Looking for girl power in all the wrong places

For years, gender feminists have been busy trying to project girl power in the areas of politics, corporation, academia and sports among others, which are traditionally seen as male dominated areas. This is largely because gender feminists decided a few decades ago that women have to be like men, or just “be men” and symbols and bastion of male dominance have to be destroyed and be replaced by women. As a result of this unbalanced focus to turn women into men, gender feminists have neglected to project girl power in traditionally more girly areas, such as fashion design or cooking. Most of the famous fashion designers or top chefs at five-star restaurants or celebrity chefs on TV are men. But now, rather a bit belatedly, Cathy Horn of New York Times attempts to do a little chest-thumping to say that girls are becoming claiming their places in fashion design, too.

It is quite interesting that men tend to dominate the fashion and other industries that cater mostly to women. The majority of clients are women, and majority of students who study in fashion design and other related areas are also women. But somehow, when it comes to the gender breakdown of top fashion designers, it is overwhelmingly men. Is it because the sexist nature of the industry, or because they want to hire or promote people who look like them to top jobs? Not likely. Guys in the fashion industry are one of the most immasculated type, kind of guys that cherish feminine sensitivity, and it is hard to think that they would suddenly turn “neandelthaar” and deny promotion for women.

I think the main reason for this gender imbalance in this girly industry is because, first, as I stated above, gender feminists have paid much less attention to these areas at the expense of their focus on getting more women in politics and corporate boardrooms and editor’s office in major newspapers and magazines. They didn’t cook up many fabricated statistics to show discrimination against women in pay, hiring, and promotion, bring baseless lawsuits on sexual harassment or discrimination, and did not push for gender quota in the number of designers who participate in such and such fashion show. Second, to be a top designer means you need to be competitive and beat other designers in terms of creativity. And when it comes to competition, it is men’s game, even if the men we talk about here is actually more on the girly side than regular men.

This lead me to think, if women cannot even become top fashion designers or top chefs in a fair competition, how women would be able to reach pinnacle in other more male dominated area of politics, corporations and others? Quota, lawsuits, fabricated statistics, media campaign? You bet. Those are the only options.