You Can Bet Money I Will Never Have a Clothing Line

From an older piece called Dressing for Success:

The late, great Helen Gurley Brown -- longtime editor of Cosmo magazine and author of multiple feminist books -- once said that she believed you should "dress pretty" for the office.

Notice she didn't say sexy. A lot of people seem unable to distinguish the two things.

Reviewing that and a related piece led to new writing. Here is an edited outtake from a new piece elsewhere that's mostly NOT about clothes:

And I don't know how to break that pattern from my end because the clothing industry and all of society give me exactly TWO socially acceptable ways to "dress appropriately as a woman":

1. I can dress sexy...

2. I can dress (in a way that implies) I'm marriageable material.

Neither of which really socially signals "I'm a serious business person here to do business and that's IT."

I'm SERIOUSLY medically handicapped and writing is My Occupation and in recent weeks a lot of my productive piddling has involved adding archives to multiple blogs of mine and in the process I've also reviewed a lot of things for typos and to change embedded videos to links and similar cleanup.

And that explains the existence of the second piece quoted above.

I'm happy with how my blogs are looking but it's having an unfortunate side effect of me writing substantial new material and I REALLY DESPERATELY want to BELIEVE that I'm simply turning this dreck that absolutely NO ONE READS into some format that isn't a total embarrassment for posterity's sake or some silliness before moving onto comicking and making clothes so I can earn something vaguely resembling a middle class income.

The world has spent many years kicking the crap out of me about my delusions of grandeur that writing should make money and pay my bills adequately in spite of my medical situation. (Maybe if you jerks weren't throwing so much money at Patrick McKenzie for his shit writing, I wouldn't IMAGINE that should be possible.)

But, alas, the cat is out of the bag. My aspirations to make clothes I would like wearing and sell them to office drones who would surely want something nice like this IF it existed has political roots.

It's a desire to exercise power and problem solve and not accept that as a woman, I'm a completely helpless victim obligated to dress like a literal prostitute to be allowed to the leave the house at all and then get endlessly sexually harassed and sexually assaulted and told it's MY FAULT...for dressing the way society expects me to dress in the Sluts R Us clothes that is the ONLY thing you can find in any clothing department aimed at girls over age five.

I'm certain this shall Not Be Allowed by planet Earth, AKA Rape Culture Central, where telling women what THEY can do to protect themselves to some degree gets decried as victim blaming and openly attacked as clearly bad behavior. 

In The Good News Column (TM), I have an idea and tentative script for a comic. Maybe in 2026, I shall figure out comicking.

Sorry, poor unfortunate souls born with girl bits. The Suckitude will most likely continue unabated.

Same as it ever was.