A good observation- and a few question for future research

Found at Sociological Images (specifically- here)

Finally, Cheryl S. noticed that J. Crew decided to market some of their boys’ clothing to girls. Rather than designating the clothes as unisex, or listing them as boys’ items in the boys’ section and girls’ items in the girls’ section, they instead created a section in the girls’ part of the website called Borrowed from My Brother:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us
As Cheryl points out, there is no “borrowed from my sister” section for boys. We accept the idea of women wearing men’s clothing, even seeing it as potentially sexy, in a way that we don’t tolerate or condone men crossing gender lines to wear women’s items or take on other aspects of femininity. J. Crew simply applies this wider cultural acceptance of women taking on some aspects of masculinity (as long as they balance it with enough signs of femininity), which we see in the marketing of “boyfriend jeans” to women, and applies it to kids.

Interestingly, J. Crew are also the ones who featured in an add a boy with pink painted toenails:



Scandal ensued, with media comments outraged about how the ad is "“blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”- or about how it would make the child gay (no kidding!).

So, why is it that we as a culture are OK with girls wearing guys' clothes, yet we are terribly appalled by guys wearing girls' clothes? Gender-egalitarian masculists and feminists argue that the idea that it is "wrong" or "abnormal" for a guy to wear female clothing is detrimental to men, as it limits their choices, and to women as well, as it is based on the assumption that male-specific things are somehow "superior" to female-specific things, therefore a woman acting like a man is to be admired while a man acting like a woman is to be ridiculed.

I wonder how far can the comparison go between men in our days who are attracted to clothes/objects/activities/habits that are deemed specifically female by our society and women who were trying to take up more "manly" roles in the XIXth or early XXth century.

On the same note... I wonder why popular culture associates so strongly crossdressing with homosexuality, while actually the percent of gay crossdressers is not higher than the percent of gays in the population.