Clothing

[asterroc]

This quote perfectly describes my relationship to clothing every single damned day of my life. It's part of a larger piece on why the author (a woman) no longer attends tech events.

It may look the same to you on the outside but I always spend too much time on the inside thinking about how I look at events.

Or really anytime I am around people who work in tech, which is all the time and I can never escape because everywhere I go there are dudebros talking about crushing code and I wish I lived on a farm instead of in this fucking morally bankrupt city.

I don’t want to be thought of as cute, pretty, hot or sexy. I often stick with baggy hoodies and sweatpants that make it hard to tell what shape my body is. Over time, this leads to a weird disconnect with it.

Something I need to hide from the world.

I struggle with makeup. I like to wear makeup but in the A/B test of my life, men will take me more seriously and listen to me more if I don’t wear it.

At the same time, it is hard to go to these things all the time looking your worst: hair up, unbrushed, no makeup, baggy clothes, tennis shoes.

--

When I’m giving talks, deciding how to look is most challenging. One must take care to neither appear too attractive nor too unattractive. When presenting, I tend to wear glasses and wear my hair in a bun so at least in my mind my face stands out less.

My eyesight is bad enough that wearing glasses impairs my vision which makes it more difficult to present, but seems worth it to put something between my face and the men watching me perform.

When I speak, like everyone else, I worry about if I will sound smart, if people will like the talk, if they will laugh at the jokes I put in. But more than that I worry about what men will think and say about how I look, because I’ve heard what they say about the other women.

The only thing worse than when they think you’re ugly is when they think you’re pretty.

I often wonder how I would look and dress if I didn’t have to worry about what the men in my industry thought about it.

--Shanley, Seethe and Grin: My Life Going to Tech Events

Though for me, it's not just the men but also the women, and in many ways they're worse.

Originally posted on Dreamwidth. comments there. Comment here or there.

Comments

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

yeah :( women get judged all the time for things that people don't even notice about men.

[q10.livejournal.com]

not the point, but i feel like i don't understand this one clause at all: "My eyesight is bad enough that wearing glasses impairs my vision which makes it more difficult to present,"

i assume this relates in some way to my "not under massive cultural pressure to wear contacts" privilege, because that's the only variable that i can see and as it stands i can't make ny sense at all of "wearing glasses impairs my vision".

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

As someone with good vision, I don't know for sure either, but I can make guesses.

* People who wear contacts may get those prescriptions updated more often, so her glasses may be an old (ineffective) prescription
* She may be pressured to wear glasses that are pretty, which often means a smaller area of glass, so a smaller effective field of view.
* It may not be possible to make strong enough lenses for glasses while it is possible for contacts? (Though I'd expect the other way around honestly.)
* Her natural focus point may be at a distance of less than 1" from her eye, so she tends to focus on the glass or the frames, not the world through them.
* She may use bifocal glasses, which could make presenting more difficult.

[cosmicwonder.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for sharing this! I never consciously thought so critically about the stress I have when choosing clothing, but this writer is so right. I also attend tech events, specifically for educational technology, and I spend more time for these events - than any other - deciding what to wear. I don't want to look too masculine because I want to show that I'm proud of being a woman, but at the same time, I don't want to be so dressed up that my ideas are not being taken seriously.

I agree that in most instances, women are way worse than men when it comes to judging clothing. However, I'm not sure in this case. At least in the NYC edtech scene, there just aren't that many women. Many of the women I meet are just as confused as me as to how we can contribute to the scene - which is very new here - that I'm not sure we have the energy to judge each other on what we're wearing.