Why I Do Not Wear Yoga Pants

I realize that this is a rather personal matter, but we all know that it is essential to the wellbeing of the entire world that each and every one of us expounds in detail on the contents of our closets and the why and wherefore. I just want to say that this is only my personal conviction and I wouldn't dream of it imposing it on anyone else. Nonetheless, it's important to tell it to everybody. Because.

So, to understand this story, you must first understand that I grew up in a very old and rather drafty farmhouse, with no heat on the upper two stories. It was cold in the winter. Very cold. Our beds generally had a number of wool blankets under the quilts, and our standard pajamas for the winter once we outgrew the zippered footie kind were thick sweatsuits. We never quite woke up to sifted snow on the quilts--the walls were snowtight and also we had a depressing lack of blizzards--but it was a similar idea.

Back in those long-ago days, people generally labored under the notion that there was one kind of clothes for bed, and another for daytime wear. When we rose in the morning we changed in our frigid rooms into our long johns and jeans and sweaters for daytime wear. Especially--and this is what seems especially strange nowadays--one would never, ever appear in public or greet visitors in night clothes. It had nothing to do with decency, as evidenced by the fact that our nighttime and daytime clothes were equally bulky. It simply Wasn't Done.

Well.

About the age of 10, I noticed that some people wore sweatsuits as daytime wear, both for their intended athletic purpose and sometimes for other occasions. Especially sweatsuits with decorative tops. One of my acquaintances, a girl about my age, wore them on every occasion. Admittedly she wasn't a fashion leader, but still, it was plainly something that was Done.

And I had a few sweatsuits with decorative tops, bought by my great aunt who did such things, no doubt, and not by His Majesty who always found the 75% off sales of the mix-and-match sport solids.

So after much deliberation and in the spirit of experimentation that has fallen upon me with mixed results throughout my life, I decided to try wearing one of these decorative sweatsuits to an evening church event.

About five minutes after arrival, I realized my mistake. I was wearing pajamas in public. It was exactly like one of those nightmares where one discovers one's self to be wearing pajamas in public (I suppose nobody has those sort of nightmares anymore, but they were common back then. Perhaps people still have nightmares about being naked in public, though, and they are roughly similar only slightly less exciting.) Only it wasn't a nightmare, it was real, I had done it to myself, and there were two hours and twenty-five minutes of church event to go.

Somehow that evening ended and I returned home and never, ever wore sweat pants out in public again.

What I later discovered, however, was that the deep psychic scar I had impressed upon myself did not limit itself to sweat pants. I could not wear *any* cotton knit on my lower extremities. Even perfectly legitimate knit skirts and dresses, which were clearly not sweat pants, after a short time would betray me and I would be left with that uneasy and inadequate feeling of appearing in public in a nightie.

I finally swore off knits on the lower half altogether. And so, when everybody else got yoga pants and debated where they should and shouldn't be worn, I didn't. (Except for one pair, which I use for doing exercises and occasionally curling up on the couch with a book and such pajama-suitable activities.)

I suppose I could get counseling for this and try to undo the damage and free myself to wear yoga pants, but at this point it's easier to just keep wearing jeans.

Thanksgiving Week

I have made it past my low number of posts from last year, and then I seem to have stopped.  I feel like my mind is too full. Two major things, one of which I would rather not talk much about, and the other of which I can't talk about just yet. (The first one is remodeling my grandparents' house in hopes of making it more marketable. Spending evenings and weekends steaming wallpaper in order to desecrate a childhood shrine is not a pleasant task.) The other thing is good but a little scary and should be ripe for revelation before the end of the year.

One other major accomplishment of this month was hosting my first large-scale Thanksgiving. It started smallish and grew to 16, but we managed tables for everyone and I only slightly overcooked the turkey. In anticipation of the meal, I had made up a bunch of post-it notes stuck all over the windows of things that needed done.

I figured I should get my grocery shopping out of the way early, as grocery stores would be crowded on Wednesday. (They were pretty crowded on Monday, actually.) But I figured we could easily get it done in the morning and be done by lunch. We stopped at Store A first and on our way out some people in the checkout line bought the kids a box of sandwich cookies. I wasn't too thrilled, but the kids were and I figured I would give them some in case we were a little late for lunch.

