In our society, women are expected to act and dress certain ways, and those cultural expectations are often the standards by which we compare and assess ourselves.
In order to reflect the golden standard of femininity decided upon by society, we are often forced to define ourselves by what we wear.
Coming from an artistic and eclectic environment, I never expected to be fashionably ambushed when I stepped foot onto UF’s campus.
I wear nice clothes, present myself well and try to blend in, but there’s something about a college campus that makes girls forget who they are and how to dress.
What’s the difference between how feminine I feel versus how I thought I felt?
Girls obviously feel more pressure than guys to dress a certain way, which is just one fragment of the gender inequality in our society, but you would think every female on campus was a carbon copy of one another.
Every girl wears the same style T-shirt and carries the same — ugly — bag. I never experienced that homogeneity in high school, and coming to UF unquestionably changed me.
The majority of females on campus present themselves with a group mentality, as if individuality cannot be expressed if femininity is desired as well.
I realized the first time I went home after starting school that I dressed differently.
Normally, I feel somewhat inadequate or unfeminine on campus.
I do not do my hair every day, and I wear gym clothes to class. So what? When I go home, however, I dress up, and I love it.
I don’t know if I feel the need to overcompensate for how I don’t dress at school or if I like to show off to my family how much college has changed me, but I wear dresses and do my makeup and feel like a girly girl, which never happens on campus.
As Michael Kimmel states in “The Gendered Society,” the sense of a gendered self does not depend on biological factors but, rather, those interactions and demands of social experiences.
Thinking more about the issue, I realized I, much like every other 18- to 24-year-old, compare myself to those around me.
I look at the “Greeks” and wonder where they got their flower-printed hair bows — even though I think they’re hideous.
When surrounded by such fem-bots, who wouldn’t feel less feminine?
The trick to not letting it bother me, I have found, is to try dressing fashionably away from school.
Am I embarrassed to be seen attempting to be trendy, or do I think I look bad in anything other than a T-shirt?
No, but somehow, I feel the need to rebel against the homogeneity and only attempt fashionable styles in a more comfortable and less-judgmental environment.
My mother took notice and said, “You wear something new every time you come home.”
“Maybe so,” I replied, knowing perfectly well I saved my dress for that occasion because I wear the same dozen T-shirts and running shorts every other day.
Going home is my excuse to look nice, dress up and feel feminine.
The two versions of me do not necessarily mean I do not know who I am, but it means I haven’t found a way to splice those identities into one.
When I leave college, the dresses and the sweatpants will have to intermingle because they are both parts of me.
I never want to carry an ugly neon-paisley-print backpack, but I want to look as feminine as I do when I go home and still feel like me.
The point of addressing college fashion trends and how they influence femininity is to highlight how girls make other girls feel — it is a cycle.
One small group reinforces another until everyone feels the need to wear the same thing and just accept that as being indicative of normal.
Femininity is not easily defined, but apparently, on a college campus, it has a certain image.
The college campus is arguably what Kimmel would call a gendered institution, where the institution itself reflects gender differences and, therefore, reinforces the social expectations of each gender.
I am a female, and I do not succumb to the pressures of all ugly fashion trends, but those choices influence the way I feel and identify as a woman.
Away from the college bubble, I am more me. Out in the world, surrounded by people of all different ages, backgrounds and education levels, I become a more rounded individual. I am free to dress how I want and express my femininity as I choose.
The fashionably stifling environment that is UF was supposed to be a wide-open blank slate to expand my view of the world, but instead, I am surrounded by a lot of the same. That’s too bad.
My wish is other girls realize they will have even new pressures to dress differently when they leave here.
The societal issue of female pressure to look a certain way may not go away, but the ways girls let it influence them can.
Carly Rogers is an anthropology senior at UF. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
