Gender threads

People have many good reasons for wearing clothes. Not getting arrested, for instance. But sexual advertisement? Not so much. \nThis week’s online edition of Newsweek features an article by Jennie Yabroff titled “Girls Gone Mild(er): A New Modesty Movement.” The article discusses a trend of teenage girls who are “rejecting ‘bad girl’ roles embodied by Britney Spears, Bratz Dolls and the nameless, shirtless thousands in ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos.” Instead, they are choosing to wear the most boring clothes imaginable on the basis of wanting to look “modest.” \nThe article talks in large part about one author who believes this trend is “a welcome corrective to our licentious, oversexed times.” But if it’s a “corrective” force against over-sexualization, it’s an even more sexual movement. \nDressing modestly in and of itself is no less sexual than wearing stripper attire. The latter is more overt about its intentions, but the purpose of both is to advertise a sexual attitude. Onlookers often interpret gender based on an individual’s outward appearances. But performative gender is practically impossible to entirely tease out of the way one dresses. \nIn light of that problem, it’s healthier for teenage girls who are not ready to have sex to use the way they dress to display that attitude than to dress in a way that sends a message about their sexuality that they don’t mean solely because they want to meet societal pressure. \nBut just because sexuality can’t be eliminated from dress doesn’t mean it has to be the focus. Applauding girls for displaying a more truthful representation of their sexuality is still applauding them for thinking the point of the way they dress is to represent a gender role. \nAs I said before, representing gender is not the only reason to wear clothes. And since we have to wear them, we may as well make them into a form of self-expression. Clothes can express their wearer’s interest in a lot of ideas more interesting and less outmoded than the gender expectation by which they abide. They can be used to express interests in art, music, politics or any number of other opinions. \nI’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong to use dress to display sexual interest, just that making it the central focus only propels the nonsense that girls’ and women’s express purpose for dressing should be sex. \nNeither dressing modestly nor leaving nothing to the imagination empowers women because both reduce their self-expression to their gender. On the other hand, using dress as a display first and foremost for other forms of self-expression automatically brings about sexuality in a much more interesting and empowering way. Rather than looking “sexy” because of their position on sex, they look sexy because of a more rounded appearance of their personality. \nThis rhetoric of “dressing modestly” only adds to the problem of over-sexualization. To truly correct the problem, we should let girls – and women – know that the empowering way to be sexy is to be an individual.