[ExI] Why are women's clothing so much more flamboyant than men's?

[spike at rainier66.com]

On Behalf Of Brent Allsop via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Why are women's clothing so much more flamboyant than men's?

 

 

>…Very good question.

Any chance we might be able to change this?  Could someone break the mold and release the flood of men's fashion change?

Or do we all not want to change?

 

 

Brent I have a fun story for ya.  At the start of my engineering career, a colleague was telling me of his childhood on the Maine coast not far from the Canadian border.  There were few jobs, so many of the locals subsisted on hauling their food from the sea, fishing and crabbing.  Those with means had a boat they could take out from shore and haul in more fish and lobstuh.  The lobstuh were worth good money, so the boatmen had cash.  The shoremen had no boat and no money, so they caught crabs in their traps and mullet for food.

 

The boatmen had wool pants, which were far more ideal than the cotton dungarees the shoremen wore: more protection from the elements, good insulators even when wet, etc.  But the wool pants were expensive, 14 dollars!  The shoremen had to content themselves with the 4 dollar cotton pants.

 

One day the shoremen noticed a man walking by they didn’t recognize, which happened often even in that remote area so it would have escaped notice, but something really odd: this shoreman had his fishing pole and crab trap just like the others, but… wool trousers!  Only boatmen generally had those.  Strange indeed.  They mentioned it to the sheriff, who went and talked to the man on a hunch.  Sheriff found him in possession of a radio transmitter.  Wool-trousers shoreman was a Nazi spy, scouting out possible invasion sites.  He had almost every detail right, down to the local accent and sports results, but missed that wool pants detail.  A week later, a second shoreman was spotted wearing wool.  Got him too.  The Nazis never invaded.

 

The story rattled around in my brain for years.  I always wanted wool pants but assumed they were too expensive.  Recently I realized my budget wouldn’t be too strained by a 200 dollar pair of pants, so I went online looking for them and discovered an Army surplus site.  Army trousers came in four sizes, but one is small-long, so I ordered a pair.  For 17 bucks I could risk it.  

 

I could make them fit around the waist by adjusting them all the way down, but they were still too long, so I looked online at all the things one does to prevent wool from shrinking, and reversed every advice.  I shrunk them enough to make them fit without modification.  I discovered that I, with my oddball shape, am one of four standard men’s sizes.

 

I ended up buying a dozen pairs of the 17 dollar wool trousers, and shrunk them all to fit.  Now I am so GI Joe, and it didn’t even cost me much.  They feel great, look good, dated for sure, but hey, so am I.  Being a senior citizen has some advantages: freedom.  Nooooobody cares how you dress.  So you get to be comfortable.  Clarification, if anyone does care how I dress, I am not in that group of those concerned.  I do like comfort however, and my bride says the army trousers look good, with the regulation crease.

 

Fun aside: these pants are 100% wool and were manufactured in 1951, some in 1952.  Yet they still have that wool smell after all this time.  They couldn’t be offgassing much, or they would have sublimed to nothing by now, nearly 70 years down the road.  This tells me that the nose must be able to detect substances in astonishingly small quantities, and a dog’s nose far more capable.

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20191215/5b62c19b/attachment.htm>