Why I Believe Men Should Wear Skirts
Decades ago, when I was in high school, I was a part of my schools DDF ( Drama, Debate and Forensics) and spent my time writing and performing original speeches. My favorite and most popular speech was titled “ Why I Believe Men Should Wear Skirts”. It’s 2020 now and the world is burning, so I figured why not revisit this idea again. That original speech has long been lost to time but I remember some of the basic core arguments.
- Clothing doesn’t have a freaking gender.
Gender and patriarchal oppression have led to men being shamed and mocked if they dare wear a skirt or dress. Look at social media pages of people not on the gender binary or ones who don’t fit into a particular “masculine” or “feminine “ box. The comments sections are full of angry people yelling about how “men should look like men” “You look disgusting in that dress, wear pants like a man”. Those, of course, are the nicer of the critical comments. Some people get so damn offended by others not looking or acting the way they think they should. If more straight men wore skirts and it became normalized, some of this would stop.
I don’t understand why we as a society put gender labels onto clothing. It’s cloth, it doesn’t have a gender, therefore there is no such thing as boys or girls clothing.
Let’s look at pants. While there was a time when women in Western civilization were not socially accepted as wearing pants, today, no one blinks an eye at a woman strolling down the street with them on. Pants had been a common item for women to wear for centuries and millennia in other cultures but much of western society, especially here in the U.S. women wore long skirts and dresses unless they were doing sports or work that required pants but those were usually worn outside of the public eye and not on the street casually going about one’s day. Pants as an everyday clothing option didn’t come to pass until the mid 20th century.
In the United States, Elizabeth Smith Miller designed an early version of pants like clothing for women around 1851 what we know as “bloomers”. It wasn’t until the 1960’s/70’s women rights movement that pants really became an accepted staple for women. So basically, both and pants and skirts have been worn by all genders during different times and trying to gender clothing is stupid and pointless and as the famous Eddie Izzard said, “They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them”.
2. History, man, history.
Archaeological evidence shows that the first types of clothing were wrap skirts or aprons, regardless of gender. The domestication of horses was largely responsible for this shift to pants. As someone who grew up as an equestrian, I can tell you this makes sense to wear pants while riding horses. Skirts won’t protect your legs while riding and it just isn’t very comfortable to do so. So when did that happen? The earliest existing pair of pants comes from China and dates to around 1000 BCE.
Scythian warriors, both male, and female, from Central Eurasia, are depicted wearing tight fitting trousers in Greek art dating from the 6th century BCE. So even when pants were introduced, it wasn’t originally gendered but more to do with function and status.
In Europe up until around the 8th century, men still weren’t wearing pants. After the fall of the monolithic Roman Empire, Europe fell under rule of knights on horseback, who wore pants due to it being nearly impossible to ride horses in a robe/skirt, and because they were in rule, pants became a high status symbol among men. It did take some time for this switch to pants for some cultures, Scottish warriors wore kilts into battle up to the 20th century.
The fact is, men historically have worn skirts since the beginning of time and unless you are riding a horse into battle, there isn’t a reason to not wear a skirt.
3. Visual appeal.
We’ve managed to sexualize women and their clothing for centuries, why not men? I’m all for equality, so let’s see some legs gentlemen! I do love to see a nicely muscled calf peeking out from the bottom of a skirt and so do many others. Think about those movies with kilted warriors running around. Would Braveheart (1995) and Rob Roy (1995) been as popular had the actors not been showing any leg? Who knows, but I do think it helped seeing some lovely leg flesh on screen. Google “men’s skirts” or check out some runway fashion shows to see how truly stunning men can look in these garments. Seriously, it’s some pretty sexy stuff!
4. Comfort, so much comfort.
Skirts and dresses can be hella comfortable. Freedom of movement and your legs don’t feel trapped like sausages in a cloth casing. There is nothing better than wearing a skirt on hot summer days, you can get a nice breeze that cools your legs down if you’re lucky. I don’t know how pants are comfortable on men. You have to jam your entire package into a small space or have it go down one of your pants legs. Honestly that seems like a recipe for disaster and I’d think men would love the comfort of having a free swinging member. I don’t have a penis, so I can’t really say for sure that it’s more comfortable for those with a swinging appendage, but I suspect it is. It’s all about airflow and freedom from restrictive movement.
In conclusion, clothing has no gender, historically men wore skirts, it’s visually appealing and very comfortable. Let’s just throw away all the nonsense and let people wear what they feel good in, no matter the article of clothing or their gender, because clothes are just clothes.
