Yes, I think your experience is common for a lot of men of roughly our social situation. Men have somewhat more leeway to go topless in more situations than women, but that doesn't actually men mean have fewer restrictions overall. Narrower bands of what's an acceptable level of formal for a given occasion, fewer options within a given level of formal. And clothes which draw attention in any way, either being elaborate or unusually tight or revealing, definitely risk masculinity policing. That feels not completely unrelated to complaining about women being too "sexual" or too "modest", but I think stereotypically the masculinity policing is somewhere between an unspoken social norm or taboo and something that's enforced with violence, and whereas women's modesty policing is the subject of endless essays all over the media. And I think men generally don't get as much directly connecting modesty to morality, not from the religious direction at least.
Miscellaneous. Eclectic. Random. Perhaps markedly literate, or at least suffering from the compulsion to read any text that presents itself, including cereal boxes.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-12 11:39 am (UTC)