As the issue of women’s dress codes in workplaces gains traction – with one woman’s petition to make it illegal for employers to mandate high heels for women attracting almost 134,000 signatures in the UK, and photos of a waitress’s bleeding feet after being forced to work her shift in high heels going viral – Grace Dent writing for The Independent has gone public with her disgust for ‘millennial feminism’, declaring that she’d rather join the patriarchy.
Bravo, Ms Dent. It takes a certain kind of courage to openly support patriarchy because women no longer want to be forced to wear foot-torture devices throughout their work days.
And by ‘courage’, I mean ‘painful ignorance’.
I am not lampooning the wearing of high-heels per se, but there is a huge difference between wearing them for a couple of hours on a night-out (with a pair of flats in my bag for when my feet inevitably start aching), and being forced by your chauvinistic employer to wear them all day, every day at work for no discernible reason.
Ms Dent wishes we’d untwist our knickers, however, because things are more or less equal between the genders. She cites the fact that men are often required to wear suits at work that are “uncomfortable, hot, and tediously traditional”.
I guess she’s forgotten that a lot of us women have actually worn suits of one kind or another, and therefore are in a perfect position to call out this laughably false equivalence.
Ms Dent, would you point us to studies showing that suits contribute to back, foot, knee, or ankle problems in their wearers? How about stories about suits leading to bleeding, swelling, cramps, or any other kind of physical pain? Because Google has thrown up precious little, and at this point I am truly intrigued. You are obviously an expert in the terrible consequences of wearing suits, please enlighten us, the way you did with this gem of a paragraph in which you explain how wearing makeup when representing a company is simply a thing women must do.
You’ll need to cover your spots with foundation, wear mascara, stick some blusher on to make you look alive at 9.15 am, put your hair out of your face, smell fragrant and wear something your Aunty Glenda would recognise as ‘smart’.
Because as we all know women are hideous trolls who must do everything in their power to avoid horrifying the general public with their natural visages, whilst men are glowing dewdrops whose faces are carved from the perfect glutes of Adonis himself.
The tone of this article is so depressingly defeatist that I double checked the date in case I had unknowingly time-travelled back to the 1920s.
The subtext throughout is this:
Girls, this is just how the world is... why are you wasting time signing petitions when you could be capitulating quietly? Look at the men... look at them! They’re not complaining!
My dear, sweet, Grace... it seems you’ve missed the point of feminism entirely. And that is why none of us are surprised that you are renouncing the sisterhood. A woman who goes around belittling other women protesting being ‘groped at gigs’ simply because she herself quite enjoyed being groped when she was 16 (seriously), is not a woman any of us want representing feminism.
So thanks for the thought, but we’ll continue signing our petitions (which, by the way, now has enough signatures to qualify for debate in the UK Parliament) and making a big deal out of our bodies being commodified and groped by strangers.
Meanwhile, I invite you to visit New Delhi and get on the general compartment in the Metro at rush hour. You’ll get all the groping you could possibly want, the gropers will undoubtedly be happy for the opportunity, and every other woman there will be glad for the buffer – it’s a win-win-win. And if this doesn’t sound appealing to you, maybe, just maybe, you’ll begin to finally get the point.
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