It's all rich people problems
a disorganized rant
Awhile back I saw a post on Facebook that, years later, is still living rent-free in my brain. An activist in my hometown was on her period (I'm not being a jerk, she basically says it and I'm on mine right now, too, so leave me alone) and it inspired her to forcefully poeticize her thoughts on how freeing it must feel to be a man.
This thing is years old and maybe she doesn't feel the same way anymore, I dunno, but I've seen a few fresh explainers on old feminist 101 style arguments like they’ve just graduated a new cohort of 2010s-style SJWs and it's irking me, so I'm going to tear into this a little because people keep talking about this stuff like they’re new revelations and I think we're conflating some problem-sources here.
Of course I could relate to some of these universal woman qualms, but what stood out to me was that, while the list had a clear undertone of blaming someone or something for these lamentations, much of it was simply no one’s fault — or the only entities on which blame could reasonably be placed were biology or even other women.
Let’s go through a few:
Periods: biology. Also at a certain point most of us eventually figure out how to stop ruining sheets and underwear and leggings.
Edit: nevermind that last sentence. Sometimes we aren't consistent with remembering this particular lesson. Ask me how I know. RIP that particular pair of underwear.
Getting to be a parent without having to birth a child: yes, you guessed it, biology, but also, for real? Lady, surely you have heard of adoption and surrogacy and fostering and step-parenthood, no? Actually I know that you have because I follow you on two different platforms and have seen that since penning this list for Facebook eight years ago, you married a guy with a kid and you call yourself her mother and her your child. Congratulations on figuring this one out.
No baby showers. No bridal showers. No parties for your friends weird candle/essential oil/legging/sex toy business: entirely your choice, ma’am! I am here to give you permission to not attend parties that don’t sound fun to you. Granted, you are going to have to do some work to determine what events are important enough to prioritize since you might be considered an asshole for not attending your sister’s baby shower, but I’m sure you can discern when you should support a female loved one through a major life event vs. when you can skip pretending you’re interested in buying something from the latest pyramid scheme she’s joined.
Playing golf on the wedding day: is this a thing? And women aren’t allowed to do it? Why not? For real, though, why aren’t we allowed to play golf on our wedding day? Is it because it’s 1904 and our chaperone is telling us it’s unladylike? Is there a manager following you and only you around who decided that you have too many things to do, so you may not join your fiancé for a round of golf before your vows? Or even your bridesmaids or something? Can’t even swing a club at a ball by yourself for some reason? What is going on here?
Or is it that our hair and makeup and white dresses and shit (that we’re definitely required to wear if you’ve read any of the panicked articles about the cost of weddings these days1) will get dirty and ruin the look before the ceremony? Because if that’s the reason, please see prior responses: you’re doing this to yourself. If playing golf before the wedding is important to you, you can make it happen. Simply play the golf. The first time I got married was in a dive bar by a rando officiant we met on Craigslist in exchange for a bottle of cheap brandy and we kept it a secret from everyone we knew for a year. It is 2025. There are no rules.
Your bare, natural face and hair not feeling like a revolution: look, the only way someone is actually telling you that you have to have a face full of makeup and dye your hair is if you are in one of a few select, usually extremely privileged and well-compensated career roles for which conventional physical attractiveness is the primary vehicle for success, like modeling, acting, or some other, third thing. Things you have to set out to do extremely on purpose with full knowledge of what it's like. That's not to say you can't complain about aspects of choices you make, but rather that normal people are not having their faces policed by literally anyone. Absolutely no one in normal, polite society is looking at a woman without makeup on with her natural hair color and thinking, “what a slob. Such a lazy girl. We should fire her and socially banish her, probably.”
You and I do not have the same problems as Pamela Anderson. There is no reason for anyone to expect this from us, which is why they don’t. Do you? We’re not revolutionary for skipping mascara today, although it can be argued that Pam is actually kind of brave when she does it since she fits into one of the above categories of the extremely privileged women who are expected to.
Christ, most men can’t even tell the difference between a makeup-free face and one with a little mascara and eyebrow pencil on, and the ones who do notice makeup are noticing the women with a ton of it on their faces and saying loudly that they don’t like it — which often elicits a common yet contradictory response: “we aren’t doing it for you, asshole.”
