Opinion: Wearing the pants
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According to a New York Times article, “Pants May be Touted as the Coming Thing, but Women Seem to Prefer Dresses.” Included as evidence? Quotes from the 1941 classic “Citizen Kane” and allusions to a decades-old short story, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”
If you assumed the piece to be an old nugget from the archives trotted out for amusement (like we do here, on occasion), you’d be wrong. Here’s a choice bit:
I am not eager for women to become “a little more hard-core, a little more androgynous, a little more butch.” Yes, gender play is fun, and trousers are a useful wardrobe default for the woman in business. But unless you are Thomas McGuane and find nothing sexier than a woman with crow’s feet, tight Wranglers and suede chaps, you will have to concede that, for flattering a woman’s body, nothing is quite like a dress.
The sentiment alone—men like women in dresses—is too obvious to be objectionable. That the story tries to couch the sentiment as advice for women is plain silly, as is the idea that New York City women would wear summer dresses in winter, or the dreaded “trousers” in summer (we in L.A. can pull both off a bit more easily).
But there are some objectionable things here: the peeping-tom creepiness; the weirdly old-fashioned gender ideals; the patronizing slide-show title, “Enjoy Being a Girl”; the clear and cruelly-put preference of the writer for the young and full-figured; and the dismissal of successful women in the fashion industry. (How dare those power-grubbing witches anoint pants trendy and ruin it for the men!)
Still, it’s not as bad as Shashi Tharoor’s defense of the sari, which came to my mind. The dress at least is convenient to wear. And though there are those graceful ones for whom a sari fits and falls well no matter what, for most women, wearing several yards of wrapped fabric is a downright hindrance to daily life. (And that’s not even considering the weighty symbolism of wearing Indian rather than “Western” clothes, or a sari rather than a salwar.) But Tharoor nonetheless wants women to sacrifice ease and comfort for tradition, for an antiquated ideal of Indian-ness and, mostly, for men who want an eyeful.
The dress doesn’t have as much symbolism to bear, so it’s not really pernicious to ask women to wear it. Still, both men display the same tendency to treat women as scenery while pretending to exalt them for their beauty. Some things never go out of style.
(Thanks to Feministing for the tip.)