Cross dressing

[Worker 11811]

Your comment inspired me to do some more searching and what I am finding is pretty interesting.  It's turning out to be a pretty deep dive.

There's a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_skirts 

There's another one at a site called "Bustle:" https://www.bustle.com/style/were-dresses-made-for-men-skirts

They are both long articles that would take a long time to quote and summarize so I'll let the reader decide what to read and take away from them.  However, the idea of skirts (or skirt-like garments) being for men or women is strictly a Western idea that started about the time when men started to ride horses and when technology became mature enough for pants to be made on a larger scale.

Like I said, there's a lot of interesting stuff to read.  🙂

Still, I think that gender roles, especially as they apply to fashion and clothing are pretty old fashioned.  Back in the days when men went hunting while women stayed behind to tend the home, those ideas might have made sense but, nowadays, in an industrialized society where both genders play more or less equal roles, those ideas are becoming more and more outdated.

I think that the idea where men should wear one kind of clothing and women should wear another is mostly bullshit.  I think that it amounts to little more than sexist "pigeonholes"... putting people into groups based on arbitrary concepts.  I think that classifying people based, solely, on gender is doing a lot of damage to peoples' psyches and I think that many of the trouble we see with sexual violence between men and women is because of it. (Mostly by men UPON women but also by men upon men who, somehow, don't measure up to arbitrary, made up, standards.)

I grew up in a place where people held traditional views and many people were strict in their thinking.  Yes, I hold traditional views but I think that I differ because I don't think that those views should be strictly held by everybody.  If a person wants to be a traditionalist, that's fine but if they don't, there isn't anything wrong with that.  Back when I was a kid, men were men and women were women but, as I grow older (and hopefully wiser) I'm starting to see how much of those beliefs are really just arbitrary bullshit.

At the same time, people where I grew up were pretty Libertarian... "Nobody can tell ME what to do and how to live!"  I believe in that but I also see that the concepts of Libertarianism and traditional gender roles are at odds with each other.  How can somebody say, "Men should be men and women should be women," at the same time they say, "People can do what they want?"  It comes down to nothing more than self-serving bullying...  "I can do what >I< want but YOU have to do what >I< tell you!"

Traditional, in my views, I may be but the "Do as I say" attitude is BULLSHIT!

What I think, in terms of what clothes people wear, is meaningless in the greater context.

People can wear whatever clothing they want.  If you want to wear a skirt, a toga, a dashiki or a pair of Levi's jeans, that's YOUR decision.  If other people don't like it, they can go fuck themselves!

Oh!  I do agree with you.  When it is well done, I think that a man wearing a dress can look pretty good!  🙂

Edited June 19 by Worker 11811

[Kidnapped]

Hmmm - the shift of tone in this conversation is quite surprising to me. In the beginning this thread was all about "how interesting is it to cross dress".

And somewhere in the middle this turned into a declaration of freeing yourself from society's expectations, even suppression of what you are supposed to wear as a man.

Personally I find exactly playing with society's expectations to be the interesting part. I mean... just imagine what would happen if the utopia some of the participants in this discussion would come true: Imagine all attire was unisex and no one would care what you wore. Well... 

On 3/24/2021 at 4:58 PM, paul2809 said:

.. formal dresses, nice long wigs, make up, stockings, heels, all while wearing furs or sensous burlesque feather boas going out for a night with some one....

...would be nothing special anymore for a man. It would be no exciting adventure, nothing you needed to be brave to do... it would be... well... without meaning. Just another man wearing something something. 

What a boring world that would be...

[Worker 11811]

I like the idea of men wearing women's clothing (or, maybe better said, "non-traditional" clothing) when it's done well because it's different.  As you hinted, variety is the spice of life.  Yes, it would be boring if everybody wore the same thing.  I can't imagine myself wearing a dress but, if the time and the place and the circumstance was right, I wouldn't rule it out, either.  It would have to be the right clothes that fit me, fit my personal style and look good.  I don't know what clothes those would be or what the time and circumstance would be but, as they say, you never know.

Look at Monty Python... Men dressed up as the "pepper pot" women.  They did it for practical reasons at the beginning.  There weren't any women to play the parts but they went with the comedy bits, despite.  Dammit!  They were funny!  They were so funny that you almost forget that they are men wearing dresses.

What about Le Cage aux Folles?  That show ran for four years on Broadway and was revived more than ten times in different cities.  It's been a long time since I've seen it (in movies) but I remember being amazed at how good the performers looked.

In my town, there is a group of men who cross-dress and advocate for a person's right to dress as they want.  They have meet-ups and sponsor public events where men are encouraged to go out in public wearing non-traditional clothing.  (Women's dresses.)  They go to movies, restaurants and coffee shops together, as a group.  I've seen some of them and met them, dressed in both men's and women's clothing.  You wouldn't know the difference.

By saying, "you wouldn't know the difference," I don't mean that they could pass as being actual women.  I mean that they just look like people.  The first time I saw them, I was kind of shocked but mostly confused.  You don't see people doing things like this, very often.  It takes time to get used to the idea.  Then, when you look again, they actually look pretty good!  After that, it's just... normal.

When I was growing up, I lived in a dysfunctional family.  There was alcoholism and lots of other stuff.  My father was a bigot, a racist, a womanizer and other things that I don't want to talk about.  Most of the other adults in my life were narrow minded and bigoted, too.  I took on a lot of those traits, too.  When I went away to college, I started to see what the world was really like and, as I grow older, I am learning that most of the things I grew up with are utter bullshit.

Like you, I kind of enjoy giving the proverbial finger to all those narrow minded people in my past and I don't hesitate to call bullshit on bigotry and bullying.

How does the proverb go?...  "A man's right to swing his arms ends at the tip of the next man's nose."