I was going to write an article about men wearing skirts. Heterosexual cisgendered men, that is, meaning that they’ve never questioned the match between their personal identity and their physical gender at birth, because it was aligned and within societal norm. Your average Joe, you might say.
I was going to argue about how the average Joe drew the short stick in the sexual liberation movement – us girls got the skirt and the pants, while men got stuck with pants alone. I was going to make a joke about how it’s said that when asked what he’s wearing under his kilt, a true Scotsman will show you… Which implies that it’s usually not much more than what nature endowed him, and also that whatever nature “hath giveth” is enough to poke an eye out.
I was going to argue that a guy who’s truly secure with his masculinity will be confident enough to push the boundaries, to take society on, and let the air flow dictate his happiness, rather than what society thinks is correct. I was going to talk about Brad Pitt’s mini-dress photoshoot for Rolling Stones in ’99 that still makes Venus de Milo’s nipples hard, and how GQ is full of shit with their blabbering about how “the male skirt takes a herculean amount of confidence with the right brand of eccentricity to work” as their way of saying sorry for placing Jared Leto on their worst dressed list because of his occasionally wearing of skirts.
I was going to offer endless examples of traditional costumes that consisted of skirts and dresses, like the Greek foustanella, the Indian dhoti, or the unisex yukata and kimono in Japanese culture, and argue that pants are more of a modern invention that we’d like to think. That men and women in cultures and places far apart have found it easier and more practical to embrace the wrapping of rectangular pieces of cloth around their waists, rather than to have bothered to sew the crotch together for one gender versus the other.
I would’ve argued that so many peoples and cultures still embrace the skirt in its many forms and names, that “pantaloons” are obviously a very Western obsession. I was going to talk about the growing popularity of Utilikilts and unisex skirts, and about how designers like Craig Green, who have their male models catwalk in saris, sarongs and everything in between, are on to something, a sexual revolution so close that we could taste its naked calves. I was really close to even praising Jaden Smith for trying to break barriers, however ridiculous he might be in his usual imaginings.
And then I was reminded of Sasha Fleischman, the agender teenager who was set on fire on a bus because of wearing a skirt. Of the awkwardness that the editorial team from BuzzFeed felt when they took on the challenge to wear skirts for a week, admittedly some of them more flowery than others, and the mean comments that are still collecting at the bottom of Matthew Guiver’s happy discovery of man-skirts, something that he’d wanted to try for so long, and a feat that was so obviously liberating for him, and so enraging for others. I would’ve mentioned how sad I felt to see that on Skirt Café’s forum “dedicated to exploring, promoting and advocating skirts and kilts as a fashion choice for men”, one of the most discussed topics is “Difficulties with partners” in accepting their wearing of alternative fashions.
I was even going to touch on gender spectrum with Pax Ahimsa Gethen’s touching description of their (not his, or hers) partner’s dressing habits – perhaps one of the only men in San Francisco who wears tie-dye skirts on a daily basis. I would’ve then had a revelation about how my rant on why it’s OK for manly-men to show up at the local dive bar wearing kilts started out as an equally ignorant point of view as that of its opponents, and understood that this one simple piece of clothing is so emotionally-charged that only by starting a true dialogue on the need for a non-binary gender system may we overcome our ignorance. I would’ve planted the seeds for knowledge-seeking and debate, for people to discuss these notions and, perhaps, learn to accept them.
Indeed, I would have. But then again, maybe I have.
Don’t be fooled, Brad. I’m still into manly-men in dresses, I’m not that deep!
Ally?
rallyshoplocal 