The Culture Wars, Then and Now |
6 |
It has been over fifty years since the confluence of youth culture, sexual revolution, and civil rights activism set the culture wars in motion. Judging by the present state of affairs, it may be another half century before the many questions raised in the 1960s are finally resolved. I wrote the bulk of this book in 2013, a year punctuated with important fiftieth-anniversary observations. The year 1963 was a watershed. It was the year that brought us the Beatles, The Feminine Mystique, the Great March on Washington, and the Kennedy assassination. The teenagers of 1963 are in their sixties now but still arguing about many of the same contentious issues that have occupied us since junior high. Commentators originally attributed the rifts in our society to the perennial conflict between youth and age, but the generation gap has faded with the passing of our own grandparents and parents. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the culture warriors and they are us.
In the preceding chapters I have described the major battlegrounds as revealed through dress. In this chapter I use the same lens to examine what our current gender controversies and quandaries owe to the unfinished business of the sexual revolution. Finally, I ponder what may lie ahead.
The civil rights battles of the 1960s were not new nor were they just about race. They were the result of struggles dating back to the earliest years of European colonization. The ideal of equality, articulated in the Declaration of Independence, has a long, contentious history of claims by different classes, races, and nationalities, believers, and nonbelievers. Our country’s history has been one of gradual expansion of civil rights, though not without tensions, resistance, and conflict. It also includes women, gays, lesbians, and, most recently, transpeople. To claim that the principles of equality and civil rights cannot be linked to sex, gender, or sexuality, particularly since the 1960s, is disingenuous and false.
The rise of second-wave feminism was certainly connected to the larger civil rights movement, sometimes in solidarity but frequently in tension fueled by the perspectives and agendas of women of different races and classes. Mix in the sexual revolution, timed to coincide with the adolescence of a demographic wave of unprecedented size and affluence, and the stage was set for cultural upheaval. Beginning in the mid-1960s all of the questions and tensions surrounding gender and sexuality were played out among factions that may seem to have been well defined. Closer examination reveals that individuals within those factions varied considerably, and movement between positions was more fluid, especially in the beginning. Dress continues to be a valuable lens for making identity-based conflict visible, because it is so intimately tied to our public and private selves. Fashion provides a means of keeping up with kaleidoscopic change. This project has focused on gender identities and expression, but there is also endless opportunity for other researchers to use the same approach to examine race, age, and other dimensions of difference and connection.
In our consumer society the marketplace is where most of us must go to literally materialize our lives. Clothing and accessory manufacturers can’t provide every possible variation or every color in the visible spectrum. They restrict themselves to their own best guesses as to what will profit them. Whether we feel comfortable or uncomfortable in current trends depends on how well we fit the composite customer in the manufacturer’s imagination. Advertising and branding are designed to help us envision ourselves as that imaginary consumer. If you experience no friction between your desires and the ideal lifestyles depicted in popular media, you are likely to be satisfied with the available options. If you do not see yourself in the glossy ads or share in the fantasies they promote, you are more inclined to notice the places where our culture chafes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the instability and variety of popular styles meant consumers had an unprecedented opportunity to match their outsides to their insides, or their lifestyles to their lives. This may have been exhilarating to young consumers, who were eager to try on new looks and identities, but manufacturers and retailers were less happy. From season to season they gambled on trends ranging from Nehru jackets and turtlenecks to polyester double knits and designer jeans. Some of these innovations reflected permanent changes in cultural patterns; others turned out to be short-lived fads. The fads, particularly the most popular ones, should no more be dismissed as trivial than should major shifts such as the acceptance of trousers for women or the mainstreaming of jeans. All of them represented possibilities that seemed plausible to someone, at some point.
The sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement affected people of all ages across the spectrums of gender identity and sexual orientation. After all, so much of the way sex and gender are conceived and expressed in our culture is in terms of relationships between opposites or complements. Without a commonly understood gender binary, there can be no unisex or androgyny. Advocates for cultural change recognize this, and so do those who oppose any alteration in traditional gender roles or sexual mores.
