Quote from: Annabella on August 18, 2014, 12:31:31 PM
What White Rabbit said.
That being said:
The history of feminine aesthetics is closely related to the idea of fertility. You will find that incredibly often you are going to see imagery in fashion that is, if not explicitly, implicitly tied to sexual contact. That is after all usually the underlying theme of fashion, especially among teenagers (both male and female) eg: "we're young, let's have sex". It just so happens that in the dominant culture, which is heterosexual, the way that you have sex is by one person penetrating the other, and it's the male penetrating the female, so we end up with all of this iconography in female clothing which presents the female as a walking vagina, and the male as a walking dick. 
The problem is when we mistake that iconography for consent or invitation. It is perfectly acceptable for a woman to wear clothing which is symbolically linked to sex without the expectation that she therefore is telling every man that she wishes to be immediately penetrated. This is the kind of bull->-bleeped-<- thinking that leads to women in the middle east not being able to show any portion of their skin in public because it might make men want to have sex with them.
There is something to be said for time and place, for example I don't think it makes sense from a utilitarian perspective to wear sexy lingerie to the office, but even showing up naked would not justify being raped.
Another note, which I should include, some feminists avoid wearing skirts because historically at one point in time the skirt was developed to make it as easy as possible for a male to casually have sex with his woman which was seen at the time as his property. I can understand this, but I disagree with those of them who think that a historical use of a garment tarnishes all future uses of that garment.
Excellent points here. I would add that the other side of this is to consider the history of imagery of cis males in unbifurcated garments and how this imagery has been used and modified over time in a variety of media. There are numerous examples of such garments, worn for the most part and at times wholly exclusively by males, that not simply do not imply a desire for "penetration" but that are meant to affirm stereotypical ideas about men who penetrate (rather than the opposite), and about masculinity in general. Kilts and unbifurcated Japanese hakama are hardly garments meant to imply "femininity" in the wearers thereof; the bifurcated hakama is, according to one line of reasoning, made to resemble an unbifurcated garment so as to aid in confusing an opponent's eyes during a battle. Common contemporary justifications for men wearing modern kilts, like the Utilikilt, are that such garments are not only more comfortable to wear for male-bodied individuals if said individuals wear them without underwear (which is generally true) but that going commando aids in (to paraphrase many a review of these kilts) both getting women and having sex with them without undressing. Such garments, then, become associated with stereotypical masculine attributes, like war and sexual prowess, rather than being associated with the man in question inviting penetration, which would--to re-engage with stereotypes--negate or diminish those masculine attributes.
And, of course, there is the long list of garments that men have worn in a plethora of cultures and times that are indistinguishable from skirts--pareos, lungis, sarongs, etc. Even robes are simply a form of dress, or vice versa.
But, at the same time, these garments, to be associated with "masculinity," are almost always referred to by names other than "skirts" (and never, to my knowledge, as dresses, when long skirted garments appear, like the Saudi thobe). The word "skirt" does occasionally appear connected specifically to men, as in the Christian bible, but this seems to be far from the norm after a certain point in history. And perhaps this is the point: the very word "skirt" impies a "femininity" that stereotypical men seem to find undesirable at best and repulsive at worst, to the extent that garments that are unquestionably forms of skirts cannot be referred to as such. Beyond this, there is the common depiction in western media of evil characters wearing skirted garments (like, to use the example of a children's film, Jafar in Disney's Aladdin) while the other characters do not; these characters, who often embrace other negative and absurd stereotypes of femininity (sneakiness, deceptiveness, etc.), seem to be associated with evil in part because they are closer to these negative stereotypes of women. Their skirted garment reinforces their evil. This is not always the case, but there are certainly many examples where something like this operates, perhaps subconsciously reinforcing in viewers these negative stereotypes.
Beyond all this, no attack or thought should be justifiable on someone based on what they are wearing. Moreover, to think a man (more accurately, someone gendered as male) wearing a skirt wants to be penetrated simply reinforces, aside from all else, the negative notions that cross-dressers are gay (which is statistically untrue, but this notion persists) and that cross-dressing should be sexualised or associated with sexuality. The mere fact that these stereotypes may exist is no reason to perpetuate them. My Romani friend often reminds me how many people still think the Roma people, the gypsies, are all thieves and child-kidnappers, which is false; the mere existence of this stereotype does not imply its rightness or that it should be perpetuated.
