Why I Wear Nail Polish by Jonathon Reed Culture jamming a society that doesnt want me to be myself

A teenage girl sat across from me on the tram today. Excuse me, she asked, are you a boy or a girl? Boy, I replied. She leaned back and said, So why are you wearing nail polish? I stared at her, taken aback by the venom in her voice. No reason, I eventually responded. She and her friend shared an ugly look. Honestly, I heard as they got up to leave, a boy who wears nail polish what a fucking queer. What I didnt tell her Hey, I didnt stand up and call after her, you really want to know why Im wearing nail polish? The first time I wore red nail polish it was smeared on my fingers by a group of laughing kids in a small village in the Andean mountains. I paint it on when Im feeling sad or lost as a visual reminder of a time that I was happy and fulfilled. Its a piece of self-identity, and it gets me through hard days. How dare you try to take that away from me, I didnt snarl. Break rules & challenge power She didnt have a problem with nail polish itself. It was only after I had affirmed my identification as a boy that she verbally punched me to the periphery of acceptable society. By painting my nails red, I had broken a normative rule; I had asked her to recognize my subjectivity and distinct gender expression. She said no. Of course she did. Our society is built on an imbalance of power that makes it far easier to reject the other than to adapt to unfamiliar realities. Add in a bit of feminism Femininity in boys blurs the black-and-white boundaries of the social order, which is why a 2011 clothing ad featuring a young boy wearing pink nail polish was called blatant transgender child propaganda. Its seen as a danger to good and proper binarisma challenge to traditional power structures.

It also clashes with patriarchal values, which associate femininity with weakness and inferiority. By displaying a typically feminine trait, I was seen as abandoning a superior position as a man. As Lori Duron asked: How come when girls play with gender its a sign of strength and when boys play with gender its a sign of weakness? Effeminate boys are viewed as having given up power, because masculine concepts of physical and emotional toughness have largely remained unquestioned as a boyhood ideal. Somewhere along the line, feminine qualities have become weaker. For the girl on the tram, being queer meant being less. Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because its okay to be a boy; for girls its like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (1978) My red nail polish really didnt have anything to do with my gender identity, but so what if it did? Why are we so afraid of those who dont conform to rigid binaries? Why do we consider boys who are effeminate to be lesser than? Fight the good fight And, at the end of the day, should any of this really matter? Quite honestly, its up to you. The world is a cruel place; theres brutality and intolerance everywhere you turn. And you know what that means? All weve got is each other. The very least we can do is treat each other with respect and acceptance. At stake here is nothing less than how we measure the well-being of our fellow citizens, and how much that wellness hinges on genders that coincide with normative expectations.Ken Corbett, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities(2009) When I wear nail polish, you know who asks me about it most often? Kids. Most of them already have some inkling that I shouldnt be doing it and they are curious as hell. Thats how societal change beginsby breaking a few rules, teaching a few people that its okay to be different. Stand up for those who cant. Defend equality and all that. Most importantly, be your fucking queer self. It was important to follow this little boy that met such rough justice and was left with no ally, no voice.Ken Corbett Its all you can do.

Summary In the article Why I Wear Nail Polish, the writer describes the reactions he received from others, for wearing nail polish. Jonathon Reed, the author, explains the time a teenage girl saw his painted nails, and asked him whether he was a boy or girl. When he replied boy, she seemed appalled by the fact that a man would wear nail polish for no particular reason. As she exits the bus, she refers to Reed as a fucking queer. Reed discusses how his reasoning behind wearing nail polish was because it reminded him of a better time, when a small group of kids in the Andean Mountains painted his nails. He wears nail polish to remind himself of the time he was happy and fulfilled, and felt that the young girl bashing something he feels is a part of his self-identity, made him feel like she took something away from him. It did not have anything to do with his gender identity. The author then goes on to discuss how society has been created in a way where it is much easier to reject and criticize anything that is different, rather than to accept it. The article brings up the idea of how femininity is looked upon as a sign of weakness. Therefore, when women display masculine traits, its like promotion for them, as it is ok for women to try and be like a man, yet when men display femininity, they are considered weak. The author states his opinion, that the least we can do as a society is be accepting, and respect each other. It requires someone to stand up for themselves, and openly be who they are, in order for people to understand that it is ok to be different.

Social Injustice

At one point or another we have all stereotyped how men and women should be. I think this social injustice is important to address because it is so common, and affects both genders equally. I remember in elementary school, I saw a guy sitting near the field playing with Barbie dolls. At the time I thought it was weird and I didn't think that he should have been doing that. Looking back at the scenario now, I don't see why boys can't play with dolls. I think I knew that even then, and that's why I still remember this considering this happened in grade 2, yet because it had been something I hadn't seen before, and something that I had been told was what girls did, I had found the boy to be weird. Men who may have feminine characteristics may try to hide who they actually are due to them being affected by what society expects from them. At the same time by making it seem that being feminine is such a undesirable thing, society is degrading women. It seems like we are sending people the message that you can either be feminine or strong. It has to be one or the other. It doesn't make sense to me how people think that that is true. I think people need to understand that strength does come from how "manly," you may seem. Being who you are, and displaying characteristics that may be

different, requires more strength and confidence, then someone who just follows society's norm about who they should be, and how they should act and dress. If we stopped making it seem like it is a wrong thing for men to have many feminine qualities, men would be more open to having female role models. This is something I have noticed even in between my friends. Women often have male role models, but not very many men have female role models. Even if a man claims to have female role models other than the women in his family, those women are often sexually objectified.

Solutions I think parents can help fix this problem, by exposing their children to both feminine and masculine influences. By doing so kids will have the choice to make their own decisions and decided who they are, rather than being exactly what society might want them to be. This will also allow the child to be more open minded, and accepting. Another thing we can do to fix this problem is have better and more diverse representation of both male and female characters in movies and TV shows. In a lot of movies and TV shows, women are portrayed as being weak individuals, who need strong men to take care of them. When they do put a strong female character in a movie, those characters are usually very sexualized, and at one point or another those women do need to be saved by a man. They often do have some masculine aspect to them, whether that is their muscular body type, or their ability to something that may be considered a "man's job". Rarely do you ever see a female character get a broken nose, or a black eye during a fight scene. Neither do you see large, furry, and ugly female villains. If there is a female villain in a movie or TV show it is usually, someone attractive, who uses her sexuality as her weapon. Femininity in men on TV, is usually used to show homosexual men, whereas heterosexual men are not shown to be feminine at all. Having strong female characters, with more focus on their personality than their appearance, and by having men display some characteristics that are more feminine, people might feel like they have more freedom to be who they are as they are being represented in something that is viewed by a large audience.