In this country during the 20th Century women finally started nearing equal status to men. Women gained confidence and began to enter the workplace, sit in parliament and have more control over their own futures than ever before. There are drawbacks such as Ann Robinson, but hey, you can’t have it all.

Sometime halfway through the last century women started wearing trousers too, what a bizarre sight that must’ve been when it first started happening! To the eyes of a public who’d never seen this before it must’ve looked ridiculous, like a poor imitation of a woman trying to be a man, rather like the stoning scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”. What were these early women like? Were they transvestites? Perhaps they wanted to imitate men to assume that role of power men had at the time?

This movement towards the traditional masculine ground continued in many other areas of the female psyche. Women today are often tough, ambitious, unemotional, suit wearing and a hundred other traits traditionally within the masculine role in order to fit into the man’s world. That’s not to say that women didn’t have these traits before (naturally they did) but the masculine role is what women strive for to achieve. Why is this? Do we as a society still view men as naturally better that women have to imitate to achieve?

For example; a girl wearing a skirt with a feminine top, with her hair open, plenty of makeup. That creates an image in your head about what kind of job she does and how senior she is within the company. Now the same girl wearing a trouser suit and no makeup will give a completely different impression. The difference is that the second outfit is geared towards making her more masculine to fit into the man’s world.

So are we as a society regarding traditionally female traits, attitudes and clothes as less positive in comparison to men’s? In some situations yes and in some we respect the female characteristics all the more. But I think we really understand the attitude to feminine culture when we imagine the same example as above but with a man. How ridiculous does he look in the skirt and top? It’s laughable, and indeed many jokes are based around this. The humour exists for many reasons; it’s unusual, he ill fits the clothes and he’s debasing himself. He’s deliberately put himself into the weaker female role, there are plenty of words for this such as: pathetic, sissy, poof. Interestingly much of the stigma of being gay comes from the female attributes associated with it along with the fear of the act of homosexual sex.

British men today are terrified of letting people think of them as camp or feminine in any way, peer pressure keeps men constantly reassuring themselves of their masculinity for fear of anyone thinking them gay or feminine. Men use football particularly as a way of reassuring them as masculine, also allowing them a brief opportunity of showing affection for their friends without the implication of homosexuality. The irony in all of this is that we have the saying “be your own man” when society tells us to be just like all the other men.

We’ve become a male focused society. When will that first man wear a dress as that first woman wore trousers?