Went to party city today, notice how it’s not even “sexy nurse” yet they give her thigh high fishnets and a short ass dress. Burglar (m) is in a wool sweater and jeans and the woman is in a full body latex suit???
The absolutely inexistent effort to think critically about this of the people going “if the stores sell this it is because women want them”.
Maybe the market has created that need because, shocking, the market befits from sexism? Just like it did gendering boys/girls toys? And hygene products, and stationary, and literally everything else it possibly can?
Maybe the fact that something sexist is done to make money doesn’t stop it from being sexist? Maybe the suggestion that the aim of it being making money somehow validates the oppression it’s perpetuating is a horrible take?
And why? why do women even “want” them, to begin with? Have you thought about it? Because you might wonder as well why do women systematically submit to pain and discomfort, why do they “want” to be cold and unfortable, why do they “want” to wax their body hair, why do they “want” to lay under a scalpel and needles and pay surgeons to cut them up and sew them back together, just to conform to what we’ve been taught since we were toddlers that was expected of us (and the demands keep getting more and more unattainable and insidious as we grow up).
There’s a lot of things we “want” we don’t genuinely want, we’ve been taught to want the social reward and the validation that comes with the sacrifice, but it is a sacrifice. And most women don’t even want to analyse that, because admitting you’re not 100% the ruler of your own brain and actions is frustrating, and painful, and shameful, specially in a society under a sudden trend of valuing “women’s empowerment” (women’s empowerment to freely choose to submit to patriarchal norms and be fuckable 24/7, yay!). Cause it makes you feel like YOU are weak, YOU are not empowered enough, it’s YOUR individual problem if you feel pressured.
“Women do that because women want it” is a weak ass argument that deliberately presents women as living in a bubble where their actions and decisions are solely their own and not affected by their context, which is a heteropatriarchal and capitalist society that impregnates everything.
It’s a fucking Halloween costume, I couldn’t care less about it, we don’t even celebrate Halloween were I’m from, and I’m sure people can find other costumes elsewhere. But it’s the constant ridiculing and minimizing of people (specially women) who denounce things that are wrong, or prejudiced, or oppressive (specially when it’s sexism) in a site that prides itself on being mostly “woke”, that kills me.