In the battle between second-wave feminists and antifeminists in the 1970s, the conservatives were by far more organized and, ultimately, more successful, slowing down the political and economic progress that were the primary goals of second-wave feminism. If there was a moment when the wind shifted, it was at the November 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Gloria Steinem claimed that the gathering would be a constitutional convention for American women, a setting for consolidating their demands for political and economic equality. The conference program lists the group’s demands, including steps to move women into positions of power and influence. The conference also planned to recommend that the federal government assume a major role in providing “bias-free nonsexist quality child care.”1 That was what was supposed to happen. Instead, antifeminists took over the nominating process for the Houston conference. Conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly organized busloads of women opposed to the ERA who registered on voting day, elected a conservative delegation, and then left. By the time everyone got to Houston, antifeminist women controlled about 20 percent of the seats at the conference. Throughout the three-day conference there were pro-family rallies across the city attracting attention and distracting from the business of the meeting. “Houston will finish off the women’s movement,” Schlafly said. “It will show them off for the radical anti-family pro-lesbian people they are.”2 While it was not the end of the women’s movement, the 1977 conference marked the high mark of progress on many feminist initiatives. They were able to win a three-year extension of the deadline for ratification of the ERA but not much else, and the ERA failed to reach ratification by 1982. As sociologist Philip Cohen has pointed out, the growth in women’s employment rates stalled in the 1990s, especially those of married women with young children.3
But Schlafly and antifeminist conservatives were not alone in their objections to the direction of cultural change. There were fissures and factions within the women’s movement as well. Although right-wing pundits have been depicting feminists as a single bloc for years, feminists from the very beginning varied widely in their interests and arguments and did not agree on objective or tactics. Cultural feminists, for example, sought to elevate what they perceived as women’s unique capacities. For cultural feminists the problem with the gender binary was the power structure, not the categories. It was possible to embrace motherhood and equality; women in power would bring a “feminine essence” to balance masculine tendencies. Liberal feminists emphasized political and legal reform such as reproductive and abortion rights, while radical feminists argued that significant change required changes to the root of the problem, identified as oppressive patriarchal social structures. Many black feminists objected to the assumption that race could be disentangled from gender and class and criticized much of the liberal and cultural feminist agendas as narrow and elitist.4 Between internal and external criticism of the women’s movement, it is not surprising that progress has been slow over the past fifty years. Examining the fashions of the 1960s and ’70s provides some insight into what the larger public was experiencing beyond the activists on the front lines.
For at least the past two and a half centuries, men’s and women’s clothing has been growing farther apart visually, even as women gained access to higher education and the franchise. Though baby and toddler clothing lagged behind this slow wave of gendering, even this last category of dress has divided more and more sharply into masculine and feminine styles. Scholars have been trying to explain this trend for more than a century from dozens of disciplinary perspectives. Until we are locked in one room and forced to arrive at a unified theory of gender expression, there won’t be a definitive answer to why clothing styles persist in being gendered as male or female, even in the face of increasing economic, social, and political equality. For now, here is my best attempt: this pattern parallels the rise of individualism and of a culture that ties identity to consumption. Sex is one of our most basic identifiers, and until just recently it has been understood as a very clear binary. This pattern extended to individuals whose appearance or behavior did not fit into either category, who were commonly described in binary terms (effeminate gays, mannish lesbians, “shemales,” and so on), and were considered at best abnormal and at worst immoral. Mainstream fashion reflected that underlying model and served as a vehicle for expressing one’s individuality within well-established rules for masculinity or femininity, as appropriate—that is, until the 1960s.
Consider again the environmental science concept of punctuated equilibrium, which posits an evolutionary process of periods of dramatic change followed by periods of recovery, allowing for ecological adjustment. I believe the cultural equivalent of punctuated equilibrium is evident in the 1960s and ’70s. After a short, anxious period of dizzying change around 1966–1969, the early 1970s ushered in a revival of classic styling, nostalgic escapism, and a superficial truce in the gender wars. For some there was a sense that progress had been made; women were making gains in the workplace, sports, and higher education, and gays and lesbians were living more open lives, especially in politically liberal parts of the country. But in more conservative quarters, those who were uncomfortable or hostile to gender equity and gay rights, sensing that progress had been stretched to the limit, continued their efforts to organize resistance and rebuild barriers. The study of dress since the late 1970s suggests that the tide of liberation was receding, and until just recently there were signs that we have settled back into a more gendered and restrictive status quo. Rather than see this pattern as cyclical, I see it as evidence that we are still working through the questions raised fifty years ago as individuals and as a society.
Adults now in their forties, who were children during the early years of the gender revolution, have played an important role in the gendering of children’s clothing in the 1980s and 1990s. Raised on Free to Be . . . You and Me and William’s Doll, these older Generation Xers traded their own neutral fashions in a nostalgic return to “classic” styles as they entered adolescence and then adulthood in the late 1970s and early ’80s. As they became parents they began to influence baby clothing. Between 1980 and 1990 the proportion of births to first-time parents shifted from baby boomers and Generation Xers; the availability of neutral styles for infants plummeted between 1984 and 1986 and has stayed low until very recently.5 The 1970s girl who had worn plain corduroy overalls over a striped turtleneck grew up dressing her own daughter in pastels and ruffles and adding a stretchy headband to the outfit when they went to the mall, just to make sure everyone knew the baby was female. Hair ribbons and barrettes for infants took the children’s accessories industry by storm in 1988, signaling the end of unisex in infants’ clothing.6 Across a cross-section of retailers from mass-market catalogs to designer boutiques, infant clothing departments offered more gender-specific styles and fewer neutral options. Even in newborn sizes boys’ clothing was not simply blue, but was blue with masculine motifs such as trucks or footballs, and the last traditional “baby” elements, such as round collars and smocking, were eliminated from infant and toddler boys’ fashions.