Then we finished up at the second store and were heading out to the car when Dash, running full-tilt through the damp parking lot, slipped and landed on his forehead. I rushed him back in to the bathroom where a very kind lady volunteered to bandage him, even though there was blood everywhere and the store people took awhile to find gloves. Dash tends to be very vocal about pain, let's put it that way. Or possible pain. Anyway, when I finally got him back out to the parking lot I discovered the other kids had unloaded all the groceries and were waiting for us in the car.

It was definitely into stitch-worthy territory, so we headed straight to Urgent Care. It turned out to be kind of crowded, and there were no interesting magazines and I hadn't brought anything along, but we survived on sandwich cookies and memory games. Later people asked me why I hadn't called to have someone else get the rest of the kids, but I kept thinking that it would only be a few more minutes, and continued to think so for all of four hours. It was only three stitches, but it was plenty of drama for all that. Dash is hoping for a Harry Potter-style scar, but I doubt it was quite enough to be lightning-shaped.

That would have put a crimp in Thanksgiving preparations, but I ditched wallpaper steaming instead.

Also I had a birthday on Wednesday and DOB got me a haircut and a new outfit (including a pair of jeans that I think qualifies as non-mom jeans, not that I approve of that terminology because why should it be a fashion offense to have children?) and we hung out at the mall on the day before Thanksgiving, which was curiously quiet and pleasant. My birthday is a boring square number this year, but next year it's my all-time favorite prime number. (BTW, given that I am an adult human under 100, that's enough information to figure out my actual age.)

Closet Philosophy

Most trends operate by reaction, and the common reaction among those who have lived too far down the impossible rabbit hole of "Women must dress in a way that prevents men from lusting," tends to be, "Women should wear whatever they $&*# well please." Which is an understandable feeling, but clearly a reactionary one and therefore limited in scope by its own reaction.

What I would like to do is set that whole sloppy mess aside, and start off in a different direction. I shall not attempt to address any theological questions; I am not a theologian. But anyone with  a place to sit and a space to stare off into can philosophize.

So the question I would like to ask is, "What role does clothing play in the expression of our sexuality?" (There are, of course, plenty of other reasons for clothing, such as sunblock and tick protection and frostbite avoidance, but those are far less philosophically interesting--although the fact that our hides are such tender things that we need clothing for such uses is itself suggestive.) And, more specifically, "What and how should children and young people be taught on such matters?"

First, one can note that in any culture or setting where clothing is worn at all, there is universal agreement on what areas are top priority for coverage. (At least as far as I've heard of, and though not an anthropologist, I was a pretty diligent student of back issues of National Geographic as a child.) There's not a culture where kneecaps or necks are strictly taboo but reproductive organs are appropriate for public display. What extra areas come in for mandatory coverage is, of course, widely variant, but the basics always come down to the same.

Why? I suspect is that this is a way we demonstrate our humanity by distinguishing ourselves from animals. Truth be told, the mechanics of mating and birthing are pretty similar for humans and for other mammals. Which is exactly why we, as humans, must undertake them in distinctly unmechanical ways, surrounding them with ceremony and even secrecy.

It is analogous to the way we handle eating . . . we could simply grab and stuff whatever semi-edible substance was lying around, but doing so is considered an act of desperation, not humanity. We surround our eating with ceremony, we prepare our food. There is a huge variety in what ceremony and in how we prepare, but a great universality in our need to make a simple, animal act into a production.

And it is the same way with our reproductive capacity. Various efforts have been made to approach such matters in a simple, natural manner--and they inevitably fail to gain any sort of traction. Nothing is so unnatural to humans as acting natural. Try as we might, we must have ceremony, and if we do not pursue beautiful ceremonies, we will have ugly ones.

What we want and choose to wear is, in many obvious and not-so-obvious ways, influenced by our culture. At the same time, culture is us. It comes from many things, all interacting and playing off each other: universal elements of human nature, practical matters of our geographic location, history and experience, and individual choices. A huge variety of the panoply of human cultural choices are morally neutral: simply part of the beautiful diversity of human experience.

