shiremaiden:

I saw this and couldn’t stop giggling.

ilikesallydonovan:

rebecca2525:

ilikesallydonovan:

ms-demeanor:

epoxyconfetti:

codex-fawkes:

unified-multiversal-theory:

stained-glass-rose:

hyggehaven:

profeminist:

Source

I want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.

That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.

Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants.

The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.

Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.

Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.

This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.

So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.

My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt. 

They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.

My mom got sent home from school when she was 8 years old for wearing a pair of shorts under her skirt. She wore them because she didn’t want to show her underwear when she was playing on the jungle gym.

The principle explained to my grandmother that if she was old enough to worry about showing her panties then she was too old to be playing on the jungle gym and had to start acting more like a lady.

My GNC aunt had to be forced to wear skirts right up until the second she was old enough to join the navy and then spent the rest of her life wearing the baggiest pants she could find. The reason she thought the military was her only viable option was because she had terrible grades through high school because she kept getting sent home for wearing shorts under her skirts.

My mum both fought to wear trousers and to wear the miniskirt. Ironically, of the two, trousers were the bigger fight.

Argh, this reminds me of the people who say “women can wear trousers but men can’t wear skirts, so who has is easier”.

The reason why men can’t wear skirts is not because there’s some group out there that wants to control them – the reason is that femininity is (subconsciously at least) considered less and it’s seen as weird for a man to stoop down and associate himself with it. See also why you have to make up new words like man bun and man purse just to make absolutely clear that there’s nothing feminine about it.

It sucks for the men who want to dress more feminine, but the reason behind it is still plain old sexism, not reverse sexism, even if it also affects men negatively.

And women actively fought for it. It took them years, it got them in trouble. But they persisted until they had pushed society far enough to accept women in trousers. Nothing says men can’t do the same.