Please Put on Some Pants

Events have transpired this week to make me feel old, and not in a cool way. In a curmudgeon way. Such events include:

1. A worrying pain in both my knees. I do have one torn ACL, so that makes sense, but I think climbing into and hopping out of buses is doing them no favors. They also have been aching in the mornings when it is cold. This makes me feel approx. 105 years old.

2. This morning I was buying wine (amongst other things) at the grocery store, and the cashier kept staring at my ID and staring at me. I smiled in a sort of disarming way, and she handed it back, saying suspiciously, "well, I guess that's you. It looks enough like you. I also had trouble finding your birthdate on there." Now, the confusing nature of NY licenses is not really my fault, and if I were to use a fake ID, it would NOT be with the picture that is on my license. I look better now than I did at age 16, I feel pretty confident in saying. So maybe not looking like my license is actually complimentary? Either way, my 16 year old self seems to be mocking me, with her blondeness and youth and slightly surly mug-shot expression.

3. The way that underclassmen seem to look younger and younger every year. My senior year in undergrad, I thought the incoming first-year class looked like they were 15. It's even worse now.

This final point is the main crux of my curmudgeon tendencies of late, in that I've been seeing a lot of female students wearing leggings in place of pants, and my immediate mental reaction is something along the lines of, "please put on some pants. Do you want people to respect your mind or your body? What would Gloria Steinem say about this nonsense?!" I'm about two horrifying mental steps away from, "listen honey, he won't buy the cow when he can get the milk for free. Cover it up."

I think I make a distinction between women who wear revealing clothing because it makes them feel nice and confident (rock on!) and women who wear revealing clothing to attract the opposite (or same) sex. Which concerns me. But a part of feminism is that women should be able to wear whatever they want, without having to justify their actions to a predominantly male gaze. One of my favorite sections of The Vagina Monologues is called "My Short Skirt," and it ends defiantly and wonderfully with: "But mainly, my short skirt--and everything under it--are mine. Mine. Mine." We deserve to be respected, demand to be respected, no matter what we wear. But that's not the reality, is it?

I am worried for these girls (and I do mean girls). We were coming home late last Saturday night and drove by a student, walking alone, tottery in high heels, shivering, and wearing a very tiny dress. My friend who was driving slowed down a bit and we did a quick check of her as we went by. "Do you think she'll get home ok?" "I don't think she's drunk, she seems to be walking pretty straight." "Her friends must have left her at a party." "I wonder where her dorm is." "There are enough lights here that she should be ok, right?" We weren't fussing about her outfit, but about her safety. And that is a much, much bigger problem for more than just one girl, alone on a Saturday night.

At least I've got company in my mothering/judging tendencies. My close friends all joke about how we're like prematurely old ladies (the knitting, the wine, the love of Murder She Wrote, the early bedtimes, etc), but my new friends here are on much the same wavelength. A few weeks ago I was asking one about the home football game she had gone to, and she said, "it was really fun! Oh, except, oh..this is mortifying. There was this idiot drunken frat boy behind me, and he kept swearing, and finally I turned around and said, 'Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?!' And then realized I sounded exactly like MY mother, AND he was 5 years younger than me, and he looked at me like I was from another planet."

The summer after my first year of college I was working in the Children's Room of the public library in my home town, and a boy came up to me--he was probably about 9 years old--and said, "you look like my friend's mom! Are you his mom?" Since I was 19 at the time I was suitably horrified by this, and proceeded to wail about it on my break. One of the reference librarians told me that she was doing a tour once for a first grade class, and they kept telling her that their teacher, "Old Lady Rizzo," would be coming in soon. When she arrived, "Old Lady Rizzo" turned out to be in her early 20s, the point of this story being that to a 9 year old, anyone older than 18 looks like someones parent. And that I should just embrace it.

And the point of this post is that I might not agree or approve of what you are wearing and the message it gives off, but I will always defend your right to wear it, and to be proud of yourself. Even if you make me feel old. And maybe that doesn't make me quite so curmudgeonly, after all.