Body Practice Blog Post #1

As I come to my final blog post, I began to reflect on what it means to be feminine and its correlation to my practice of wearing dresses or skirts, which is mostly exclusive to females even until today. Gender is a social construct. But does wearing a dress automatically mean one is behaving femininely? What does it mean to be feminine? Adhering to female exclusive fashion? Being demure and gentle? And even if we fulfill all these qualifications that society classify as feminine, does it mean we are automatically becoming womanly? Gender is the social and cultural perception that society has on us, but being a member of society ourselves, shouldn't we also have a say on who we are? Our actions should not be gendered and used to draw inference as to whether we are behaving in accordance with our biological sex.  Further, perhaps we should get to decide what is feminine and what is masculine. One should not be expected to conform to strictly either category with the two gendered way

This is my third (supposedly fourth) week of doing this body practice exercise. Over this period of time, although this habit of wearing dresses/ skirt gradually grew natural on me, my menstrual cycle came just when I got accustomed to it. And of course it felt inconvenient again.  Wearing a dress during my period cycle feels awkward and stressful, as I usually go for thick, dark pants like denim jeans. This is because I won't ruin my pants even if my menstrual blood leaked whereas light colored thin fabrics would expose this and put me into an awkward position. During this period, I intentionally walked more slowly and carefully and often adjusted my menstrual pad so that blood won't trickle down my thighs as there are no pant trunks to protect me. It triggered me to think, when it comes to wearing pants, am I weaponizing this piece of garment? I have never thought about the psychology of wearing pants being my armor. I know that Hong Kong is such a safe place to me that I hav