gender

see that's what I thought! SF Giants fans seem less tribal (both of these assumptions are based solely on seeing people going to/from games walking down the street/on public transit), but I've never seen pink shit on them either.

also a better example of refiguring masculine cool in sports gear is when ally contemplated belting a huge giants jersey she owned and wearing it as a dress. in some ilnfl thread of yore.

i am not a crazed ally stalker i promise; i just miss her

xp I think the subtext is that they assume you don't care about the team.

― drawn to them like a moth toward a spanakopita (Laurel), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:18 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

okay, yeah, it puts being a "girl" over being a fan. makes sense.

x-post I hope she did that.

xp Yes.

also is there anything cool about a dude wearing a football jersey? because i live in buffalo i often see men wearing them like, out to dinner on a tuesday night and it's always like, really? i don't think cool is partic important to those guys.

i think the subtext is even worse, because if the woman doesn't care about the team, why is she wearing said item of clothing? Presumably to appeal to a guy. Which is gross in more ways than one: 1. that she isn't appealing enough as herself that she needs to additionally brand herself; 2. the pigeonholing that we've previously discussed

but you care about yr man who cares about the team!

That's totally how I see it. Cringeworthy.

i don't think cool is partic important to those guys.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:24 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

you'd be surprised. cool is v important to guys, and we have LOTS of different ways of constructing it. to many guys, a sports jersey is the height of sartorial coolness.

omg i am not five! i guess i am objecting to the word "cool" but yes, of course wearing a football jersey is a performance of a certain kind of masculinity. i think the guys i am talking about would take pride in their "uncoolness" where "coolness" is read as effeminate.

but please, explain to me more about guys.

football players in jerseys:yes
dudes in throwbacks: yes, kinda
in public or at a bar it's almost a signpost "i will be shitty drunk & shouting later, fyi"

I dont think it's as dorkville as some do, but I like seeing team loyalty anyway

yeah now i feel mean to fellow buffalonians. i say these things affectionately, except for the part about thinking dressing well is kind of gay.

lol @ omg I am not five!

i guess part of my questioning on the pink stuff is this: i see something very interesting and potentially positive in the "culture of girly, glittery pinkness" that seems to have become this huge thing over the last, what, 15 years or so? among other things, it strikes me as an aggressive statement of pride in femininity.

like: "FUCK YOU, i am a GIRL and i can wear whatever the FUCK i want! you don't like pink glittery shit? well FUCK YOU, i LOVE pink glittery shit, and i am going to make my whole fucking life pink and glittery because i am a GIRL and this is what we do. i am PROUD to be a girl, to be "girly", and FUCK YOU if you don't like it."

it seems super tribal to me, and kind of badass. i get that it's also consenting to be defined by an infantilizing and potentially toxic stereotype, but that tension is fascinating in itself. how do you define female culture without being defined by patriarchal expectations? you're either endorsing them (yay, girly shit!) or engaging in something like misogyny (boo, girly shit!).

i think the guys i am talking about would take pride in their "uncoolness" where "coolness" is read as effeminate.

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:30 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, but masculine "pride in uncoolness" is just another kind of coolness. it's like hipsters sneering at hipsters.

i guess you could read it that way, as something coming out of the babydoll dresses of RiotGrrl, maybe?

or ugh I hate pink

like: "FUCK YOU, i am a GIRL and i can wear whatever the FUCK i want! you don't like pink glittery shit? well FUCK YOU, i LOVE pink glittery shit, and i am going to make my whole fucking life pink and glittery because i am a GIRL and this is what we do. i am PROUD to be a girl, to be "girly", and FUCK YOU if you don't like it."

Listen, I did this. I did this when I was 18 and I had blue hair and wore steel-toe docs with my baby pink mini skirt. I reclaimed it and wore the shit out of pink. That's not what's going on here. Trust me.

okay, but masculine "pride in uncoolness" is just another kind of coolness. it's like hipsters sneering at hipsters.

hahaha! i know so many guys that do this, but i don't think it's exclusive to guys.

super tribal to me, and kind of badass

It can be but not in the way the majority of the women buying and wearing pin sports stuff are doing so. It's just not. Sorry.

there are intended uses, and oppositional/ironic/whatever uses to consumer goods. I am really reticent to say that every female who wears these pink sports things or glittery pink stuff is doing so with the same frame of mind/intention.

but that brings us back to post-structuralism and critiques of Althusser

not

^^ mistake post

derrida!

