mishawakaskirt wrote:Sorry you were treated that way.
Brings up the age old question again, why can the ladies wear just about anything and get away with? Denim jeans, suit and tie, long shorts , yoga pants, pajama pants, short shorts, short hair. Cowboy boots, leather, camoflage, team sports. Baggy trousers, skinny trousers, trousers full of holes. All acceptible ladies wear. Fassion freedom, you go girl! If a man wears even a few of those items we would be greeted with laughter, a yuck. Go change your clothes, that's discusting, why you wearing that? Etc, we have all seen some sort of disaproval reguarding our clothing selections.
Yet a woman can wear a potato sack and be called a visionary.
I wonder if the walmart redneck would have behaved the same way if Lady Gaga came walking past in her meat dress.
Mishwakaskirt
Many women don't see wearing skirts and dresses as a pleasure at all, but only as something they do when they feel required to do it. If they wear them to be attractive to men, well, that's because men want them to. If they feel a pressure to dress up for formal affairs and office parties, that's again a norm that is primarily rooted in how men want to see women, not women's own preferences. In this view, wearing a skirt or dress is like a prisoner decorating his cell. It's not his
choice to be in a cell, but since he is required to be there, he makes the best of it as much as possible. The cell for women in this analogy is male expectations...what women feel they need to do to gain male approval.
Making the best of a bad situation could explain the enormous range of options available to women buying skirts and dresses, all on its own. It would take a lot of decoration to distract yourself from the fact that you are in prison...to give you some sense that you are still able to exercise choice. The prison analogy has been used by feminism to characterise the home, as well. It's always about what men do to, or fail to do for, women. Modern appliances oppressed women by making the home less work for them, leading to identity crises.
And everyone understands the "fear of femininity" aspect of it; that a man is bound to be ashamed of lowering his own status by being un-masculine in any way; so if a man is not trying to sexually attract, or at least please other men visually with a feminine appearance, he would have no reason at all to wear a skirt or dress. By this reasoning, a man in a feminine-ish skirt but not striving to "pass" as female is probably just in denial or crazy, and any talk of it as a relative rights issue will fall on deaf ears because it's like free people calling prison a right they are being denied: ridiculous on the face of it.
Not all women are like this. Some actually prefer skirts and understand why a man would want the same. I had a long talk with a woman at a streetcar stop one summer day a few years ago. I had my long khaki skirt on and she asked why I was wearing a skirt. I told her it was because I just preferred skirts to pants. I could tell that was the answer she was hoping for (and probably suspected would be the case given that my skirt was definitely not made for women). She volunteered that was how she felt too, and that she never wore pants anymore. She even told me about how her daughter (in college I think) had just started doing the same and that now they both totally enjoy skirts for personal bodily freedom as well as comfort on warm days. The streetcar was delayed so we kept talking and even touched on some of what I meantioned above. She didn't understand why more women didn't wear skirts all the time too. Women old enough to remember when skirts were actually required in schools are most apt to continue seeing it as
their own rights issue, and therefore
not a men's rights issue.
Or maybe my hoop petti.
