Cover Photo: A photograph of five pairs of blue jeans hung from a drying line outside a window. The wall the jeans hang against is in black and white and the jeans appear in vivid blue.
Photograph by Ricardo Gomez Angel/Unsplash

I Gave Up Pants—But Femininity Is Just As Binding

I stopped wearing pants in the name of physical comfort, with the emotionally uncomfortable result that I now present as a woman who wears dresses all the time.


allies.

Excuse me, stewardess, I speak girl.

The Faerie Queene

a woman who wears dresses all the time.

This performance was a better game, a camp indulgence, when I could balance it back to neutrality.

all the timenever live

girliness

Jess Zimmerman is the author of Women and Other Monsters and an editor at Quirk Books. Her essays and opinion writing have appeared in the Guardian, the New Republic, Slate, Hazlitt, Catapult, and others.