“That’s not ladylike!”

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Were you ever told to do or not do something in the interest of being ladylike?

I’d imagine that these days it’s more of a fundie thing, but I was wondering if anyone else here heard it, and if so, in what context.

I heard it a lot when I was growing up. I was always a tomboy and didn’t easily conform to what was expected of me. I usually wanted to know the reason for a rule or expectation, and if it seemed dumb to me, I had a lot of trouble going along with it.

My parents were both pretty relaxed when it came to gender roles. They never told me it wasn't normal or ladylike for a girl to be going to the nearby pond and hunt for frogs or bugs. Or playing with my cousin's Masters of the Universe figures. I liked a lo of girl things too, like My Little Pony and dolls. Role-playing was a big deal to me. I guess because you're in control of everything while living in a world that's always trying to control you.

Sure, the culture I grew up with is very much sexist.
And I can easily ignore any remarks of "needing to act ladylike".


When it came to younger years, it's usually related to wearing a skirt because school uniforms or something too short and moving around 'inappropriately' with it.
Thankfully that's not how my household works. And thankfully they realized that I'm not very interested in 'girly' inclined plays.

My neighbor playmates are usually girls who have no problems with roughhousing and play-pretend.
It meant that no parent is going to just scold my younger self for whatever gender based preference when other kids of the same gender are doing it, too.

Then there's the interaction between men and women; all assuming heterosexuality, that I should not be so close to any man because 'it's like a magnet' to them.
It adds to the fact that this culture is clueless about the existence of asexuality.

Lots and lots of physical activity related things. Like I shouldn't be doing some heavy lifting because men should do it.
Sometimes having a man around or hire some of them is more or less mandatory because of said heavy lifting.

In larger companies, there should be a balance in genders. That men shouldn't disproportionately outnumbered or be simply alone with too many women, and a woman should never be outnumbered let alone be alone with too many men.

Or being able to go around alone especially at night.
Well, there's the overall concerns with females going out alone on the streets; sometimes it's justified to some cases and the lack of concern over men...
So far, I've been lucky? Not that it matters since I don't look like a lone target nor I'm stupid enough to be in shadier places.


Well, some people who knew me enough understands that I don't exactly act or even feel like a female despite having a body and an appearance of one.

The funniest conclusion my sped teacher thought was that I have no clue if I'm a girl or not. I don't have a true inner gender.

I don't let gender make anyone's interactions be more predictable for them; I make my gender be more predictable of an interaction for me.

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I am transgender and was assigned male at birth, so theoretically I was supposed to be learning male gender roles, despite never being very good at it. I was often told that I 'seemed gay'.

One of the things that delayed me transitioning was feeling like I could never meet the standards for women in our culture. I'm clumsy, like to wear loose clothes, hate makeup, have traditionally had many 'male' interests (science, computer games, comics, etc), and more.

What helped me was meeting women with autism or other developmental disabilities and I realized they are also like me while being different than men, which gave me a model I felt like I could meet. It still took me a long time to unlearn a lot of assumptions I had, though this was partially because I was being judged very harshly once I actually transitioned, as if people wanted to make up for the type of criticism and pressure I hadn't experienced as a child.

Now I feel somewhat rebellious and try to push back against these assumptions for how women should be, not verbally but through how I live my own life. I only wear makeup when I'm dressing up, which I rarely have any reason to do anymore, use a backpack instead of a purse, wear a mix of women and men's clothing depending on what's convenient, and things like this. Usually no one is too explicitly critical, but that's to be expected when you're 35. The indoctrination window has mostly passed and people have to accept that you're an aging weirdo who does what they want.

I did have a man interrupting me walking in public (or actually matching pace, despite me not knowing him and despite me trying both to move up and slow down in an attempt to shake him) ask why I was wearing a backpack. I told him it was to carry my things, to which he responded by asking if I didn't like purses. I didn't go into more detail, but I want to tell people like this that they should try carrying 20% of their body weight for 5 miles in 90 degree weather in a purse and see how they feel afterwards.

I'm sure this guy has never actually carried a purse and meant no harm beyond the already objectionable, albeit one off, stalker type behavior, but there's lots of things like this I question. Another one is that I prefer to carry heavy things by myself unless it's too heavy for me to safely do it, in which case I ask for help myself and intend to still carry one end. I don't appreciate men grabbing my stuff without permission, even if they mean well and want to help me carry it. I'm convinced this habit has given me more body strength and independence compared to women who think it's not okay for them to physically exert themselves.

