The Good Grooming Reality Show
Washington, DC, USA. Strip the Human Race absolutely naked and what is left? It is the eye of other people that ruin us. [N1]
Although we enter the world most certainly without clothes, each and most every one of us lives in society that require us to be dressed. The clothes often wear us, rather than we, them.
Virginia Woolf had it right: "We may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking." [N2] There are dress codes for church, there are dress codes for work. Weddings, funerals, baseball and football all have dress codes. Even Christmas dinner with your grandparents, parents and extended family has a minimum dress code: you probably aren’t coming to the holiday table without the top and bottom parts of your body covered.
The human species habitually produces farms and cities and cultural dress codes. Like ants building nests and bees building hives, it’s what we do and we show little sign of ever changing. The rich and the poor, women and men, owners and workers, young lesbians and gay men — our social group, however we may define it, pressures us to conform. Resistance, while not futile, is at our own peril.
No more so than in the work place where most every business has a dress code, implied or otherwise. Even when it appears no obvious dress code exists, the requirement for uniform non-conformity may become just as rigid as the published dress policy established of the most conservative prep school or religious university.
I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he...
