summer in Texas is wanting to bang every guy in the room), but of course every woman deals with that because no one wants to bang every guy in the room, or on the way to and from the room. Those messages still reverberate when I am deciding how to dress. I have also gotten shit from so-called friends (of the "Nice Guy" variety) who feel like I shouldn't have dressed attractively around them ever if we weren't going to eventually fuck. These are obviously all completely unfair and uncalled for, but they still give me pause when I am deciding what to wear.
I basically have all these conflicting and conflating pressures running around every time I put on a pair of pants (or whatever). I am pretty sure that most women (for various reasons) could say the same. And now I am seeing that none of this has very much to do with my sexuality.... Which I guess is the answer. Asexuality is a piece to the puzzle of whether or not any given day I will dress with an eye towards being perceived as attractive, and since identifying as asexual I haven't made effort to dress in such a way as to attract specific people, but in general, it's one piece of a complex puzzle that's mostly made of patriarchal bullshit.
Thanks for this. I'm not ace, but I am lesbian, and I still feel this sense that I'm dressing - and living while dressed - under the male gaze. But, yeah, I don't think any of this has much to do with our sexualities at all, I think that's the thing with rape culture - it's got nothing to do with us.
ReplyDeleteI like your analysis of it as our non-normative sexuality "opening up a chink" in that pressure, though. That's a really accurate description of how I feel about it, too.
Did you see this recent article on compulsory sexuality in fat-positive spaces? And there was a little more commentary on Tumblr.