Dressed to Pull

BEA’S TAKE

In my late teens my living situation changed from being a household of all women – my mother, sister and I – to having a live-in stepfather. This change, while being difficult to get used to at first, turned out to be enormously lucrative in the marketplace of my dealings with my mother. In the early years of my parents’ divorce my mother was incredibly strict. Whenever I wanted to wheedle a teenage night out I had no leverage, no chips, no stock. Sometimes I was allowed to go to birthday parties. But even if I had a party to go to on the weekend we always went to church first on a Saturday night. I must have been the only person at those parties who had received the Eucharist an hour before. One time, as a passive aggressive sort of rebellion, I wore a leather coat to church with no clothes underneath. To this day I don’t have the guts to defy my mother in any overt kind of way.

Everything changed when I got a stepfather. He is not a Catholic and soon church ceased as a weekly ritual. This was not a standover move on his part, I think religion just was no longer relevant to their life as a couple. Note to the kids: when I got a stepfather, I simultaneously got a lot more freedom. Stepfather guilt, so much more potent than divorce guilt alone, was like suddenly getting a 51 per cent stake in the family corporation. My mother started letting me go out at night. It didn’t even have to be someone’s birthday. My mother never neglected me, or stopped worrying about where I went. She just went from being hyper-vigilant to being a normal parent who could be duped with a fairly flimsy excuse.  So there I was, not yet legal, getting into clubs with the purloined license of a 26 year old who looked nothing like me. (Don’t know where the license came from, think a friend donated it).

Having been denied access to nightlife and coming from an all girl school, I relished the chance to mingle in a world of men and booze. In my day life I was a nerd, I wore 70s revival printed polyester shirts from op-shops that made you stink if the temperature went up without warning. The front of my favourite shoes bore the hand drawn silhouette of Sherlock Holmes embellished with glitter smoke. At night I became something different. I was the anti-dork. I don’t think Salt ‘n’ Pepa ever released a track about lady vampires, but if they did I would have been the perfect back up dancer. A lot of makeup and lycra went into the creation of nighttime me. Pale skin, batwing eyeliner, dry matte lips in colours like “mulled wine” or “intense cranberry”. The gothic-lite hooker look. I was a caricature of night living for females.

Everything was super tight, short, and low cut. Most of the time I was profoundly pissed. In a club serving two dollar drinks my friends and I were ordering doubles. We had competitions on how many guys we could kiss in one night. All of us were virgins then, but we thought we were big time temptresses with our chaste snogs.

Now I can’t really tell you whether my heavy makeup, boobs and tight clothes would have been an effective lure for men in everyday life. I can’t tell you this because I led a split existence. There was daytime me and nighttime me. Nighttime me, the try-hard Elvira, fared well in the world of club make outs. But in a darkened room serving cheapo drinks most people can get a leg over for a dry hump and some slag shuffling. I know I did. By three o’clock in the morning I might have been similarly prolific if I had dressed in a cat suit covered with duck feathers. If nighttime me and daytime me had been one, I would have been drunk and skimpily clad all the time. Career options would have been limited. Over the course of my life I have had a few relationships with people I met in bars. But they didn’t turn out to be very good ones. I had much more success with people I met during the day. This may not be the case for everybody but for me it is a personal formula.

At some point in my teens I internalised the message that tight sexy clothes = pick up. If I am going to be honest I should say that my nighttime clothing choices were also driven by insecurity, I thought I had to look sexy to get attention. Club/bar life can be brutal, people are drunk, they leer and flatter and take the piss in equal measure. What I wore at night I would never have worn in the day. As I aged and stopped going to clubs I stopped wearing the hyper-sexualised uniform that enabled me to move with a sort of paradoxical confidence in that world.

Here are a couple of unfair truths. Truth One:  If you go to a bar or nightclub, you are unlikely to see guys in hotpants trying to pick up women. In dedicated gay clubs as well, most guys are wearing pants and a shirt.  They aren’t revealing the delicate curve of their balls. Unless somebody asks. Truth Two: ‘Sexy dressing’ for women in clubs and bars is fairly proscribed and generic, and has been for some time. The basic formula is boobs, legs, tight clothes, makeup. This is unlikely to change and seems only to be getting more extreme. Pretty soon, women will be wearing swimwear in clubs.

Day life, or what I call day life to designate life away from clubs, is somewhat different. In day life people can communicate on a more complex plane. Tastes and interests and personal charm assume greater importance. Not that you don’t chat with people in clubs and bars, but the transactions are a bit more animalistic. Even with internet dating, where the profile pic is all important, banter assumes a heavier importance than it does with the initial first flirtation and gyration in a club. I can’t help but feel that if you meet a person wearing something that in any other context (including sobriety) would make you feel utterly uncomfortable and exposed, then that does not bode well for any potential relationship.

Of course, there are plenty of people who don’t feel uncomfortable about their flesh being exposed, drunk or sober, day or night. And good luck to them! Women or men should be able to dress in a sexy revealing way if that’s what they like. But they shouldn’t feel that revealing clothes are the only way to get attention. I would like to think that if a woman dresses according to the style which makes her feel comfortable and appeals to her own aesthetic, there will be like-minded people out there who will dig her look. This is maybe being overly idealistic. I am aware in the hetero game a lot of guys are put off by looks that are overly fashiony or eccentric (As documented in the great and popular website manrepeller.com)

But if you love high fashion or unusual dressing, or just comfortable and loose clothing, is it worth compromising to pick up? If you think it’s a bit unfair or even sexist that the woman always has to do excessive amounts of primping and revealing, shouldn’t you be able to eschew that whole process? Surely the man or woman who respects and understands your look is more your type anyway? I am not sure of the answers to these questions. I don’t think there really is a simple answer, it’s too easy to pontificate. Maybe if you are a really horny woman and in a sex drought you could go put a mainstream flirty feminine look out there to draw the greatest number of potential flies. But I wouldn’t advise dressing to pull all the time. It’s too boring. Also for me it’s started to feel like a costume, like I was always pretending to be something I wasn’t. Maybe the whole charade is kind of like The Crying Game. You dress like the sexy archetype to lure the man flesh. When he sees what you really like to wear in private he might feel a bit nauseous, but by then it’s too late. He’s hooked. *

* Possibly a bad example given that a penis is not necessarily something you wear, and also things really end badly in that film.