How did this happen? As I explained in chapter 4, it may have initially been a reaction to the experience of wearing unisex styles as children, especially for children whose gender identity was still taking shape or who felt more keenly the deprivation of gendered clothing and toys. (Whether the loudest cries for weapons or Barbies came from tots with strong or weak gender identities, I will leave to the psychologists.) Certainly the connection between cultural environment and gender identity development is far from being understood. When girls began to wear pants to school in the 1970s, there were studies suggesting that girls who wore pants were more active during recess than girls who wore skirts or dresses. Later research introduced a wrinkle: girls who wore pants were perceived by their peers as more active, even when they weren’t.7 The relationship between highly feminized play clothes and girls’ freedom to romp and get dirty is still unclear, but we do know that gendered clothing is an effective vehicle for encouraging stereotyped expectations. The more children’s clothing has branched into distinctly masculine and feminine styles, and the fewer neutral options there are, the easier it is to attach those same labels to children, even when they are just a few weeks old. This may make it even more challenging for today’s young parents and teachers to avoid essentializing children, because gender stereotypes might seem more natural to them.
The sharp gendering of children’s clothing has created friction for children who do not fit easily into pink and blue boxes. Every few months there is a new story about a boy who dresses like a girl, a girl who dresses like a boy, or a boy who likes pink nail polish, setting off a new round of claims, counterclaims, and controversy. Many of these stories are told by their parents in clear efforts to challenge prevailing gender norms and to reach out to other parents in similar circumstances. Blogger Sarah Hoffman explained, “I started writing about my son because I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a pink boy. I think being pink is just a natural variation of being a human being. I wanted to let other parents, doctors, teachers, and families of pink boys know that there are other pink boys out there—boys who struggle with the same sorts of things, with families who strive to support them in all their sparkly glory.”8
This is in sharp contrast to the generations of “gender-nonconforming” children, mostly boys, who were quietly taken to therapists. Psychologists and social workers themselves have disagreed in their approach to these children, with some taking the relatively new approach of supporting kids wanting to live openly as members of the opposite sex. Others encourage kids to discard their more pronounced behaviors, explore new interests, and embrace the gender associated with their biological sex. Many therapists take the middle ground by accepting a boy’s desire to wear dresses and saying it’s fine for him to do so at home, but strongly discouraging him from wearing them to school, where he might encounter unpleasant responses or even bullying.
At the center of the issue is the connection, still not yet completely understood, between gender identity and adult sexual orientation. “I think parents are very worried and confused and there isn’t clear-cut advice,” says Ellen Perrin, chief of developmental-behavioral pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. “It’s a complex issue.”9 Parents wonder if their child will someday want sexual reassignment surgery; the answer is probably not. According to years of study, most gender-variant children (between 85 and 90 percent) grow up quite content with their biological sex. Will gender-variant children grow up gay? For boys that is more likely, though still not a sure thing. In contrast only about one-third of gender-variant girls later identify as lesbian or bisexual.10
But it’s not just parents of gender-variant kids who are trying to break out of the binary. Around the globe, parents are once more attempting to raise ungendered children, and their stories echo the messages of the unisex era. Nearly always there is a loud negative reaction from critics who see them as foolish, misguided, or even abusive. But with every one of these stories, the ranks of defenders increase, many of them children of the 1980s looking for alternatives to highly gendered clothing and toys for their own offspring. As I write this in 2013, there is not only more resistance, including more parents choosing not to know their unborn baby’s sex, but there are also more neutral clothing options on the market. Most of the alternatives come from online retailers, many of them small businesses, not the mass merchants of children’s fashion. Consumers are also pushing back against gendered toys and books—and winning. When thirteen-year-old McKenna Pope organized a Change.org petition to ask Hasbro for a ungendered version of the classic Easy-Bake Oven, the manufacturer unveiled plans for a black and silver version.11
Mainstream women’s fashions today show little evidence of the unisex era. The clothing changes that accompanied the women’s movement beyond the acceptance of pants were subtle, not revolutionary, and the resilience of beauty culture and “traditional” feminine styling has puzzled many gender scholars. In 1977 John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success for Women offered a means by which women could secure their places in business and politics. Some of his advice seems antiquated today—his warnings that pants-wearing women might be too threatening to male bosses, for example. But overall Molloy was suggesting only that women pay attention to the rules that men had learned to observe in the workplace: focus on the job, not on the clothes. The themes in his advice for women were little different from his recommendations for men: invest in well-made clothing in classic styles that will last for years; save the flash and fun for leisure. Women’s business styles followed the Molloy prescription through the early 1980s and then drifted into familiar old territory. The conflict between women’s desire to be taken seriously as students, workers, and athletes and the importance of an attractive appearance was never completely resolved. They followed the current trends in silhouette and skirt length. They incorporated softer fabrics and this season’s colors. Suits lost their importance when dresses made a comeback, and the simple blazer suit took a backseat to trendy cuts and fabrics.
