Material Culture Alert: Pants are evil!

Pants are evil. At least that's what my classmate N-slice and I have decided. Pants never do what you want. If you fail to conform to their shape, they either sag and droop or compress your internal organs. Skirts, on the other hand, are forgiving and flexible. Skirts are our friends, especially in a fancy-pants museum school.

Now, you may be aware that there are some conservative religious groups wherein pants on women are evil. My fave Arkansas family the Duggars are an example of this, as are some Catholic homeschooling factions. In their eyes, pants undermine modesty, chastity, the role of women in the family, and the natural complementary differences between the sexes. Those are big issues, so I respect their worrying about them. The worry can lead to some extreme ideas, though. Naturally, if you look around the internet, you can find people in crazy arguements about this topic. For instance:

This article I found today is well meaning, heartfelt ... and totally nuts. When the author suggested that you take your husband shopping with you so he can pick out your clothes, I had to laugh out loud. It also seems to imply that pants simultaneously make you look too fat, too sexual, and too "cheap." Dude, which is it?

This post in response is snarky, skeptical, and full of female common sense. I laughed out loud more than once. Basically it says "I am a busy mom chasing after my kids - PANTS!"

All day I've been hashing out what I would write in response to these ideas about modesty and gender roles. Why can't I stop thinking about it? Here's my own itemized pants/skirt manifesto.

1. This is a material culture issue - clothing has both individual and social meaning. Clothing can assert control, reinforce a group affiliation, express individual creativity, and yes, offend those around you.
2. Longing for the "good old days" of modest clothing is bad history scholarship. Have you ever seen a Hogarth engraving from the 1700s? Not much modesty there. Granted, immodesty may be much more visible and diverse now, but it always existed within the social constructs of its time. That's another thing - clothing culture is a language that evolves. In Jesus' time, everyone wore long robes. Was that blurring the sexes too much?
3. There is extreme immodesty in our culture, but you don't have to go to opposite extremes to combat the cultural poison of, say, Jersey Shore.
   
4. Last night I read Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives. That book is a worst case scenario of caricatured gender relations, but the first article has some similarities. In both worlds, men admire women for their beauty, and want to direct how that beauty is displayed and idealized. The Stepford husbands wanted impossible women who would do endless chores with no personal needs; the other author appears to want the impossibility of never remembering that women are sexually attractive.
   
5. I'm the kind of person who takes spiritual advice much too seriously, especially when it is strict. Last year I read Colleen Hammond's Dressing With Dignity, and it troubled me for weeks. Was I really buying into a modern conspiracy of Marxism, Freemasonry, and the downfall of civilization as we know it? Padre Pio, a profoundly holy man, wouldn't even hear the confessions of women in pants. Was he looking down from heaven ashamed of me and my wide leg dress trousers? But then I remembered - that was one holy man's opinion. He was not infallible and he was influenced by the context of his time.
   
6. Lastly, having itemized lists of rules or forbidding entire genres of garments outright is not an adult moral approach. This is a lesson I'm learning myself, since I tend to like structure and direction. But I'm not in my high school anymore with its regulation of shirt collars and prom dress straps. There is no papal checklist approving or condemning every item of clothing you might ever try on in a store. As adults in a mature relationship with God, we must take our properly formed consciences and apply them to the unpredictability and diversity of daily life.
   

So that's my rant. No, I don't think skirts are evil signs of patriarchal oppression. I like wearing skirts and how they make me feel feminine and polished. I like when The Beau tells me I look pretty or my female classmates compliment me on a new dress. Some colleagues are bigger fans of pants, but they still look feminine.