So much less laundry: this is where it really starts to break down, I think. It has been like eight years since I first saw this and the inclusion of laundry on this list is still bewildering to me. Who is giving you their laundry to wash and dry and put away without your permission? Who is doing that to you and why are you allowing them to continue? Who is wearing all these clothes and why don’t they have to help you wash them? What are men doing so differently that they have so much less laundry than you, a single woman at the time of this original writing, living alone?
Oh, it’s you? They’re your clothes? You’re responsible for wearing and dirtying the clothing that you’re upset you have to clean? Okay, my bad, allow me to rephrase my question: why are you giving yourself so much laundry to do?
A curious twig of feminist theory sprung out of the fashion branch of the third- (fourth-?) wave tree. Where women were once ribbed for our clothing obsessions and interest in personal style, we now have to reconsider everything in light of our new intersectional, critically-theorized reality and determine who was actually responsible for this perplexing hyperfocus on the fabric in which we drape our meatsuits.
Fashion is often considered by normie masses to be superficial and boring and arguments to the contrary tend to fall on deaf ears so, like feminists of the Girlboss Sect are wont to do, they simply agreed that it was lame to care about fashion but only under the condition that some other person or entity be blamed for our collective frivolity.
(It’s men. Patriarchy and men.)
Is this why women “have” to do so much more laundry? Because someone told us that we can’t wear the same outfit twice?
This is a sentiment that seemed to be repeated across the femisphere like it was scripture for a while. The reflex is that, because it’s felt as a gendered difference, it must be misogyny and the villain must be patriarchy. And if men are privileged for not needing to deal with this social “requirement,” then it means that women who do are oppressed for it, because that’s how this game works.
Who’s oppressing us with this expectation that we are supposed to wear a different outfit to every event, I wonder? Because try as I might, I cannot remember a single man who’s remarked on something like this in my life.
The thing is, I’ve never actually had a woman remark on me wearing the same thing to more than one function before, either, probably because they do the same thing. Why wouldn’t they? We’re not uniquely smart for not falling for this and opting out of this game — we are simply normal people and normal people do not care about things like whether or not we’ve already worn a specific piece of clothing in public before because normal people buy clothing to wear more than one time. Normal people prioritize their money differently and because they have less of it than rich people (who are not, for the purposes of this argument, normal), they also have different expectations to meet, and those generally do not include wearing a different outfit to brunch every week or each of your friends’ weddings.
If you aspire to live the life of a wealthy socialite who gets to wear a different fancy outfit to countless weekly events, it kind of goes without saying that not only is this expected of you because it’s a display and reminder of wealth and status, but you’re literally perpetuating it not only by participating but by aspiring to it in the first place. You legitimize the very system you hate by playing into it after begging to be let in.
An interesting thing has happened since I initially collected these screenshots back in 2017: people started listening to the criticism.
…But in a stupid way.
Okay, we’ve finally accepted that it isn’t men who do this to women, but women who do it to each other, and I guess the solution is not to ignore the issue because it’s fucking stupid and not relevant to the majority of people on the planet, but instead to sympathetically understand that female bullying is so complex that we cannot extricate ourselves from its grasp even to do something as banal as wearing last year’s jeans. It must be accommodated instead of resolved or even mocked because women are simultaneously bullies and victims of each other, at all times. And we aren’t allowed to opt out, I guess! Perhaps doing so would disrupt our fragile lady-constitutions. We must be pandered to or we will simply shatter.
Ultimately I don’t think my experience is all that different from other women’s, and I think the explanation for this is very simple: these aren’t female problems, they’re rich people problems.
Where else can you possibly expect to be bullied for wearing the same dress to two different weddings? By whom would you ever expect to be scolded for not wearing enough eyeliner? Who is it, exactly, who bullies young women for not being fashionable enough?
I've dressed roughly the same since high school with the only thing consistently changing being the fit of my jeans (bootcut, skinny, etc.), the only trend I bothered to keep up with simply because it’s damn near impossible to find one type while the other is in style.
