Or they say I have nothing to complain about.

A White Bear said it best: “So International Women’s Day came and went, and mostly it seemed like a good time to comment on the rotten ways different cultures celebrate women. Today women in the UK, Poland, China, and Italy all learned that women are good for wearing pink, bearing infants, sniffing flowers, and feeling pretty. There’s not much difference between a woman and a fuzzy bunny.”

At Gallaudet, I was greeted for almost a week with a giant banner and a campus-wide e-mail imploring me to show my woman-solidarity for this day I didn’t even know existed two weeks ago. How did they suggest I support this wonderful cause?

“Wear heels!”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. It was International Women’s Day, a perfect opportunity to celebrate all things woman and underrecognized. And what did we do? Tell each other to strap on torture devices and delude ourselves into thinking changing an aspect of our appearance (which is already a scarred battleground for equality as far as females are concerned) meant unity.

Well, phooey. How did I celebrate Women’s Day instead?

Well, I got up in the morning, kissed the hubby good bye, sent the little girl off to school. That took care of the “traditional but by choice” segment of my day.

Then I:

  • went off to my job, where I’m often asked to do graphic design work (a male-dominated field)
  • attended a class (seizing the right to be a smartie and not being shy about it)
  • found out I was accepted into a Ph.D. program (take that, all you nay-sayers)
  • and sent out a few e-mails about establishing a DWU student organization on campus (sorely needed, obviously, if our woman-pride extends only as far as wearing heels, and the average undergraduate can’t name one female deaf leader or role model, but can name ten males easily).

And I did it all while wearing a very fashionable set of brown and pink Skechers sneakers.

Wearing heels, or a to-do list all checked off? Hardly a dilemma.

Wearing heels was a good idea. Good intentions were behind it. But I think it did way more harm than good.

For one thing, it perpetuates the idea that a woman’s selling point is her appearance.

For another, how the heck are men who stand behind all the women in their lives supposed to join in on this show of support? Sure, we could put them in heels too, but I don’t think we’ve recovered yet from the onslaught of ignorant Brokeback Mountain jokes.

Still don’t think changing our appearance is an anti-feminist thing to do?

Deborah Tannen (a world-famous sociolinguist from Georgetown University, who has published several bestsellers) spoke on campus today. To illustrate one of her points, she asked us in the audience to look around and examine each other’s hairstyles.

The men, she said, would mostly have a variation of a short, non-descript hairstyle. For most of them, their hair would say absolutely nothing about who they are.

But the women, however, would have a huge range of choices to choose from - short, long, curly, straight, bangs, layers, on the face, or off the face. There exists no non-descript, nothing special hairstyle for women. Just the way we wear our hair alone tells the world something about us. Just because we’re female and have hair, we can’t escape the extra scrutiny.

To choose to wear heels is certainly every woman’s prerogative.

But to hold up that choice as representative of women’s solidarity? I say bad call.

(And no, the fact that I can’t figure out how to wear the darn things has nothing to do with it.)

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