Policing Men's Clothes

[MalagaNights]

There's an interesting debate going on twitter between many of the GC feminists I follow and Sarah Phillimore and Helen Pluckrose.

It seems to hit on some of the themes we've been involved in discussing on here previously. Particularly linked to the man in a dress at Genspect.

https://x.com/SVPhillimore/status/1748983536785190951?s=20

Helen Pluckrose states somewhere that there is a a streak of authoritarianism in GC feminism. With some wanting to control what men can wear.

Sarah and Helen seem to be saying you can't legislate for this which I actually don't think anyone is arguing for. They're arguing with a straw man I think.

But what I think they're missing is the societal shift that has socially accepted men in women's clothes has allowed many men permission to have their fetish publicly celebrated.

We could turn that around with a change in social attitude. E.g many companies have now allowed men to wear the women's uniform at work. They don't have to allow this. We could return to men and women's uniforms including practical options for both.

We could openly discuss and express our discomfort about men who do this is usually sexual, instead of pretending it's just fashion. Everyone used to know this about cross dressing and that's why it was done privately.

Then we hit on the tricky issue how do we discriminate between men who are AGP and men who like exploring fashion?

Helen Pluckrose is arguing it's not usually sexual and if you are uncomfortable deal with your own feelings.

We could ensure that where men still insist on performing feminity we at least don't have to listen to why they're so brave and their 'story' to self discovery, as has been happening in work places.

I actually think the 'it's just clothes' ' let's abolish gender' stance of some feminists has led to this opportunity for men to queer the boundaries and bring their sexual fetish into every day life. I think we're discovering that some of the boundaries we had around the sexes, performed a role which we've thrown away.

I agree with Sarah that we can't legislate for this. But we never had legislation on clothing we just had socially acceptable rules which change over time with common consent.

Anyway, it's very heated over on twitter and I think we've actually reached a point of having to address this issue. How do we deal with men who get a sexual thrill from wearing women's clothes. Once we've all agreed they're men. Then what?

I think the concept of policing is extreme, and not feasible, and I'm not sure anyone has actually suggested it. Quite alot of our social norms/etiquettes are not actually policed but just an unwritten social contract

It seems men wear skirts/dresses in very hot countries and because they are easier/cheaper to access than tailored trousers, for countries that can't access mass produced clothing as we can.

Clearly the exact design of the article of clothing is irrelevant, it's more that is there a cultural set of clothing that is commonly associated with either sex.

and in most countries there is. The question to ask is why? I've you look a few pages back I gave afew reasons some of which may be to do with women's safety

Wow I have always defended a woman’s right to wear what she chooses from a burka to a bikini and not be harassed for her clothing.

I could provide a range of photos of women wearing very little in public including those who chose to go without knickers and flash the paps.

Yes some men wear clothes that are typically female - some look like the middle aged women they are trying to be. Some look highly sexualised like the women they are trying to be. Some look stylish many don’t. Are some motivated by paraphilias - absolutely but what about the actor who had “top surgery” and just wore a waistcoat on the red carpet?

Kilts are skirts, it like little boys saying action man isn’t a doll.

If we start to police men’s clothing then we also have to accept women’s clothing should be policed too.

If you want to police what men wear you also need too police what women wear. Sexualised clothing - and I include bondage gear in that - should have no place in offices or schools. For the creeps in the street I believe there is still an offence of offending public decency.

I don't think anyone is / was seriously proposing to "police" this. Rather the issue is more one of not being wilfully blind to fetishes being paraded in public, and not being wilfully blind to men conveniently turning up at events which are supposed to be handling the impact and fallout of testing and breaking boundaries and established safeguarding.

Feminine clothing that is sexualised (revealing and/or kinky) sends a different message depending on who is wearing it.

For a woman, it advertises vulnerability, and she'll only get away with it in a society with strong women's rights (and not always then, when things go wrong).

For a man, when it's not an annoying parody, it's a threatening show of male sexuality and strength, comparable to indecent exposure.

Women are being forced to suppress their self-protective instincts.

@BlessedKali one really helpful effect of gendered clothing is identification at a glance, as you say.
If you cast your eyes across a group wearing traditionally gendered clothes it’s easy to see if there’s a fox in the hen coop.

That can be counter productive though- it makes it easier for the interloper to hide by dressing in the opposite sex’s clothes- not evading a direct scrutiny, but a quick glance.

Honestly I’m not that interested in what other people wear.

Can we address poor behaviour rather than clothes? I think so.

