47 Comments

As a man who occasionally wears dresses, I loved this article and once considered writing something similar. In spaces like gay gatherings, wearing a dress feels harmless, but when I cross-dressed just out and about in the city during peak woke, it felt like committing social terrorism. People didn’t know how to react, fearing they’d become a viral video. It’s inconsiderate to force that dilemma on them.

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How about simply being polite to you, eh? Feminine men and boys are just beautiful. Why shouldn't there be more of them?

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Preach! But you’re preaching to the choir. For most people, the clash of one person strongly signaling both masculine and feminine traits feels dissonant and grating. It’s like asking a chud to watch an art film—they’ll get angry and demand, ‘What was the point of it?!’ because they can’t handle ambiguity or tension.

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So, by that logic, women shouldn’t be allowed to be androgynous either, right? No more butch lesbians!

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Correct.

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Would males getting full-body and facial laser hair removal also be unacceptable since this would make them look more like females?

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lol, I don’t see a realistic path to achieving that, if it were desirable. My basic takeaway from this article was softer, like “have empathy for the people who can’t handle it, and try being considerate instead of being an exhibitionist”.

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BTW, can one really say that people such as F1NN5TER have made the world worse off?

F1NN5TER is unusually tasty, after all.

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They’re high-variance and destabilizing. Great pleasure for some, great suffering for others. My interest is in exporting more of this culture to Africa, the ghetto, etc.

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Considerate means wearing PG-appropriate clothing, right?

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Or wearing a hijab in an Arab country, etc.

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Kilts also bear in mind the difference in men and women of waist to hip ratios.

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Makes sense in theory but I’ve watched men wear kilts as the first step to trooning out, so approach with the same caution as with Ayahuasca.

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My wearing a kilt, when I get one, will be a tribute to my ancestry. I am a flaming heterosexual. Lol.

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I mean this in the nicest possible way: that’s what they all say.

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The way that I see it is that a swastika is a much more offensive symbol than a dress is. And facial tattoos in general are heavily frowned upon, regardless of their content. Though to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily blame someone for a swastika tattoo if they associated it with Hinduism instead of Nazism, but I'd need to be really sure about this and I think that the angle of the Hindu swastika is different than for the Nazi swastika. Arguably, it's not illegitimate for Hindus to wish to reclaim the swastika from its Nazi legacy, similar to reclaiming the song Deutschland Uber Alles, which was almost a century older than the Nazis themselves were.

"Suppose you live in a community in which everyone wears a red shirt on Fridays. You grew up in this community. The red shirt on Friday custom has been in place for centuries. Suddenly you say that you’re going to stop wearing red shirts on Friday and wear some other color instead. You say that alternative clothing choice is your “self expression” and some other color better “reflects who you are inside.” That choice seems narcissistic, and it also seems to indicate an unhealthy obsession with clothing. What would it even mean for a different color shirt to “reflect who you are inside”?"

Seems like such a society doesn't believe in free speech, no?

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By the same logic, is it wrong for women to wear pants, even though the stigma against that has largely disappeared in recent decades? Would it become acceptable for men to wear dresses if a similar cultural shift occured in the coming decades?

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Pants are a practical necessity for some tasks, such as riding horses, so I don’t think the social stigma against women wearing pants was ever as strong as the social stigma against men wearing dresses.

Since the stigma has largely disappeared, no it’s not wrong for women to wear pants. If there were a cultural shift toward dresses or tunics or kimonos for men, then it would not be wrong for a man to wear one, but I don’t think that will ever happen, because unlike pants for women, there’s no practical reason pushing in that direction.

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"Ever as strong"?

Women used literally get thrown in jail for wearing pants. And we never fought to get into men's jails, where we would rape.

You're literally functioning with a total ignorance of history, legal history, and stupid male behavior.

This is why men shouldn't vote. You're delusional.

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-retrospective-20141023-story.html

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You stated that the stigma against women wasn’t AS BAD. Women were getting thrown in jail by men, who were exclusively passing the laws.

You were clearly wrong.

You don’t understand how language or logical arguments work, Simon.

Go play video games.

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Both men and women got thrown in jail for cross dressing.

You didn't know that because feminists are stupid, ignorant people who don't know anything about history.

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Feb 1Edited

Just accept your wrong man, like christ have some humility.

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Look at this fucking idiot.

