On Manicures and Mindsets

So my mom and I went to get mani-pedis while I was home over the holidays.

It’s not the first time I’ve had my nails done, although I can count the total number on the usually un-polished fingers of one hand. Apart from the discomfort of paying a stranger to do personal hygiene stuff for me (but that’s another blog entry), I enjoy them.

It’s nice to have my nails shaped by an expert and to get the opinion of someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s fun to have my hands massaged and moisturized.

Frankly, it can also be refreshing for a little while to have my painted nails as a clear sign of my gender–a brief break from weird looks, rude questions, and pronoun hesitation.

But unless I get the clear stuff, I can keep nail polish on for about 48 hours, tops, before my hands feel like they don’t belong to me anymore.

When I have nail polish on, I realized this time, I feel like my fingers are more delicate. More fragile. Less capable.

And that’s not a cool thing to think.

Since I was a little kid, my version of femininity has always been more androgynous than is standard. I like suits, shaving my legs, ties, short hair, tailored fits, brogues, sneakers, shaped eyebrows. Wearing make-up has never appealed to me; neither have dresses or skirts, although it can be fun to doll up with both on special occasions, if I feel like it.

For this reason, for a lot of my life, traditional femininity has felt like an antagonist: something I have to actively combat in order not to be subsumed. But, as I’ve considered before, that sometimes makes me vulnerable to sexist intuitions.

I am ashamed to understand that when I think of manicured nails, my first association is incompetence: omg, I broke a nay-yul!, those long nails sure must get in the way of doing work, that stereotypical image of a receptionist (of course, never the boss) on the phone with a friend, filing her nails.

That’s not right. The length and colour of someone’s fingernails, or their choice to develop their nails’ aesthetic qualities, has nothing to do with their ability. Just because I’m not used to long nails (or high heels, or long hair) doesn’t mean that other people are as incompetent as I am; just because that aspect of my personal appearance doesn’t matter to me doesn’t mean I can judge others for caring about it.

In light of that, sometimes I wonder how much of my preferred gender presentation is about my personal identification and how much is internalized sexism.

I know that’s a silly dichotomy to make: it assumes that I have some Platonic True! Inner! Self that’s separate from all my experiences in the world, which simply isn’t true. I don’t believe in a single pure me, a soul that has an irreducible essence that is always the same in every situation.

But I still have to consider my gender presentation a negotiation. Is it enough to say that this is who I feel I am? (And it is who I feel I am.) Is the fact that my gender presentation is non-traditional–that it presents difficulties of its own for me–sufficient cause to allow me to ignore the way I prefer it in part because it perpetuates sexist associations with white masculinity?

I don’t think it is.

Wearing skirts and dresses make me feel weak, incompetent. It’s okay to feel that way, but it’s not okay to allow that feeling to colour how I interpret others’ sartorial choices. It’s also not okay to accept my feelings as sancrosanct, unquestionable, unchanging. Feelings deserve respect, but that doesn’t mean they automatically deserve axiom status.* Feelings can’t be erased, but they can evolve, and they can self-contradict.

So, I have to ask myself, should I be concerned that my adoption of a masculine aesthetic and rejection of traditional femininity is a reflection of ideologies I consider unethical?

Obviously, I’m going to answer “no,” but equally obviously, I’m biased. I don’t want to have to change the way I feel about traditionally feminine aspects of dress.

To be honest, I’ve never tried: I’ve attempted to like or emulate parts of traditional femininity so I can be “normal” or so I can learn valuable, interesting skills, but I’ve never gone full Clockwork Orange, worked to the full extent of my skill to change how I feel. (And perhaps referring to it as “Clockwork Orange” gives away the fact that I see traditional femininity as something that will always be external to the “real” me, whatever that can possibly mean.)

In other words, when my painted nails don’t feel like mine anymore, I remove the polish, instead of working to remove the feeling.

Is that the right thing to do? Lord knows I’ve done it the other way around a ton, when I didn’t (or when I don’t) have the choice of looking and dressing the way I wanted to, and it didn’t work then.

But I also didn’t know then what I know now: that books are wrong. And TV is wrong. And Hollywood is wrong. When they show women who look the way I don’t want to look being the way I don’t want to be, they’re only telling at most half a truth. They’re not showing all the ways these women can be like me and undervaluing all the ways I might want to be like them.

So I don’t know what to do. But that’s okay. I’ll keep getting my nails done, if that’s what I feel like, and I’ll keep taking off the polish, if that’s what I feel like too. And I’ll think about what’s going on–not to force myself to change who I am inside but to consider what effect that has on others.

* I, like everyone else, am much more willing to accept this about other people’s feelings than my own. But the focus should be reversed: my own feelings are the ones of which I have the best knowledge and with the most direct effect on my quality of life. They are the ones most relevant to my being a good and ethical person.