But the fact that many variations are morally neutral does not mean they all are. (Was foot-binding a practice without moral significance?) And the difficulty in drawing a bright-line test does not mean that there is no better or worse to be found. Beautiful music is hard to define, and impossible to fully quantify, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that there is no distinction between fingernails on a chalkboard and the Moonlight Sonata. (Or, for that matter, a simple folk tune sung without accompaniment--I am not arguing for elitism here, in music or clothing.)

To move from this to the practical level, I am willing to bravely stand with most of humanity and endorse the cultural convention of covering reproductive organs in public. It's a good rule. It acknowledges that we are not just animals, that we need ceremony and privacy. It applies with equal force to everyone out of infancy, regardless of age and gender. It is about dignity, not shame.

On a matter more specific to cultural trends, I think it's a reasonable extension, which I will impose upon my children, that one should attempt to prevent one's underwear from being visible in public. (While acknowledging that accidents happen, especially when one lacks hips.) Occasionally it becomes fashionable to ignore this convention, but, honestly, I think it's a bad fashion. Defiance for the sake of defiance, usually, or simple carelessness. The tricky thing is that some clothes may be quite adequate for this task for some movements and not for others. But there's nothing inherently shameful about pointing this out, nor even gender-specific: men in kilts should be careful how they bend over. Anyway, squatting is better for your back.

After that, things get fuzzier. Yet I don't think that means that every ideal must be thrown to the wind. We are getting into areas of art, not science or law. But art can still be informed by what is good. It seems worthwhile to suggest that scraping the bare minimum of propriety is seldom a beautiful act. There is both a beauty in subtlety and a wisdom in realizing that one cannot have the fun of breaking taboos forever. Pleasures are to be savored, and overindulgence in anything leads to boredom even if nothing worse.

Especially for the young, dressing is often part of the worthy and important task of attracting a mate. As a human pursuit, this needs ceremony and discretion, without attempting to entirely deny the bald physical reality.

While the often-repeated claim of modesty culture that "men are more visual" may be groundless, it is a scientific fact that the reproductive capacity of women is advertised in a very visual way: there is, for instance, a high correlation between hip/waist ratio and fertility. For this reason, women's clothing choices inevitably have a more direct sexual connotation than men's clothing. (Women may admire a nice set of pects, but they are not sending us any subtle messages about sperm count. We have other means of detecting a good mate, such as smell.)

Dressing to express one's sexuality while maintaining the decorum and subtlety that acknowledges that human mating is about much more than physical desire is, again, an art, not a science. But it is an important art, and one that should be taught, not simply left to the experiments of fourteen year olds in the first flush of newly discovered hormones. (Like most arts, it is best learned from its practitioners, i.e., more experienced women, not its audience.)

So you will notice I am not going to make any further judgment calls about which specific fashions are appropriate or inappropriate. For one thing, I don't need to make that for the world at large (though I retain the right to make it for children who are clothed with my money). There is a great deal of variation possible and I am not the fashion police. But the lack of hard and fast rules does not have to mean the lack of ideals. Aesthetics may vary in application, but deliberately denying the human need for beauty, for privacy, for ceremony is inhumane and, for that reason, immoral.

In Which I Venture Into Matters Of Which I Know Very Little

Diary of an Autodidact is doing a series on Modesty Culture that is well thought-through and quite interesting. I have some thoughts on it and I'm probably going to do two posts, one on some additional factors and one an essay (in the original sense, writing as an adventure to uncover my own thoughts) on a philosophy of dressing to share with my children.

Personally, although I grew up in the veriest hotbed of modesty culture, I never internalized it in the way that seems to have affected many other women who did. I never felt ashamed of my body. Maybe this is because my parents were sane and didn't make a big deal of it. We certainly dressed very conservatively, but it was just what we did. Maybe it was because I just never got that kind of attention, for good or ill, in any setting. I don't know whether it was my complete lack of physical grace or my overpowering nerdiness, but I always felt, with much regret, that the only way I could prove a stumbling block to men was to leave my feet in the aisle.

