Why Don't Men Wear Skirts? Gender Identity

When it comes to gender roles and identities there is often debate, just as with other human characteristics, about how much can be attributed to nature and how much to nurture.

Having established that trousers are a relatively modern form of clothing, I think we can confidently say that the assignment of skirts as female dress has nothing to do with any inherited predisposition and is entirely a social construct. By this I mean that when, in the modern western world, parents choose to dress their sons in trousers and their daughters in skirts; this is because of social convention not because of natural instinct.

We very much recognise this behaviour from our grandparents and parents, and no matter how enlightened we feel in comparison today the tradition continues. See this website that I found for a shop that sells unisex children's clothes. It markets itself on its uniqueness, and prides itself on its progressive stance, but obviously the policy is not profitable enough, because it also has a boys and a girls section.

It is therefore a natural threat to our ingrained model of the world when men wear skirts. But hold on, don't we all try and challenge convention these days. Well, designers might do so because that is their job, but there are plenty of walks of life in which people have a vested interest in preserving traditional gender roles. I am imagining a "traditional middle-class couple". The husband happily follows his profession or chosen work and his housewife is happy to give up work to support him. She may even have been raised for just such a role and finding the right husband may have been akin to the husband finding the right workplace. Such a couple are likely to oppose a threat to traditional gender roles as vehemently as a designer is likely to promote it.

So what if we try and take this social construct out of the equation. Take the Goth scene. "Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style" is a book written by Dunja Brill. It was reviewed last month by Catherine Spooner in "The Times Higher Education"-http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=406767&sectioncode=26 and referenced extensively in a student essay I found on the internet by Simon Pascal Klein-http://klepas.org/files/doc/a-critical-examination-of-gender-relations-within-goth-subculture.pdf.

The impression I get is a world stripped of any expectation to conform to traditional gender identities so that natural and intuitive expressions of gender can emerge. The result is men taking on androgynous appearance and other men using make-up, jewelry and skirts as a form of power dressing to accentuate their masculinity. In turn it seems that some women need to go even further to express their femininity. Brill adopts the term "hyperfeminine" to describe them.

Could this mean that women could feel threatened by men wearing skirts. Is there a certain power associated with skirts that women would prefer to keep for themselves and as a result consciously or subconsciously discourage men from wearing them?