Why Most Men Still Don’t Casually Wear Dresses In the mainstream, gender bending stil

[natina]

Why Most Men Still Don’t Casually Wear Dresses
In the mainstream, gender bending still only goes one way.

https://www.racked.com/2018/4/23/172...ng-men-dresses
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/23/172...ng-men-dresses
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/23/172...ng-men-dresses

[natina]

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Why Most Men Still Don’t Casually Wear Dresses
In the mainstream, gender bending still only goes one way.



guy who, after offering to make breakfast in the morning, stood up, stretched, and grabbed one of my shifts off the floor so he didn’t have to fry up a couple of frittatas in just his socks. Never has a man walked from my room with a dress skimming the tops of his hairy thighs, the short hem flashing cheek as he rooted around for pans, the strap falling all come-hither-like down his shoulder — and me watching all of this from my bed, biting my fist.

We’ve seen this same scenario play out a hundred times over with women wearing men’s shirts, but never really the other way around, at least in the United States. And you have to wonder: why not?

This observation isn’t anything new. We’ve been grappling with these imaginary lines for a long time now, and always end the conversation in the same stalemate. In 1938, for example, a mother wrote to her local paper asking what she should do about her son. He went to a costume party dressed as a girl for a laugh but hadn’t taken off the dresses since.

“His sisters have to keep their closets and their bureau drawers locked up to keep him from wearing their things. We have tried every way in the world to shame him and his father has thrashed him several times about it, but nothing stops him. What can we do?” she asked.

“Isn’t it queer that for a boy to want to be a girl, and look like a girl, and dress like a girl is so unusual that it fills his parents with fear that he is abnormal, whereas virtually every girl in the world wishes she were a boy?”
The response back was surprisingly introspective. The advice columnist wrote, “Isn’t it queer that for a boy to want to be a girl, and look like a girl, and dress like a girl is so unusual that it fills his parents with fear that he is abnormal, whereas virtually every girl in the world wishes she were a boy and the majority of them try to look like boys, and act like boys, and dress like boys? The greatest insult you can offer a man is to call him effeminate, but women esteem it a compliment to be told they have a boyish figure and that they have a masculine intellect.”


The reason for that has to do with the way the gender binary is enforced, and how our choice in clothing is us “doing gender.” According to Sarah Fenstermaker, the recently retired director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, gender is a set of behaviors, ways of being, and ways of interacting that convince ourselves and everyone around us that, deep down, we are just what we appear to be.

More than that, the binary is built on the idea that it’s 100 percent natural and, because of that, is “naturally” recognizable. To be feminine means to be the opposite of masculine, and to be masculine means to be the opposite of feminine. Period.

“When we embrace something as only ‘natural,’ it means that it can’t really be changed — that it’s baked into who we are. Anyone then who strays too far from expectations that surround this naturalness is odd, deviant, and often deserving of punishment or exclusion,” Fenstermaker explains.

To be a man and want to wear feminine flounces puts a crack in the theory that these classifications are inherent, which makes you question just how natural the power that comes with masculinity is. And in a male-dominated society, that question is a big deal. Which is why we weed out and ostracize anyone who deviates — femme gay men, butch lesbians, nonbinary individuals, trans people, and straight men who like skirts.

“The display of skirts on men is effectively an undermining of male power — by males. To put it extremely, they are like deserting troops.”
“The display of skirts on men is effectively an undermining of male power — by males. To put it extremely, they are like deserting troops. So what do we do in response? We make them gay,” Fenstermaker says. This stops the hierarchy from toppling because we reason that gay men aren’t “real” men because “real” men aren’t feminine. While it’s true that not all gay men are feminine and all lesbians are masculine, that’s the expectation used to write them off.

From an agender California teen being hospitalized for three weeks after a classmate set their skirt on fire after mistaking them for a gay man, to a high school student getting suspended for “attempting to incite a riot” for wearing a pink tutu for breast cancer awareness month (after being questioned if he was gay,) to Young Thug getting whooped by his father for wearing his sister’s glitter shoes at 12 years old, straying from your binary path has consequences, and men are constantly being reminded of that.

“Any expression of femininity results in a judgment that one is not a real man, and that is just a short step to not really being male,” Fenstermaker explains. That fear alone makes many straight men second-guess reaching for a mini.

But why were women able to put on pants seemingly scot free? Granted, it didn’t exactly happen overnight. In the beginning, there was pushback because of the power grab it hinted at — from Victorian women who went outside in bloomers getting rocks thrown at them by angry men, to Vogue calling women who kept their pants on after their factory shifts in the 1940s “slackers in slacks,” to a socialite being asked to walk to her restaurant table in nothing but her tuxedo jacket because pants weren’t dress-code approved, there were moments of backlash.

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https://www.racked.com/2018/4/23/172...ng-men-dresses
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/23/172...ng-men-dresses
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/23/172...ng-men-dresses