I'm not trying to brag about being a lazy dresser who isn't terribly fashionable or intentional about the way I clothe myself2, just pointing out again that I feel like this, like almost all fashion and beauty concerns of this nature, are rich people problems that I never would have organically known existed otherwise because they simply are not here in the world of normal people. I don't even know what it sounds like to hear someone be called “weird” for not wearing something fashionable — as an adult, anyway. Middle and high school were different stories, of course. One table of girls laughed at me in math class one day after they asked where I got my clothes because I admitted that my shirt and pants came from two different stores and therefore I guess I wasn't wearing a real “outfit.” Learn something new every day!
The funny thing about that incident is that I really thought I'd get a totally different reaction because one of those stores was Sears, a department store, meaning it was where normal, middle class people shopped for clothing instead of Target or Walmart (my school was full of poor people so our teenage status signaling was based on much lower standards).
Anyway, am I supposed to believe that adults are like this now, too? I simply cannot fathom such a reality. I guess people do exist who have a huge problem seeing a green text message in the group chat, so I don’t know why I’m so surprised.
Ultimately, so many of these things — the complaints about the little inconveniences that women have to go through, the cost of weddings, the superficial expectations that no one has actually imposed on you, specifically — are things you can simply choose not to participate in any longer without many, if any, negative repercussions. You can wear fewer outfits in a day so that you can do less laundry. You can have a less expensive wedding. You can play golf whenever the hell you feel like it. You can stop shaving your legs and still get promoted at work because even if the company contains one or more men who are actively sexist about body hair, who the hell is checking this shit at your place of employment? Are you a stripper? Because if not then I don’t know how this is even a problem in your life. Are you afraid of getting made fun of by teenagers at the beach? Yeah, me too, teenagers are scary, join the club. But it’s unfortunately not illegal to be a bratty teenager, so if you want to free yourself of needless burdens like caring what 14-year-olds think of your body hair, you have to start somewhere. No one else is going to do it for you!
If you want to badly enough, you, too, can feel as free as a man bird.
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Let me let you in on a little secret: weddings cost whatever the court charges to file the paperwork plus whatever the officiant charges to actually marry you. Anything you spend beyond that is entirely your choice.
For the record, if it is not clear, I am also not making fun of people who are into fashion as a hobby or art form or career or what have you. There is a world of difference between the fun kind of fashion interest and the kind that is solely about how much money your outfit cost you and signaling to other rich people how much money you have at your disposal. People who actually love and appreciate fashion don’t tend to care about that nearly as much as they care about what the clothing actually looks like.
“Being taught from birth that you are worthy”
This is not what being a man feels like at all. Quite the opposite, being a man is a constant struggle of proving and demonstrating your worth, because male worth is almost entirely wrapped up in what you do, what you provide, not what you are. Men themselves are expendable / exchangeable for greater value, indeed the most revered heroes are those that fully sacrifice themselves to some great cause.
I think where the confusion comes in is that traditional male roles offer more pathways to status and wealth. As a result we invested young men with support and training and encouragement to go do great things. But the privilege of that opportunity and support always came paired with the tremendous burden of expectation and responsibility. In the end, they still had to go out and prove themselves worthy, earn their keep and their respect.
(Obviously there exist privileged nepo-babies who are handed “worth” through no effort, but a) nepo-babies come in both sexes and b) *being* a nepo-baby is unearned privilege but *having* a nepo-baby is a lot of work for the previous generation)
Thanks for that. FWIW I’m an old, white male, so take the following as you see fit. Anyway, I grew up mostly in a small, middle-of-nowhere ranch town, the kind of place widely assumed to be a bastion of old-fashionedism. But, in general, people, both men and women, pulled their weight. Yes, conformity to gender stereotypes existed. But it didn’t dictate everything. I was exposed to many women who could hold their own doing difficult, physically taxing things. That’s what was required- all hands on deck at a branding, at the volunteer fire department, etc. Any accurate description of that milieu must include ‘egalitarian’. For overall mental health and a personal sense of freedom it beats all as a foundation. Yes, there are alternatives to being trapped by materialism and other people’s stupid social expectations.