Age-old advice: Cross-dressing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2016 (3261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dorothy Dix Letter Box, originally published May 14, 1932.

Dear Miss Dix — Why do not men change their style of dress? Everything else has changed and improved except men’s clothes. Women are far ahead of men both in comfort and looks when it comes to modes of dress.

Why should men be restricted to dull, dark, stiff, heavy clothes instead of being able to wear soft, silken, gay garments, at least in the evenings as women do?

I know I would like to wear fancy lace things if I dared; and I believe other men would.

Women wear men’s clothes if they so desire. Why shouldn’t men be able wear women’s if they want to?

-A Man

Answer: Personally, I have always thought that the chief proof that men had more sense than women consisted in the fact that they stuck to their own clothes and did not doll themselves up like women, while women never miss a chance to grab a pair of pants and dike themselves up in masculine garments.

You never see a man parading the street, in a flowered chiffon dress and three-Inch heeled snakeskin slippers. You never see a youth at a party with a string of pearls encircling his Adams apple but Heaven help us, our eyes are daily affronted with the spectacle of fat ladies in breeches, and scrawny, sallow girls in shorts.

So I, for one, don’t want my faith in the mighty masculine intellect shaken by men taking to fluffy ruffles. I don’t believe I would have much faith in a doctor who got out his vanity case and his lipstick and made over his complexion while he was listening to my symptoms, and I know I wouldn’t trust the judgment of a banker in a sleeveless embroidered mull with an orchid corsage pinned on his breast.

That is just prejudice, of course. In the old days when men wore brocades and satins and velvets and laces and jewels and were as resplendent as any peacock they did some mighty bloody fighting and a lot of wily scheming an pulled off some shrewd financial stunts that would make a modern promoter look like a piker. But all the same, we have come now to associate sober businesslike dress with efficiency, and frills with frivolity, and I don’t think it would help any young man to become a go-getter to appear in public as a female impersonator.

Nor, for that matter, does it get a girl anywhere for her to put on men’s clothes and understudy her little brother. A transcendent beauty can get away with it, but for one who does not possess all the forty-seven different varieties of pulchritude it is a fatal mistake. Soft chiffons and floating draperies and flattering colours are a camouflage for a lot of defects in a figure and blemishes in a complexion, and just lacking in natural gumption is the woman who doesn’t take advantage of them.

As for women’s clothes being more comfortable than men’s, that is a debatable question. Of course, women are cooler in the summer than men, but by the same token men are warm in winter, which women never are.

The only advantage that women have over men in the matter of clothes is that they have the excitement of shopping, which to a woman is what drink is to a man.

So take my advice, brother, and stick to your own tubular garments. They may not be pretty, but they are comfortable and sensible and you will look better in them than you will in a Paris model.