Of the three primary strands of advice for women in the early 1960s—from Friedan, Brown, and Andelin—Helen Gurley Brown’s vision of sexual liberation seemed to have gained the most traction, as women’s clothing, even in the workplace, has continued to focus on physical attraction as the most important element in femininity. The other two philosophies—feminism and antifeminism—have been battling each other for dominance for fifty years, leaving the marketplace clear for what I’ll call “cosmofeminism,” in honor of Helen Gurley Brown’s longtime leadership of Cosmopolitan. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, cosmofeminism was the likeliest vehicle for business success. Many second-wave feminists were hostile to fashion, when they considered it at all. Although the stereotypes of hairy-legged, frumpy “women’s libbers” are both unfair and false, the truth is that the movement didn’t lend itself to commodification, nor did it wish to do so. Ms. magazine was no handmaiden to commerce, having refused advertising its publishers considered “insulting or harmful to women” for its first fifteen years and being essentially ad-free since 1991. The conservative antifeminist movement also focused more on political action than on fashion and beauty and, consequently, has had little direct influence on fashion. Ironically, both of these forces helped propel the popularity of cosmofeminist dressing for women and girls, though probably inadvertently. New generations of feminists have reclaimed makeup and high heels along with other feminine elements once rejected by their mothers and grandmothers. In 2013 the Financial Times reported that “feminism is back in fashion,” quoting current Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles as an example of the trend: “Probably the most feminist thing I have in my own closet this season are Tamara Mellon’s genius, sexy, hugely practical legging boots, which pull on in one easy movement. . . . Women want fashion to keep up with the speed of their lives.”12 Coles, born in that banner year 1963, has not only claimed that Cosmopolitan is “deeply feminist” but also that it has done more for women’s rights than feminist academics.13
Conservative antifeminists see gendered clothing as a natural expression of innate and essential differences between men and women. Although Helen Andelin died in 2009, Fascinating Womanhood’s legacy lives on in local club chapters, online classes, and even a Facebook group. The rise of conservative religion has complicated the advice given as observant Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women struggle to balance the demands of modesty and femininity in a consumer culture where sexiness seems so essential in female fashions. In fact concern about the conflation of “feminine” and “sexy” is one point of agreement across the feminist-antifeminist spectrum, especially as it affects girls.
Compared to the fashions of the 1950s and early 1960s, today’s clothing for women, including girls in their teens and even younger, is more revealing and more focused on sexual attraction (or objectification, if you prefer). Cleavage, once relegated to beach, ballroom, and boudoir, is visible in classroom and office settings. Dresses and skirts are almost always above the kneecap (sometimes way above), and it is difficult to find women’s shorts that are longer than mid-thigh (which probably explains the popularity of cropped pants and capris). To many women the implicit cultural message that they should want to be sexually attractive in every waking moment and every social situation is oppressive. This is felt particularly by women who don’t “measure up,” by virtue of age, body size, or other media-influenced ideals, who may see images of themselves only in “before” pictures in ads or in reality makeover shows.
I believe that the sexualization of femininity is also connected to the phenomenon of early feminization of girls. It probably wasn’t the fathers who first embraced a return to gendered baby clothes in the mid-1980s; it was the same mothers who were buying “romantic” dresses and ruffly blouses for themselves. The Walt Disney Company may have commercialized the princess dress in the late 1990s, but the homemade versions its former chairman Andy Mooney saw at Disney on Ice performances inspired the idea.14 This hyper-gendering of little girls’ clothing associated “girly” femininity (ruffles, pastels, flowers, and the rest of the lexicon of softness) with being a little girl, with the result that girls grow out of it and into—well, what?
One vital aspect of children’s gender identity in a media-rich consumer culture is that the boys and girls start to influence the market at a very young age. At four and five little girls may clamor for pink and glitter so ardently that parents mistake their demands for innate needs. When their princess enters third or fourth grade and rejects pink, girly styles as “babyish,” the parents find themselves fighting a battle over clothing that is too sexy for an eight-year-old. Blogger Suzette Waters observed that her nine-year-old daughter, Anna, left “pink behind” and traded it for blue, purple, and black.15 According to child development literature, this is a clear sign that Anna had mastered the concept of “gender permanence” and no longer needed to adhere to stereotyped clothing and toys in order to maintain a stable gender identity. The once beloved symbols of femininity looked childish instead, and Anna wanted a more grown-up look.
