Walking into a dimly lit room, bass vibrations rattling the windows, I look around—the women are in uniform. So am I. The year is 2023. I’m in a small “going out top” matched with straight leg jeans, and for personal flair, my black combat boots. I’m adorned with gold jewelry of varying levels of quality.
Watching the debauchery of it all, the clouds of cigarette smoke, the endless cat-and-mouse of drunk people flirting with other drunk people, reminds me of the wickedly depraved, yet titillating, 1920s. I can picture it now: a flapper girl dancing, her bob bouncing and her heels clicking on the floor with a demure, red smile. I can see her tube dress, that now relatively modest garb that at one point was scandalous, moving with her as she steps to the music. A question comes to mind.
For something to be feminist, does it have to have feminist intent?
Countless times, I’ve looked in the mirror getting ready for a bar and found strength in my desirability—I look good. I feel more powerful, more confident, as if the clothes have morphed into armor.
If you ask women why they wear what they wear, especially on Friday nights, I’m sure you’ll hear a variety of answers. The most interesting, to me, has to be “empowerment.” Countless times, I’ve looked in the mirror getting ready for a bar and found strength in my desirability—I look good. I feel more powerful, more confident, as if the clothes have morphed into armor.
Does that make the “going out top” feminist?
In the 1920s, the flapper’s tube dress, with its drop waist and loose fit, created a kind of androgyny never before seen on women’s bodies. Rejecting the artificial structuring of the corset and bustle, it made women look, well, more like men. With the look of androgyny came the act of it, too. Flappers were drinking and dancing through the wee hours. They were flirting and having sex with men outside of the confines of marriage—and daring to enjoy it. They were changing the very construction of gender, and the flapper dress became emblematic of a larger political movement for female agency.
But the flappers weren’t feminists in the ways we define it. In fact, First Wave feminists didn’t even like them, claiming they cared more about partying and pleasure than they did about “The Cause.” It sounds eerily similar to the same conversation Second and Third Wave feminists have today. Around and around we go.
Every wave of women negotiates equality through fashion in different, and varied, ways.
In the same way the tube dress made flappers feel free, when I put on my “going out” top, I feel visible. When eyes scan the room, some land on me and stay on me—women, men, doesn’t matter. But why does revealing my body make me feel sexy, and why does sexy feel like strength? Feminist author Lauren Shields has written extensively about the “The Beauty Suit,” that the social pressure of ‘looking hot’ is merely another cage women have found themselves in, a way for the patriarchal mainstream to negate women’s decades long movement for the freedom to be sexual. “Being fuckable doesn’t mean being respected,” she writes—I may feel less invisible in my going out top. But I have a sneaking suspicion it's because I’m now a shiny object instead of a dull one, as opposed to anyone feeling more inclined to listen to my opinions.
Does that make the “going out top” NOT feminist?
Who is failing the sisterhood? Is it those of us who make choices that promote agency, but often end up objectifying ourselves before men can get a chance? Or is it those of us whose strict definitions of feminism alienate the subversive potential of ‘non-feminist’ clothes? Every wave of women negotiates equality through fashion in different, and varied, ways. And more importantly, maybe no one person can have a stronghold on "effective" feminism when women continue to be constructed as objects of sex, not people who do it.
I’m tired of never knowing what the more feminist fashion choice is, when it all seems like a double-edged sword.
How do I be desirable not in a submissive way, but in a powerful, feminist, show-of-agency kind of way? The only hope, I gather, is by looking at how it's been done throughout history—that, somehow, flapper women were simultaneously provocative and masculine, erotic and threatening to the norm.
I’m tired of resenting my sexuality for overshadowing the other aspects of my humanity. I’m tired of never knowing what the more feminist fashion choice is, when it all seems like a double-edged sword. I want control over my own perception. What I would pay to get a drink at a bar with a flapper, to ask for her opinion on how to get it.
Maybe she’d tell me to just shut up and dance.
