Sometime during my first year of university, I found a pale green dress at Value Village. It was floor length, and had a high waist and cap sleeves. Remarkably, it fit me well. It made my body look a bit more like that of a woman. I decided to wear it for Halloween and go as a Jackie Kennedy-esque society lady circa 1960. I bought a big black wig that I put curlers in, and a friend spent an hour on my makeup, hiding as best she could my permanent five o’clock shadow. After a lot of intensive, painstaking work I knew I still didn’t look beautiful, but I thought I looked okay. I grandly emerged from my room and our friend Samantha caught me in the hallway. She burst out laughing–“Oh my God, Anne Frank!”
We went out to a house party that night. As each member of our group of mostly girls entered the bus, a rowdy gang of drunken guys hooted and hollered. A girl dressed as Little Red Riding Hood–hoots and hollers. A girl dressed as a fairy–hoots and hollers. Then I climbed the steps. You could hear the very briefest cheer, quickly cut short. Then silence.
That was also the Halloween I discovered that high heels are bullcrap.
“Well, this is just insane!” I declared, taking them off and finishing my walk home barefoot.
Despite these experiences, I wore dresses for each Halloween over the next three years. I’ve always enjoyed women’s fashion. A part of me holds onto the dream that I may one day do drag. (I have my drag name picked out–Max Capacity.) But what I discovered through my experiments with dresses is that I did not want to wear women’s clothes all the time. I felt like my feminine tendencies, which I normally exaggerate or control based on context, were out there on display. Also on display were my legs and my bum, and friends touched them a lot. I couldn’t help but wonder if a short skirt signaled to people that it was okay to be handsy.
After an evening wearing a dress, there was nothing I wanted more than to get back into my jeans.
I thought about my adventures in dresses when I read about a group of men in India who donned skirts to protest the prevalence of rape in their country. Twenty-five men wore skirts and t-shirts for a rally in a Bangalore park. They were joined by about 200 hundred supporters. The protest, which they promoted on facebook, stemmed from the tragic gang rape and murder of a 23-year old student last December.
“I wanted to show people that if a guy won’t get molested if he wears a skirt, then a girl shouldn’t too,” said organizer Adithya Mallya.
As much as protesting violence against women, the organizers wanted people to consider the ludicrousness of the idea that a woman could invite harassment based on what she’s wearing.
“Wearing a skirt does not make me a woman,” said another attendant. “Wearing a skirt is my choice and women should have the same choice that I have. Nobody holds me up for my choices, but women are held accountable for the clothes they wear and the choices they make. They should have the same rights as every man has.”
A woman is raped every twenty minutes in India. The number of rape cases rose by 9.2% in 2011, and those are just the reported ones. The census from the same year outlined a growing gap between the number of men and the number of women, most likely due to selective sex abortions. As the New York Times wrote, “India has a glut of young males, some unemployed, abusing alcohol or drugs and unnerved by the new visibility of women in society.”
A higher ratio of men to women doesn’t ‘cause’ rape in and of itself, nor does unemployment, alcohol, or changing cultural values. Most definitely, what a woman wears does not result in rape, and women should have the freedom to wear whatever they want. While men taking a stand against rape in a country like India is undoubtedly a step forward, my concern is that, like Toronto’s Slutwalk before it, by focusing on women’s clothing we’re sidestepping the real issue.
By all means, point out the absurdity of claiming that a woman was ‘asking for it’ by wearing a short skirt. But the point isn’t that women shouldn’t fear being raped when they wear a skirt–it’s that they shouldn’t fear being raped ever.
As a gimmick, men wearing skirts is a good promotional tool and means to get people talking. But the protestor who said that wearing a skirt didn’t make him a woman hit the nail on the head. The objectifying hoots and hollers were not directed at me that Halloween, despite my green dress. At the end of the day, these men can take off the skirts, put on pants, and go back to being men– just like I did the day after Halloween.
I don’t know how to end rape, but I know that it takes more than putting on a skirt and high heels to understand what it feels like to be a woman.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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