Men performing fetish is fairly evident by behaviours- demanding validation mainly. If there is attention seeking behaviour, address that. Reward people for being team players rather than centring themselves.

Have we been using short cuts to describe bad behaviour? Probably. Let’s identify the language for the poor behaviour rather than focusing on the clothes.

Im really quite happy for men's fashion to change organically and incorporate skirts. But I just don't see this happening at present.

This would happen through some cultural movement of influential men, media interest, cool subculture that become mainstream and then general acceptance.
Designers would be designing and selling skirts to men.

This just isn't happening. A few rare men might be wearing skirts but there's no movement or cultural shift.
And I do spend a lot of time in Shoreditch! and this isn't the trend I'm seeing for cool young men at all.

I think the cross dressers, who don't want men's skirts, they want to wear women's clothes have actually set back any fashion movement for men's skirts. Because they don't want that uncool association.

Even in cultures where men wear skirts or dress type clothing, there is still a clear distinction between what men wear and women's clothing.

I think whatever the changes within fashion might occur, we'd still get differences between men and women's clothing because human nature wants to acknowledge differing fundamental categories. Not everyone but enough people that distinctions will always emerge and exist.

So there will always be opportunity for men to dress like women to queer boundaries. Whatever the fashion at the time.

I think cultural shifts should be organic and by mutual consent, I think past suspicion about men who want to queer boundaries was been beneficial to women and children, and we throw it out too easily thinking it will bring a genderless new dawn when in reality it's just given license to perverts.

Policing adults clothing is not a great idea.

I think allowing to male transvestites to wear what they want, within reason obviously office appropriate clothing when at work.

Firstly, it demonstrates the sexualised nature of a lot of fashion for women very effectively. I am not policing women's clothing choices, but let us not pretend the huge multi billion dollar fashion/cosmetics industry doesn't exist, and isn't more powerful now than ever and beauty battles between women are not a thing. They are. They are also artificial social inventions which we need talk about.

One of the best ways to see that is by seeing the same clothes on a male body. Obviously it looks absurd, laughable.

Why do we think the same clothes on women is right and normal ?

The fact is we have choices on what we want to wear and it is right that is the case, but also the beauty industry really does a number on women's self confidence. Feminists have been saying this forever.

We need to TALK about this openly. Allow people to understand the nature of peer and sexual competition in clothing so women make informed choices.

Dress to look hot great, but don't pretend you are not sending off social signals, because you are. Attempting to get most women to stop loving aesthetic choices about dress is impossible I think, but what we can do is be more self aware about it and pushing that drive into a productive self fulfilment rather than mass consumer society which is based on endless fashion choices.

Secondly, we need to prevent the HORROR of transwidowhood. The best way to do that is outing secret fetishes so women can see what they are getting. Extreme transvestites are avoided by most women as an obvious red flag. We can stop a lot of women having their lives ruined.

Yes that means we are going to see stuff that makes us uncomfortable.

Actually men signaling to women they are creepy is USEFUL though.

What we don't do is play along with delusions.

I can't fully agree with the dichotomy presented here. Women's "sexy getup" is also often comparable to indecent exposure (have a peep at some of the Daily Mail photoshoots of public nocturnal revelry), and was/is traditionally seen as distasteful or indecent if worn in public, although that view has been suppressed to some extent by the idea that this constitutes "slut-shaming" which is supposedly always a bad thing.

While I acknowledge that the male "sexy" cross-dressing fetish is more aggressive (and there should be no place for it at all in female safe spaces), the female version they're imitating is also exhibitionistic and arguably anti-social in its disregard for courteous public social boundaries.

I think there's an issue with legislation, it's not about how we legislate on what men can wear, but how we avoid a situation where employers (or community groups, too) are compelled to allow males to wear their fetish in public places.
I remember reading about a discrimination case being brought by a transwoman in the USA (on Gallus Mag's old Gendertrender blog, must be a decade ago now at least). He worked at a funeral parlour, and the women's uniform was a pencil skirt - close fitting cut from abdomen to knees. The funeral palour mostly provided services for residents of a conservative Lutheran community.
Before reading about cases like the above I wanted to smash e norms, set the people free from the confines of clothing rules. But I have to admit the truth in what @MalagaNights is saying. What's being smashed is the social contract that says it's not ok for a young male to attend the funerals of devout, conservative ommunity members with his bulge on display.

I don't care if a man is wearing a dress because it turns him on or if he is a fashioninsta, as long as:
a) It is appropriate, as per the example above about bulges in the funeral home, and
b) He and everyone around him knows very well that he is a man and he has to use the male spaces/sports categories, etc.

