I thought Friends was slightly more clever than the usual sitcom fare but not particularly. It just seemed to work harder than most.
True story: my mom taught Courtney Cox in the 7th grade. She was called CeeCee back then. When Friends was on the air, one day a bunch of her students asked her if she taught Courtney Cox. She was like ??? How do you know that??? and they were like, she was in a PSA and she talked about you. I have looked and looked for that PSA to show my mom but I can’t find it. Thought it was a The More You Know but it’s not one of those.
In the 1990s the place where I worked still required all women, even those behind the scenes who would never see a customer, to wear a skirt or dress, pantyhose, pumps, and makeup. They also gave gendered holiday gifts to only the women, while allowing the men to choose from a general catalog.
Suits won’t hurt your feet. And if you can find the right suits, they won’t cause your skin to break out in hives. I haven’t been looking, but I don’t think there are the right pantyhose.
Much more range: a suit, or dress pants with a dress shirt and tie, with or without a sweater or vest or blazer. No rules about what kind of socks or shoes other than they needed to be dressy (but could be loafers, or wingtips, or saddle shoes, etc.).
A lot of dress codes hit people with sensory issues, regardless of gender.
I cannot wear a lot of the most common fabrics for dress clothing – depending on both the fibre and the weave or knit, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard (hidden for those who are imaginative and can mentally recreate a distressing sensation from text description alone) but against my skin. I also cannot wear anything around my throat (I think this may be due to a near hanging when I was about a year old), which led to a showdown at one workplace when they decided everybody needed to wear ties. I can’t even do up the top button of a button shirt with a collar, let alone add a noose.
This means that I am restricted mostly to wearing jeans or other very soft and smooth fabrics, which tend to be used in casual clothing (eg denim, jersey knits or flannels) or very expensive clothing (smooth silk, leather and suede). Most standard “office wear” is no go territory for me. I literally cannot afford the cost of a “professional” wardrobe. I am lucky enough to work somewhere that “non-offensive, not sleepwear” is acceptable. Go Union.
I wonder about workplaces with gendered dress codes what happens if you don’t choose a gender, or else choose a different one with clothes you like better. Complaining about your gender wouldn’t get them very far, and laws certainly prevent them from confirming your biological sex.
What bothers me at least as much is that the dress codes are often ethnocentric, and hardly anybody ever remarks upon this. Why should I need to dress in the fashions of a completely different continent? And if so, why not choose dressy clothes from elsewhere? African dress clothes are no more indigenous here than are European ones.
(Yes, HR Directors love me. My previous workplace hired a new one just to deal with me making such cases to them)
I think the French OSS 117 films are so much funnier than Austin Powers and deadlier in their satire of the macho spy genre. I also loved the French series on Netflix, A Very Secret Service, for a smart skewering of machismo and imperialism.
Yeah, not quite as rigorous as for the women, but still rigorous. My current dress code doesn’t even require a button down shirt, let alone a tie or slacks or nice shoes. I rarely wear slacks at all because they itch so much, and I can rarely find shoes in my size.
It’s easy for liberals to decry the hypocrisy of Republicans, the putative party of family values, embracing Trump as its avatar. But there is no real hypocrisy here. The core value is patriarchy, which can take different forms. There is an older patriarchy which wears the mask of chivalry, and offers women protection in exchange for submissiveness. But the age of chivalry is no more. We now have raw patriarchy, which asserts its rights through naked displays of power. And the president, with his porn star mistresses, his boasting of sexual assaults, and even his phallic tweets about the size of his nuclear button, is the perfect leader for conservatives’ post-chivalric world.
I think it’s a bit of both. Things are somewhat different, but lots of this stuff is still pretty taboo to talk about, as we can see with the backlash against Metoo.
You’re hitting on an important point here that often gets ignored. Not all women’s experiences with gender roles are exactly the same. There in fact has never been a time when working class women (especially black working class women) didn’t work. In the 1950s, when being a housewife was what middle class women were expected to do, working class women were still working.
I think that’s true, but they also ignored working class women, too. And black women. The second wave had some important points, but they also missed a hell of a lot… and for many of these second wavers, their daughters ended up having to pick up the home slack when they were working. But again, working class young women always had to pick up the slack at home.
We can learn all we want… but until men also acknowledge, listen, and learn, we’ll keep running into this same brick wall where we end up doing double-duty and being excoriated for it.
I disagree… just like it’s not up to black people to dismantle for white people racism over and above what they’ve already done, it’s up to men to make changes in their own lives and in masculinity more generally. Men have to be part of the change and at the forefront of it, or we’ll keep being on this merry-go-round for another generation. Men have to be willing to share power, share responsibility, share the effort of changing the world, change themselves, or nothing will change.
I know.
I have a book by Bergen Evans from the 1940s in which he remarks how tiny is the circle of firelight in which modernity exists (he’s talking about why superstition and really bad ideas persist). I wrote that post after reading a really depressing series of posts on Engadget about the lack of women in STEM, regurgitating the old rubbish, cherry picked statistics and so on, how women didn’t really want difficult jobs, given a chance they would all want the nice jobs, no women miners or plumbers, ad nauseam. These people have enough intelligence to log in to a website and write posts in fairly acceptable English but they seem to be only a small stage advanced on the Taliban.
So please take my comment as what it was, a somewhat despairing remark.
Slavery in the US did not end because the slave owners became more aware. It ended for a lot of reasons, one of which was that the British saw that abolition could be used against the United States in the War of Independence and during the Napoleonic Wars, and one of which was that slavery was simply inefficient - a lesson the Prussians did not learn until 1945. Racism in the strict sense seems endemic in parts of US society (he says based on time spent in the Mid-West) in a way it isn’t in Europe, whereas I get the impression that the white people trying to combat it are mainly younger, urban people. The racists, if they are dying out, are a long time a-dying. In fact, currently they feel they are winning again.
So while I entirely agree with the point you are making, if we are going to have to wait for the majority of men to change, we may have to wait long beyond my lifetime.
The silence on the left is easily explained by scandal overload.
No, in my case it’s because I’m sex positive. I see nothing wrong with the porn industry or sex work, to the extent that I think prostitution ought to be legal nationwide. I also think what a politician does in their private life should stay private, as long as it does not affect their ability to do their job, and as long as it is between consenting adults. IMO extramarital sex can be okay, under certain conditions, and extramarital cheating can be a scumbag move but is a far cry from rape or sexual assault.
Then again, I’m on the left, not a Democrat.
It’s easy for liberals to decry the hypocrisy of Republicans, the putative party of family values, embracing Trump as its avatar. But there is no real hypocrisy here. The core value is patriarchy, which can take different forms. There is an older patriarchy which wears the mask of chivalry, and offers women protection in exchange for submissiveness. But the age of chivalry is no more. We now have raw patriarchy, which asserts its rights through naked displays of power. And the president, with his porn star mistresses, his boasting of sexual assaults, and even his phallic tweets about the size of his nuclear button, is the perfect leader for conservatives’ post-chivalric world.
Can we just agree that the Republican party has no moral compass, and runs mainly on tribalism and unrestrained id?
It’s not up to black people to do that, but it’s what’s happening. Look at movements like Black Lives Matter. Don’t expect the dudebros to carry the banner for that movement.
I actually expect them to ignore it entirely, but I’m a bit pessimistic…
