There has been an abundance of commentary of late which contains various lamentations about how boring menswear is. I've even seen a comment or two talk about how if more guys "tried" to integrate women's clothing into their wardrobe that somehow our numbers would swell.
Yeah, right.
Thing is, guys are generally perfectly content being the guys they are. 99.whatever% of men don't get up in the morning and find themselves bummed out by the fact the cannot wear a dress. In fact, many men look upon the female rituals of dress, hair & makeup as being utterly bewildering.
Visualize any man in the public eye and try to put him in women's clothing in your mind's eye. Aside from the fact he'd more than likely find the thought appalling, chances are he'd look rather unusual as well, perhaps even silly, when compared with how dapper and handsome he is when presenting as the male that he is.
I've commented before on a NHL coach, Guy Boucher of the Tampa Bay Lightning. His picture has been prominent on the SI NHL page due to an article about him being on the hot seat which kind of fed into my current thoughts on this posting. I believe it was at the draft a couple years back when I saw him with his entourage (including Steve Yzerman) and noticed not only how handsome of a man he was but also that it was absolutely impossible for me to get my head around him or anyone else in his group being anything but satisfied with his wardrobe choices that make him look the man that he is. Same holds true for the Oscar's this past weekend. The men pretty much looked amazing in their tuxedos. That was no senior prom where most of the kids rent their tuxes at the same shop and look identical. Instead, each one had designer nuances that you know these stars, these men, picked out with attention to detail to look the best they could (or at least their stylists did so). Did they lament the efforts their female counterparts go through? I seriously doubt it aside from that very small percentage who MIGHT have a transgender streak in their being.
Many men are content with lazy casual such as jeans and a t-shirt. Some women can be just the same. But generally, the choices men have from casual to business dress to formal wear has enough variety and color to keep 99.whatever% of men out there perfectly happy with their choices. Put a man in a skirt on a fashion show runway and it's going nowhere unless the man on Main Street embraces it and that ain't likely to happen any time soon. It's no conspiracy. It's just the evolution of fashion on both sides of the gender fence which is based on a binary where men are men and women are women. Some lines get blurred but rarely are they crossed in the mainstream. And women tend to find their men attractive when they look like men. Imagine that???
Think about what brings us to these pages in the first place. It's about who we are, what we do or a combination of the two. Think about how you started this whole thing. A child of five years in his mom's closet isn't likely thinking forward about how his fashion choices will be severely limited if he doesn't get into this CD'ing thing. Just the same, the average guy can't get his head around why we are who we are or why we do what we do. Stop trying to recruit him to the cause. Let him be happy being the man he is, something he really gives no second thought to.