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.