You don't want men to dress like women. Nobody does.
You don't want men to dress like women. Nobody does.
But why? Think about it.
It took me a minute to remember who Timothée Chalamet is; actually I had to look it up to be reminded that he made a big headline name for himself about five years ago, when he appeared in the movie Call Me By Your Name as the underage gay lover to an older man. Such is the state of film today that a movie depicting a predatory same-sex relationship was very well-received and won lots of awards. I guess people like that sort of thing and I guess they at least profess to like this, too:
Look, I don’t think it’s too outrageous to assert that nobody—and by “nobody,” I mean “very very few people”—actually really digs this sort of thing. Timothée Chalamet is dressing up like a woman here; he’s wearing what the New York Post describes as “fitted crimson trousers and a matching backless halter top tied artfully at the neck.” That’s how you’d describe a woman’s outfit. It’s like something Emily Blunt would wear, or Amanda Seyfried, I don’t know.
Nobody really wants this. It looks silly; it makes Timothée Chalamet look like a woman and it’s just very silly. Many people have been pretty aggressively browbeaten into thinking they want to live in a world where men dress like women all the time, or at least one where nobody cares what people wear either way, but actually the great vast majority of people, men and women, don’t want that. They want men to dress like men and women like women.
But why is that? What does “dress like a man” (or woman) actually even mean, really? It’s a good question. This is something that we feel in our bones but we don’t easily know how to articulate, at least in a way that makes for a compelling counterpoint. Even hardline “social conservatives” who know better than most that this whole thing is just a train wreck—even most of them don’t have an immediately firm grasp on why they don’t like to see men dressing in backless halter tops, which is why, if pressed on the matter, many of them will kind of fumble around for a bit and then say something like, “Um, well, in the end, I don’t judge anybody. So long as everybody’s happy, I guess I don’t really care.”
But we do care. Even the liberals care. Even the really liberal liberals care. The diehard LGBT ideologues that have made such a big deal about gender ideology in the past decade or two are a very, very small minority of people. They have succeeded in forcing most of the population to meekly submit to this whole paradigm but they haven’t succeeded in making them believe it or even like it. Ninety-nine percent of the women who glam over Timothée Chalamet’s girly halter top would never want to date a man who wore one; ninety-nine percent of the men who pretend to think it’s a good look would never consider putting one on, ever. As the mogul John Chambers said: Deal with the world the way it is. And this is the way it is.
So, why is this the case? Here is what I suspect: Most ostensibly we are discomfited seeing a man in a halter top because it looks too impractical for a man to be wearing—that is to say, it looks like it hamstrings a man in a distinct and important way. More specifically: If the shit hits the fan and a man needs to employ his maleness in some way—if there is some sort of crisis in which a man’s unique aptitudes for physical strength and violence are needed to help solve the crisis in question—then he’s going to be at a distinct disadvantage if he is wearing a “backless halter top,” which is ill-suited for situations in which physical violence and action are necessary.
I mean, just look at that thing. It has about 93 points by which an assailant could easily seize and redirect the wearer’s body and/or choke him with the garment itself, and/or in which the wearer could get easily tangled or snagged in a frantic exchange of some kind.
Maybe that sounds overthought; maybe to you it seems like the people who are repelled by a man wearing this type of thing aren't thinking about it that deeply. If so, at least ask yourself these questions: If you were thrust into a crisis situation of some kind involving violence and physical action, what would you consider the more advantageous article of clothing to be wearing: a flowing, spangly, backless halter top, or a tucked-in button-down shirt? Obviously you know the answer. And in that same situation, who would you place your bets on having the overall highest tactical advantage: the average male or the average female? The answer is again very obvious.
Combine those factors and the dislike people feel of a man in a woman's outfit becomes understandable. People instinctually recognize that in most cases a man who wears women's clothing is effectively handicapping his own latent physical advantages, and that matters because by doing so he might not only be incapable of defending himself but also (and this is the most important thing) incapable of defending those around him if need be. Nobody is really impressed by a man who does that, for obvious reasons. This is where the resistance to male cross-dressing is located. 1
It is of course statistically unlikely that there is going to be some sort of incident at the Venice Film Festival—or anywhere, really—in which a man will be required to use some sort of force. Of course, it’s statistically unlikely you’ll be in a car accident as well, but you wear your seatbelt anyway because you don’t really have the luxury of reassessment when the exigency starts to take place.
In a modernized world where violence and mayhem has become less common, this type of transactional assessment might not seem much of a pressing issue. Yet the second, more practical objection is that by wearing this sort of thing in public, a man is making it more likely that other men will do the same, thereby popularizing and democratizing a net negative cultural trend.2 The bigger-picture concern here is that any devaluation of men’s practical advantage of physical strength—which necessarily brings with it the reduced likelihood that he will use that strength in a good and meaningful way—will spill over into other areas of his life, and that men will overall become inclined to weaker behavior, less protectiveness, and fewer acts of split-second courage and basic heroism when it matters the most.
That is ultimately why nobody wants this—because nobody, absolutely nobody, wants to live in a world of weak, timid, functionally pointless men. It would be awful.
People—men and women both—want to live in a society populated by strong, good men, those who are always predisposed toward good acts of strength even if they don’t ever need to perform them. This is not a bad thing. And men wearing women’s clothing is directly and inarguably inimical to that. We must deal with the world the way it is, halter tops and all.
There is a case to be made that the desire to see a man dress in men’s clothing is ultimately less about physical practicality and more about innate, intangible desires that are wrapped up in millions of years of evolutionary impulses—that manly clothes signify maleness in a way that is in the end impossible to really qualify. “The well-dressed man,” wrote William S. Maugham, “is he whose clothes you never notice.” Maybe. But I cannot see any sort of deep-seated desire of that variety that doesn’t ultimately come back to one of the principle generalized characteristics of maleness, which is superior strength—just the type of thing evolution would likely select for, anyway.
Celebrities seem to be trying their best to make it happen; Harry Styles seems to regularly dress like a woman these days, and even Brad Pitt, long a symbol of understated yet dependable masculinity, recently wore a skirt in public.