I knew perfectly well it wasn't my dimensions, which fit nicely into the ideal (back in the days before twins), but still, there it was. I did not think I would ever even get anyone to notice that I was female at all. (True, I did manage to catch a man eventually, but it was by years of political debate online and personal attraction was entirely an afterthought.) So although I probably should feel more incensed and more empathy with those who were shamed for matters beyond their control, my ability to actually feel such empathy is, alas, held back by the envy of one to whom feminine allure has always been a hopelessly closed book.

I have, therefore, instead of personal experience, more abstract thoughts on factors that may have affected the popularity of modesty teachings among people with more noble (or at least, not creepy) intentions.

One is the fashion arc from the 80s through the present day. I'm no fashion expert myself, but Duchess checks out books on historical fashions by the dozens and leaves them lying around, and when books are lying around, I read them. One book had an appendix summarizing the changing predominate silhouette in women's fashions as the defining feature of each decade. Since the beginning of this century, the predominate silhouette has been form-fitting from head to toe. This is a fairly unusual look: usually the silhouette is pinched in somewhere, but loose elsewhere. But in more recent fashions, it's been figure-hugging everywhere. (This is finally starting to let up a bit as maxi dresses come in. The one constant about fashions is that they change.)

Now, this interplays with ideas of modesty in several ways. For one thing, it was a huge shift (taking place gradually through the 90s) from the bouffant 80s look. For fun, check out an 80s movie or TV show. Odds are, the leading lady, no matter how young and alluring she is meant to be, will be wearing a high-necked, baggy top for pretty much the entire time. It's just what people wore. Even if she wears a low-cut evening gown (and even evening gowns might be turtlenecks), it will be cut and worn in such a way that cleavage is minimized. (Quite different both from modern eras and from many earlier ones.)

What this means, is that the middle-aged enforcers of values during the 90s and 00s were naturally going to have their mental fashion senses already set to a very different, less body-conforming style. The shift to a slimmer profile, drawing more attention to the actual shape of the body, was that much greater of a shock--and, if one was dubious about the propriety of drawing too much attention to the body in the first place, all the more likely to lead to the conclusion that modern fashions were downright sinful.

Of course, the corollary is that the fashions of the immediately preceding era are the ultimate in frumpiness in the current era. It's the natural tension between old and new ratcheted up and given a moral dimension because of the direction fashion happened to shift just then.

Further, the streamlined silhouette is extremely hard to wear successfully. There's no hiding the less than perfect figure, and especially the no longer young figure. So that gives an extra oomph to the Snow White syndrome. Not only are young people's clothes scandalous, they very pointedly and painfully showcase the shortcomings of the old.

Finally, although there have been a few prior eras of a trim silhouette, I think this is the first time it's been attempted through completely ready-made clothing. A gentleman of the early 19th century wore a very form-fitting outfit. And he had it specially made by a skillful tailor to actually fit him. (Someone who was not a gentleman and therefore couldn't afford a tailor didn't try to wear fashionably form-fitting clothes.) But very few use tailors any more, or are capable of sewing for themselves at that level.

Instead, women are all trying to wear off-the-rack clothes that fit perfectly all over. This, of course, is nearly impossible. Except for the lucky few who find a brand whose fit model matches them, and celebrities who can devote their lives to perfect clothes, most women wearing current clothes are stuck wearing snug clothes that don't quite fit. (The agonies I undergo in the area of jeans alone are enough to blight my existence. I cannot find a pair that will stay up but not pinch. I think my hip bones are the wrong shape.) The end result is that it is absurdly difficult to find clothes that fulfill their basic functions of coverage consistently, and many people just give up, resulting in more exposure than people really intend or want. 

The other thing I want to address is the broader cultural milieu, which is just as disturbingly obsessive as modesty culture. Like the number of times I have to refrain from showing my children an interesting article about science because the entire sidebar of certain news pages is filled with "news" articles critiquing how women celebrities look in (or out of) their various outfits. (And it can't be avoided at the grocery store.) Or the way, just when their body has achieved the one great thing that in all the universe only the female human body can do, give life to another human, the instinctive reaction of most women is, "My body is totally ruined." Something is seriously, seriously wrong in the way we think and talk about women's bodies, and it is not just modesty culture.