He said the stigma against women wasn’t AS BAD, and I proved it was actually worse because men were passing and enforcing the laws that put women in jail.

Nobody cares that you spent thousands on OnlyFans pics, you sadsack.

I know you’d love to go back to the good ol’ days of chivalry when wife-beating was legal because if women have no options, then maybe one will pick you.

It’s not happening.

You lost. There’s nothing you can do. I, or any other feminist out there, have a better understanding of basic history than you ever will, which I proved right here.

Stop making a fool of yourself. Get back to your anime.

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There are some similarities, sure, but there is a large difference between something being "shocking" because it violates gender norms versus something being "shocking" because it is associated with systematic targeted mass murder (among other things).

"Shock" may be correlated with things that are wrong, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. A lot of people would find this post of yours shocking, does that mean that you posting this was morally wrong? Similarly, I am sure you can think of some things which are/were wrong but the society at the time did not find shocking.

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The point is about the intentions of the person doing it. It was intended to be a shocking act.

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But in the end, there's no way to really know someone's intentions. Whether it was truly self-expression or attempting to be shocking. You can ask questions but what's the point if you're going to assume? 🧐

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There actually is a way to know someone's intentions. You can listen to their words, watch their actions and make reasonable inferences.

I'm skeptical that "self-expression" is a real thing. I think that nearly all of what is called "self-expression" is actually juvenile rebellion and novelty-seeking, like a guy getting a swastika tattoo on his face.

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"I'm skeptical that "self-expression" is a real thing. I think that nearly all of what is called "self-expression" is actually juvenile rebellion and novelty-seeking, like a guy getting a swastika tattoo on his face."

Do you think ingroup signaling is a real thing? Since I *think* that's why some people dress in unconventional ways, not to deliberately shock people who aren't part of their ingroup.

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Ingroup signalling and deliberately shocking the outgroup are often the same thing.

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I suppose you would feel shock if you see a man in a dress - personally, I wouldn't feel shock (so it's not shocking the outgroup in my case, whether deliberately or not).

I don't know if people are *deliberately* - whether they're consciously aware of it or not - trying to shock the outgroup. An argument against that is that people in subcultures dress in ways that are shocking even when their destination for going out is a meet-up with other people in their subculture. In fact, in places where there's a higher ratio of ingroup to outgroup people (eg Wave-Gotik-Treffen, I would think goth clubs), people tend to dress in *more extreme shocking ways*, ie there's an inverse correlation between extremity of dressing and ratio of being perceived (number of people, time spent being perceived?) by the outgroup to being perceived by the ingroup.

I also argue that cultural shock is not a bad thing. I found this post shocking, but not in a bad way.

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Ah, that makes more sense. It's important to acknowledge that the skepticism will influence your inferences. To some, self expression might be something more that we don't get. Personally, I'm with you on that because I don't think self-expression can happen in a vacuum so there's always an aspect of it that's meant to interact with public presumptions. I personally think men look cool in dresses and it's not *that* shocking but I'll put that aside to be civil lol. I don't think a dress and a swastika tattoo can be correlated though- and imo it's an absurdly inaccurate and uncomfortable thing to suggest. But I definitely think there's interesting potential in examining ideas around self-expression, autonomy and how much of it is tied to the fundamental wish to be different. Thx for expanding on that.

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Yes, I agree perhaps that seeking to cause shock for shock’s sake is overrated. But I disagree that the people who were shocked by the swastika would primarily be upset because of the shock per se. The shockstream would be downstream of the moral judgement.

In the case of violating a gender norm, the shock is (maybe) downstream of a moral judgement, but somebody trying to shock those moral norms is trying to make the case that those moral norms should be changed.

Your hypothetical depends on whether or not the person with the swastika is trying to make the case that the moral norms about Nazism should be changed.

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Femininity is shameful for a man. This includes wearing frilly dresses but goes much further - being physically weak being the most obvious example

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I'll hire, the tattoo may stay but the dress must go ;)

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I think you meant to say transgender women in the intro instead of transgender men. If you were intending to be rude and transphobic by then contrasting them with "relatively normal men", at least get it right? Referring to transgender men here is confusing bc it's unlikely they would wear a dress in the way you described. Then again, I could be wrong and I'm only deciphering from context clues 🧐

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The purpose is not to be rude. The purpose is to tell the truth.

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Wow your so brave.

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