This phenomenon has attracted a great deal of attention in the last decade, especially since the American Psychological Association published the report of its task force on sexualization of girls in 2010.16 The report documents the expansion of sexualized media since the 1980s as it reached younger and younger girls and details the already observed consequences, including “cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality and attitudes and beliefs.” As I was writing this chapter, the performance of twenty-year-old Miley Cyrus on the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards show had Twitter all atwitter and occupied nearly every talk show and blogger for a week, despite looming crises in Syria and the media coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. By the time you are reading this, I have no doubt that more young stars have committed more outrage, but this episode stands out for the way that all of the trends converged in a single location. Miley Cyrus had been a child actor in the classic wholesome Disney mode, first packaged for consumption in 2006 at the age of thirteen as “Hannah Montana,” in the TV series of the same name aimed at younger girls who had outgrown princesses. Replacing fairy-tale fantasy with a story line about a teenager who leads a secret life as a pop star, Disney launched a line of items, including clothes, bedding, luggage, makeup, and toys through mass-market retailers across the country.17 The clothing featured the pop star side of the character’s persona, and because Cyrus’s character was modeled on existing images of (adult) female performers, it soon drew criticism from some parents, who felt that the look was too mature for Hannah Montana’s young fans.
What happened when Miley outgrew teen pop fashion may have been disturbing, but it wasn’t surprising. Compare her experience with other post-1970s celebrities such as Drew Barrymore, Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan. Their trajectory from cutie pie to cheesecake parallels the blurring of size-age boundaries in girls’, teens’, and women’s clothing. This relationship between celebrity and consumer culture has been around for some time, although the particulars have changed. For stars of an earlier generation the pattern was prolonged childhood, an abbreviated adolescence, and early domesticity, as seen with Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom married before they turned twenty.
The youth-driven fashions of the 1960s had long ago erased the boundary between young adults and teens in women’s fashions, and a similar transformation eliminated the distinction between tweens and teens between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. Combine that with the reassignment of more modest expressions of femininity to girls under the age of seven and women over fifty, and what’s left is sexualization for everyone else. The APA identified half of the problem—sex-saturated media that broadcast an image of women as objects of desire and sexual violence (and often cast women of color as actively seeking those attentions)—but missed the more insidious piece of consumer culture that primes toddlers and preschoolers for sexualization by initiating them into a world of femininity that they are destined to outgrow within a few years. When four-year-old girls want everything pink and glittery, it’s nature, but when they’re eight and they want flirty, it’s the media’s fault? That’s having your cake and eating it too.
In addition to the hypersexualization of women’s fashion, we also see evidence of visions of equality and femininity dating back to the 1960s, which offered new choices in nearly every facet of women’s lives. But these choices were neither equally available nor equally valued, resulting not only in the well-known “mommy wars” between women working outside the home and stay-at-home mothers but also in the marginalization of women who do what they must because they have no choice. Women and girls of all ages are subject to a beauty culture that may be different from that of the 1950s and early 1960s, but it is no less problematic. Despite fifty years of modern feminism, an analysis of Google searches revealed that parents were twice as likely to seek ways to help their daughters to lose weight than to look for similar advice for their sons, despite the fact that the proportion of overweight girls and boys is essentially similar.18
John T. Molloy is still dispensing advice, and his opinions on clothing for career women who aspire to leadership positions has changed only slightly. He now endorses pantsuits, and his reasons are revealing: “The suit remains the uniform for women executives but today it is as likely to be a pantsuit as a traditional skirted model. The pantsuit was made a legitimate executive uniform by Hillary Clinton and today pants are being worn by women because the skirts that are being shown are not appropriate for business.”19
What about masculinity? What do today’s fashions reveal about how the gender revolution affected men and boys? Once the peacock fever had passed, they too reverted to older patterns. Still, some deep and permanent changes did emerge from the chaos of the 1970s. Men benefited more than women had in the loosening of occasion-specific rules for dress and today enjoy are greater range of options than they did during the 1950s. Although the unstructured leisure suit in its pastel polyester incarnation went out of style, other, less revolutionary casual styles moved into the workplace. Even in a conservative fashion culture like the federal government, sport coats are more common today than suits. The Washington, D.C., Metro during summertime rush hours is filled with men in shirt sleeves and tie; they wear no jacket at all, or they leave one at the office “just in case.” “Casual Friday” has evolved into a weeklong affair labeled “business casual.” Men’s leisure clothing is colorful and expressive, even if what they are expressing is no more than love for their local football team. The men’s grooming industry has flourished since the appearance of the first unisex salons in the late 1960s, even reviving the humble barbershop. Of course, the twenty-first-century version is not so humble; it’s an upscale exercise in nostalgia for “a time when barbershops provided real men a place where they shared common values, where they could relax, and where they could enjoy meaningful conversation with old friends and new acquaintances.”20
The popular award-winning series Mad Men has focused attention on the 1960s and the experiences of men and women as they navigated their ways through a culture in transition. Through this series, post-boomer viewers have learned about the 1960s from a completely different angle from the stereotyped “flower power” and civil rights lenses. This has revived interest in the look of the period, but even the most ardent fan of the show just wants to look like Don Draper, not behave like him:
On the outside, Don is successful, rich and married with children. But in reality he is a deserter, a drunk, an adulterer and, to be frank, pretty fucked up.21
Draper then serves as not role model but as a warning.22
With the advantage of hindsight and history, viewers know that the masculine culture of Mad Men is headed for challenging times. The irony is that we still may not be able to predict where Don Draper will be in the twenty-first century, other than retired or dead. Men’s lives took so many different directions in the late 1960s that a man in his early forties in 1968 could not begin to fathom what the future held. Even with today’s look-alike fashions, a time-traveling Don Draper would find himself in a strange new world fifty years later.
