Skirts, dresses, long hair, and being a woman

"If you were really a feminist, you would cut off your hair and stop wearing skirts!"

I choose to wear either a skirt or a dress about half of the time, and more often than that in the summer. Most of these are well past my knees in length, and the rest are right about knee-length, and many of them are in "girly" colors such as pink (I won't even start with how pointless it is to assign a gender to a color, but the cultural stereotype remains, at least in the West). I find it much more comfortable to wear a skirt than I do to wear shorts, especially in the Texas heat. A skirt is going to be, by nature, cooler than shorts of the same length- and trust me, when the temperature outside hits the triple digits, this becomes important. 

Long hair does not necessarily have the same advantages. In fact, long hair can be uncomfortably warm, leading most people to wear their hair in either a ponytail or some form of bun if it's long enough to be uncomfortably hot. My reason for having long hair has nothing whatsoever to do with comfort. I have it this way because this is how I like it. 

Actually, a large part of why I choose to wear skirts so often is the same, because I like them. Believe it or not, I like to feel pretty, and the fact that skirts are comfortable is a very nice bonus.

The argument that feminists should all conform to a male standard has long been a relatively disturbing one to me. Despite claiming that it would be representative of ultimate equality, people who say it are consciously or unconsciously assuming that men are the norm and that women are the ones who deviate from it, and thus to make ourselves truly equal we must assimilate. To do so would not be a symbol of a progressive society at all, but would instead be just as biased as what exists today and perhaps more so, only hiding the bias under a facade of sameness.

While there are many types of feminists, and not all share the same views as me, I think that I would be correct in saying that most do not wish to eliminate differences, but would instead celebrate those differences. It is indeed true that I possess mammary glands and the capability to bear children, just as it is true that men are, physiologically speaking, more inclined to have a greater muscle mass than women do. These differences do not make masculinity inherently better than femininity, just as they do not make the opposite true. They simply make us different.

This is, additionally, the root of my problem with supposed chivalry. It's not the actions themselves--after all, opening the door for someone who's carrying a small child or bags of groceries is only polite--but rather the reasoning behind them. Insisting on opening doors or pulling out chairs for someone because she is a woman is just silly, given that most people who do that would not do the same for a man. Even such seemingly innocuous actions exhibit a belief that women are somehow "less" than men, that they either cannot or should not be allowed to do those things for themselves. 

Wearing a skirt or having long hair does not debase women. It's a choice- and one that should be available to men as well. Due to simple facts of biology, men and women are never going to be physically equal. Equality is not in appearance or biology; true equality is found in treatment and opportunity. 

I know this is two posts in a row about feminism. It wasn't intended, I had just had these particular thoughts on my mind this weekend. I promise I'll talk about something else next time.

To Boldly Go

"Thank you for choosing [coffee shop], this is Wesley and Beverly Crusher, what can we get started for you today?"

I was working as a barista the other day, wearing the second drive-thru headset so that I could start making drinks as soon as the customer ordered them. It's an efficient system, and listening to people make up names is always entertaining. One of my coworkers, especially, never actually uses our real names; one day we were Timone and Pumbaa, another day we were Calvin and Hobbes. As soon as he finished that order though, I had to ask him, "Why Wesley of all characters?" For those of you unfamiliar with Star Trek, I'll note that Wesley Crusher is quite possibly the single most universally-hated character in that series.

He looked surprised when I asked that, and the ensuing conversation quickly turned to science fiction. If you don't frequent coffee shops, or perhaps have never paid attention to the people behind the counter, we tend to talk a lot while working, it helps to relieve the tedium of making the same four or five drinks a couple hundred times a day. What stood out to me most about that conversation however was my coworkers' surprise at finding out that I, a woman, love science fiction. How could I not? The sense of discovery and adventure have always appealed strongly to me, and exploring the universe is a logical extension of my early love of the great explorers such as Magellan and Cook. For one who generally finds history tedious, I had a remarkable love of the explorers. It's not a subject that one would expect to interest only males, and yet I have repeatedly encountered incredulity that I love it as I do.

It's something that has never made any sense to me, this illogical assumption that all or most science fiction fans are men. While much early science fiction writing did tend to objectify women and cast them almost solely as either damsels in distress or objects of desire, that has long since changed and strong female characters are written often and well. It is, therefore, a genre that should in theory be equally accessible to both men and women, though the majority of the fans I meet tend to be men. This could be due to two things: either the majority of fans are men, or I expect them to be and therefore do not speak to other women about science fiction as often as I do men. Bias is perhaps most difficult to detect in yourself, and therefore I can never really be certain if I am guilty of the latter.

Either way though, the disbelief that I am faced with when expressing my love of science fiction is a reality. A nonsensical one, but a reality nonetheless. What I fail to understand is why it happens. Why do people assume that science fiction fans are men, and that women who enjoy it are an aberration?

The same thing happens with video games, especially of the shooter variety. I'm particularly fond of Team Fortress 2, a game which, as the name implies, relies strongly upon teamwork in online games. Much of this is coordinated via team voice chat, and a reaction I hear all too often is "Where did the girl come from?" "There's a girl here?" "Make me a sandvich!" (The "v" in "sandvich" refers to one of the characters, which can regain health by eating a "sandvich".) Gamers are already an often-marginalized group, and to be further marginalized by them is a rather disheartening experience. I tend to keep quiet now, speaking only when necessary or when I hear another female already in the game.

Both science fiction and video games should appeal to women as strongly as they do to men. They work on ideas that are universal aspects of humanity, not just masculinity or femininity. Despite this, the core fan base is assumed to be male, whether or not it's actually true. I hope that this changes within my lifetime, because men and women alike can look up at the stars and dream of going there themselves. We can look at the Moon and wonder what it would be like to actually live there, or watch a rocket launch and wish that we were on board.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Perhaps my dream is best exemplified by Commander Shepard, the main character of the Mass Effect video game series. Man or woman, Shepard is a strong leader who commands his/her ship, bringing his/her crew through the most difficult of circumstances to eventually save not just Earth, but the entire galaxy. If Shepard happens to be a woman, not one person comments on her gender with any surprise that she is doing what she is doing; her competence is simply accepted as fact. While this was originally an accident of script-writing, most scenes changing nothing but the pronoun with which people referred to Shepard, it served to create one of the strongest female characters ever seen in a video game, and that is a very good thing.

I work again tomorrow. If I have a different drive-thru pseudonym, I'm hoping that this time it's Zoe Washburn, though I wouldn't object to Kathryn Janeway.