How To Find Freedom In Women's Clothes
If you happen to be a guy who at some point developed a fascination with women's clothing, you've probably spent a good deal of your life since that time feeling guilty and disliking yourself. I don't say that because I'm some guru with a deep insight human nature, but because I'm a human with eyes, and any human with eyes can see that if there's anything that modern living sets us up for, its feeling guilty and giving us reasons for disliking ourselves.
More than ever, we're shown exactly what we should be like by those around us and by the media from the moment we are born. Sit down at 3pm and watch television for half an hour and you'll see what I mean. You'll also see that children's television has morphed from being fairly benign entertainment in which a kindly father or mother figure plays with toys and shows you how to make crafts into a crazed, high powered extravaganza in which children are shown as entirely emancipated consumers and the entire parade of hyper marketing madness (which invariably will include pop culture tie-ins not suitable for anyone under the age of 18) will be lead by adolescent presenters who will, sooner or later, be brought up on illicit drugs charges. But I digress. What you'll see are girls showing girls how to be girls, being pretty and ditzy, and boys being boys with trucks and war machines. Of course, this has always been a part of human society, but the fundamental reason for it has changed.
You see, at one time, we expected people to behave in certain ways because we thought that a strong man and a maternal mother were essential for making sure that kids survived the winter. Nowadays, we expect men to be men and women to be women because reinforcing gender expectations makes people better consumers. Women don't buy make up because they like it, they buy make up because they are told that make up will make them prettier, and therefore, more socially acceptable. After 10 or more years of buying into these ideas, women internalize them, and then you see ladies who say that they wear make up for themselves. At that point, cosmetics companies chuckle in glee, because they've moved from being sellers of products to being an essential part of women's self esteem.
The same thing goes for men. Men are marketed to on the basis of strength and masculinity, because a man who believes that being strong and masculine (as masculinity is defined by the marketers) is a man who will faithfully buy every crappy deodorant spray and 15 blade razor that comes out onto the market. He'll also buy beer, because beer is manly. I don't know if you've noticed this, but beer advertising has reached entirely new planes in recent years, with cinematic style commercials that sell not beer, but entire lifestyles.
What's the point of all this ranting that only seems remotely connected with the issue of men wearing women's clothing? It's that marketing is becoming one of the primary sources of social pressure in the modern world. If we can realize this, we can free ourselves from a lot of the guilt associated with not being what we're 'supposed' to be. If we can see that the bulk of people surrender their desires to marketers and then faithfully buy whatever the marketers tell them they should want, then we can feel good about no longer falling into that trap.
You can be whatever you want to be. Truly. You are more than a consumer unit. Turn off the TV and discover what it is that lurks inside you, then relish it, protect it and nourish it, because its the only thing that truly matters, its the only thing that is truly real.
