Why a Man Might Want to Wear a Skirt

A couple weeks back, I went into Value Village and bought two skirts. The women's kind. I guess there's a lot to say about this simple act, psychologically, but I'll try to keep this post brief.

There are a couple reasons for buying a skirt initially. First of all, I have only ever seen one or two men wear skirts, as a fashion piece, as opposed to dresses. One of these was in the movie Rent, in which the character Angel wears a skirt. Angels, according to Jesus Christ, are sexless, so the name and the skirt and the sexuality all kind of go together. I hope somewhere out there someone is doing a more thorough analysis of that whole movie, because I sense that it's pretty rich in symbolism and stuff.

The other context was that a kid in my high school came to the prom in a kilt. Now, this is not unusual. I've seen lots of men in kilts. And almost universally, they have protested: "It's not a skirt, it's a kilt!" as if that makes it any more manly. "It's tradition!" as if that is the sole factor that makes it cool for a man to wear a female fashion. A kilt is pretty much a skirt. This got me thinking, why can't a heterosexual, masculine man wear an honest-to-goodness skirt.

The third thing that got me wondering about skirts was that I am constantly seeing women around the university campus, as well as elsewhere, taking the skirt to interesting conceptual places. I mean, I've seen the long skirt come back, for example, paired with a standard blouse, or even a men's shirt. Sometimes a long skirt is combined with a flannel coat, like the lumberjacks wear. And universally, skirts at my school are worn with black tights underneath. No one has bare legs, not in the winter anyways. Also, lots of women have taken to wearing denim skirts, which can almost seem masculine, but you think to yourself "no, that's clearly feminine, even though it's denim, because it's in the shape of a skirt."

So women have all these options when it comes to skirts, and men seem to have not so many when it comes to pants. You can wear jeans, cords, khakis, dress pants, cargo pants, and that's about it. You can't wear track pants unless you're actually at the track. You certainly can't wear shorts in the winter, because you can't wear black tights under them.

Now, the thing about a man wearing a skirt that's unambiguously a skirt, while not wearing any other feminine accessories, is that it should, in theory, trigger a similar thought process in everyone that you encounter. If women can wear a skirt that's kind of manly, then surely a man should be able to wear a skirt that's kind of manly.

And that was the sum of my thought process up until the day I actually went into Value Village and bought a pair of skirts. Of course, even that was not so simple, and it took me a few trips to work up the courage to even enter the women's clothing section of the store. I told myself that I could say to anyone who asked that I was just shopping for my girlfriend, or my sister, but what kind of man buys cheap skirts for a woman? I guess it would have to be a really clueless one, which is what I was going to have to pretend to be, though I wasn't quite up to chatting about which skirt my pretend girlfriend would look best in.

Still, as far as I know, there's no law that says a man can't shop in the women's clothing section of a store, and no one asked me to leave. I couldn't say if they gave me strange looks, because I wouldn't make eye contact with anyone as long as I was in that section. Which must have looked strange in itself. Here's a man, smiling, saying hello, and chatting to everyone in all the other sections of the store: books, men's clothing, housewares, furniture, but as soon as he gets into the women's clothing section, he turns completely inward.

After I picked out my skirts, I had no idea what size I am in women's clothing, so I decided I had to try these on. So I went back to the men's section, grabbed a couple pairs of pants, loaded them on top of the skirts, and headed for the change rooms with this big bundle of inidentifiable clothing.

The change room was uneventful. One more awkward moment came when I went to pay at the checkout. I had bought a number of other items, and put them on top of the skirts, and I must have been nervous. At the moment the cashier noticed I was buying skirts, her friend made a joke, which wasn't particularly funny, but I burst out in one big, unbracketed "ha!" The two of them just looked at me, and then went back to their work, one bagging the skirts, the other handling the debit machine.

So now I have these two skirts, and I haven't yet worn them in public. I wear them around the house to get used to the feel of them, and I've worn them to walk down and up the stairs of my apartment building to do my laundry.

I realize that one of the reasons I like to wear skirts, is that I like to imagine a woman might have also worn them at some time. It has little to do with sexiness or femininity, but I guess I just like to try to imagine what that one small part of being a woman is like. That's not at all the reason that I initially set out to wear skirts. My original reason was to question the simple fact that men don't wear skirts, which are essentially neutral pieces of fabric. I wanted to test that barrier, and see if I could break through it. But now, a whole bunch of other factors want to seep in, and I do find myself wondering about the erotic aspect of it all.