BECAUSE WISDOM LIES IN A BOTTLE OF TOP COAT

‘Don’t let anyone with chipped nails tell you ANYTHING about life’ – this is what a sign read outside a nail salon in my home town that my friend brought to my attention one time we were out on a walk. We spent the following hours talking about how much we disapproved of it and wondering about the different things it was alluding to. Elitism, classism, shallow materialism, misogyny. The whole package, really. I still think about the sign to this day and, as someone typing this out with chipped nails that have lasted me well over a week now, I definitely have more than just something to say. So, here’s a short one.

Seeing this sign, I was reminded of a recent post I saw on X (formerly Twitter) that quickly gained momentum and went viral. The original post from a user named Jenny questioned why some women don’t get regular nails treatments: “Girls that don’t get manicures and pedicures…. Why???”. The thread of replies that followed were those of women rhetorically bringing to attention the jobs and responsibilities that make fancy nails impractical and uncomfortable, posting themselves in their work uniforms that ranged from mechanical and construction work, to surgeons and midwives. But some posts especially caught my attention and thoughts – those of mothers. “Because I’m tired, Jenny”.

It’s not always about practicality, comfort, money, or even opposing beauty expectations. Sometimes, it is about the time that women must direct elsewhere. Obviously, the chain of women embracing their responsibilities and roles is a powerful encouragement of women in male-dominated jobs, but this post actually reveals a deeper problem we have formulated in our society. We are all aware of gender expectations and their compartmentalising effects on behaviours and social relations. But with the rise of this awareness, a new overriding expectation has emerged, particularly for women.

Women were once solely expected to be mothers and carers. The sensitive and emotional compared to the ambitious and dominant. Attempting to discard these gender roles has led to the encouragement of women to step out of these boundaries – we now see more women in corporate and managerial positions, more mothers sharing caring responsibilities with the father and attending work, more young girls engaging in sports. But, as humans, we are rejecting of extremes and incongruence. Now we have a problem.

Women are pushed to be comfortable in dissolving gender roles and expectations, but you can’t do this too much. You should strive for leadership roles and be bold and confident, but you can’t be too assertive or bossy or puffed-up. You shouldn’t let yourself be pushed into the role of an over-burdened and over-worked mother, but you also shouldn’t be work-focused and selfishly pursue your career. You should do what you want and empower women in male-dominated areas of society, but you shouldn’t be too boyish. Returning to the viral X post, you shouldn’t let beauty expectations be imposed on you and sway your choice in choosing not to abide by them, but you should also dedicate your time and money to take care of your appearance as a woman. The problem is that it is all positive and progressive of society to acknowledge gender roles and expectations and try to move away from them, but because of how normalised and accepted they once were, we are left with traces of what we expect of women in society. People want to empower them but are also hesitant in seeing them become opposite of what we have learned to expect of them in the past.

What are we left with then? An art of living a contradiction. A life of living in the in-between. Women should be empowered to discard binary expectations and stereotypes. We should know when to defy, but we should also know when to step back – this is what society expects of us. Another problem? The in-between ‘gray’ area is often left unseen. With this formula, we are left with mothers who spend hours looking after their child at home and not leaving the house much, but working night hours at home in front of the computer. We are left with a woman managing a business, but she is just the middle management who will never become CEO because she’ll always have to mediate and never be able to assert her dominance. These roles go unrecognised precisely because of their denial of embracing a role wholly – a rejection of becoming an ‘extreme’.

For me, these ideas really resonated with that one scene in the Barbie movie I also happened to be rewatching that week. The scene where Gloria remarks: “You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people”.

It sometimes really is impossible to be a woman.

So, to the nail salon’s sign, and to Jenny: you can keep your perfect polish. The rest of us will keep living. Oh, and don’t let reality chip that veneer – it looks expensive.