You may know Jeremy Kerr as "that guy around town who wears a skirt" or maybe "that guy around town who wears the fedora with colored fuzz-puffs around the brim" (more likely the former). Or you may know him as a professor or a friend ... or hell, you may not know him at all...anyway, while I've known OF Jeremy for a while (a friend of mine took and loved his class at UK), and I've always found him to be an fascinating character about town, I've never actually met him – somehow I went through my tenure at Georgetown College, where he was a professor, without ever really crossing paths with him ... which is weird in and of itself ~ it was a small school, and I spent a good portion of my time there with my radar tuned for weirdos/interesting characters (a search, I suppose, I all but abandoned after it yielded such minimal results time and time again.)
Anyway, apparently he no longer lives in KY. And I can't comment too much on why he wears a skirt because I've never actually talked to the guy. But from what I understand, it's a sociological experiment of sort, measuring public reaction and discrimination against gender differences ... according to the article, Jeremy's skirt-wearing is a reaction to an "overall reduction of femininity in society." Pretty genius stuff. To me, it calls into question why we find weird the things we find weird (does that make sense?). The answer usually lies in some meaningless social construct that we've been trained to accept. I'm all for inviting people out of their comfort levels so long as it's done in a non-intrusive, non-offensive manner (and to be offended by a guy in a skirt is just plain stubborn, shallow and close-minded).
As you might expect, Jeremy has caught no shortage of hell for his fancy ~ he eventually sued Georgetown College for discrimination, and he made the Herald-Leader today for filing a civil rights suit against the New Orleans police for gender stereotyping. Check it out ... as is usual these days, I find the reader H-L reactions to the article to be as interesting as the content itself~ if not more so ~ (which doesn't say a whole lot about either, actually). Someone was questioning whether or not this actually constitutes news ... I'm just glad something potentially intellectually stimulating made the paper today.
You can find out a little more about Jeremy on his homepage. If you know anything else about him and his theories, please feel free to comment.
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Kerr has it wrong. The fact that women have been in a long term trend to wear skirts less and less doesn't reduce femininity in society---it reduces "aesthetics." Aesthetics, or wearing decorative clothes, is sex neutral, not as most "think," "female." The thing about the corset was somewhat useless. In the 19th century women fought for the right to stop wearing them---they were indeed medically dangerous. People, don't you know that the 1988 Presidential contender, Dukakis, wore a skirt as a boy of age 7? It was in People and Time magazines as part of his Greek heritage--men traditionally wear a skirt (as men, not as female impersonators). President Ford wore a dress as a baby, Franklin Roosevelt wore dresses as a boy, police in Fiji and Samoa (male cops) wear skirts today, Rome exiled men in pants in AD393. No possible chance are pants/skirts gender differences, men abandoned skirts due to wearing pants for riding horses. Don't expect any "mental health professional" to have 1% comprehension of what's wrong with the sex typing of garments. Yes, bras are female.
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