Disclaimer: This argument paper was written for my English class in May, and I've been arguing with myself over whether or not to put this out in public since then. I did my best to educate myself in these topics within a short time span. All content is truthful as best as I could research. If any of the information in this series is wrong, please respectfully inform me specifically what is wrong so that I may look into it and correct it.
To better understand the effect of lolita fashion on the modern world, it is best to look at what changes have recently occurred thanks to earlier alternative culture. Fashion culture mixed with feminism started a crawl towards women’s equality: the first generation of feminists (including Gibson Girls who embraced androgyny, updos, and calf-length skirts for the sake of practicality in the 1900-1910s) had won women the right to vote; their daughters, the flappers, took gender equality onto a social level by bobbing their hair, sexualizing their appearances, wearing makeup (which had, prior to this era, been considered for prostitutes), smoking (which in particular was only for men) and drinking not only in public but in the presence of men, and having sex as they wanted (Erenberg). The flappers created dating, the most common form of courtship in the United States today, and got rid of calling, a formal affair whose sole end purpose was for marriage (Clement). The flappers openly disdained prior female constructs, having recently come out of a time in which many women had gained socio-economic benefits from becoming part of the workforce out of necessity when the men were away fighting in World War I. The less extreme flappers simply enjoyed the freedoms of shedding their corsets and wearing short hair, further spreading the influences and acceptability of a woman dressing and acting, publicly, for herself (Fass). The roaring 20s was flooded with the carpe diem philosophy left over from the realities of the war, and the quote by Lois Long, the most infamous and celebrated flapper, reflects it frankly: “Tomorrow we may die, so let's get drunk and make love” (qtd. in Gill). Women in this time undoubtedly experienced the most social freedom of any women in the United States until that point.
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| Photo of Lois Long from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website |
With the progress made since then, some try to argue that women have achieved gender equality. Straight from the Women’s Bureau in the Department of labor, one can find “Women [in 2010] accounted for 51.5 percent of all workers in the high-paying management, professional, and related occupations,” and young women in 2010, between the ages of 16 and 24, made 95 percent of what men of the same age made. Not only was female employment higher than men’s, women went from being nearly equal in numbers of enrollment in colleges (98 percent enrollment equality in 1994) to surpassing them at 114 percent ten years later (Lopez, Barrera). While it is true we have made leaps and bounds in gender equality over the last hundred years, the United States still has a long way to go before reaching complete gender equality. Legally speaking, many issues regarding employment, wages, and education have been addressed (similarly, despite young women approaching wage equality, women collectively in all age groups in 2010 still only make 77 cents for every dollar a man made for the same work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). Where we still see major problems in gender inequality is in modern society and popular culture. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 85 percent of the people who are victims of domestic abuse are women, and much of that abuse is sexual. To date, 17.7 million women have been either raped or have had someone attempt to rape them according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN).
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| There are no tasteful pictures for any of these points. |
Not only are nine out of ten rape victims female, but “The majority of sexual assault are not reported to the police (an average of 60 percent of assaults in the last five years were not reported).1 Those rapists, of course, will never spend a day in prison. But even when the crime is reported, it is unlike[ly] to lead to an arrest and prosecution. Factoring in unreported rapes, only about 3 percent of rapists will ever serve a day in prison” (RAINN). Social psychology tells us that our social interactions center around two primary needs: to be correct, and to be liked. The problem here goes beyond even the rape itself—it demonstrates how deeply ingrained and cyclical sexism towards women is in both men and women by illustrating the problems of victim blaming as a common psychological phenomenon, which is an offshoot of humanity’s tendency for “belief in a just world” (Sta˚hl , Eek, Kazemi). Victim blaming allows us to maintain our belief in a just world (the defensive attribution in which people assume that everyone “deserves” what happens to them whether good or bad), reinforcing our instinct to see causality in coincidence, and filling in the gaps of our knowledge so that we feel secure in the world around us so that we can believe we are correct (Azar).
Even worse, the effects of conformity concerning discrimination is astounding, as shown with the Milgram and Zimbardo studies. This is not to say that people merely conform out of pressure from masses (although we can, have and will likely continue to) but there are two important factors to consider in these types of conformity: informational conformity occurs when one isn’t certain about particular information and looks towards the majority answer as a basis of information, such as when a large group of 20 people face a certain direction in the elevator and a newcomer enters, 95% of the time he or she will face the same direction as the group of people in the elevator; in the Milgram study, which has been reproduced numerous times, 60 percent of people will conform to an authority figure (in this case, a man in a white lab coat) even if they believe they are killing an innocent person with electrical shocks for an experiment (Holt). Essentially, we blind ourselves to the realities of rape by either denying it or blaming the victim, and find comfort in our concurrence with society, which is already shaped to accept those beliefs. If we are a fair and equal society, how can these things possibly continue to happen at such astounding rates? And what does fashion have to do with worldwide movements like the Slut Walk, a peaceful protest held annually to educate people about sexism, and how do either of those things fight for the human right to be judged as an individual?
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| Ashnu at Slutwalk NYC |
Fortunately, in our social progress, we are fighting many of these natural tendencies to conform to an outdated patriarchal norm with education and movements such as the Slut Walk, which originated in Toronto, Canada and is now held in over 200 countries. Slut Walk’s numerous pickets include sayings as blatant as “there is no excuse, the solution is obvious, just don’t rape people.” This decidedly feminist equal rights movement also seeks to inform the public about privilege: white, male, class, heterosexual, and able-bodied privilege, which many U.S. citizens don’t even recognize as being benefits. Heather J., who never provides her full last name, captures its essence in her blog post on the official SlutWalk Toronto website:
Privilege is something we have that gives us built-in advantages in life over others. Privilege being ‘built-in’ is precisely why we do not see it or how it operates unless it is pointed out to us or we are forced to encounter it somehow. The nature of privilege is that it is an inherent part of someone’s existence, so there’s not an obvious way to recognize, understand, and discuss privilege with others unless you actively seek this out” (J.).Sources can be found here.
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