PYT

My name is Doreen and I'm a Pretty Young Thing in recovery.

I've had men tell me I'm interesting because I think of things other than clothes, makeup and jewelry.

I dress for women and I undress for men.
-- Angie Dickinson

The world over, parents still largely raise girls as if they have a future carved in stone as a full-time wife and a mother of many children. Then we wonder why the world is struggling so much to successfully transition away from that pattern now that women typically have fewer kids and most do paid work for at least some portion of their lives and many have serious career aspirations.

As part of that, women seem to be taught that they need to be accommodating of others and they need to worry first and foremost about their looks because it will more or less be their bread and butter as their only real career aspiration will be marrying well.

I was very pretty when I was younger. It didn't get me the life I wanted. This blog grows out of that fact.

I have this hypothesis that a lot of what we think of as feminine is really something more like private sphere coded behavior and what we think of as masculine is more like public sphere coded behavior. This blog exists to explore that hypothesis and try to split hairs about such things, if only for my own edification.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think feminine means never standing up for yourself and standing up for yourself means abandoning being feminine. I don't agree with either of those ideas, which is why my retelling of a story I read in a magazine in my teens about Assertiveness training was the pinned post on this site for a time.

Standing up for yourself is the kind of thing that falls under the heading having character. We seem to think feminine character is a contradiction in terms. The world seems to think you need to pick one.

The title of this blog has three meanings.

1. Being feminine while having character works. You can do both.
2. It's a work space for me to sort out how exactly to do that since the world seems to think it's not possible and tends to provide few good examples, both IRL and in literature.
3. It's a space to examine characters, both IRL and in literature, and use that as a lens for exploring how to be both feminine and have character.

I never seen a pretty girl look so tough

I'm older than I used to be. I want to be like Viveca who came across so wonderfully as the elder Catherine Langford in Stargate and once said in an interview she didn't really care about her looks.

Although I like the idea of the Bechdel Test and I'm aware women are underrepresented in literature, this blog seeks to pull examples from wherever I find them. I don't self-identify as a feminist, which is part of why this blog replaced an older blog called Feminist Slacking.

To my mind, feminists are women who want a career like a man and are willing to sacrifice the welfare of their children to get it. I think we need to change how things are done such that a woman can have a real career, it doesn't have to be a career like a man and we don't have to sacrifice our children to do it.

This is not intended to attack women who do self-identify as feminists nor women who did the best they could with the options available to them. This is future oriented and looking for something better than the way we had. (I hate labels anyway. They are just sometimes a necessary evil for communicating.)

I have heard that the French Bible says The nonchalant shall inherit the Earth instead of The meek shall inherit the Earth. Having grown up in a bilingual home, I can see how those are variations on the same idea and, yet, the French framing seems vastly more constructive to me than the English framing.

The English framing seems to suggest you should be a doormat and let people trample you and count on God to set things right and reward you. The French framing comes across to me like "Be diplomatic. Don't go in with both barrels blazing. Don't start shit unnecessarily. Be competent enough to stand up for yourself without being a jerk to people."

I'm not against dressing well or looking good. There's just more to life -- and career success -- than that.

Footnote

This website is sort of the "sister site" to r/ImNotYourMommy and that reddit is intended to provide a path forward on dismantling rape culture, so I somewhat often talk on this blog about tough subjects, like sexual assault. My policy for how I write those posts is more or less laid out here: What you leave out.

I do not intend to spend an inordinate amount of time on THIS site trying to desperately account for the fact that some folks have serious mental health issues and hear what they want to hear no matter what you actually said. If you are thusly inclined, I highly recommend you not read this site as it is probably just a means for you to keep your insanity alive.