merelydovely | (Reply)

From:

There's also something about cis male bodies feeling more like blank slates than other bodies.

This triggered an instant flashback to Deborah Tannen's excellent essay Marked Women, Unmarked Men, which, despite being written in 1993, continues to be irritatingly relevant to my life:

Although no man wore makeup, you couldn't say the men didn't wear makeup in the sense that you could say a woman didn't wear makeup. For men, no makeup is unmarked.

I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men's. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.

There is no woman's hair style that can be called standard, that says nothing about her. The range of women's hair styles is staggering, but a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her for many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some.

It's disturbing to think that this pervades our media preferences and even our authorial tendencies, but at least we know we're not crazy for feeling that pressure and wanting to avoid it where possible!