I’ve been in an email discussion, with John of the creatively named blog J. D. Carriere, about gender-specific clothing and hairstyle. In short, he thinks women should wear skirts and long hair, and men should wear short hair, except when necessity forces otherwise; I don’t think that "feminine" clothing has to include skirts, and I don’t think that long(ish) hair on a guy is automatically un-masculine, either. I think it has less to do with structure than with style.
At the very bottom, though, we don’t disagree. Our dispute is about how to implement a principle that we agree on: Men and women are different, and should dress the part. (Sing it, sister, says John.)
But the rub is, what’s "dressing the part?" What’s "clearly" masculine and "clearly" feminine these days? I think there are a lot of things that are clearly one or the other, but there has been
a certain migration across the boundaries in the past couple of generations. Except for the "all skirts and dresses are feminine" law, now it’s less a matter of what sort of item it than how it is styled.
Blazers and pants — yes, even a pantsuit — can be worn by men or women and can be "masculine-styled" or "feminine-styled." And certain things that you might think of as exclusively masculine can look very feminine, at least I think so, with the right accessories
or modification. A lot of stuff, the form is simply practical, and the style is where the femininity comes in.
It looks way worse when you stick with something rigid like "women must wear skirts" and then try to relax it by slapping on a STYLE that is basically masculine, rather than the more flexible "women’s style should be feminine, but the form of the clothes can vary." Think of all those Pentecostal young women with their church-festival matching tee shirts and their ankle-length denim skirts…. YUCK. It’s, like, anti-feminine!
Another example of this is the eighties-style "corporate attire" women’s suit with the skirt and the suit jacket. Clearly, masculine styling stamped onto "women’s clothing," i.e., a skirt. But that looks terrible and un-feminine compared to a very stylish women’s suit, obviously cut for a woman, even if the bottom half of it is trousers.
Certainly the word "pantsuit" coming out of John’s mouth is shorthand for a whole fashion syndrome…. But not every women’s suit with pants is a "pantsuit."
It’s the same thing with hairstyles. By now, long hair can be a masculine hairstyle, at least around here. It depends on the execution. You know that sort of discreet, low ponytail, that looks like short hair from the front? I like that. It certainly doesn’t look feminine. And conversely, short hair isn’t always masculine, but can look quite feminine if it’s cut right.
If it’s just style, surely I should be able to isolate the characteristic that, at least in North American culture, makes the difference between masculine and feminine when it comes to hair, or clothing for that matter. I think that, with hair, it comes down to freedom of movement or fluidity.
A woman’s hairstyle has to be long enough to be a little free, at least part of it, for it to be feminine. So it could be, for example, very short on back and sides, even under-cut, but long
enough on top to have bangs and to come down on the sides — this is a hairstyle I have had — and still be very feminine. And of course long and flowing qualifies. A man’s hairstyle, to be masculine, has to be short enough not to move much, or else constrained somehow — say with the ponytail, or even in something like dreadlocks — to be masculine.
As I think about it more, it does seem that the rules should change once the hair goes gray though. Don’t know why… ask me again after mine starts to turn.
bearing blog 