Clothes and Civilization

One of the things I like about the area where I now live is that people don't dress at all badly. Most of the students come to class dressed very decently and my colleagues always gladden everybody's eyes with beautiful outfits. At Purdue, for example, things were very different. More than once, I saw groups of students marching to class in pajamas of the kind I would be ashamed to wear to bed. Many people on this continent dress in ways that highlight just how much they hate their bodies. We shouldn't be surprised that this self-hatred then pushes them towards voting for crazed anti-carnal Evangelicals or dusty Harper's conservatives. 

And please don't tell me that wearing baggy jeans, pajamas, and ratty humongous T-shirts in public is convenient. Convenience-schmanvienience, people. Civilization is generally extremely inconvenient. The entire human civilization is one huge way in which we inconvenience ourselves on a daily basis. Stopping in the middle of the street to take care of one's physiological necessities would be a lot more convenient than suffering in search of a restroom. Jumping passersby to fulfill one's sexual needs would be so much more convenient than getting to meet people, soliciting their consent, and suffering if that consent is not granted. Brushing one's teeth, dragging oneself to work in the morning, saying "please" and "thank you" are super inconvenient. 

Human beings have come up with the concept of aesthetic enjoyment. Not all of us are gifted enough to be artistically creative, of course. We all, however, have the capacity to bring beauty to what belongs to us: our living and work spaces and, of course, our own bodies. We are taught by our culture to hate and despise our bodies as evil. All too often do we give in to this conditioning and destroy our bodies with horrible food, sexual deprivation, nasty useless medications that purport to cure us from shyness and short lashes. And then, to top it all, we dress our bodies in vile (and usually quite expensive) rags to destroy their natural beauty and make sure that nobody finds us attractive or enjoys looking at us, lest our Evangelical overlords condemn us for enjoying ourselves.