Cross-dressing Conspiracies.

I called my friend, A[flaneur]a, from the dressing room at the value village a couple of days ago because I wanted to ask her if she thought that it would be ok to buy a pair of bell-bottoms if they really made my ass look good. She told me to buy them and cut them into shorts. So I bought them, but I didn't cut them into shorts because a larger consensus of people I polled told me that wearing bell-bottoms would be cool; particularly because no one would ever accuse me of being a hipster in bells (not that anyone ever has accused me of that anyhow). Especially, said HH, if you let the bottoms drag in the mud and get all ratty and tatty.

We were in La Carreta at that time, HH and LQ and I, and as HH began to lay into the hipsters a pair of obvious hipsters at the next table began to giggle about it. Like look at these fucking hipsters here, said HH, berating them. I'm sorry but I just hate people like you. We're not hipsters, they said defiantly, their eyes cringing a little behind their black chunky glasses, their wire thin pasty arms flexing under their skin tight black tee-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands no one has ever heard of ironed on with patches so faint that no one can read the band names anyhow, their skinny jeans tightly caressing the ankles protruding out bonily from their canvas sneakers.

The true measure of one's hipsterdom, LQ said, is how in denial you are about being a hipster. It's a kind of metaphysical trap, I decided. If denying that you are a hipster makes you a hipster then how can you avoid being a hipster? ~ The answer is to buy bell-bottoms and to wear them without any feeling of irony. I got up in the restaurant and started doing a disco dance that involved a lot of sharp pelvic thrusting. The hipsters cringed.

I have my bell-bottoms on now and there's another thing about them I noticed: the button buttons up on the opposite side from usual and also the flap on the fly feels like it is facing the wrong way..it throws me off every time I go to take a piss. Plus, I noticed after I bought the pants that there is a flowery blue and white strip of fabric sewn into the inside rim of the waist. Ergo, these are women's pants that I have bought!

The cut looks like a man's cut to me, but I guess the pockets are kind of shallow, which is annoying. I'm probably going to have to get a matching purse, something in brown suede with lots of tassels and coloured beads on it, if I'm going to carry all my manly shit around.

What I've been thinking about, as I stand there trying to fish my dick out from my underpants to piss, though, while I am forced to reflect for a moment on how I have been pushed out slightly from the usually seamless comfort zone of my masculinity, is that I wonder to what extent having the buttons on opposite sides for men and women is somehow just another way that heteronormativity reinforces itself. I mean, I am used to buttoning and unbuttoning in a certain way. Thus, if I go to unbutton a woman's shirt or pants, or reach round to unclasp her bra, or whatever I'm doing, the motion is always going to be a natural one because I'm unhooking things in the same direction I always do. A woman unhooking something of mine would have the same experience.

However, if I were to be unbuttoning a man then it would be slightly awkward because the buttons would be the reverse of what I was used to…unless he (or I, more likely) was wearing women's cloths, I guess…or unless my girlfriend was wearing one of my shirts…

Well anyhow, practicing undressing someone of the same sex for any extended period of time, like more than a week, would probably be enough to overcome any sort of confusion about the issue, but I can't help wondering what the function of the gender opposite buttons is anyhow.

Undoubtedly some genius someplace has already discussed this at length.