Anyone who knows me knows I love skirts. Long, full, swishy skirts are a delight and joy to wear. Do I feel that skirts are extra-feminine?–yup; are skirts the ONLY clothing that is feminine?–nope. Do I feel skirts can be very modest?–yup; are skirts the only clothing that can be modest?–nope. My loving skirts does NOT mean I hate your jeans. Most clothing choices have modest versions but any of them can be made raunchy if you try hard enough.
A person’s tastes and preferences in clothing vary over time. I’ve had my pantsuit phase, my jeans and t-shirt phase, my fancy painted sweat-suit phase, and my Pakistani salwar camise phase, my colorful shawls phase, and am now in my I-LOVE-SKIRTS phase. I am a relaxed style person. If the clothing isn’t comfortable I’m not into it. That has been true no matter which of my many fashion phases I have been in. Currently, the love of comfort translates to a love for long full skirts.
According to the book The Science of Sexy, I should, based on my body type (height, weight, shape) wear my skirts just below my knee which is OK but I love my skirts to be longer. So I accept that my longer skirts are less attractive on me than my “short” skirts that are just below my knee in length. Totally modest but showing off nice features in a non-sexual manner is a good thing when making clothing choices. But today I am wearing a double circle skirt that goes to the top of my foot. I love the feel of it.
Over at A Woman’s Place Depends on Her Vocation, I ran across a post about something I have experienced on more than one occasion and it is disturbing to me that so many people have such apparent hatred and rage at anyone who is attracted to anything traditional. In this case, it is something that is merely a fashion choice! SKIRTS. Skirt Wars and Sola skirtura is the blog post that caught my attention. I feel the author did a really good job with the topic.
Of course, I did browse around the links she provided too. I didn’t see anything new. Being that my love affair with the skirt has been going on for over a decade I’ve found myself attacked for my clothing choices on more than one occasion. Generally, I find the attacks baffling!
There have been times when, unless you enjoyed shopping every last store in the mall and a bunch of box stores, you could not find a full comfortable “I can sit on the floor with the kids” skirt. It got to be really frustrating because at the time I neither sewed nor did I know anyone to do any sewing for me. So, one day, I asked online if anyone else had problems finding clothing they liked?
Soon, several of us were discussing our favorite sorts of clothing and how difficult some of it was to find. A smaller group branched off into a conversation on skirts in particular. Long skirts were, at that time, exceedingly difficult to find. We began to share sources for skirt patterns, online clothing stores that carried skirts similar to what we each enjoyed, and the ins and outs of wearing skirts. A very few of us were moving to wearing skirts nearly all the time and we enjoyed sharing why we each loved skirts.
Suddenly, with no preliminaries and to our shock, our little group of skirt loving gals were under ATTACK. Women who were not previously part of our conversation began to post and they were NOT NICE.
These ladies were OFFENDED by our conversation about our love of skirts. They accused us of saying that women in trousers were immodest– none of us said ANYTHING about trousers not being modest. They accused us of dressing like nuns and saying that anyone who didn’t was immodest (since when have skirts been reserved to nuns?). We could not comprehend where the anger was coming from– so we tried to explain we were only talking about what we personally like and that it had nothing to do with anyone else.
Trying to dialog with such rage was impossible. The angry women kept attacking, we were crazy traditionalists who rejected Vatican II (huh? what has an ecumenical council have to do with skirts?), we were pushing women to dress frumpy and claiming it was more modest (REALLY? The only people who are modest are frumpy?–where did these women GET these nutty ideas?).
We abandoned that thread, and started another chat on skirts. They followed us and began with another round of accusations and attacks. WHY? WHY such hatred for anyone who likes to wear a skirt? It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. But it didn’t end there.
Somebody reported/complained to the moderators and the priests on the forum that we were some crazy sect of trad Catholics who wanted to make women dress like Muslims in burkas. So there was soon a harsh post by a priest on the EVILS of extremes in dress, the wrongness of lay women dressing like nuns, and the deviations from Catholicism this represented. I did write the priest to explain that it was no such thing on our forum, just a group of gals chatting about skirts. It did no good.
We were condemned every which way.
The original group of gals who were enjoying a nice chat about skirts ended up abandoning any attempt to have the conversation.
This was a number of years ago, before the derogatory terms “sola skirtura” and “longskirts” were coined to imply that anyone talking about wearing a nice feminine skirt was somehow part of an extreme sect of one sort or another.
Thank God this is MY blog and I can talk about skirts and all the ways I love them. It is also a fully moderated blog so discourtesy will not be allowed. I love being moderator! 