One important distinction, though less visible, between clothing for men and women is the pace and magnitude of fashion changes from season to season and from year to year for business and formal dress. Men’s clothing for the office has been reduced to classic styles and a limited range of colors and fabrics for generations. They rent most of their formal wear, which is also only lightly touched by fashion. Why so many women have been so reluctant to relinquish fashionable clothing, particularly in the workplace, is a puzzle, and the answer is complicated. Part of the explanation may lie at the intersection of feminism, antifeminism, and cosmofeminism, in the territory sometimes called “having it all.” Part of it may be a side effect of the gains won by the women’s rights movement. The fortieth anniversary of Title IX was celebrated at the governmental level and by many women in sports. But it is telling that in writing about the occasion Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss felt compelled to dispel several myths about how Title IX had hurt male athletes and men’s sports. This is perhaps the most pernicious accusation of the women’s movement: that the advancement of women has come at the expense of men. This echoes the antifeminist counterarguments of Helen Andelin in True Womanhood: “One of the greatest threats to a man’s position . . . is when his wife earnestly pursues a career. The dedication and drive required for success tends to push the man into the background.”23 Dialing back on the power suits, or even compensating with styles that convey softness and seduction, may have been a way to relieve this tension. British journalist Caitlin Moran, author of How to Be a Woman, wrote in 2012: “When we imagine the fully emancipated 21st-century woman, we are apt to think of some toned, immaculately dressed overachiever, leading a Fortune 500 company while bringing up bilingual twins. And that’s what simultaneously stresses women out to the point of living on a Pinot Grigio drip, and terrifies insecure men. This idea of perfect, sexy, superhuman lady-titans, winning at everything. That’s what scuppers moves toward gender equality.”24
For all the privilege associated with being male in our culture, comments like these bring to mind the Freudian-influenced concept of fragile masculinity, vulnerable to “corruption” in early childhood. Much of stereotypical male behavior may be aggressive, but their clothing is defensive. The traditional suit is going strong, still shielding men’s bodies from view and still deflecting ridicule through conservative cut and color. It is easy to see that it may have been premature in the 1970s for women to dress too much like their male co-workers. It also may have been too soon to ask them to relinquish fashion as a marker of femininity.
The role of queer fashion professionals—designers, models, journalists, and curators—is significant. In the 1960s gay male designers could challenge prevailing gender norms through their designs, but just up to point. Today’s more accepting climate has made it possible for them to be much more open personally and creatively, which in turn has brought discussions of gender expression to the forefront once more. Whether it is transgender runway models or lines of ready-to-wear clothing expressly for butch lesbians and androgynous straight women, the market is responding to the demand for options. Less evident but even more important has been the steady erosion of the visual stereotypes of gays and lesbians; the news coverage of same-sex weddings has exposed the general public to the range of body types, hairstyles, and clothing in the LGBTQ population, in all its glorious ordinariness.
I also have a hunch that the popularity of cosplay (dressing up as a character from a book, film, or computer game) is part of an emerging sense that all clothing is costume. (Or, in the words of RuPaul, “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”) This is more true with feminine dress than masculine clothing, as there is still a lingering tendency to think of menswear as “just clothes.” The extent to which femininity had become a performance by the early twenty-first century is best illustrated by the popularity of makeover reality shows, from TLC’s What Not to Wear (2003–2013) to RuPaul’s Drag U (2010–2013) on Logo. The latter is the most fascinating for any student of gender. A competitive makeover show, it featured three “biological women” who were coached to discover their inner divas by three drag queens. In this, as in all makeover shows, the underlying message was not only that femininity is a learned behavior but also that women who have not acquired it are missing a vital aspect of themselves. On Drag U this message extended to lesbians as well as straight women, resulting in a truly mind-bending episode featuring a trio of self-described “butch” students learning how to walk in four-inch heels from their gay male coaches.
