Sometimes clothes are just clothes

It's ten minutes to dog-walking time, and so I have ten minutes to think of something intelligent to say about women and their clothes. I might have to come back to this post later. Ten minutes isn't very much time, even for someone who has spent a career writing on deadline.

I'm thinking of the woman in the Sudan who was arrested for wearing pants in a cafe. She faced a charge of public indecency, and while she was sentenced to only a fine (which she has refused to pay), they could have lashed her 40 times with a plastic whip.

For wearing pants. Now this is mostly horrifying, although in my twisted mind I also think that men have spent millenia trying to get women to remove their pants, and that thought makes me chuckle, but mostly it is simply horrifying. The woman has refused to pay the fine and so has been thrown in prison for a month. For wearing pants.

And then I think of the story I saw over the weekend that ran in the Washington Post, a lifestyle story about little girls who are very excited about what they are going to wear on the first day of school. They have spent all summer planning their outfits, they said. Let me repeat myself: They have spent all summer planning their outfits.

All summer? Planning their clothing? The story went on to note that what you wear on the first day of school (according to these little girls, whose ages, I think, were both 12) can set the tone for how people view you for the rest of the school year.

Surely this isn't true. Or if it is, surely it wasn't always true. I cannot remember any back to school outfit from my entire life. I cannot remember what I wore the first day I started any of my jobs. I'm not immune to fashion, and I certainly remember driving my mother insane when I was in junior high because I thought--no, knew, passionately, desperately knew--that my skirt was one inch too long and why won't she drop everything she is doing, right now, making dinner for 12 people, doing laundry for 12, vacuuming, grocery shopping, whatever, and shorten my skirt right now for me?

But even I, in my self-conscious 13-year-old paranoid way, didn't think that someone (who?) would notice my one-inch-too-long-skirt and that would be it, I'd be damned for the rest of my life. (Or the school year, which, when you are 13, is the same thing.)

I was damned lucky to be born in a country that allows me to wear pants at a cafe. I was not allowed to wear pants in junior high--the dress code did not allow it for girls, though it did for boys, of course. In Duluth in January it was tough making it to school in skirts without freezing my kneecaps off. But still, even then, I could wear pants in a cafe.

And I was damned lucky to be born in a time, and a place, where my entire social life didn't rise or fall based on one outfit.

I tell you, having your life governed by clothes--by others' opinions of your clothes--is no way to live. People threatening to whip you or ostracize you, forcing you to consider what you wear for months, forcing you to put your life on the line based on what you put on your body--what a way to live.

It's dog-walking time. I do not have a thoughtful conclusion to this post, other than to restate the title: Sometimes clothes are just clothes, and I'm lucky that in my life that's always been the case. My sympathies to those little D.C. fashionistas, who don't yet know that they need my sympathy, and my deep admiration to the Sudan woman, who wants no sympathy, only justice.

Leave your own thoughtful conclusions in the comments. Oh, and the picture? Just for fun. My mother, and my grandmother, looking fabulous and modern in their 1940s clothes.