mmmmmmmm

Trans women can’t exist without everyone reminding them that someone out their hates them, even people in their communities, and we as allies HAVE to do better. Instead of saying “terfs don’t look at this” or whatever preformative allyship floats your boat- deplatorm terfs, block them and STOP ENGAGING, and uplift trans fem voices!!!

“ Madison, who works a customer service job at an airport spa, has an employee handbook that says “makeup should be well maintained” and “hands and nails must be well manicured.” She says the few men she works with just ignore these guidelines “because they’re meant for women but [it] doesn’t explicitly say that.” Her wages ($13.25 per hour + 15% retail commission) do not include additional pay to purchase manicures or makeup. During her interview, her now-boss commented on how nice her makeup looked and how well her shoes matched her purse—comments that make her feel like she needs to keep up that kind of appearance even though she already has the job. 

It’s well known that a persistent wage gap exists for women workers in the United States, a gap that becomes even wider when race, industry, age and geography are taken into account. But less frequently discussed is the often silent expectation around appearance imposed on women workers, which has its own financial costs—known as the “grooming gap.” The grooming gap refers to the set of social norms regarding grooming and appearance for women, including the time women workers must spend to conform to these norms and the material consequences it has on their lives. 

We’ve all heard the common advice to “look the part” at work. For men, that can often just mean business casual clothing and a short haircut. For women, it can mean hours spent each week on makeup, hair styling and curating an outfit that’s both attractive and professional. 

The rules are usually unspoken; even when employers do not explicitly require workers to wear makeup, for example, women workers often feel required to wear it anyway. 

They’re not wrong: Sociologists Jaclyn Wong and Andrew Penner found that physically attractive workers have higher incomes than average-looking workers, but that this relationship is eliminated when controlling for grooming in women. In other words, if you purchase the right clothes, makeup and haircut, higher wages are more within reach. It’s true that men need to abide by certain grooming rules, too, but they are less complex, less expensive and less time consuming. Men’s haircuts, for example, often cost much less than women’s haircuts—regardless of hair length. The grooming gap essentially constitutes a pay cut catch-22: If women don’t conform, they are paid less; if they do conform, they’re expected to use those higher wages on beauty products and grooming regimens. 

Grooming costs for women can be extremely expensive; the global beauty industry, valued at $532 billion worldwide, directs aggressive advertising toward women to convince them they need to purchase a whole host of products to have a chance at being beautiful, well-liked or successful. The industry relies on maintaining impossible expectations around women’s looks so it can continue to rake in enormous profits. One 2017 study found the average woman puts $8 worth of product on her face each day; another found the average woman spends up to $225,000 on skincare and makeup during her lifetime. And then there’s the “pink tax”: Studies confirm that, 42% of the time, products marketed to women are more expensive than comparable products targeted to men. 

The grooming gap also results in a loss of free time: 55 minutes each day for the average woman, the equivalent of two full weeks each year. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFACWA), says that, in her industry—a workforce that is 79.3% women—the expectation around appearance literally “interrupts your sleep”: Flight attendants get minimal rest between flights, and that rest time is further shrunk because they are expected to appear “perfectly coifed” before their next flight. Nelson says that all of her grooming tasks took 30–40 minutes each day (more than two hours in a five-day work week). Madison agrees: it takes her 45 minutes to do her makeup and style her hair before her 7 a.m. shift—and she wakes up at 5 a.m. to get it all done. Prior to this job, Madison says she worked at the beauty department at Target, where she spent $200 on products every other week. 

Restaurant and hospitality workers are perhaps hardest hit by the grooming gap, as they rely on tips to survive. When I was a barista in 2010–2011, the only official dress code rule was to wear closed-toed shoes, for safety. Still, I knew I had to show up looking pretty to pay the rent; I made less than $10 an hour and I needed the tips.

Katie, 36, a veteran bartender and server in Fort Smith, Ark., says at her current job, it’s “understood” she should wear makeup. At a previous restaurant, a manager even told her and her coworkers they would “make better tips if [they] wore makeup.”

“Based on my own appearance—weight fluctuations, makeup versus no makeup, jewelry versus no jewelry—there’s a definite difference,” Katie says. She adds that she was passed over for the most lucrative bartending shifts at her previous job after overhearing her managers say they wanted “cuter girls” to bartend instead.

Multi-billion dollar industries also market fad diets and anti-aging products to women. Both Katie and Jeeva, 24, a bartender and member of UNITE HERE, the union representing hospitality, hotel and airport workers, worry about aging. “As you get older, as a female bartender, your tips can go down,” Jeeva says. Katie says she “hope[s] to leave [the service industry] in the next 10 years, before I get too ugly.”

The grooming gap’s effects are compounded for women of color. According to Restaurant Opportunity Center, restaurant owners look for workers who are “clean-cut, [have] good hygiene or a professional appearance, all potential code words for race.” For instance, Black women spent $473 million on relaxers, weaves and other hair care in 2017, in part because of racist ideas that natural Black hair is not professional or attractive. Black workers annually spend nine times more on hair and beauty products than other workers. 