One of the reasons I wanted to write about unisex fashions is that they seemed emblematic of a very complicated—and unfinished—conversation about sex, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps the crowning achievement of the conservative movement has been the creation of a stereotype of the 1960s and ’70s as self-indulgent and aimless—just a bunch of free-love hippies waving protest signs and getting high. That is certainly one way to trivialize the yearnings of millions of people for lives of their own choosing. Many of us who grew up in the 1960s have mixed feelings about that era, though mine are more positive than Senator Santorum’s. The conversation now comprises so many voices that it may seem there will be no end to the chaos. But I am hopeful that a multitude of voices is exactly what is needed to resolve the conflicts generated by social and cultural categories. As feminist activist and social critic Naomi Wolf wrote, “Underlying all of these movements is the democratic ideal from the 1970s that asserts: No one person has the natural right to suppress, silence or dominate any other person, simply because of where both are situated in society.”25
Perhaps we are just halfway through a century-long conflict that will be a footnote in our great-great-grandchildren’s history books. We still have a long way to go before pink is just a color again, female athletes can wear their hair long or short without arousing speculation about their sexuality, and men can trade their khaki trousers for cotton skirts on humid summer days—without having to shave their legs. In the meantime, we need to listen to one another in order to grasp the consequences of the individual freedom we claim to prize so highly. We already know enough about the origins of beauty culture and fat shaming; we need to understand the outcomes they produce in real people’s lives.
Perhaps “clothes make the man” after all. In an exercise in aspirational dressing, consider the possibilities if our wardrobes reflected the full range of choices available to each of us. Imagine that we dressed to express our inner selves and our locations not as fixed but as flexible. Imagine a consumer culture so responsive that no one felt excluded or shamed.
While male-female relationships may be a driver in shaping gender roles, they’re unlikely to be the entire story. An important part of the interplay between existing and emerging gender roles for women has taken place among women. For every liberated, pants-wearing, makeup-rejecting woman in the 1960s, there was another women the same age who still dreamed of being Miss America rather than picketing her. Women do not dress just to attract men; lesbians certainly do not. Historically, blue- and pink-collar workers have tried to remind their upper-class sisters in the women’s movement that they want “bread and roses”—the right to beauty in their lives, not just economic security. Women enforce and influence women’s appearance perhaps even more strongly than men do, especially when they are young.
We are living at a time when individual expression is far more possible than ever imagined, through social media, blogging, self-publishing, and myriad other platforms. We can choose to listen or ignore the voices of others, but we cannot make them go away. Their very diversity challenges our attempts to sort them into categories, so perhaps we should stop trying. Consider, for example, the use of stereotypes in clothing to mark homosexuality as “the other.” Fashion journalist Clara Pierre commented optimistically in 1976 that unisex clothing and the sexual revolution had reduced fears of sexual ambivalence and “clothes no longer have to perform the duty of [sexual] differentiation and can relax into just being clothes.”26 Her celebration was premature, but when a popular reality show can feature straight men being re-fashioned by five “queer” guys, change is in the air.27
A more open climate for discussing issues of gender identity and expression has paralleled shifting public opinion on gay rights and marriage equality, issues that are far from being settled. Is gender identity a matter of nature or nurture? Science tells us that the foundations for sexual behavior are laid down before we are born, but also that human variation is vast and complex. Perhaps, in addition to making the mistake of assuming a binary model, we have been asking the wrong questions about gender all along. As long as gender was envisioned as separate paths stemming from biological starting points, it made sense to ask how the paths were laid down or why some individuals strayed from the paths. Now it’s time to consider the consequences of cultural norms, not their origins.
Knowing that most boys behave in a particular way does not tell you how your son will behave, nor will it explain why your daughter might prefer Barbies or Transformers. History tells us that children can wear dresses or pants, and that both girls and boys can wear pink or blue, but that strongly gendered or gender-free clothing has an unpredictable effect, most of it not evident until they are grown. The effect of either/or constructs when status differences are involved can be insidious. If men are expected to be sexually aggressive while women are passive, the results are a double standard for sexually active men and women, overemphasis on women’s appearance, homophobia, and a rape culture. When “princess boys” adopt stereotypical signifiers of femininity, such behavior can be defended as an indication that they are performing their authentic selves. When “girly-girls” embrace the same signifiers, does it make sense to criticize them for adopting an artificial construction imposed by consumer culture? These and other contradictions are signs that our basic assumptions need to be revisited.
We are still untangling the complicated relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality. One way to begin is to let go of worldviews that no longer fit scientific facts. The binary model of sex, particularly the notion of male and female as opposites, needs to join the flat earth and the geocentric universe in the discarded theory bin. I feel a twinge of sympathy for demographers who will have to come up with new boxes on forms to accommodate evolving notions of gender, but they already have had some practice adjusting to changes in how we see race, so they will probably be fine.