Ironically, the tabloid culture and the modesty culture are basically the same, even though the popularity of the latter is in many ways a reaction to the former. In both, the point about a woman's body is the effect it has on the (male) observer. Or the female observer for purposes of comparison. Either way, it's there to be looked at, not to do things with. Just goes to show how much attempts to be counter-cultural tend to be highly overrated--the act of reacting is itself defined by what it reacts to.

Presidents and Denim

We've been working on taking President's Day Weekend as a weekend getaway, thanks to Their Majesties (possibly assisted by Walt Disney and Maxwell Smart). We've done it three years running now, which is pretty impressive. It's a better time than our anniversary, which is in early September, a time when whole-family trips to the beach sound like a good idea. In February, cabin fever makes everyone happier with a break from each other.

It's always been President's Day Weekend with us, back to when we were first courting. We don't do that mushy Valentine stuff. We sit around and talk about dead presidents, as we have done from the first. Indeed, I am reminded of a chat early in our acquaintance. I forget how the topic came up, but DOB asserted that he had learned valuable lessons from each and every president.

"Oh, really?" I replied, "So what did you learn from William Henry Harrison?"

"Don't make a speech in the rain without your hat," he replied.

This year we didn't actually go anywhere--we stayed home and bought flooring while it was on sale at Costco. And we went to used bookstores and I found the entire Kristin Lavransdattr trilogy for $6 and a beautiful copy of Robin Hood and many other fun things.

DOB decided he had better stick to his usual exercise schedule, so while he was at the Y on Monday morning I went to Target and decided to spend some time learning how to find jeans that fit. Someone recently posted a link on how not to buy mom jeans, which I read without much enlightenment. Since I wore grandma jeans as a pre-teen (technically my great-aunt's, but I think that counts), just wearing mom jeans is fashion progress for me. Still, I tried a number of different ones on to see if it would enlighten me.

What I have found is jeans in two categories: the ones that seem to fit OK in the dressing room, but are pinching unpleasantly by the end of the day, or the ones that seem to fit OK in the dressing room, but are sliding down awkwardly by the end of the day (and usually finding somewhere to pinch along the way). Trying on a dozen or so did not reveal any that seemed likely to defy this categorization, but I did definitively decide that jeggings are not for me. (Duchess looks quite good in leggings and long tops, but then, she is nine and streamlined and I am neither.)

Anyway, after all that trying I didn't buy anything, but later we went to the thrift store and I found two pairs of jeans that seemed to work pretty well. One of them pinches a bit at the end of the day and the other one slides down a bit at the end of the day, but they will do. They may or may not be mom jeans. I'm still fuzzy on that concept.

The Visitation

DOB's parents have been out for a two-week visit, during which we did lots of fun things like listen to the house be quiet because the children had all gone out to the trailer to see them. We did not go on a last-minute weekend trip to the coast, although we did all the packing and unpacking for it. We did go see Narnia in the woods and it stopped raining just long enough for the show, but the battle was very realistically muddy.

The case I have been working on for the last several months is supposed to go to trial this month (whenever a courtroom opens up), and I'm supposed to get to go along and help with voir dire. This, in turn, proves to be a good excuse for getting some very nice clothes and shopping at an actual department store. DOB was kind enough to do it with me, which was good, because if there's one thing I can't do by myself, it's spending money. Also, he has good taste. I went with dresses, which both looked better and didn't require me to hem. I am too tall for petite and too short for regular, so unless I want to wear four-inch heels (which is never, ever going to happen), I would have to hem all pants. Or just wear them to rags at the heel, which is what I do with jeans.

Also, with extra babysitters on hand and willing to stay very late, we went out for a late night Magic tournament at the local game shop. I astonished myself by coming in third. Bibliohippo came in fifth, and DOB seventh, so we were all prime numbers and pleased with ourselves.

School has been a little less than inspiring, what with all the other fun things going on, but I am determined to get finished before summer drama camp, so we slog on. I am hoping to enliven things a little this week by making comic books about Columbus. Also, it looks like we are going to start probability in math. And perhaps--just perhaps--it will really stop raining.

