Warbler said:
He doesn't have to explain to me, but that doesn't mean I can't ask him.
Sigh. Another sigh from you. That wasn't a rhetorical question. I genuinely wanted you to tell me why not.
But, no, I do intend to answer you, with a fun anecdote, no less.
Picture it. Sicily, 1908...
Oh, no, wait. Let me try again.
Back in St. Olaf...
Oh, crap. Okay, wait, for reals this time.
I've always been "weird" and sought to go against societal norms ever since I was a kid. And as a little kid, I do remember being occasionally jealous that the girls got to wear cute dresses, and I wasn't allowed to. But as every other child, I was indoctrinated into the "right" way of thinking, and I can remember, from a very early age, repressing, repressing, repressing. It even got to the point where I remember being about 6 or 7 or so and always muting the TV or running out of the room whenever a "girl" commercial was on because I didn't want the Barbie jingle stuck in my head because that shit's not for boys.
But it was May of 2006 (so about a year after I joined this forum) when I had an epiphany. It was one of the last days of finals of my sophomore year of college. I came into sophomore acting studio for our final in that, and I was chatting with classmates before our professors came in. One of them in particular was a female classmate, and she happened to be wearing a long, flowing, floral print skirt, and I complimented it. In return, she joked, "I'll have to let you borrow it some time, Lance." And we both laughed at the obvious humor in such a ridiculous concept and then went about our lives.
But suddenly it was like a switch flipped in my brain, and I was suddenly capable of thinking in an entirely new way. The question popped into my head: "What if I'd said yes?" And I realized that there are so many things we take for granted. We're told as children what's right and what's wrong. What's proper and what's not. And we're children, so we take it at face value and take it as solid, immutable fact. Men can't wear skirts. Why? Because they can't. It wasn't solid, immutable fact. It was just something somebody came up with, and people generally haven't questioned it. And I decided right then and there that that's not really any good reason for doing anything, not on its own.
And so I started wearing skirts, and it's been an amazing means of expression as well as a fascinating social experiment. I have so many interesting stories I could tell about my adventures living outside of the social norms. I have had wonderful conversations with dozens, if not hundreds, of interested people. But it's affected my entire perception of the world. It makes me think more. It makes me not take things at face value but to always ask WHY we do anything that we do. And if I can't figure out any good reason for not doing something, then I'll do it. And I want to, for an instant, shake other people out of their comfort zones and cause them to have to think for a second. Sure, many will just laugh at the freak and never stop to consider it, but I hope others will manage to have a moment like mine where they suddenly find themselves thinking in new ways. I'm not trying to "convert" a bunch of gender nonconformist disciples, but I just want people to see something out of the ordinary and consider for just a moment that things can or even should be out of the ordinary.