For transgender women, too, there can be an added layer of work, stress and self-consciousness. Autumn, who transitioned while at her current publishing job in Washington, D.C., says she quickly realized how much time and energy it takes to perform femininity for work. She used to spend 20 minutes to get ready in the morning, but now takes at least 45 minutes. Autumn adds, “I have to do things that cis women don’t have to… [but] it’s gotten easier with time and practice,” like tucking and dealing with facial hair. Because she presents extremely femme, Autumn says she hasn’t dealt with enforcement around her appearance, but other women workers around the country have been disciplined and even fired for appearing insufficiently feminine. Women workers have sued—and won—over gender discrimination that manifests as attractiveness discrimination.

Nat, a trans woman who works at a union in the Washington, D.C., area, says, “I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be a woman if I liked masculine things. It delayed any kind of self-reflection” about gender and identity “for such a long time.”

At work and in the world, all women—cis and trans—feel the pressure to conform to normative standards of femininity and attractiveness. But the solution to this problem isn’t to throw away all the eyeshadow or take out a new line of credit for weekly manicures. The solution is to organize together.”

Continued in the link to the article, but uh

TL;DR: There’s a significant wage gap between women who conform to traditional feminine beauty standards by, for example wearing makeup and heels and using a lot of hair and beauty products, and the women who don’t. Meaning women are financially punished for not conforming to femininity or beauty standards. The gap is worse for women of color and trans women because there’s higher beauty standards for women of color and trans women.

I always thought the “nice guy” meme was over-exaggerated but when I go back in the Dating Scene™️ it’s actually so fucking real. A guy told me he had depression and anxiety so is kinda afraid of approaching people and I was like chill me too, but then when I said I didn’t want to have sex on the first date he texted me and like flipped out and said I worsened his self hatred then blocked me and cursed me out before I could say anything.

Perhaps “nice guys finish last” because they act like the “chads” they complain about; they’re super pushy and sexual at the very beginning of a relationship. And it’s funny because the only guy who apologized to me for anything was a total asshole 90% of the time.

So my advice for “nice guys” is, instead of focusing on being the most moral and appealing person possible, work on your sensitivity to rejection. THAT is what’s creating these issues, not you being weird or awkward or whatever the fuck—that’s another thing, these men victimize themselves so much. They seriously seem to believe they are the only ones who struggle in life.

Think about why this man didn’t move on. Think about what made him decide to continue their relationship. It wasn’t just love or even lust. 

He’s got 6 years of experience being a legal adult, while she hasn’t even started adulthood yet. The reason he thinks he gets to tell her what her hair should be like, and the reason she is asking for help here instead of immediately realizing this is dangerous behavior she should end the relationship for, is probably because he has been doing and saying similar things for their entire relationship. She’s not experienced legal adult agency without him being there as her guidance telling how to do things.

i've been aware of this person's online presence for like a couple of years, but it was still kind of insane to see them go from posting shit like "i am not transphobic, i just think posting about anime girls is creepy" to keysmash laughing about a theoretical serial trans woman murderer.

it's also interesting to think about, because a lot of like contemporary liberal media blames 4chan and reddit for the rise of fascism in young men, but shit like this is proof that a subculture of deranged fascist tradwives can spawn even from flowery aesthetic blogs on tumblr.

being a lesbian is about loving women–even if those womens bodies have penises, or flat chests, or deep voices, or adams apples, or facial hair.

claiming that being a lesbian is about hating penises, or liking vaginas, or breasts, or anything other than loving women regardless of what their bodies are like, is disrespectful not just to trans lesbians everywhere, but to all lesbians whose bodies dont fit what society tells us women have to be, regardless of whats in their pants.

However - every single goddamn time I’ve seen civilians try to criticize porn, the “critique” always ends up perpetuating some kind of whorephobic stereotype or falling in line with some aspect of SWERF rhetoric. It’s framing porn as a specifically and uniquely harmful form of media, it’s implicitly positioning porn stars as the enemies of women.

When a civilian says something like “we should be able to criticize porn without being automatically assumed to be SWERFs,” what they pretty much always mean is “we should be able to criticize porn freely without feeling obligated to listen to sex workers when they tell us the way we’re doing so is missing the mark or making their lives harder. We should be allowed to shout down the voices of sex workers who disagree with us.” And they act accordingly.

There are SO MANY reasons why people (especially men but not just them) think it’s okay to sexually harass others. Like there’s an entire rape culture out there, entire schools of feminist thought have been created to analyze the ways that boys are taught from birth that they are owed access to women’s bodies (and girls are taught from birth that they have to go along with it). This indoctrination begins long before any exposure to pornography, and continues after that first exposure.

Porn that uncritically depicts rape can be a part of how rape culture is perpetuated, yes. It can be a part of how rape culture is propagated and enforced. But to suggest that it’s the reason people think it’s okay to sexually harass others is just scapegoating porn for the existence of rape culture. This implicitly blames sex workers for the existence of sexual violence (its easy for this line of reasoning to turn into “if porn stars just worked a different job then rape culture wouldn’t exist”), which is logic that’s used to justify violence against us. It also actually obfuscates the myriad of other ways that rape culture is perpetuated and taught to people, especially young people.