Summer Suitings: If You Don’t Command Respect, You Won’t Be Respected, Part Deux

My thanks to mewmewfoucault (MMF) for dialoging yesterday. I crystalized my thinking last night and realized my responses to MMF’s comments were circuitous at best. (All quotes unless otherwise noted are culled from MMF’s comments.”)

MMF’s main criticism of my previous post is that it suggests that I advocate disrespecting people because of what they wear. This is not at all what I mean nor do I think that sentiment is contained in the quote. Disrespecting people for any reason is not cool. Regardless of a person’s dress, political or religious beliefs, I advocate cordiality and concern at all times. I fail more often than I succeed at doing this, but I aspire to do it all the time. I believe the quote says this, if you want to command respect without ever communicating with people, how you dress is probably a good starting point. The quote reads, “If you don’t command respect….” Command used in this sense is not a verb that in any way suggests mistreating another human being. So I believe the quote says this, if you want to command respect without ever communicating with people, how dress is probably a good starting point, specifically by finding more age-appropriate casual wear.

Implied by MMF is a belief that this focusing on clothing is somehow superficial (“strong people who accept or enjoy looking trashy because they don’t have the desire or the ability to invest time and energy into convincing white and middle-class people to like them via their clothes, and because they see that as borrowed and contingent respect at best.”). First, like is not about respect. I hope we all know this. Second dress is about aesthetics. To quote Jesse Thorn from Put This On:

First of all, presuming that aesthetics are only “superficial” is a horrible mistake. Our sense of aesthetics is one of the things that makes us human. I appreciate the beauty that people create in the world every day. It’s one of my greatest joys. I would never dream of suggesting that aesthetic choices are superficial, whether they be in the form of art, architecture, design, clothing or even language. Beauty is important.

Besides aesthestics, Jesse continues, clothing is about self-representation:

Secondly, clothing has much more content than just aesthetics. Clothing is a way we represent ourselves to others. This self-representation couldn’t be more significant. When you dress, you are making a statement; not a fashion statement, but a statement of identity. If you put on a jacket and tie, for example, you are signifying to others that you take the occasion seriously, whatever that occasion may be. If someone looks at you and interprets how you dress, they are not being superficial. They are reading the message that you wrote. If that message says, “I am to be respected,” then they will respect you. (emphasis mine.)

MMF, like several of Jesse’s detractors, believes that I am superficial because I am incapable of seeing past someone’s clothes. Writes Jesse:

The mistake Jason seems to be making is to assume that someone who would read the language of clothing would “stop at the clothes on [his] back.” That’s, of course, absurd. It’s like saying that no one should pursue literature because if they learned to write, they’d only impress people who didn’t pay attention to anything besides silly words on a page.

I would also argue that clothing, besides being aesthetic and a powerful form of self-expression, is also political. American women were not, until recently, allowed to wear pants at work. Canada and France have controlled the covering some Muslim women adopt. Until the end of slavery, there were many laws on the books that limited to rags what slaves could wear.

During slavery there were laws on the books in many areas that prohibited or limited the dressing of the enslaved. During the initial days of the emancipation celebrations, there are accounts of former slaves tossing their ragged garments into the creeks and rivers to adorn clothing taken from the plantations belonging to their former ‘masters’.

Men, of course, face physical punishment and loss of employment if they attempt to wear dresses or skirts in public at any other time besides Halloween.

The language of clothing is complex, writes Jesse, as complex as the spoken and signed word. Slave masters understood the psychological dehumanization that occurred by forcing humans to dress in ragged garments. It’s one thing to have this done to you, but why do it to yourself? But, regardless, respect should be given regardless and respect can be earned in other ways. Yet a person concedes much by believing that clothes are superficial.

Can one earn respect in other ways? Certainly, and one should. But that’s no reason to open a conversation with someone by saying, without words, “this is not important to me.”

In closing, I want to paraphrase Jesse. We have many ways to communicate beauty and our concern for our personal well-being. Some are better at expressing some, others are better at expressing others. If you want to pursue one avenue to the exclusion of all others, that is your right. But do not say that I am silly for nor dismiss my argument using the ad hominum attack that I a white middle class dude (“you as a middle class white dude decide you know just what’s going on”) for pursing those that are most important to me.

The Summer Suitings: If You Don’t Command Respect, You Won’t Be Respected, Part Deux by Jay Sennett, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.