/sigh

yeah, i think part of the difference in this discussion is that, as a guy, i'm loath to criticize "girly" type stuff. i figure it just isn't my place. guys going "gross, girl shit!" is nagl. but women have no reason to hold back.

'Cause you're not entitled to an aesthetic opinion?

so did anyone see the daily show bit with Samantha B earlier this week

It's the girl in 'girly type stuff' at which I take offense. If you're 13 and going through a pubescent pink and sparkles phase I may roll my eyes and say nothing but if you're 26 and still playing the girl my response will be less forgiving. I feel the same way about guys. I don't want to derail this from issues of gender but there are a lot of hang-ups we seem to have about being men and women and aging which I find foolish.

i'd be up to discuss gender and aging

when you're old men's balls get soft turn into mush
science

There's a difference between girl shit and girl shit conforming to a toxic stereotype. I like pink, I like sparkles, I loathe the hegemony of disney princess pink sparkles, bows, ruffles and anything that elevates prettiness to basically being the only valuable quality a female person can have.

xxpost gbx yeah I saw it last night. It felt kinda on the nose for me. I dunno. Kristen Schaal's stuff was always pretty on point, but somehow this Bee thing just did not sit right with me at all.

'Cause you're not entitled to an aesthetic opinion?

― le ralliement du doute et de l'erreur (Michael White), Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:34 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, because aesthetics are inseparable from the construction of gender, and the masculine dismissal of traditionally feminine things doesn't sit well with me at this point in the development of our thinking abt this kind of stuff. too tied to a long and ugly history of the demeaning of the feminine.

separating the feminine from the childlike does help, but i'm not sure that can be done as clearly as it might seem.

yeah but erica isn't saying "gross, girl shit!", i think she's saying "gross, girls wearing pink/glittery/"raunchy" sports gear to please their men!" or IOW it's cool to wear what you like if you like it, but to wear it bc it pleases men is NAGL. xps to contenderizer

yeah, it's cool for erica (?) to take it however. i was mostly addressing my own reticence to condemn it as a man.

like (and not to open a can of worms) i think "feminism" should mean different things to men than it does to women. a perspective that would be feminist coming from a woman is not necessarily feminist coming from a man, and vice-versa.

I'm sure it does not escape the marketing people that large gatherings of men and women are converging before the game to drink/socialize so in their minds lllllllllllladies will want to be looking as blingy and boobalicious as possible, because, youknow, BOYS!

I think if you make something in a "coded" color, even if you're largely inventing/reinventing the coding by doing so, you can sell twice as many of them once you've convinced oppositionally coded groups that they have to have one or the other.

Which is really my yuck factor on this stuff. Also that I am more man-shaped where shirts are concerned and sexified ones are useless to me.

Contenderizer - I'm the Erica referred to above. Just FYI.

And, yes, just1n3 because in the end, as we sort of worked out collectively, that's what a lot of the pink/sparkly/tight sports stuff really comes down to however much I wish that weren't actually the case.

I tailgate with a couple of other women a bit older than me, and we all have the same complaints about buying fan gear, that it's all either sorta lame boring men's designs, or OTT miami beach nightclub wear.

But even the whole...football milieu?...i'm not sure of the right word...community, I guess...doesn't really handle, or really acknowledge female fans in a good way, i don't think. There's some exceptions, but for the most part you're either there because your boyfriend is, or you're some kind of weird lesbian anomaly or something, idk. There's no communities halfways as cool as I have found ILNFL to be, with regard to dudes and chicks just hanging out talking baout sports. It just doesn't seem to naturally occur out in the regular internets. But I guess that's good, so I never have reason to leave ILNFL.

sorry, tl; dr

pfft, i show you how to tl;dr

because aesthetics are inseparable from the construction of gender

i think this statement warrants a closer look, because while i do not disagree with this out of hand i don't think this is such a simple thing to declare

fwiw, i'm not saying that aesthetics = gender constructions, just that they can't be clearly separated, especially when we're talking about our response to "girly shit"

well, when we talk about "girly shit" re: sports merch, a lot of the time we're talking about the default men's merchandise that's modified in certain ways... rendered in loud colors or patterns; and/or cut to be more form-fitting / revealing / body conscious; or embellished, bedazzled, and decorated

is it a coincidence that a lot of these modifications kinda code as having a class dimension, too?