Hard on the heels of radical feminist Jessica Valenti admitting she is too insecure and obsessed with how men perceive her to leave the house without makeup, we have a new column in which she cops to wearing skinny jeans and high heels, and isn’t likely to give them up any time soon. This is men’s fault, of course. It’s the big mean patriarchy forcing Jess to whore up every day, and not, you know, her own lack of confidence and fixation on her sexual value. Jess wants, needs to be hot: to make men want to fuck her and make women jealous of her.
It’s good to want things?
Let’s stop for a moment and consider the purpose of high heels and tight jeans. Why do women wear high heels? This was recently the subject of a TED talk, featuring Dan Dennett.
High heels are fashionable, but uncomfortable, and can even lead to chronic foot damage. It doesn’t make sense to favor footwear which harm and hurt feet, plus render it difficult to run from ancient and modern predators.
But if wearing high heels makes women more attractive, allowing them to be more choosy over a larger number of higher quality males competing for their attention, this could explain the evolutionary advantages of this fashion statement.
And what is that advantage? Appearing more attractive and more fuckable. To men. By altering women’s gait, ‘high heels exaggerate the sex-specific aspects of the female walk which could cause sexual arousal in males. The normal stimulus of a woman walking is exaggerated by the wearing of high heels, producing a supernormal stimulus’.
Let’s move on to skinny jeans, which can cause serious nerve damage, because denim does not have a lot of give to it, even when a touch of lycra is added. There’s a bit of stretch, but not much.
Here are eight reasons women love skinny jeans, according to HubPages:
- To attract attention from men
- To make other women jealous
- Peer pressure
- To look skinny
- To show off your legs
- To be fashionable
- To create the perfect outfit
- They feel good
Skinny jeans take all a woman’s wobbly bits and squeeze them into a skinny silhouette – skinny jeans are the more disciplined version of yoga pants. Yoga pants perform the same function, but they are far less forgiving of wobbly bits. Feminists hate yoga pants, because one generally has to be fit to look good in them. Skinny jeans offer a bit more leeway on the fitness front. The historical word for an article of clothing that rigidly contained a woman’s flesh to enforce a particularly desirable form was corset. Ooh, that medieval torture device, imposed on helpless women to meet patriarchal standards of beauty.
Corsets remain popular with a certain segment of the population, and those women engaging in ‘waist-training’ are hopeless dupes of the patriarchy, dontcha know? Silly, stupid women who have bought into the idea, hook line and sinker, that their value lies in the shape of their body. Feminists know that women are more than just that.
Lol!
Apparently not.
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I don’t wear heels. Not ever. End of story. I do wear yoga pants, very often, but skinny jeans are not an item of clothing I own. My jeans are of the Levi’s 501 variety, and they go very nicely with my gold lame ballet flats or my Harley boots. Jessica insists that women who do not wear heels and skinny jeans are women who have ‘let themselves go’.
The simple answer is that hurting our bodies in the name of being beautiful is sometimes easier than the alternative. Because our hurt means at least we’re trying. Women who wear comfortable shoes or ignore fashion in favor of things that feel good on our bodies are women who have “let themselves go” or who don’t “keep themselves up”. For women, aesthetic apathy is a sin worse than ugliness.
Oh, really? Gisele Bundchen begs to differ.
In fact, designer Tom Balanciaga featured only flat shoes because Gisele refused to wear heels.
These women have ‘let themselves go’, have they?
Can’t be sexy in flat shoes? Bullshit.
What do all those women have in common? They’re fit. They don’t need heels to make their legs look long and skinny because their legs are long and skinny. They don’t need to thrust their hips forward to make their abdomens look long and lean. Their abdomens are long and lean. These ladies don’t need corsetry because they clearly spend a lot of time putting down their forks and hitting the gym.
Plenty of women have other priorities than keeping fit, and that’s fine. To each their own. But don’t blame men when you want to appear to be thinner and fitter than you are. Men are not responsible for women’s vanity. The patriarchy doesn’t make women obsessed with their fuckability score. Jessica Valenti desperately wants men to want to fuck her. She needs skinny jeans to compensate for her ass, heels to compensate for the hours she doesn’t spend doing crunches and lipstick to compensate for the years on her face. Men like fit, young women with a large hip to waist ratio. This is universal. Women want to appeal to men. This is also pretty much universal (for heterosexual women). And there is nothing at all wrong with any of that.
The problem is feminists refusing to do the work it takes to look great in flat shoes and comfortable jeans, cramming their asses and feet into painful pants and shoes so they can pretend to be fit, alluring women and then blaming men for their own vanity and laziness. Bitch, please. I would have far more respect for a woman who simply owned it. It’s the hypocrisy that I hate.
One of the things I am often accused of is supporting men and boys only because I crave male attention. Growing up in a house with three brothers and no sisters, surrounded by all their friends from early childhood, I can assure you male attention is not something that was ever in short supply in my life, and it’s still not. I live with my husband and my son, who are both incredibly gregarious and social people, and our home is constantly filled with men and boys, in addition to my friends and my daughter’s friends. It’s raining men where I live. And that’s wonderful. None of that stops critics from sneering at my ‘desperate’ and ‘pathetic’ attempts to get men to notice me and pay attention to me.
Consider this though: between me and Jessica Valenti, one of us gets up every day, dons comfortable clothing and footwear, pulls her hair into a messy bun and leaves the house sans makeup, with a smile for everyone. The other is too afraid of what other people think to leave the house without taming her thighs with nerve-damaging denim, wrestling her feet into distorting and painful heels and painting her face to look younger, healthier and more attractive.
Which one of us craves male attention? Which one of us can’t bear the thought men don’t want to fuck us? Which one of us is so invested in male approval, our health is curtailed? Which one of us is pathetically dependent on the approving glances of men on the street?
Irony: meet Jessica Valenti.
Lots of love,
JB