Resisting femininity experiment - who's in?

[sethstarkaddersmackerel]

I was thought-provoked by the 'I'm a feminist but....' thread, particularly Dittany's posts, in which she talked about women who choose not to 'perform femininity'.

I posted on the other thread that I hugely object to all that bikini-line business but do still shave my legs. Am not sure why I do this, so I think I'm going to stop and see how it feels. It felt like a major issue when I was 20 or so but I actually suspect not shaving them now would make me feel more, rather than less, confident.

So I wondered if anyone else was thinking about giving up any beauty practices or other elements of compulsory femininity and would like to do it together and see how it feels.

this is not a competition - if you decide after a day you hate it and can't live without it, fine, but it would be really interesting to hear about, and I think it could advance our understanding of how this all works.

anyone else in?

btw, I am in a vile mood today so if anyone wants to come along to the thread and tell us we are just falling into the trap of thinking all feminists have to have hairy legs, or that actually they wax everything and are a still better feminist than meeeee, I will tell them to fuck off because if you don't 'get' this I can't be bothered explaining, either you get it or you don't

I've never had a single thing waxed. Maybe I can be a control in our grand experiment.

Ooo the latter. That sounds way better. Sure I'll sign that, if you can get it past the ethics committee...

I bet there is someone, somewhere on Mumsnet who knows how to do that.

Although how will we know that the grafting process results in the same level of feeling in the the male leg?

SAF, a little while ago you suggested people with male partners pull their leg hairs to see how much it hurts them. I really can't believe you are suggesting behaviour like this - just goes to show how feminists have such warped ethical standards -

don't you remember? women don't touch men's legs

'after i've held my head high and said i like it i feel bizarrely respected by them.'

Result!!!!!!!

Still yeti-legged here. I am finding this experiment quite fascinating and it is really causing me to evaluate what I do and don't do (and will or won't in the future) in the name of femininity and acceptance in the wider world. I know I will shave my legs when I start to get them out as the weather warms. My hair is thick and dark and my skin is fair. I have found my line. The difference this year is that I won't have in the back of my mind that I need to be hairless all the time. I won't feel "less than" if I have a bit of stubble even under trousers. I won't stop doing anything if I haven't had the time or the inclination to depilate. Because, to my shame, in the past I have declined going swimming because I have not seen to my bikini line, for example. How crazy is that? Also fairly narcissistic, I think.

I just read this on I Blame The Patriarchy

"So do you get kicked off the Island if you perform femininity? Dang, whaddya take me for, some kinda radical feminist? That would be messed up. I?m a spinster aunt, goddammit, and we fucking love everybody. I merely urge women to engage in the intellectual exercise of examining femininity: how much of the gottadoo is really gotta, and how much is actually wanna. The femininity-bagging suggestion is not, as this blamer surmised, that women endanger the lives of their sick children by appearing so unfeminine that their boss fires them and they lose their health insurance. The suggestion is that women pause in their daily sashay through Mansworld to evaluate their feminine personae. You know, really give it the old analytical eye. Which appeasements really are literally necessary for literal survival, and which are maybe just gratuitous expressions of internalized misogyny? The idea is to ditch as much of it as is possible without getting anyone killed. That this might trespass a bit on your personal comfort is sort of the point. No pain, no gain. The revolution begins at home. Etc."

That sums up this experiment for me.

The thing about waxing/epilating/threading is that they do hurt a lot on the first attempt but it gets better after that and once you do it regularly it isn't painful at all. I know that isn't really the main point, but just wanted to point out to those who tried it once and are horrified at the thought of women inflicting such pain on themselves regularly. Agree though that men aren't and wouldn't be expected to inflict such pain on themselves even once, not for such a reason as this anyway! And many women would probably still do it even if it was extremely painful every time...

it certainly wasn't my experience that it stopped hurting.
it gets better, partly because you get better at doing it. Maybe if you do it every 3 weeks for years it stops hurting entirely but I did it slightly less often than that for several years and it certainly never became painless. It becomes less of a big deal but surely that's to do with learning to cope with it, like with childbirth when the first one is not only typically worse but also a horrendous shock but after a few goes you know what's coming and that you can handle it so it's less scary.

I was thinking about the fact that men do all this stuff more than they used to and I have decided that this is not something we should take into account: isn't it after all completely anti-feminist to be influenced by what men do? If we have decided something is silly, that's a decision we can make by ourselves.

If it really ceases to be painful, then that would suggest a desensitisation of the legs, surely. Which doesn't sound great to me. Especially as ladies legs are designed to be touched

right. this thread has completely thrown me off track. from a 40 year old who's never waxed, shaves legs and pits about twice a year, doesn't wear make-up but does dye grey hair, i've just spent an hour googling frigging judi dench to work out what i can do with my hair so that i can stop bloody dyeing it. i was doing ok. fine, even.

i am even, even, even contemplating starting a freaking thread in style and bastard beauty to ask for ideas about styles.

ffs.

rofl @ this thread spawning threads in Style and Beauty!

it isn't a contradiction though; if cutting your hair nicely means you can feel comfortably able to ditch a beauty practice (hair dye) which you find particularly burdensome or which feels wrong to you, then it's the way to go.

personally dyeing hair to cover is one of my lines in the sand - ie something I won't do - because it is so tied up with not valuing women as they get older, so going grey naturally is important to me.

plus I really think that obsessive covering of grey can end up looking a bit desperate and eager-to-please and grey is a nice flattering colour anyway.