Racked: Why most men still don’t casually wear dresses

Not once have I had a 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.

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.”

Read the full article on Racked.