Where do these weird thoughts of mine rise from? Is it just that I dislike being told what to think, or that as a mathematically inclined person I look at everything differently?
At least I am never bored. Tired, maybe, and lazy, certainly, but never bored. So here a few thoughts on eccentricity.
I wish that, instead of a tuxedo, men could attend formal occasions in creative attire — say naked with a bloody rabbit pelt tangled in their hair, or wearing paint-splattered overalls stuffed with marbles. In this one thing women are treated better by us — they can wear pretty much anything, though not only bodypaint and dead chicken hats. Men have to wear boring, stuffy suits of monotone color — but oh joy, if you are really rebellious, it might be mauve!
I want to see a professor lecture naked. I want to see grown men in female underwear, nuns in garters, and schoolboys attending class in scuba suits. I’d adore bus drivers in top hats and shop clerks in red robes. I’d like to hear of a parliament meeting where every member was dressed as a different bird. I want to know of people buried in their swimming trunks — um, let me retract that for rephrasing.
There’s so little real variety in how people dress and behave that everything different is instantaneously suspect. If we had a little more variety, the whole concept of “eccentric dress” would disappear. One couldn’t do a mental snap judgment of “Different! Baa-aad!”, but would be forced to consider people as people, being as they wanted.
I want to see the prime minister dressed as a goth. I want to see people wearing transparent robes and having their hair dyed green. I want to see a bald female archbishop with an eyepatch and a mustache! I want to see people and clothing of every shape, size and color!
I want to be surprised, entertained and caught unawares, even grossed out, every time I see people. Not for the sake of my own amusement — well, partly, but not wholly — but because that would be a good thing. I just wish that the world was a bit more colorful place, and that people wouldn’t try to blend in, and that there would be no-one talking of proper behavior or attire, and no more of modesty and this grotesque fear of the human body. (“He saw your mammary glands! What if he’s scarred for life?”, the mother screeched, and the father added a “What if they think you’re different, huh?”)
What of it if a television announcer has the left side of her face painted white? Does it impair her speech, or slow her brain? Certainly not. Forget “clothes make the man” — the norm that personal influence can be measured by that how one covers his skin is outdated. “Proper attire” is just a social construction of ours, and quite something we could live happily without. How we dress should be just one more way of doing whatever we wish, and to that there should be no limitation that is not absolutely, absolutely necessary.
Well, at times it seems that we are going the right way: one can see, now and then, people with green hair, and of course it is OK for women to wear pants now.
We’re nearer to freedom when it is OK for men to wear skirts and high heels.
