No Jack, You Can't Wear Panties | The Objectification Of Men
There's an ongoing debate between the men who like to wear 'womens' clothing and the women who say that such behavior is utterly unacceptable. The strongest argument I have encountered on the side of women who believe that men shouldn't be able to wear women's clothing is the argument that it simply isn't attractive.
Usually women who make this argument acknowledge intellectually that yes, clothing is just clothing and it doesn't have a gender per se, and that yes, everyone should be free to wear what they want to, but at the end of the day, they have the right to be attracted to whatever they want to be attracted to and that isn't a man in a pair of lace panties, thank you very much, mhhhmmm.
I can't and I won't argue that a woman should be attracted to a man who wears panties just because its entirely sexist and hypocritical for her not to be. I'm not going to say a woman is bad or evil for being unable to stomach a man who wears women's clothing, but I do think that she is blindly following the programming installed in her by her cultural experiences to the exclusion of finding a partner who truly loves and appreciates her and will treat her well. She's also not giving herself a chance to reassess her idea of what 'attractive' actually is. Believe it or not, attraction is not a concrete thing. It can change very quickly based on circumstances and both external and internal influences.
I understand why she'd go with the traditional style male however. It feels on some level 'better' if a woman can have a man who pushes all the buttons she's been taught to believe she has. Tall, dark and handsome. Rugged. It's a cliché, but we love cliches, we really do. Men have trophy wives, and women, well women have trophy boyfriends and husbands.
You see, some women exist in constant competition with other women. They have a group of friends who alternate between being a source of support and fun, and being a pit of venomous bitching snakes. These women want a man they can show off to their friends and be proud of. In these women's lives, a man isn't just someone they love, its someone who makes them look good.
Why do you think some women attack other women when their man has been unfaithful? It's because, on some level, they see the man as being almost inanimate. He is a prize, a possession, a thing she owns and she must defend this possession from the other woman who might steal him away. The fact that we even use the term “stole her man” says a lot about the way some women perceive men.
It's been popular for women to complain about piggish men objectifying them, but how much more objectified can a person get when we refer to them as being 'stolen'. When we say someone stole someone's boyfriend, everyone knows that a little hussy didn't come along with a rag filled with chloroform, drug the guy and hold him prisoner in her boudoir until he succumbed to Stockholm's syndrome. No. We know that what really happened is that the boyfriend left his girlfriend for another woman.
If this is the way a woman wants to choose her partner, based on his adherence to socially acceptable norms of behavior, she's quite likely to end up with someone superficially perfect but fairly empty on the inside. Why? Because she's so obsessed with finding someone who makes her look good she ends up finding someone who has devoted a fair amount of time to making himself appeal to the norm. Someone who has made himself the picture of propriety isn't likely to also be someone who has spent a lot of time discovering who he really is. Real people very rarely conform to norms. He's not likely to be very open minded (which, trust me ladies, has a major downside when it comes to other aspects of your relationship,) and there's a fairly good chance that he'll also have picked up some socially acceptable but quite negative 'masculine' traits, just because he can.
Instead of worrying about what a man likes to wear, what if we worried about what he was like as a human being? There's a novel idea.
