A Case for Men in Skirts

Who decides femininity and masculinity and why is femininity punished?

I hear that “it's a man's world” more often than I want to and topics like this drive the realisation even more into my head: that the world, as we know it today (since the institution of the patriarchy), is in fact a man's world. I think of how many things in existence were made for men or popularized because they could be of use to men in the rare instance that they served anyone else. The first images on the Internet were made to satiate men's hunger for sexualizing a woman's body, sanitary pads;originally because they could soak up blood in war, makeup; because women were not allowed to act, and skirts too were made for men at some point, in some places.

I raised the idea that more men should wear skirts often, in a group conversation once and was almost shamed into silence because skirts are feminine and a man should not be caught dead in one.

This lunges me into a memory– some kind of nostalgia except it's without the fondness. It's almost a rite of passage that the young feminist girl figures that some things hold more social importance than others and “others” happen to refer to the things associated with being a girl. She would want to be seen as strong and would struggle with denouncing her love for these “girly things” so that she is not deemed weak in comparison to her male classmates. Some of these girls declare their hatred for the colour pink, my declaration was an abhorrence for skirts.

A pink flower because why not?

It is odd that I advocate for them now but rightfully so. Why wouldn't I, when for the most part, skirts are comfortable, easy to wear and beautiful.

Whenever I mention that more men should wear them on a day-to-day basis, I am met with two arguments: the first; that it is not culturally appropriate and the second, which I only face if I'm able to raise that men wore them in the past, is that it is not appropriate for our current era.

For the first, I would debate that in some parts of Nigeria, men traditionally wear wrappers, which to me, appear to be a close relative to skirts, with the added guarantee that skirts will most likely not come loose unexpectedly.

In addition to this, we did not seem to care about what is culturally appropriate when we decided on casual wear, so we can just view skirts in the same way.

Argument two only just solidifies the plot that markers of gender are socially constructed. What changed in men that physically disallows them from being able to wear skirts? If men could wear them then without it affecting their masculinity, then the only thing that is warped is our current sense of masculinity. Of course, not all men(since that is their favourite phrase to throw around) used to wear skirts, but if some of them could, then all of them can.

The deciding factors of femininity and masculinity have changed over the years and as the roles of women continue to be viewed as less, and the power held by men, increases, femininity, which is closely associated with women, has also taken a lower rank. This is why when a woman does something a little masculine, she is applauded or not even noticed at all.

A woman is allowed to be masculine but not too much because then how dare she defy gender norms but a man is punished as soon as he breathes feminine because how dare he choose to identify with what is less than him. An example for this degradation of femininity or “being woman” is a phrasee I've heard used to refer to female lawyers: “gentlemen in skirts”, this term is used to show equality between male and female lawyers with the subtle implication that female lawyers have to “become men” because a woman can never be equal to a man.

The patriarchy punishes masculinity and femininity but one of them suffers more as femininity is to the patriarchy, what the negro was to his slave master.