The number of men wearing skirts because they are comfy in them is minisule compared to the ones wearing it because they get a boner or get off on the discomfort women feel at them being there in their twinset and pearls. The ones that wear the twinset and pearls is miniscule compared to the ones who are dressing like they are looking for a customer down a back alley or putting knickers back in the aisles at M&S after they have 'used' them.

I am one of the people that was all for men adopting female clothes, until the brick wall of what this means in reality actually means.

It's not MY fault that these men took what could have been an excellent progressive approach and made it nasty.

Seems a commendably rational and liberal attitude, I agree.

But b) especially means persuading many influential people that women's basic rights are more important than the unjustified demands of a handful of male fantasists.

I don't think anyone is / was seriously proposing to "police" this.

Really? I'm obviously far too literal.

It's a bit frustrating that a thread that is headed "Policing Men's Clothes" isn't actually about policing men's clothes.

Personally I am not blind to the fact that many cross dressers are doing so as part of a fetish. It's clear as day to me what they are doing.

"and arguably anti-social in its disregard for courteous public social boundaries"

This is what I'm getting at.
We've never had legislation about clothing and no one wants that. But what we did have was a social contract about decency which you would be socially censored for transgressing.

We are now in a period where the idea of a social contract, of values such as decency, courtesy and standards are scorned. No judgement is allowed and it is the judgers who are ostracised as unacceptable.

I think the phenomena of people wearing pyjamas in the supermarket has parallels or the extreme sex/underwear type fashion some young women wear.

This lack of social norms and distain for having them, and encouragement or celebration for people to trample boundaries and queer the norms, is a license for perverts.

The boundaries provided some constraint for all but also provided some protection.

You are far too literal.

The title of the thread was taken from one of the twitter discussions linked to.

It is using 'police' as a metaphor for control and boundaries and how or whether we should have these.

I actually think the social judgement is kicking back in on this issue with people at last being able to talk about agp and call men out on the sexual nature of their dress up in a way we couldn't a few years ago.

It's bringing some social control via shame back. Whereas for a few years all we had was celebration of bravery and if you judged you were censored.

I think this does get difficult to do however alongside; it's just clothes and men can wear dresses. Making that distinction gets very murky and gives cover to the fetishists.

When there is a real fashion movement for men's skirts and it's distinct from them trying to imitate women then I'll be more convinced. For the moment I'm suspicious.

Clothing just needs to be appropriate for the environment.

Both men and women have always worn 'fetish' clothing but not generally to work, in the supermarket or walking down the street. It's not the clothes that are the problem, it's when/how to wear them and that's what needs to be policed socially if people cannot make the appropriate choice themselves.

I agree with this but we need some agreement on appropriate.

E.g a man in the office wearing a women's blouse, pencil skirt and heels. Lipstick but no false breasts.
Says he's a man.

Fine fashion choice or fetish at work?

Actually I think you are being disingenuous here.

It was clear from the very beginning of this thread that several posters thought you were debating whether or not society has a place in the actual policing of men's clothing choices. You could easily have put us straight that you meant to be metaphorical.

On Twitter some women replying to HP are talking about using public shaming as a way to deter men who display their fetish in public so it's clear that the Twitter debate is not simply using the word "police" as a metaphor.

She seems to get stuck on the idea of 'decency' and cannot conceptualise a society where this is generally understood and shared and socially regulated.

What is it you mean by "socially regulated" if it's not social pressure to control men's clothing choices?

Err the police don't use public shaming they use the law?

Look I'm sorry you feel I was disingenuous, it wasn't deliberate I really thought my posts were obviously about how we sanction (police) men wearing women's clothes or not.

Hopefully it's clear now.

What is it you mean by "socially regulated" if it's not social pressure to control men's clothing choices?

I do mean social pressure.
Not the law.

I thought it was clear. I also think the Twitter take on it (that laws are actually being considered!) is likely to be the next ridiculous myth propagated.

Yes I'm not talking about The Police (as in the law) either. I'm not that literal!
I'm using the term policing to mean control by societal pressure.

I was responding to Resister's post where she said

I don't think anyone is / was seriously proposing to "police" this. Rather the issue is more one of not being wilfully blind to fetishes being paraded in public, and not being wilfully blind to men conveniently turning up at events which are supposed to be handling the impact and fallout of testing and breaking boundaries and established safeguarding.

The debate on Twitter is about the societal policing of men's clothing. I was under the impression that the same debate was being had here.