That is absolutely the risk. Most women today would not protest for their right to wear a skirt. I learn this all the time in my interactions with women in the workplace and in public. Women don't view skirts as a freedom they have but as a burden, and when they don't feel compelled to wear them, they are happy to wear pants.Grok wrote:Particularly when women can wear just about anything they feel like.Daryl wrote: Exactly so, but it goes further than skirts. The writer laments that women must "monitor" the amount of skin they show, when the truth is the exact inverse of that: they can choose how much skin they want to show. Men do not have that luxury.
Women pretending that their freedoms are burdens is just a sign of how silly the everything-oppresses-women narrative has become.
And BTW, I can imagine The Powers That Be dictating trousers for all. I expect that their dictates will be based on what is convenient for them, rather than what we would like to see.
So our freedom and equality based arguments in favour of men wearing skirts are really much thinner and less compelling than we imagine they "ought" to be. Our best way forward, in fact I think our only way forward, is to seize the day while there is still some latitude and disorganisation in the opposition.
In a weird irony, only the trans community is actively asserting skirts as definitively feminine. Trans people wear skirts as part of gender expression designed to have others perceive "female" upon seeing them. Pre-op trans people in particular can effectively obscure their sex in a skirt but not in women's trousers. Women's trousers fit too closely for that purpose. Once the skirt is de-normalised for women even trans folk won't be able to assert it as a rights issue based on gender expression.