Okay, so the Missouri house of representatives has enacted rules for what women must wear on the state house floor. I’m linking to an article in the NYT here even though some people I know and love have been known to label that newspaper as a purveyor of fake news. Harumph.

Anyway. Women must cover their arms? Really? Since when are bare arms a distraction to a man’s penis? I suppose there are some arm fetishes out there but but but… I mean Marjorie Taylor Greene(eee) of the US house regularly wears sleeveless attire to whatever it is that she does out there in Warshington. No one seems to care about that.

Of course there are no restrictions on what MEN must wear. Why not?

Nowadays I am a full-time telecommuter and no one cares what I wear. When I began my adult job at Cubelandia, business casual attire was very loosely required. I didn’t have a problem conforming to that at all and actually I always covered my arms. Partly because I felt weird walking around in sleeveless clothing but also because it could be cold in Cubelandia.

Our dress code was always loosely enforced. One day I arrived at work and realized I was wearing a rather “loud” pair of socks (with my sandals). For a moment or two I was worried that I might be non-compliant with the dress “code”. Then my boss the LSCHP walked in. He was wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt under a huge brown suit jacket and I fergit what else. Oh yeah, Batman yarmulke. I thought okay, I am good…

Then there was a summer when we downsized and rearranged Cubelandia. That whole summer was declared summer casual. Yikes! What that ended up meaning was that large refrigerator-shaped men wore cargo shorts to work. Meaning the rest of us got to look at their big hairy calves. In truth this did not bother me at all. In fact, it totally cracked me up. I continued to wear my comfortable low-key summer-weight biz-caz.

In one of my most humiliating junior high experiences, I was walking alone through the attached high school building after band practice (a VERY long story but I was in the high school band in junior high). The principal, a well known person and friend of my family, approached me to tell me that my skirt was too short. In fact, since we had been marching (outside) and I had been running (until I got into the school) because I had to join my junior high class late (always embarrassing), my skirt was “bunched up” in front. I knew that and was VERY embarrassed about it but hadn’t been able to FIX IT! All these years later, I am still angry that he felt obligated to stop and harass me about my clothing. He had a long career there and a lot of people have wonderful memories of him. I remember him as a bully.

Why oh why oh why are we still so focused on regulating what women wear?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2023 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.