Brilliant, Twisty. I visited Austin last summer, and understood at last (the scales melted into my eyeballs) that the summers I usually experience are almost refreshing in comparison. But…it still gets hot. I want gauzy things that allow for updrafts, can be shed in layers as necessary, are strategically opaque, and pose no impediment to sprinting.

As for shoes: I reserve the right to carry half of a pair of stilettos, since one doesn’t need a permit. But on my feet: OMG, I just want something out of the Athleta or Title 9 or NorthFace catalog that I can afford. Something sturdy, ventilated, Goretexy, light-weight, tractiony…and not $115. I just can’t countenance beating someone over the head with a stiletto in order to steal her Nikes. Wrongity wrong wrong wrong. Umm, but if anyone has bought a pair of size nine sport-type shoes and doesn’t like ‘em, or thinks they look too butch, or not butch enough, or whatever, I might take ‘em off your feet hands for a very modest sum.

Twisty, again thanks for replying. Thanks, also, for addressing the point I made and for your succinct and logical refutation of it; what you say makes sense. I stand corrected.

RobW, I think what Twisty’s saying is (all together now): It’s not about you.

Women get sick to death of trying to have this conversation and constantly having some guy wander (or barge) in and say, ‘Hey, I get it - do I get a cookie?’

Curiouser- I can bake my own cookies, thanks. And if this is a women-only conversation, I wish someone would have said so. About me? What? I made a point, apparently irrelevant, about the larger effect of patriarchy on everybody, for which I get personally attacked. So if I defend from personal attacks, that’s making it about me? How about this: if it’s not about me, quit making comments about me or what you think I am. It’s irrelevant.

Along with everything else in teh P, the shoe thing is about power. The deal is, your ‘uncomfortable shoes’ make you look bigger and stronger; a women’s cruel shoes just make her easier prey. The power runs all one way - the shoe, chunky or stiletto, is never on the other foot.

See, now THIS makes sense. It addresses the point I had made and refutes it. I understand, reading this, why I was wrong. Thanks for that, and to hell with your insults. (Slaveholder? Give me a break. I’ve never been married in my life.)

AmandaW:
I wasn’t trying to turn the topic around at all- read back, I was trying to bring it back to the original point of Twisty’s post regarding how it is not about what covers your body, it’s about what warps your mind.

I failed miserably by breaking an unwritten rule: thou shalt not mention patriarchy’s effect on men (if you are one), for that is making it all about you. It won’t happen again.

1: You say this as though it were new to us.

2: Then why the insistence on turning the topic around to focus on the less- (and far-differently-) affected class?

Perhaps you need to stop and read awhile, rather than objecting to the fact that the conversation isn’t enough about you.

I have worn men’s trunks with a women’s top to the beach for years now, as I cannot understand why it is necessary to shave my pubic hair to go swimming. I *still* get shit from a particular sort of dude about this sartorial decision. The only thing that gets them to shut up is asking them to imagine a world where they had no choice but the Speedo.

Rob W’s point doesn’t need to be summarized. Patriarchy is enforced with violence. Period. You boys find it just as difficult to exist in this cocked-up, woman-hating world?! Bullshit. And, wah.

What pissed off the revolutionary boys from the sixties is that feminists exposed them for the cowards they were. Feminism is THE revolution, bro. All the rest of them have just been changing one bunch of fear-ridden, trembling egos on the hoof for another.

But I think RobW’s earlier point could be summarized more concisely as “Men buckle under the weight of social pressure (known hereabouts as The Patriarchy) to conform just as women do.”

So I don’t think our identities are molded on the basis of fear any more than yours are. We just find it as difficult as you do to resist all the ways in which we are molded.

Women get sick to death of trying to have this conversation and constantly having some guy wander (or barge) in and say, ‘Hey, I get it - do I get a cookie?’

You’re the white slaveholder who walks into a roomful of ex-slaves and wonders why the conversation suddenly dies. ‘Yeah, but I spent some time digging ditches, too, and got my poor hands all dirty and stuff,’ you wail plaintively. And you’re offended by the silence, or the angry glares, or the lack of camaraderie.

Yeah, maybe your mean old dad made you do heavy physical labor, and maybe he was a real s.o.b. while he was at it. But guess what? When you get to be a big fella, you have the opportunity to be just like him. Whereas a woman doesn’t get to play that card, ever. She’s always going to be smaller, most often physically weaker, and habituated by a lifetime of training as a ‘pleaser’ to defer to men in most, if not all situations. We don’t have the option of competing in the game; our only choice is to try to look harmless, and maybe we won’t get pounded.

Along with everything else in teh P, the shoe thing is about power. The deal is, your ‘uncomfortable shoes’ make you look bigger and stronger; a women’s cruel shoes just make her easier prey. The power runs all one way - the shoe, chunky or stiletto, is never on the other foot.