The fashions of the 1960s and ’70s are the manifestation of attempts to solve the problems of gender inequality all at once, driven by the impatience of youth, within the context of emerging—and incomplete—understanding of the biological and cultural complexities responsible for that inequality. It now seems inevitable that efforts to modify or supplement the existing binary model with androgyny, ambiguity, or the ungendered unity of futuristic unisex would falter and fail in the short run. The binary model itself, however, is showing clear signs of fatigue.
My distrust and skepticism for categories has been growing throughout this project. In real life there are many alternatives to a binary construction of gender; the Bem model was just the beginning. Because it still relies on sorting personality traits into “masculine,” “feminine,” or “neutral,” it hangs on a skeleton of binary gender stereotypes. The malleability of these categories reveals their artificiality; it is quite visible in baby clothing, where the definition of “neutral clothing” has shifted from white dresses to green coveralls in less than a century. The categories are also interdependent; what makes a garment masculine is its lack of femininity.
The possibilities for ridding ourselves of this binary view of gender boil down to two choices: no gender categories, or a finite (but yet undetermined) set of gender categories. Since the late 1970s new scholarship challenged the essentialism that stems from binary models of sex and gender. Third-wave feminism began by shifting the focus from gender to examining how individuals represent intersections of numerous identities, including sexuality, race, class, and ability. Although biology is important, it is not destiny. Forty years of gender research using multidimensional instruments such as the BSRI indicate that the correlation between biological sex and masculinity or femininity is weaker now than it once was.28 Feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling argues that not only is biological sex not binary but also the act of determining a child’s sex, based only on visible markers, is culturally constructed.29 Judith Butler, coming from a completely different direction—feminist rhetoric and literary studies—arrives at a similar conclusion: our definitions of sex are themselves culturally gendered, and basing our search for identity on these shifting “facts” sets us on fruitless, circular paths.30
There are suggestions that gender binary thinking has reached its limit, especially in the last market it touched: children’s clothing. Even while juvenile clothing has become more gendered than ever before, it has also become a site of growing parental discontent and resistance. The push back against early sexualization of girls is one sign of dissatisfaction with the double standard that stems from the gender binary. Another sign is the revolt against pink, princess culture and the lack of neutral or even nuanced options. As infants grow into toddlers, they become active participants in the gender binary fashion show, much to the amusement, chagrin, or dismay of their parents. For many boys and girls this participation is enthusiastically embraced. These are the girls who insist on wearing nothing but pink and prefer dresses to any form of pants and the boys who clamor for buzz cuts and ubiquitous sports imagery. But what about the others? What about tomboys, the little girls who in earlier decades could have worn plain girls’ styles or their brother’s hand-me-downs without appearing out of the mainstream? What about boys who feel out of place in hypermasculine clothing and are drawn to softer colors and fabrics, but for whom the English language has no positive term? What about the one person in one hundred classified as “intersex,” whose body differs from standard male or female, or those whose inner sense of identity may not conform to the gender chosen for them at birth by their parents? Clearly one consequence of a strong gender binary in children’s clothing is the lack of expressive options for children’s fluid identities, especially for children who are chafed by stereotyped, binary images of masculinity and femininity. As the categories have tightened, squeezing out neutral options, a growing number of adults have realized that children who don’t fit the binary suffer real distress. Increasingly their response is not to “fix” their children, through training, punishment, or therapy, but to argue for cultural change.
This is a beginning, but we are still years, if not decades, from resolving all of the issues raised by the sexual revolution. Change will come, because so much of what happened fifty years ago cannot be undone. Civil rights can be undone, but not un-thought. Oral contraceptives will not be un-invented, nor abortions prevented, by making them illegal or difficult to obtain. In the words of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, made famous by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., I do believe that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”31 In this case my vision of justice includes freeing ourselves from the assumptions and stereotypes that are the logical byproducts of outmoded categories. I have no idea what you or I, or our children and grandchildren, will be wearing when that day comes, but I like to imagine that it will be a perfect fit.
It isn’t just our clothing that will fit; we will fit—within our communities and even standing in a crowd of strangers. Culture is the inarticulate shaping of rules and boundaries, signaling belonging and exclusion within a society and determining the rewards for fitting in and the consequences for nonconformity. If we desire a society of individuals, each empowered to achieve their full potential, we need to produce a culture that recognizes human diversity, offers options, and respects choices. We began to move in that direction with the questions of the 1960s; some of the answers were visible in the fashions of the period. Looking closely, we can also detect the confusion and conflict that began fifty years ago and continue unresolved. We may still have a long way to go, but I share the optimism of Frank Zappa:
There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
will be free to sing and dance and love.
There will come a time when every evil that we know
will be an evil that we can rise above.
Who cares if hair is long or short or sprayed or partly grayed?
We know that hair ain’t where it’s at.
There will come a time when you won’t even be ashamed if you are fat.32