Essay by Elita Lai

“Becoming yourself is really hard and confusing, and it’s a process. It’s often not cool to be the person who puts themselves out there.” - Emma Watson

It is indeed true that society cares too much about unnecessary conventions for women, and we, as females, care too much about society’s perception of us. Begging my mother to get me a “tomboy” haircut at age 13, I have experienced a whole new reality to the teenage me in which females are judged ruthlessly by males all the time. I have always known that this issue exists in our society - but not to such an extent of prominence, even though people rarely recognize this institutionalised matter at all. As I grew up, I watched my friends photoshop away their “flaws and imperfections” before they post anything on social media, or go on a diet merely because they believed that they did not look “attractive enough”. By now, at 17, my hair has grown back its length, and sometimes I wonder why I have not chosen to keep it short - have I been trying to conform to our society’s standards of being a “feminine” woman like everyone else as well?

In Hong Kong, where we are already working towards a fairer environment in the workplace and in schools; social perception from both men and women still needs to be altered for the better. According to a study by MWYO, a youth policy think tank in Hong Kong, only 37% of young women aged from 16 to 24 were satisfied with their appearance out of the 1010 females who were surveyed. Moreover, the study found that more than 70% of young women in Hong Kong think that they are “too fat” and a third of these women are affected by male evaluation of their bodies. All these figures show that females in our community are not seeing themselves in the way they should - their current perception ultimately tears down the idea of a positive body image and shatters their self-esteem, purely because of what other people, males in particular, say about their appearances.

As catastrophic as an “ideal female stereotype” can be, we might as well ask ourselves - why does it even exist in the first place? Hong Kong, known by many as “Asia’s World City” with blending cultures from both the East and the West, has followed Western trends of female empowerment early on and has already passed gender-based anti-discrimination laws in the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, some conventions for women inherited from our Eastern roots still remain, especially in the context of education. The traditional Chinese concept of women taking on kinship roles has extended into the pages of our textbooks as they are often presented to be affectionate figures such as teachers or nurses, but rarely in dynamic careers like engineers or pilots. I have once come across an exercise book for kindergarten children while tutoring a toddler, in which there is one exercise that requires matching of everyday fashion items to a particular gender. It frustrates me that the answer key categorizes accessories to be “feminine” and baseball caps to be “masculine” - because the truth is there should never be a “correct” answer. It is time for us to acknowledge that it is all these little things that have built up our faulty social perception of gender since a young age under this notorious spoon-feeding education system, dividing gender into two polar opposites rather than presenting it as a spectrum, and creating an unrealistic mould for young girls to fit themselves into as they grow into women.

From body image to hair length and even to gender roles, the silent shackles of social perception have been keeping us from moving forward. Women and girls are unable to express themselves as who they are and who they want to be due to this fear of “not fitting in” with the expectations of a woman in Chinese culture, which is further worsened by the fact that our education lacks emphasis on the diversity of gender. Such constraints have knock-on effects resulting not only in problems such as body-shaming, but are also never-ceasing as we are not bold enough to rebel against these stereotypes. Perhaps to overcome this challenge, girls from Hong Kong should just start taking that step of self-validation forward and wear whatever they feel like wearing, do whatever they want with their hair, and eat whatever makes them happy. And maybe it is time for me to get another haircut too.