You're listening to That's Not Very Ladylike, the show where every week, we start with one rule, ladies don't, and then we do it anyway. Welcome to That's Not Very Ladylike. My name is Tracy Willingham. Some of you may know me as That Hormone Girl. And today, we are looking at ladies don't dress for themselves, they dress to not be noticed.
Tracey:So here's a rule nobody handed you in writing, but you learned it anyway and you learned it pretty quickly, probably even as a little girl. You're allowed to care about how you look as long as the goal is to look appropriate, not to be seen, pretty but not distracting, put together but don't try too hard. Attractive enough that nobody criticizes you, but still invisible enough that nobody clocks you. We don't dress for ourselves. We dress to manage exactly how much space we're allowed to take up in a room.
Tracey:We dress to dodge the comment. We dress to not be noticed, and then we call that classy. So today, we're pulling that whole thing apart because getting dressed should not be a daily negotiation with every person who might lay eyes on you. So it's story time. Gather around, my friends.
Tracey:And let me tell you about the time I wore a top as a dress and apparently committed a crime against the public. So here is the piece of clothing that I wore. And oh gosh, guys, I need to, like, I probably need to upload a photo with this episode because I love I love this dress. Several layers of ruffle down the front, and then it drops all the way to the floor in this dramatic, gorgeous train. It's just like this black I don't even know what fabric it is, but it is fun.
Tracey:Okay, y'all? Throw on some fishnets and some heels, and we are ready to go out and take the town on. Now it was sold individually, but there were pants meant to go with this top. I did not buy the pants because I was like, I do not like the pants. I like the top.
Tracey:And the top was long enough that I could wear it as a dress. So I did. I wore it as a dress fully on purpose. And, oh, y'all, the reviews came in because they always do, right? And some of the women were with me.
Tracey:They were like, Yes, girl. Yes, queen. Like, you know, all the good stuff. Like, Girl, I can't even. And I'm like, I know.
Tracey:It's so good. And then there were the other people who chimed in. Did you forget your pants at home? Hope you've got good underwear on under there. I would never.
Tracey:And my personal favorite, you do know that was sold as a top, right? Not a dress. And here's what I want to say to every single one of those comments with love. I didn't ask you if you liked what I did with it. Right?
Tracey:I liked what I did with it. I took a top. I made it a dress, and I felt incredible. I felt beautiful. I felt powerful.
Tracey:I did feel like a queen. And ladies, for the record, so did my husband. He was like, I like this outfit. And I was like, I bet you do. The only problem in that entire room was that I did not fit neatly into the tiny little box of what society had decided a lady is supposed to dress like.
Tracey:And that box, my friends, is exactly what we're setting on fire today. So let's look at the cost of this rule because there's always a cost. So researchers have a name for the thing we do all day without even noticing, self objectification. Just a big word for a way to say when you stop living inside your body and start monitoring it from the outside. So what that is is checking how you look to other people before you've even checked in on how you feel.
Tracey:And it has a real cost. That constant self surveillance eats actual mental bandwidth. Can you believe that? It eats actual mental bandwidth. There's research showing women perform worse on focus and problem solving tasks when they've been made body conscience first.
Tracey:Because part of the brain is busy watching the body instead of doing the thing that we're supposed to be thinking about creating and doing. So we're not scatterbrained. We're running a background program that men were largely never made to install. But here's the part I actually want to set you free with. You cannot win this game.
Tracey:It is rigged, my friends. Dress sexy for a night out, and you're asking for it. You're too much. Put on the uniform. You've let yourself go.
Tracey:Dress for your faith or your culture, and suddenly everyone's got a hot take on your scarf, your skirt, your covering, too modest for one crowd, not modest enough for the rest. Roll into Target in your sweats and a messy bun? Wow. She's really given up. There is no outfit.
Tracey:None. There is no combination of fabric that gets you out of being judged. So then the question becomes, if you're gonna be judged in the ballgown and the sweatpants, you might as well get judged in whatever the hell makes you feel like yourself, what makes you feel good. Right? Now, we've got to look at how deep this goes because, ladies, if you just even look back in our history and see what women were wearing, I don't even think I have to say anything.
Tracey:Think I could just post a picture and be like, Right? But let's look at it. Let's go back because this does run deep. So we've all got handed this image of the delicate Victorian lady, right? Swooning onto the couch, oh, hand to her forehead, simply too fragile for the world.
Tracey:And that's what it was labeled as. Women were called weak. She fainted. She can't handle things. You said something that distressed her.
Tracey:You looked at her in a way that she just had to lay back and pass out. But here's the truth. Do you know why women were passing out? It's not because they were weak. It's when those corsets were laced so tightly to give a thin, pleasing waist for the male gaze, they generally cut a woman's lung capacity.
Tracey:Studies on tight lacing have measured drops of up to a third, and that was under pounds and pounds of petticoats in the heat. So y'all, she wasn't weak. She literally could not get a full breath. The doctors of the day even blamed the lacing. The fragility wasn't her nature.
Tracey:It was built by the clothing and then pinned on her like it was her personality. Okay, but let's not start saying, Oh, but that's ancient history, Tracy. I got some stats for you that are going to drop your jaw if you don't know these. So women were not allowed to wear pants on the floor of the United States Senate. Y'all think of a date and then just get ready.
Tracey:Until 1993. Let's say it again. Women were not allowed to wear pants on the floor of our United States Senate until 1993. That's not Victorian era. That's Bill Clinton era.
Tracey:Pant suits didn't become acceptable office wear until around 1970. The FBI flat out forbade women from wearing pants until the day J. Edgar Hoover died because he personally couldn't stand the sight of a woman in pants. A grown woman's right to wear trousers to work is younger than a whole lot of you listening to this podcast right now. And there was an entire genre of advice for the mid century housewife.
