Reading through Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There: A Feminist's Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, I excitedly (and excessively) scribbled poignant comments in the margins, just waiting for a free moment to write this blog. Before stumbling across There are No Good Options for Feminist Footwear: The Perils of Dressing While Feminist, I planned to blog about like...choice. Or something.
Then I had EPICRAGE and completely forgot.
Right under the title, I scrawled untrue, flippy floppies. Ha, that'd show her. Marcotte goes through shoe groups and explicates her reasoning for why each will bring you some feminist backlash:
birkenstocks (openly repulse sexual attractiveness),
high heels (bad feminist! fucks up your posture and feet),
steel-toed doc martens (if you want to be treated like a relic),
sneakers (don't want to be taken seriously?),
flats (more subtle than flaunting armpit hair),
bare feet (at the cost of looking like whatever the female version of a tool is [Ann Coulter]),
ballet flats (cuteness over pragmatism),
[you'll understand why I've isolated this last one]
flip flops (the favored footwear of sorority girls nationwide...blonde girls with full faces of makeup and their fair done wearing sweatshirts, shorts and flip-flops...they make it really hard to walk at more than a snail's pace, giving the wearer the proper feminine hobbled aura, presumably making her less threatening to men).
Ahem. Fuck you, Amanda Marcotte.
Before I go on a tirade about why flippy floppies are the best footwear known to humankind and why you're an asshole to assume that sorority girls are hobbly blondes who wear makeup, let's get to some unsettling assumptions she makes about the inherent feministness of footwear.
What is inherently feminist, or antifeminist for that matter, about footwear choices? Is it not the freedom of choice, rather than the actual choice that is feminist? If a woman choses to wear high heels and fuck up her back, that is her prerogative. I used to be all oh noes I'll never wear heels again, they're all about the patriarchy, but then I realized how GOOD my calves look in them. Plus, who doesn't like a challenge? I'd like to see a man try and walk when they're three feet off the ground. So go you, high-heels wearing girlfriend. I respect your decision to wear whatever footwear you damn well please.
Insertion of irrelevant personal story time. So, I have this dress. It is ADORABLE. I decided to wear it on the last day of classes, because I wanted to feel pretty on the last day. My choice. However, I have these cute little white sandals that go with it--but I didn't want to be too feminine, like I was trying too hard. I wanted to shake it up a bit, add an element of badassiness to it to show that while I can look pretty, I still won't take misogynist bullshit.
Enter BAMF boots.
Now, the only issue with these boots was that is was ASSJESUS hot outside. So I kind of looked like a doofus. So after my WS class, I decided to give my poor sweaty legs a break and switched up my footwear. But wait, I thought, am I going to lose face if I cave and wear the cutesy sandals? It was rough, but I chose comfort over BAMF gender transgression.
I chose my flippy floppies. Which didn't even match.
SNAP.
So back to why this irrelevant personal story ties in with the theme of the blog. My footwear switch was at matter personal choice. The decision to change my footwear was for no one other than me, and I what was so feminist about it is that because I felt that sandals would be too over-the-top cutesy, I compromised my BAMF boots with my green, unmatched flippy floppies.
So step the fuck off my hobbly flippy floppies, Amanda Marcotte, because my decison to wear them was inherently feminist because it was my decision and I'll be damned if I let someone tell me or any other person that I'm compromising my feminist beliefs by donning a certain style of footwear.
You're on my shit list.
[End SNAP]
YES!!
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