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LEE’S TAKE

My older friends tell me that it all changes at 30.  I did not believe them until recently.

When I hit puberty my skin began to pump enough oil to satiate the global oil shortage.

Now, as I am approaching 30, my skin has shriveled up to sandpaper. The fine lines on my hands won’t disappear no matter how long I dunk them into a vat of coenzeyme Q10 and cocoa butter.  My ears now prick up whenever I hear ads which say “fight the 7 signs of aging.” But perhaps what is more terrifying is how much aging actually bothers me. All of my good friends are attractive women over 30 and none of them use walking sticks.  They tell me that your 30s are when you find confidence.  Unless I get a personality transplant, I don’t see this happening.  #Vain

I have been through both phases of being happily single to being unbearably jealous and intolerant of any couple who dares to even hold hands in my presence. My friends possibly think I’m asexual or in the closet as I’m often single but always in the company of a male friend or two.  Sure I’ve had exciting flings, but nothing more than that.  It also mostly boils down to an inhibiting lack of confidence, having less sex appeal than Rosie O’Donnell, being incredibly picky and not being fortunate enough to meet someone who I like who is single. The celebrity I get the most mistaken for is Ugly Betty. I don’t know any guy who lists her as their crush. Perhaps I’m aiming way out of my league and should settle for someone who is more of my physical match. In that case, this would be him. #NoSelfEsteem

I wonder if my bad luck has also brought about by the way I dress. People say women dress for other women but when I was 15 my entire closet was influenced by what I thought boys would like. One would think that obviously this means I dressed like a slapper. Wrong.

Skatergirl

In the late 90s I was pretty much the only girl in my small Malaysian school who didn’t fall under the spell of boybands.  I listened to anything with a guitar and was particularly concerned with keeping the spirit of grunge alive by graffiting “grunge is not dead” and the Nirvana smiley face over every available surface.  I thought, to set me apart from the designer-clad girls with no interests other than shopping, I should dress in the same way that the guys I liked dressed so they could identify that I was just as cool as them.  As I was fond of the skaters and garage musicians this equated to a uniform of baggy pants and t-shirts. Plus, I was stuggling with a 20kg weight gain that happened in the space of a year, so I was only comfortable in clothes sized for Biggie Smalls. #ThanksPuberty

I naturally became friends with these guys but that was it.  They lusted after the skinny girls in tight midriff bearing t-shirts and mini skirts who were more concerned about debating the Versace vs Dolce & Gabanna than Eddie Vedder vs Kurt Cobain. They dated the girls who killed grunge.

(Note: if these girls were debating Tom Ford vs Marc Jacobs or Prada vs Marni I would have had more respect for them.  Though I dressed like a tomboy, Vogue was still my bible.)

Mod

The skater boys in high school evolved into bearded, mop-haired indie boys at uni who were either wannabe singer-singwriters, filmmakers or writers.  They wore second hand leather or tweed jackets and aspired to be Serge Gainsbourg or Jean-Luc Godard with a Jane Birkin, Anna Karina or Jean Seberg lookalike on their arm.  They wanted more than just a girlfriend – they wanted a muse.

Off to the vintage store I went to buy mod dresses, mini skirts, horizontally striped tops and trench coats.  I got a blunt fringe, wore liquid eyeliner and pulled my socks up to my knees.  When I posed I pointed my feet towards each other.  Perhaps I did look cute (baby-cute, not sexy-cute) but I had the womanly bodyshape of Marilyn Monroe as opposed to a pre-pubecent waifish body of a French New Wave ingenue.  I have yet to see one of these guys with a girlfriend who has a cup size bigger than B.  If they had an Asian girlfriend, she had to be of the immaculate Japanese or pretty half-Asian variety.  Perhaps intelligent guys aren’t attracted to curvy woman (or don’t express an attraction towards them) to show they are a step above the masses who think silicone is sexy.  Obviously what I am writing is nonsense and just reflective of my bitter experience, but show me evidence of a skinny intelligent man with a fat chick and I will believe you. #BitterToday

When it works

Since I have the least amount of luck in the world (for a healthy, able-bodied person) in making a man’s blood rise (#NoExaggeration) I have given up altogether in trying to figure out what to wear to attract them.  I don’t think it makes a difference for men anyway anyway – it’s all about the face and then confidence.  I could be styled by Grace Coddington but if Rachel Bilson was next to me wearing a tattered Snuggie that smelled of tuna and faeces she would be fighting off guys with a stick while I’ll be standing by the wall looking like a (well-dressed) clown in couture.  I just wear whatever suits my mood now.

I can pathetically count on one hand the number of times I’ve been picked up.  The two times this miraculously happened I was wearing one of my most ridiculous outfits: a yellow and blue 80s skort dress.  One would think this would be a Man Repeller but instead I attracted the attention of two very sexy men (who had beer goggles on as it was very late at night).  I can’t explain what it is about this outfit.  Maybe it’s the confidence that comes with wearing such a thing?  They say that it’s sexier when you show less skin, so is the fact that it’s actually shorts and not a dress make it more appealing because of the challenge involved in removing this one-piece outfit?