The first in a series of long posts ...

... that will probably get me in a lot of trouble.

Back when I was a philosophy student there was a fourth year course that was cross-listed as a graduate course for Linguistics. For an hour and a half every Wednesday and Friday night beginning at 7:30 PM six philosophy students and nine linguistics students would meet and discuss Chomsky, sociobiology, Hillary Putnam and other matters related to the philosophy of language. The professor was male, an odd little British man who was a little like a stuffed animal come to life. The only other male was me.

As the class went on a very relaxed dress standard kicked in. The women often came to class in sweat pants, make-up was not worn and so forth.

It was a two part course each with a separate credit and we were joined by a new student after Christmas. Mimi had done the first part of the course a few years before and she was coming back to get the second part of the credit.

From day one it was obvious that Mimi was not on board with the unofficial dress code. This was a big issue right from the beginning. The previous term, before Mimi had arrived, a couple of women had come to Friday night courses dressed to go out afterward. The other women had discouraged this. They didn't say much but looks were exchanged and the message got through. After that, no one pushed the limits.

I had no real interest one way or another. I was at a point in life where women dressing up didn't have that much influence on me. Some of the women in the class struck me as quite hot enough in sweats and others I didn't think would be noticeably more attractive if they made a lot of effort. But I couldn't help being interested in the battle of wills. I knew Mimi for about four years at that point and I didn't think she was going to give up her preferred dress just because some other women gave her the hairy eyeball. I was right about this.

There were two things I did not anticipate.

The first was the intense hatred Mimi inspired. As she continued to dress up (her role model was Rosalind Russell, lots of suits) the nasty looks were followed up with nasty remarks and some discussions about linguistics quickly picked up nasty undertones. A number of women whom I did not know made a point of casually happening to mention to me just how much they disliked Mimi.

The second thing, and the more remarkable, that I did not anticipate was that Mimi was going to win. Three or four classes in, one of the other women showed up dressed up. And then a couple of others did and before you could say "tipping point", the whole thing shifted the other way around with virtually all the women dressing up for class and only a couple of staunch hold outs fighting it. Every class the hold outs looked a little further "out".

It's one of those phenomena that, once you know what to look for, you see it everywhere. Mimi was, and is, an exceptional character. She had strength of character that no amount of peer pressure was going to bend. In fact, I suspect that it was precisely the peer pressure that made her so pig-headed about it. If no pressure had been applied she probably would have just slipped into conformity.

That said, I've seen this happen over and over again in the ensuing twenty-five years. Take any group of women or girls and add just one who dresses a little more femininely or more provocatively than the rest and she'll start a domino effect that will sway the others.

This phenomenon gets blamed on men of course but it isn't us. Step back and watch and you can see it everywhere. On the surface, groups of women seem to line up, to be more co-operative and supportive but there is a cut-throat competition just below the surface and it only takes one woman in the group to get it rolling.