Despite all this, I do still wish I was more graceful and well spoken sometimes, but not enough to undergo any kind of training to achieve it.

Maybe not the kind of response you were looking for, but that's how my life experience has worked at least. I do think I've been impacted by these standards for women, both as a child and an adult.

No, I don't think I was told I wasn't ladylike. Instead I was told I wasn't human-like, because I looked or acted "ret*d" and I embarrassed my mother in particular. That doesn't mean that I was ladylike. It just means people regarded me as another species rather than a failed female.

My constant stimming, lack of eye contact, lack of desire for friends or companionship, and whooping piles of "IDGAF about social conformity regardless of gender" were always viewed with considerable disgust.

I really enjoyed your first post in this thread. Thanks for sharing your insights. ^

My mother's family was very big on having family parties, laughing, dancing, drinking etc., including men and women. Dad's family was much smaller than mum's but they were also into large-group gatherings with alcohol, despite being more in line with the ND spectrum overall. Both sides of the family loved to travel and drag me out of my comfort zone to places I hated, but I didn't have a say at that age. I was expected to just roll with it.

I was known as the "black sheep" or troublemaker because I had meltdowns and wanted to be left alone with a book instead of roasting in the sunshine on a sheet of tinfoil, dancing around in Hawaiian grass skirts, or drinking underage so I could "lighten up". My mother mocked my stims and told me not to do them in public.

There was a big pressure to act like "The Joneses" and impress the neighbours by conforming. I've since decided that my mother (now 85) is probably autistic herself but she's from a generation which was expected to mask. She likely doesn't know that she's been faking it all along, because she considers it normal for people to fake their lives, or live unhappily to please others.

I'm genuinely glad if you enjoyed it.

I think my mother also has some autistic traits to a lesser extent, though they are not the same ones that made it into the diagnostic criteria (eg, motor coordination and sensory sensitivity), so she could never be diagnosed. There were some statements about that I should be able to do things the same way as her, but that was not very realistic since she had fewer autistic traits than me and less severe ones when we shared one.

Her methods include a fake public persona that was very different than how she acts in private, which was frustrating since I would act more or less the same in public and private, leading to her being very efficient at getting people to take her side over mine. I had a lot of conflicts with my father as well, but I appreciate he is basically the same in public and private and therefore not trying to turn everyone in my social circle against me.

Currently I reject the masking behaviors, but will try to smile more than I did when I was younger, which is often enough to get people to be more sympathetic. Sometimes I will fake eye contact by looking at someone's nose so they know I'm listening to them, but I don't do this with friends and the like. I want the friends to learn that my giving them my full attention looks different than me devoting part of my mental power to faking the body language they're familiar with.

With other people like people in a professional setting, that's not necessarily realistic. The fake eye contact becomes part of the communication with them, like carefully choosing the right words before responding. I think the difference is that I am not trying to hide who I am or my feelings, just to express my true feelings in a way people can understand, even if it's not the most natural feeling way for me to express it.

I was told off for being unladylike was when I had a dance teacher as a kid. It was funny really, she expected us to raise our pinkie fingers and sit properly whilst drinking orange juice. You'd think we were sipping tea from fine china cups with the way she acted. Minor etiquette things really. 'A lady does this. A lady does that'.

I was quite the disgrace of the class. The worst thing she did was invite me to a show performance only to tell me last minute that I wasn't going to perform with everyone else because I wasn't well practiced enough. She made me stand behind the curtain as everyone else danced. I quit after that.

My parents were open minded about this sort of thing, so no. My mother had a college degree in engineering earned in the early 50s, so she did not feel she had to choose typically female roles.

My grandmother was a little bit more concerned about me being ladylike but it was just the occasional very mild comment like don't wrinkle your forehead or stand up straight or don't walk with your hands in your pockets.

Oh snap. I forgot about grandparents and extended family. My grandmother was a model and fashion designer who was into high fashion all her life, including hosiery, very high heels, tailored skirts, etc.

She used to make me walk with books on my head to improve my posture. She didn't specifically say I wasn't ladylike, but she was always criticizing the way I walked, my lack of interest in makeup, and my "non-sexy" clothes.

Yeah my grandma and mom, like that ain't ladylike.