Tracey:Fix your hair, freshen your makeup, change into something nice, and get the children cleaned up and presentable before the man of the house walks through the door so he comes home to a lovely scene. The women's appearance were not even theirs. It was part of his welcome home package. And even when women did break loose, let's think of the flappers in the 1920s. Y'all, if time travel is real and I can go back I'm going back to the nineteen twenties.
Tracey:I'm going into a speakeasy, and I'm gonna be a flapper. So come join me. But if we think of the flappers in the nineteen twenties, the shorter dresses, the bare arms, the dancing, a lot of that freedom had to go underground into the speakeasies, which were considered illegal clubs. You can move how you wanted, dress how you wanted, as long as you did it in secret and in a place you weren't supposed to be. And it has never ever landed the same on every woman.
Tracey:We have to look at some of our fellow sisters. Just a couple years ago, laws were being passed in other countries about women of other cultural groups on how they could wear their natural hair. Let that sink in. Just a couple years ago, we were talking about, first of all, women, which is none of our business, on what their natural hair was doing and how they are allowed to exercise what it does in public. That is ridiculous.
Tracey:Let's look at any woman. I'm not even going put a size on it. I don't like the word plus size. Any size that a woman is, it's never right. Too skinny, too curvy, too big, she's fat, she's gross, all of it.
Tracey:It doesn't matter. It does not matter. And then women, if you're in a religious or cultural dress, something that you want to observe and follow, you get judged from every direction at once. So this rule has never been about modesty. It is about control, head to toe, generation after generation.
Tracey:So if this could be said out loud by women, this is what it would sound like. I love this, but it's too loud for who I'm allowed to be. It's still got the tags. I'm waiting to become the kind of woman who wears it. I changed before he got home because I didn't want the look.
Tracey:I dress so my body doesn't start a conversation I never agreed to have. I want to be seen. I'm just scared of what happens when I am. So y'all, let's get to my favorite session, which really, let's be honest, these whole podcasts are all the, This should piss you off because because I'm pissed off, and we gotta talk about it. But this should piss you off because this is the question they keep landing on.
Tracey:Why is it anyone else's business? Right? Why is it anyone else's business? When did what's on my body become an open invitation for your commentary? The woman who said, Did you forget your pants?
Tracey:Who asked her? I didn't, and nobody in my vicinity did. We have somehow all agreed that a woman's body in public is a community project, a thing everybody gets a vote on. And the part that should really light you up, my friends, is how much of that policing comes from other women. I'd love to pin a lot of this on men, and listen, there's a lot we can talk about with the male gaze, but a lot of this is coming from our fellow sisters because that is exactly how the cage was designed for us all to operate.
Tracey:They trained us to enforce it on each other. So they don't even have to do the work. The men don't have to regulate us. They use us against each other. And that is the system never having to lift a finger.
Tracey:Your outfit cost those people nothing. It changes not one single thing about their actual life. Think about that. Your Daisy Duke shorts, it doesn't stop them from paying their rent, going to work, getting groceries. It doesn't matter.
Tracey:It costs them nothing. It changes not one single thing about their actual lives, and they still feel entitled to weigh in. Because for generations, women were told their appearance was up for public debate. But it is not, it never was, and it never should be. What you put on your body is yours, full stop, end of sentence, period.
Tracey:You feeling me? Do feel how fired up I am? So how do you know if this is you? You own clothes that you love and you don't wear because they're too much for a Tuesday. You pick outfits based on who you'll see and what they might say, not on what you want to wear or how you feel.
Tracey:Is this too much? Basically lives in your mouth. You've changed an outfit on purpose to dodge a comment from a partner, a parent, or a coworker. You can still describe in detail the outfit that earned you a bad comment years ago, and you're still quietly dressing around that comment. So let's look at our reflection.
Tracey:How do we take care of ourselves this week? So here's your one small experiment for this week. Pick the thing. It can be the shade, the cut, the train, the boots, the bold lip, the piece that's been hanging in the back of the closet with the tags still on it waiting for permission that's never gonna come from anybody outside of your house. Put it on for no reason, for no one else but yourself on a completely regular day.
Tracey:And when that old question floats up, is this too much? I want you to swap it out for a better one. Instead, I want you to ask, do I feel like me? Because that right there is the only review that was ever supposed to count. So in closing, here's what I want for you.
Tracey:Not someday. This is what I want for you right now. I want you to walk into a room in whatever makes you feel the most like yourself. The shade that they're going to call too bright, the train, the heels, the flats, the Doc Martens, the bare arms. I want you to get dressed for the woman in the mirror instead of the jury you've been carrying around in your head.
Tracey:It's not for him. It's not for them. It's not for other women. It's not for the version of you that learned somewhere along the way to apologize for taking up space or for daring to look these rules in the face and say, I'm not doing that any longer. Because something happens to a woman when she gets dressed purely for her own joy.
Tracey:When she stops asking, Is this too much? And starts asking, Do I feel like myself? She becomes completely, gloriously unmanageable. And a woman who dresses like her body is hers and her joy is the whole entire point, a woman you simply cannot shrink back down to a size that's comfortable for everyone else, well, that woman is free. And being free out loud and in a body that was told to stay quiet for daring to be you to put on what feels like you.
Tracey:That, my friends, is the most unladylike thing of all. Thanks for joining me today for That's Not Very Ladylike. If today's episode lit a fire, pushed your buttons, or called a little BS on the stories we've been sold, share it with another woman who's tired of being told to tone it down, smile more, or play nice. And help a girl out by making sure you subscribe, leave a quick review, and catch me on Instagram at that hormone girl. And until next time, keep getting loud, messy, and raising hell because being ladylike is overrated.