You Better Shop Around, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

May 10, 2014 Martha Thomases 4 Comments

In this column, I’m going to put together several recent stories in the news that might not, at first, seem to go together.  It’s possible that by explaining why I’m putting them together, I might seem to trivialize one (or two) of the stories that are really important.  I’ll try not to.  It’s not my intent.  Don’t read this in that tone of voice.  When you speak of this (and you will), be kind.

(Wow, I can be really, really defensive, can’t I?)

You have probably heard about the kidnapped girls in Nigeria.  Really hard-core radical Islamists, so extreme they embarrass Al Qaeda, decided to demonstrate their opposition to educating women by kidnapping more than 200 of them.  They are threatening to sell these women (or forcibly marry them to strangers, which is essentially the same thing, except, you know, marriage is a sacrament).

We only hear about this because some people, who are much more sophisticated about social media than I am, made a fuss on Twitter and Facebook.  Otherwise, our news media would most likely have ignored the story.  This is a part of the world where slavery/forced marriage is commonplace, and yet that story has not been regularly on the news programs I watch, nor the print media I read.

These Nigerian students, just because they are female, are targeted by reactionary fundamentalists.  To them, women are not fully human.  They exist to make men’s lives easier, more pleasant or, at the very least, provide someone to whom the men can feel superior.  Anything else is heresy.

But those are savages, we Americans think, smugly.  That can’t happen here.

Except it does.  Every time an issue arises that impacts the quality of women’s lives, we are subjected to cries of alarm.  Equal pay for equal work?  We can’t have that, or men will feel threatened.  Women won’t get married.  And a woman must get married or she won’t have a man to take care of her.  A woman who doesn’t get married isn’t entitled to a middle class life.

Women exist, ultimately, to be pretty and sweet and take care of their men.  She must devote hours of her day to presenting herself in a way that pleases men.  This doesn’t simply mean being clean and healthy.  She must also alter her appearance with make-up.  As the article says, “Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford and author of The Beauty Bias, has made even stronger statements on the topic. Makeup expectations, particularly in the workplace, are ‘about gender subordination,’ she said. ‘Women are subject to much more rigorous standards for their appearance.’ … In Silicon Valley, top male tech entrepreneurs can get away with shoddy grooming, jeans and T-shirts, she said, while women like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer appear in full makeup. ‘There’s an assumption that a woman is somehow less professional if she doesn’t wear any makeup at work,’ Ms. Rhode said. ‘But it’s really women being subject to a double standard. They are faulted for caring too much or not enough. Either they ‘let themselves go’ or are ‘vain and narcissistic.’ ”

If you like to wear make-up, that’s fine.  I do, too, sometimes.  The two or three times a year I put it on, I feel extra festive.  I tend to put on make-up to feel like I’m dressed up, however, not to make myself presentable.  Maybe that’s an arbitrary distinction.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that feeling pressured to wear make-up is the same thing as being sold into slavery.

However, I’m not on the market.  I never feel like I’m wrapping myself up for auction. I’m aware, however, that lots of girls and women do feel like that when they leave their homes.  We feel judged and appraised for the way we present themselves.

We may get to go to school, but we never get to forget that men sit in judgment every single day.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases is judging you back.