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Adventures in clothing, gender & mobility
May. 12th, 2011 01:02 pmToday I cycled TO TOWN. And back again! (We live in town, by the way, so "to town" means about 800-ish meters). This was a complex operation which, I have to admit, took a lot of time, because it basically consisted of me cycling a little way, finding a bench, and lying down on it for 5-10 mins, then repeating the process.
But I am ridiculously proud of having not only made it there and back again without breaking myself but ALSO having accomplished my actual goal there, which was to Buy A Pair Of Shorts. I even got a plain t-shirt while i was at it, to replace one of the ones that decided to spontaneously become more hole than t-shirt over the winter (cheap clothes do this distressingly fast, don't they).
Anyway, I bought shorts. I am not a great wearer of shorts, but having adjusted to the really low temperatures which we have here for most of the year, the modestly raised temperatures (OK, OK, 18+ degrees, I am also just a wimp about heat) we get for a few months in summer are distressing, so something has to be done. I have tried on many shorts! All different sorts! Styles! Lengths!
And it turns out that if I want to buy shorts, I need to buy man's shorts, because I am - wait for it - too curvy for women's shorts.
But men's are fine.
Sometimes the world astonishes me.
But yeah, this is basically because women's shorts are apparently designed to be:
- dainty
- very small
- for people with legs at least a third smaller than mine. at LEAST! any pair of lady-shorts that will sit comfortably on my legs will fall off because the waist will be twice the size of my actual waist.
To add to this, I have complicated and entirely queer feelings about gender, and specifically, about my gender, and I haven't figured out what works for me in terms of more casual clothes (if I'm going formal I wear a man's suit/suit with a fairly masculine cut, generally). After going through a stack of the most gender-neutral-looking women's shorts I could find, I was pretty fed up. But I thought, I have come all this way. It was a performance. I guess I'll try some men's shorts and then we can all have a laugh at the way my arse gets in the way of them doing anything good at all, possibly up to and including closing.
Because this is basically what I've assumed will happen with men's shorts, and trousers generally.
But the thing is: it turns out men's shorts are designed to be big. Like, baggy. So my thighs, hips and arse will all comfortably fit into a size 32 pair of men's shorts, largely because they actually have room left for the wearer to be able to move, which is apparently not a consideration for people with boobs. For some reason the waist-band is also fine, which is a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm not complaining.
So that was my adventure for the day! The next step is finding shoes that I can live with for the summer & that I can also afford.
But I am ridiculously proud of having not only made it there and back again without breaking myself but ALSO having accomplished my actual goal there, which was to Buy A Pair Of Shorts. I even got a plain t-shirt while i was at it, to replace one of the ones that decided to spontaneously become more hole than t-shirt over the winter (cheap clothes do this distressingly fast, don't they).
Anyway, I bought shorts. I am not a great wearer of shorts, but having adjusted to the really low temperatures which we have here for most of the year, the modestly raised temperatures (OK, OK, 18+ degrees, I am also just a wimp about heat) we get for a few months in summer are distressing, so something has to be done. I have tried on many shorts! All different sorts! Styles! Lengths!
And it turns out that if I want to buy shorts, I need to buy man's shorts, because I am - wait for it - too curvy for women's shorts.
But men's are fine.
Sometimes the world astonishes me.
But yeah, this is basically because women's shorts are apparently designed to be:
- dainty
- very small
- for people with legs at least a third smaller than mine. at LEAST! any pair of lady-shorts that will sit comfortably on my legs will fall off because the waist will be twice the size of my actual waist.
To add to this, I have complicated and entirely queer feelings about gender, and specifically, about my gender, and I haven't figured out what works for me in terms of more casual clothes (if I'm going formal I wear a man's suit/suit with a fairly masculine cut, generally). After going through a stack of the most gender-neutral-looking women's shorts I could find, I was pretty fed up. But I thought, I have come all this way. It was a performance. I guess I'll try some men's shorts and then we can all have a laugh at the way my arse gets in the way of them doing anything good at all, possibly up to and including closing.
Because this is basically what I've assumed will happen with men's shorts, and trousers generally.
But the thing is: it turns out men's shorts are designed to be big. Like, baggy. So my thighs, hips and arse will all comfortably fit into a size 32 pair of men's shorts, largely because they actually have room left for the wearer to be able to move, which is apparently not a consideration for people with boobs. For some reason the waist-band is also fine, which is a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm not complaining.
So that was my adventure for the day! The next step is finding shoes that I can live with for the summer & that I can also afford.
