Fight For Your Right... To Wear Pants!

- Analisa

I am enraged by an article that was placed in the Daily Texan (please read and see The Daily Texan's Who Wears the Pants), which held the argument that women should wear dresses instead of pants. I felt that Ryan Haecker, a history major at the University of Austin, poorly supported his argument.

Possibly the most unfounded and chauvinistic statement was “If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility.” If this statement was anywhere to being true, then the history of fashion supports that men are homosexuals. Now, this may be drastic, but men have always set women’s fashions. They have always created the fashion for themselves and then transferred it to women. Men wore earrings first (Elizabethan era), high heels (invented by Louis XIV and first to wear them, as well as creating ballet, which is now viewed as a very feminine form of dance), and robes (in fact, the French word for dress is robe). Therefore, if men wore these fashions as well as transferring them onto women, then they also love men who are “passive, domestic, child raising, [having sex], pious, and fertile.” Haecker claims that the “nature of sexual attractiveness in women is objective” because they wear dresses. But if men love women in dresses, and men wore dresses first, what does that say about men?

He also states: “The androgynous masculinization of the modern woman, through the donning of pants, suits, uncovered shoulders and unveiled hair, has in a sense led to the slow whorification of ladyhood.” As I recall, men had super short shorts in the seventies and ran around without shirts, so wouldn’t women’s fashion slowly follow this because men just want to see their images reflected in women?

As Haecker states, “what's not sexy is feminism, not to be confused with femininity.” Well I guess he is right that voting and having control of my own finances is not attractive to some men, but I don’t really feel that is my concern. I am thankful for all of the women who fought for me to have the right to vote, have control of my money, and the right to look at my own female anatomy in order to make and understand the decision of having a baby (Comstock Laws of the 1920s). I may not agree with some fractions of the feminist movement, but it seems he makes the mistake of assuming that feminism is one encompassing ideology (burning bras and castrating men) which it’s not.

Maybe what gets to me the most is the fact that this was written by a history major. Now I minored in history, so by far I supposedly have the least knowledge, but despite that, I am angry that he doesn’t recognize that he is perpetuating the enduring historical Victorian ideology, which really only makes up a small portion of human history. He has based his definitions of being feminine and elegant on the Victorian era ideal of a “lady.” The Victorian definition of a lady is called the Madonna and the Whore complex. Ladies are to be seen and not heard, passive, domestic, fertile, rear children as upstanding citizens, and be devout to her religion and her husband. Essentially all lovely qualities attributed to the mother of Jesus. Anything that is remotely against this ideal makes you a whore. I think I am far from passive, yet I do enjoy being “domestic;” however, I love to wear shorts and jeans. Am I now to conclude by this man’s article that I am a whore because I enjoy wearing my jeans and don’t meet up to his Victorian ideal? Who should he be more horrified by, me or Hugh Hefner, who he shares the same ideological themes, mainly wanting women to be passive, domestic, sexually clean, and lady-like. The only difference is Hefner likes his girls naked while Haecker wants his in a dress. Either way, both women they paint are supposed to be sexless.