Why do you want to be more lady like??
I have recently gotten a bit obsessed with the social goal networking site 43Things. It’s a fun community to be part of. Each member posts goals, checks off things they’ve done, and others can cheer you on, and write responses.
At the bottom of the page, there is a box that has a list of goals people are working on. I clicked on one that read: “be more lady like.” 12 people share this goal. I support people doing what they want, and I think being a woman is pretty tricky because we are constantly told what kind of “she” to be. I guess I just want to know what being more lady like means.
One user said that she calls herself ladylike because “i am a fantabulous lady like creature! i wear high heels, nice underwear, pretty skirts etc, i say please and thank you at the right times and i can cook!!!” later she adds: “but i sometimes think i need to be more lady like!”
Another explained that lady like to her means more adult, less like a girl. She wants to be more lady like because she wants her customers to trust her as they would someone older.
Another member attributed her lack of lady likeness to her cursing: “I am goign to try first BY NOT CURSING NEARLY AS MUCH… GRRR.”
First, i want to be clear about something: for me, being ladylike is overrated.
From the 43things members, we can see that being lady like has a lot of different interpretations. Like women thinking that cursing and bad manners are not lady like, so we can assume that these attributes are associated with being manly? or man like? Does this mean that there are men out there wondering why they aren’t manly enough? I checked. There were only 18 entries related to becoming more manly on 43Things (I just searched for “manly” and “man-like”), as compared to a whopping 116 (using search term “lady like”). This 116 is not even counting all of the goals which the social construction of “lady” is a part.
Maybe the disparity exists for the following reasons:
1. women are more likely to talk about wanting to be more womanly/ladylike than men are to admit they want to be more manly
2. men are forced to talk about manliness with indirect language like: I want to work out more, i want to lose 30 lbs, etc.
The problem with reason 1 is that it reiterates the socially-constructed idea that women are more likely to talk about problems than men. But, it does not ignore that both men and women are part of a social construction of gender.
The problem with reason 2 is that both men and women use indirect language to talk about gender. Gender is so salient that you don’t have to say the gender you are talking about.
Fortunately, gender is something that 43Things doesn’t ask about, so you can remain ambiguous. However, many of the women who posted made it pretty clear that they were women…
I have a bunch more questions I want to think more about for this…
