Oh good, another blog

Reading lipstickeater and threadbared on consumerism and femininity (recently synonymous) has got me thinking about the development of my own gender expression.

As a child I was never able to put conformity before comfort--when my long rusty hair got painfully tangled at the base of my skull, I cut it off.* Dresses were too scratchy, and besides, my feminist, atheist folks didn't want to burden me with unnecessary gender coding. It was purple or teal slacks and Calvin-style striped shirts all the way.

Then before I was really prepared for it, puberty arrived and my comfort eating began to pack on the pounds. My jeans size went up--8, 10, 12 for a long time, then relaxed fit 12, finally 14--and I bought a ton of men's XL t-shirts with superhero logos.

Through some cultural osmosis or other, I came to the conclusion that girls who cared about the way they dressed and wore their hair were stupid, and since my greatest fear was of looking stupid, I'd stick completely to jeans, jean shorts, and a single, floor-length denim skirt. I'd play with lipstick and blush when no one could see, but without access to women's magazines (soooo stupid) I had no idea how to proceed. So.

Around about the end of middle school, I began also wanting my clothes to express a burgeoning queer identity, albeit not one my parents would be able to decipher. Overlarge Doc Martens with rainbow laces--who could possibly ferret out my genius code? I would ask for my hair as short as the Great Clips drone would willingly cut it, but I could never buck up the nerve to ask outright for the stranger touching my head to give me a man's haircut. Even though that would have been cheaper.

It became important that my clothing was labeled for men, which felt so appropriately transgressive to buy and wear. This would have been the late 90s, post Spiceworld, so I also owned a couple baby tees and spaghetti straps--that was my cover, you see. I dressed for comfort, and to express my contempt for the idea of dressing for anything else. I wanted out of my body.

Second year of high school I started getting really into dyeing my hair. Since it had dulled from new-penny to old-penny during the hated puberty, I had been lobbying my mother to help me go as red as drugstore brands would allow. She would instead steer me to some extremely subtle auburns, probably out of lessons learned from her own youthful hair experiments. These hair colors did fuck-all.

It wasn't until I began colluding with my pixieish friend Aviv to watch anime and become bisexuals that I broke out the 30-vol bleach and did what I assured my folks would be only a tiny blue stripe in my bangs. The way it made me feel was addictive. I wanted to look at myself and I wanted other people to look at me and be shocked and impressed. This is how punks must have felt back when they actually existed.

From an allusional Miki cosplay to a full green head for school photos, I tried on every color, eventually settling down to a good-sized chunk of the spectrum between orange and purple. I tried to avoid stepping on the toes of any of my group of friends who suddenly all had the same close crop and orange or pink hair, but Manic Panic makes a limited range, after all.

Coloring my hair was a huge relief as a largely degendered outlet for my desire to decorate my person. Makeup would have been a minefield--there were too many girls wearing it well, who would know when I wore it poorly. Becoming a goth was always tempting, but too expensive and too likely to draw unwanted parental attention. Though it dyed my collars, pillows, and walls, my hair situated me within my female peer group while letting me stay androgynous.

I kept it up for a bit early in college, but dyeing in a room you clean yourself quickly became a drag. As far as I can intuit, this is the college experience in fashion: the elaborate looks you've created to code yourself to your high school chums erode rapidly, followed by all decorum and grooming. You'd just roll out of bed and put on whatever was closest to hand and easiest to pull over your head. That's right--those collegiate fuckers were completely biting my high-school look. This could not stand, because if everyone looked like me, no one would comprehend instantly how blindingly superior I was.

I started drawing up plans for my all-new style. It would be based on the tuxedo, all crisp white blouses with black jackets, skirts, and trousers. Basically, I decided that the ideal look would be "waiter". To that end, I started to haunt thrift stores. I started to pay attention.

The other thing that happened was, I started to lose weight. Mainly this was from living on microwave popcorn rather than food, but seeing that it was possible for me to lose weight lit a fire in me. I dieted and exercised religiously, skirting the edge of an eating disorder. I was constantly hungry, angry, paranoid and antisocial, I had a mini nervous breakdown and quit college for a while, and I dropped from 180 lbs to 120. Overall, a classic female success story!

My wardrobe, by contrast, expanded rapidly. A frenemy had opined that I was "unfeminine" and therefore unattractive, and because by this time I was desperate to attract anyone's company, I took it as a challenge. Dresses, skirts, and frilly tops began to attract my coin. I had decided that I would still be queer, but now I would be a femme queer. My logic was, and still occasionally is, that the feminine is degraded and disregarded in a misogynist society, and that I would work on redeeming feminine dress and practices (while reaping the benefits of being viewed as socially compliant).

I wasn't alone, either. All kinds of young women were turning from the androgynous styles of the 90s to "new Romantic" or "retro" or any of a dozen other ways to say a highly femininzed, desperately sexualized fashion turn towards a safe imaginary past. My passage into the feminine had been well-greased by strong cultural forces with an interest in getting me to fit in.

Moving from a socially unacceptable body and dress style to a socially acceptable one did get me positive attention. From guys. In fact, a number (3) of guys stepped up to tell me that they had even liked my socially unacceptable body, but had been wary of asking out an obvious lesbian. The threat to my queer identity boys posed was outweighed by a genuine attraction to men and an o'erpowering desire to fuck someone who was not also a virgin (sorry erstwhile roommate!). I dated a bit, then fell in love with the man of my dreams and, well, put the queer identity on a shelf so as not to be called a bisexual poseur.

Still and all, I hadn't counted on the fact that a decade of studiously ignoring fashion and, well, grooming would leave me without the necessary skills and aesthetic sense to dress myself in the mornings. I wore a bunch of bad shit. Well, they don't call it trial and success, eh?

Despite looking at girls for years, I had no idea how to suddenly become one. The girls of my acquaintance, too, wore jeans and t-shirts, but with a hundred subtle touches that resulted in feminine presentation. But, look, fuck subtlety. If I was going to learn anything about girl drag, I was going to have to try too hard. Instead of looking at the women around me, I looked to caricatures: the sex-nuts Victorians and the 1950s pin-up housewife. An hourglass exaggerated by a full skirt and a cinched waist: that was my jumping-off point into femninity. It felt like a masquerade, a costume you wear until it inhabits you, similar to the enchanted (and sexy!) costumes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's second-season Halloween episode, "Halloween."

In any case, it's been a few years since then and I'm generally happy with my dress sense and makeup skills, though I still have a ways to go with hair. I'm ambivalent about what my newfound love of adornment means for me. When I began to pour my creative energy (what little energy I possess) into looking pretty, I lost much of my drive in art and writing, which I always thought would redeem me being bad-looking. My ambition to do what I consider valuable has plateaued while I work on this new outlet, which is ephemeral, dubiously rewarding, and arguably unfeminist. I read any kind of cultural studies I can lay hands on to try and understand my fascination with and compulsion to create myself anew on the site of my body. So this is my attempt to make a style blog which is against the idea of style blogs, to become an anti-fashion guru, to create criticism, to redereconstruct. My secondary goal is to not be needlessly cruel to anyone while doing this, so if you see me being, say, racist, please let me know.


*Random bolding strategies in this post owe everything to Slog.