Should Feminism Be Going Out Of Fashion?

If you're a male feminist the majority of your time should be spent listening and learning. This much is obvious- you can't join a movement for the liberation of a group without taking the lead from them, or terrible things happen. Most of the time, I'm happy to do this, much as keeping quiet has never been something I'm good at. What happens when you think you can do better, though? The answer is that you probably can't. It's not impossible, but you still probably can't. Forget about it, whatever it is. Mansplaining is no fun for anyone. Yes, alright, but this one has been on my mind for a while, and I'm going to throw it out there and see what happens. Deep breath. I think there's a massive elephant in the room that feminists aren't talking about and it's wearing a £5000 ballgown.

By which I mean, we aren't talking about the fashion industry, and I don't know why. Yes, we are talking about the fashion industry in its individual scandals and misdemeanours - size zero, airbrushing and what have you. But why is no one asking why the hell the entire thing exists? Is anyone really surprised that we live in a society that exerts all kinds of regressive pressures on women based on how they look and what they should aspire to be when there's still this massive great big industry that can be traced directly back to the time when the assumption was that women were there to look pretty? It's just been a given all my life that the "women" pages of a newspaper, even broadsheet ones, feature lots of pictures of women in dresses. Indeed, Hadley Freeman, the Guardian columnist, had a section in her feminist book Be Awesome in which she played out her guilt in covering the world of fashion in the form of a dialogue between two parts of her psyche. Sadly I don't have the book to hand so can't quote but I couldn't make head or tail of it. Clearly this woman is perfectly aware of the awfulness of the industry she is playing into the hands of. Even with a raised eyebrow for all the ironic guilty pleasure readers, she's still aware that she's feeding the monster. Why is she unable, then, to just come out and admit that it has no place in a modern world in which looks shouldn't matter for either gender, but definitely shouldn't matter for one more than the other? Is the conclusion just too horrible to deal with?

Ahaha, look at us, disproportionately caring about

what women look like in 2014. What are we like?

I genuinely don't understand. Thing is, since reading sites like Jezebel as my own guilty pleasure, I've come to terms with the fact that many female feminists also really like fashion. The masthead for Jezebel reads Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing, which strikes me as disingenuous - surely you are going to get airbrushing and other excesses if you accept the norm that women (almost exclusively women) are by definition really interested in how other women look? I know from my feminist friends that many really do genuinely love clothes culture - many like style, enjoy a good clothes shop and have a look all to themself. What I don't understand is how anyone can square this, given that women liking clothes is a gender stereotype associated with passivity and prettification, with the world they want to live in.

Maybe it wasn't always this way. I remember Zadie Smith saying at a talk that she was glad she grew up in the late eighties when girls without a sense of style could get by with an androgynous mix of Doc Martens and check shirts. This could be very stylish still, but it could also be an opt-out for those who just didn't want to play the dress-up game. Now, however, it seems to be assumed that if you are female you'll like dresses to some degree. I wonder if the interest of even generally progressive female-friendly sites like ONTD in matters of clothing and red carpets and catwalks is causing women who would otherwise just not be interested to feel like they have to be a part of it. If even the feminists like fashion, after all, it must just be integral to being female! The football analogy is sometimes made for men, and indeed while I did feel like I had to like football for my primary school years, and keep "Liverpool" as bullshit default response when challenged as to who I support to this day, by the age of ten I felt fine about not liking football. I'm not sure it's as easy for girls with clothes.

Vod: an excellent role model for girls.

Not that there's anything wrong with liking clothes per se. I love the idea of clothes as a celebration. I myself love dressing up, especially in drag, for a special occasion - decoration and creativity are excellent endeavours to get involved in. It took a teenage girlfriend to teach me that - before I had scorned her interest in fashion until I realised she genuinely loved the creative process involved in fashioning an outfit. And I am all too aware of the male tendency to dismiss fashion as a legitimate creative art. You need only look at the number of times the Royal Wedding Dress article was deleted from Wikipedia as insufficiently important (when obscure Spider Man villains get long detailed pages) to see the contempt in which many men hold the whole thing. But I think of it like I think of makeup on women: it's great as a celebration for a special occasion, for embellishment of a "look" or for playing plague victims in stage adaptations of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. This all should exactly equally true for guys. But when it becomes necessary to even step outside the house, there are serious societal problems going on.

Makeup should also have the power to turn you into a genius

 pianist-satirist-rationalist, but that might be wishful thinking.

Similarly, the extent to which fashion still holds sway over what we believe to be "women's interests" worries me, because you still have the cleavage of "men are interested in sport and cars and doing things, women are interested in looking pretty" bubbling under the surface of everyday life. I have no problem with fashion being an interest, but something with the enormous compulsory gravitational pull it exerts, backed up by a kid culture drowning in pink and princesses, worries me deeply. And feminists are doing nothing about it. Oh, they might claim the fashion they are into is higher class, that it's a guilty pleasure, that fashion doesn't have to mean anorexic models and consumerist bilge, but can they really look into their hearts and say that the standard issue of OK stuffed full of body shaming isn't connected to the mass-culture assumption that women's stuff is clothes and bodies stuff? And that they aren't buying into that culture with their clicks and clothing purchases? And can they really look their daughters in the eye when they discourage them from buying into princess culture after all the blogs and magazines and guilty pleasures they have consumed featuring what is little more than an adult dress-up game?

I'm not denying it's a tough issue, because I know just how much fashion, whether in magazines or what they put together themselves, means to my friends. I can only say this due to my privilege as someone who has never been forced to deal with the issue one way or the other. By my nature I'm critiquing from the outside. But sometimes that is necessary. My fear is that feminism has become so afraid of looking puritan and joyless and so many of its adherents just liked clothes and catwalks anyway that it has abandoned the issue at the root of everything to do with Page 3 and body shaming and princesses and airbrushing: women are still seen as dolls to be dressed up and be looked at, and women themselves are buying into it. Basically feminism has failed to create a new image of femininity that breaks the habit of clothes addiction.

Of course, you could argue that the solution to all of this is to create a new image of masculinity that simply embraces clothes as much as women do. But if men and women had had equality for the last four centuries, do we really imagine that men would be as interested in fashion as women are now? Given that neither gender would have spent very much time sitting around and being pretty, I suspect not.

I may be wrong about all this. I may be mansplaining. But I just don't don't get why this isn't an issue. And if you want a question answered, you've got to ask it first.

Now, before you accuse me of having an agenda to androgynise clothing to the point

 where more women look like Janelle Monae, let me assure you that is NOT the case.