Elliptical

This whole fitness thing, is, of course, a modern luxury--and necessity. In the olden days, people did not have scales to weigh on or jeans to fit into. Of course, they didn't really need them, since they had to walk twenty miles uphill both ways to get drinking water (which is weird because water flows downhill), or if they were rich, to socialize while their servants fetched it. Still, if you were a rich introvert who lived next to the river, you could just loosen the belt on your tunic a little every year and thank God for your blessings, especially that photography hadn't been invented yet.

My fitness follows its own cycle, like this:

1. I notice that my jeans are not so comfy anymore. I realize I have two options: (a) exercise; (b) go shopping. Nothing is more painful than going shopping, so I decide to exercise.
2. I get up early one morning and do my strength-training workout. I am so together! I am strong and disciplined!
3. I spend the next four days moaning and unable to walk down stairs. I consider the possibility that there are things more painful than going shopping. I straggle through another couple of workouts.
4. The workouts become easier. I do reps between cooking a nutritious breakfast for my children and still am ready to start school on time. Everybody hates me, including me. My jeans start to fit better.
5. A major life crisis occurs, usually involving everyone puking simultaneously, or three out of four parental feet being injured. I drop exercising because I need that time to clean up puke. I eat whatever I can scavenge and I don't sleep well at all.
6. It takes several weeks to recover from the crisis, get the laundry put away, and get back on schedule.

At this point, return to step 1.

It's probably just as well, though, because if I kept going for too long, my jeans might be too big and I would have to go shopping anyway. (Of course, sooner or later clothes wear out, but I try to hide that fact from myself.)

A Dress from a Shirt

DOB had a Very Nice Shirt that turned up with a rip in the sleeve. I couldn't bear to throw the shirt away but a patched sleeve didn't seem quite the thing for work.

So I decided to try transforming it into a dress for D1. I came across various levels of complication in attempting this, and determined to go with the simplest method possible. I used a simple jumper-type top pattern and just flared gently out from there, using the existing yoke and buttons. I sewed some pink bias tape that had been in a bag of freebies around the neck, armholes, and top of the pocket (which I moved down). I cut the bottom straight across and gave it a rolled hem.

I thought about adding an elastic waistband--I had enough bias tape to make a narrow band--but decided it wasn't worth the trouble, especially when I discovered I didn't have any elastic.

It's a little big at the top, but we decided she can wear it as a jumper this year and a sundress next year. I might have to add a ruffle at the bottom for that.

All told it cost however many pennies' worth of thread I used and took about three hours.

Concerning Clothing

The clothing situation was getting desperate, so I betook myself to the thrift store. I am not willing to pay full price for clothes to be worn for two months of lying about the house. But it was getting to the point of buying more clothes or wrapping myself in a sheet for most of the week, and we're short on sheets, too.

Unfortunately, there is a dearth of second-hand maternity clothes above size medium. (And since the tent-like maternity clothes of yesteryear have gone out of style, if your stomach grows beyond medium-sized you are forced into larger sizes whether or not the rest of you has grown apace.)

Why is this? Surely women larger than size medium get pregnant and, eventually, get done being pregnant. What do they do with their clothes? Even at the mothers of twins sales there were only three t-shirts in size large, and two of those were pink. (I think I need counseling on my aversion to pink, it's going beyond a fashion statement to a personal vendetta.)

I did manage to find a couple of pairs of jeans that will still fit, and one cute shirt. Unfortunately, one of the pairs of jeans had--shudder--zippers at the bottoms of the legs. I thought that style had been safely buried in the 80s, but either it is coming back or someone really waited a long time to clean out her closet. Considerations of the style aside, though, what kind of sense is there in making zip-leg jeans for women who can't reach their shoelaces? That pair is destined to become cut-offs.

Everybody likes to moan about the miseries of summer pregnancies, but I have finished all my pregnancies in the warmer months and much prefer it that way. (I'm miserable in hot weather even when I'm not pregnant, so that doesn't make any difference.) I've never needed a maternity coat. I can wear sandals or go barefoot every day. (Barefoot and pregnant is not about male oppression, it's about blood flow. And swelling.) And it's so much easier to keep a newborn healthy and comfy and away from people with evil germs in the summer than in the winter--plus, fewer clothes means less laundry.