Well hows this for ladylike, I keep my body hair and just trim it. I haven't graduated to dresses yet, but I kind of would like a nice summer dress to wear with my leg hair and trimmed pits i have gotten a couple potential ones but not sure they look good on me idk...havent worn a dress since I was a little kid, outside my sisters wedding and a medival festival where I wore the same dress I wore to her wedding(it wasn;t that nice of a dress so it was fine for getting a little dirt on it from the medieaval festival) for the wedding the theme was whimsical so I was able to make the dress fit in for my outfit but it was a 60 dollar dress so I don't want it to just be one time use. And that one looks good on me, just not sure if the other few I have would look good. And not like I have any good shoes to go with them, lol I have Tiva Sandals the hiking ones, and they aren't super fashiobnable, but they are comfortable, I just don't know if you can combine a bit of glam with hiking sandals. Just when I was younger and afraid of being female I did everything I could do to avoid fashion but now in my 30's I kind of want to re-discover fashion and dress cool idk cause I always avoided dressing fashionably when I was younger, but now I kind of do want to re invent my style to being more fashionable.

But still I am not going to use my moms and grandmas standards for fashion cause they were always obsessed with if we were getting into make up to young or yada da. I remember my mom legit threw away a ton of my sisters underwear because they were stylish ones from vicotorias secret, like she juust liked underwear that looked nice but my mom always threw it all out thinking she was being too sexual, and nah she just wanted underwear she felt good wearing cause the plain cotten ones our mom would buy for us were not what she wanted. But now living away from all that I find I kind of would like to have a couple dresses to wear to go out...But Idk my family put me off being lady like but now I kind of want to show that my unladylike self could still be pretty in a dress even with my unladylike ways.

Yes, a lot unfortunately. "Sit like a lady", do this like a lady, that like a lady. For a long time, my autistic obsession was about femininity content on Youtube. I desperately wanted to act in a feminine manner because I wanted to be liked and accepted. I am physically attractive. Growing up, I noticed that men would give me attention because of that. Other than that, I was socially awkward and people would exclude me. So I learned that the only way to be "seen" was to appear attractive to men. I thought acting femininely would be part of that. I think acting femininely might have been a form of social masking. Applying "formulas" to my behavior to elicit a positive response from people (especially men).

I want to be authentic but I am afraid of all the problems it will cause. I am afraid people will reject me for it. However, I have come to the realization that authenticity is like oxygen to me. I need to be authentic to be happy. I have been running from myself my whole life and I want to come back home.

When I was 14, I visited my aunt. As I was getting ready to go to her church one Sunday morning, she informed me that in her congregation I should wear nylons because folks said that “ladies” don’t bare their legs.

I stated that I was not a “lady.” I also told her that Katherine Hepburn said that pantyhose were “an invention of the devil.”

They were lucky they could get me to wear a dress.

Apart from that, I frequently heard that I should be more ladylike by doing or not doing something. It typically seemed to be in direct opposition to what came natural to me. Mom enrolled me in ballet, so I could become more graceful. She also bought me books about tomboys growing into ladylike, young women. I didn’t understand why people couldn’t just be who they are. It all seemed so silly and pointless.

They liked Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.”

Learning about gender in sociology classes in college was fantastic. It helped clear away some of the nonsense I had been raised with. There’s nothing wrong with being very feminine, ladylike, girly, etc. It’s just not who I was/am.

Not by my parents, luckily, but by a lot of older relatives and friends' parents. I genuinely did not understand, why I should behave differently to my male friends just because I was a girl. By my friends when I wore baggy pants and button downs and spend school trips carving wood instead of snogging boys. My partner occasionally wishes I'd dress more feminine, and it still hurts.

I didn't realize how much my view of gender differed from the norm until a sociology class I was in was asked to place a dot on where they saw gender differences on a nature vs nurture line. Most were somewhere in the middle, a few more towards nature. I was the only one who placed their dot very far on the nurture side. Had a lot of conversations about gender since then, with cis friends, with trans friends, learned a lot... still very clear my experience of gender is not the "norm", and that's okay

I was told not to do a lot of things because I am a girl. Luckily for me it only infuriated me and I never listened, so people would give up. The girl thing is worldwide btw, it is everywhere. People tell this to their daughters everywhere.

Interestingly enough later in life some stereotypically women things became more interesting to me so I learned a lot on my own pace, and skipping everything during the childhood never prevented me from doing so.