Because it also occurred to me that as well as being Western-centric, the idea that gender presentation always privileges the male and punishes the female kind of ignores large portions of even Western history.
Or even what’s going on in culture right now, as male fashion magazines spread and male “grooming products” flourish with the rise of the “metrosexual.”
Consider this: 
Yes, it’s from the movie. But it’s also a fairly accurate representation of how men and women of the upper classes dressed at the time. And it’s a photograph of actual people dressed in those outfits.
Yes, Marie Antoinette’s dress is huge and unwieldy. But her husband Louis wears a powdered wig and makeup of his own, a high-collared shirt and (though you can’t see them here) knee-breeches, tights, and high-heeled shoes.
There’s a discussion of privilege that we aren’t even going to have here because simply having the time to worry about whether or not to shave one’s legs implies privilege.
What I want to talk about is the fact that male gender presentation has not been static through the ages. That quite often it too has consisted of very specific clothing, shaving, hairstyling, and behavior requirements. Yes, most of the time the women’s were more restrictive, and I don’t think we’ll ever see women embracing bound feet the way some have re-embraced the corset (full disclosure: I own two steel-boned corsets that can take two inches off my waist, but I’ve never done real corset training like Dita or others).
Sparkle, in other words, wasn’t only for women.
I hope I won’t find any feminists who will argue with me that male gender presentation is if anything more heavily policed these days than female. While a woman can wear pants, no makeup, cut her hair short, and while she may be called butch or told that she’d be prettier if…, she probably will not face the same sanctions that a man who wears makeup and dresses will (unless he’s Eddie Izzard). The sanctions for a man who prettifies, who embellishes his appearance, are generally going to be much greater than those for a woman who de-prettifies, most especially in terms of his personal safety in certain quarters.
(And I’m not even talking about trans people here, because we all know transition is policed. And that there’s the assumption that if one transitions, one automatically adopts all the gender signifiers, is straight, and otherwise does everything possible to enact some repressive gender role.)
One exception to present-day gender restrictions on makeup, high heels, and the like is, of course, the rock star: 
Ok, so that’s Bowie in the 70s. So pretty. Bowie caused quite a stir by wearing the things that he wore and acting the way that he did. He certainly wasn’t ‘pleasing’ the patriarchy. Gender-bending has always been a part of the “fuck-you” tradition of the rock star, after all, but it also served to attract the opposite sex. Putting on makeup and dresses didn’t make Bowie less attractive to women, it made him more so.
And of course, the other assumption that all of these things are evil and can have no pleasure for the people who use them makes women even less powerful. We are (slightly more than) half the human race, after all. Is it to be believed that over most of human history, women have been so beaten down that they’ve had no input into any of the choices made for them? That every decision, every choice, every second of their lives was pure misery?
We assume that ‘patriarchy’ (I prefer Kyriarchy, these days) is a vast system of subconscious controls, but if it is this way, rather than something rigidly outwardly enforced like a school dress code, how can you really tell what was a result of it and what was in spite of it?
Anything that is outwardly enforced, coerced, becomes no choice at all, of course. If you face social sanctions for not dressing like the gender you appear to be, for not having children (or for having them), for not having a gender-appropriate job, for being with someone of the ‘wrong’ gender, then it’s not a free choice. If you do those things despite social sanctions the action is seen as subversive, even when you’re just living your life.
Feminism shouldn’t be another system of enforcing social sanctions on its members for their actions, should it? What’s liberatory about that?
Bowie is such an outrageous fox. I know it’s besides the point…but I must make my position on this perfectly clear.
I don’t have much to say about this excellent post, except that beauty does not know gender and the fact that one particular gender is PROHIBITED from expressing their beauty (if they so wish) is just as harmful as when another particular gender is MANDATED to do so in a particular, rigid way.
Nope, I don’t want to get rid of gender; I don’t think that is possible. I do want to overturn the idea that there are only two genders and overturn the expectations that each gender is only allowed to present / dress / behave according to disjoint sets of narrow expectations.
To put it more bluntly: There are people, of all genders, who look *damned good* in a dress and knee-highs, and yes, David Bowie is one of them, and speaking of “crossdressing” does not even make sense to me. More recently, a few years ago in West Philly, I saw a guy, bearded, wearing a skirt (not a Utilikilt, a *skirt*) and it was just *right* for him to do that, he was just a guy going about his day.