I wear hats.
Not the socially-acceptable (but proletariat class-signal) billed caps for games very few people actually play, but real hats, with a brim all around, often made of felt, the kind that label you as at least an eccentric East of the Mississippi, and not the styles that are acceptable West of the Mississippi that look like they might be made of flocked fiberglass, either.
Not every day, as men did for thousands of years right up until the 1960’s, but fairly often. I never thought of it as a “gender issue”, never thought for a moment that it was “sexist”, or indeed that it had anything do do with women at all, other than maybe knowing when it is appropriate to remove or tip your hat in “mixed company”.
Let’s step back a bit, a few thousand years. You’ve seen pictures or statues or representations on old coins of the god Hermes/Mercury wearing what looks like a winged helmet, of sort of WWI shape? Well, if it’s a 19th Century interpretation or later, the artist probably also assumed it was a helmet and may have embellished it with helmet-like details, but in the orignal Greek and Roman versions it was not a helmet at all, it was a simple felt hat called a “petasos” that was common but especially associated with travelers, hence Mercury the messenger, now the god of delivery services.
As I’ve written with regard to other subjects, personal edged tools/weapons, the ability to make fire, etc., when something is in use for thousands of years, there were probably very good reasons. For at least thousands of years men did NOT routinely go outside hatless, that’s a very modern phenomenon that pretty much started with the automobile and really caught hold with John Kennedy in the 1960’s.
When something is in use for thousands of years and just drops out of use in modern times, it either means that there is a much better solution, or that we’ve become so very sheltered our entire lives that we don’t perceive the need anymore. Well, nobody is wearing anything much better than hats, and the big problem with being so sheltered that you don’t perceive the need anymore is that the need re-asserts itself if ever you’re not so sheltered.
The felt hat of the 1920’s to the 1950’s represented the most highly-evolved, and possibly the final form of something that men had perceived as a daily necessity for at least thousands of years. That need re-asserting itself can be seen anywhere where the lifestyle in the culture does not revolve around automobiles. Some outdoorsmen resist, but it usually takes only a few years or at most decades of spending serious time outdoors before they revert to wearing hats- and this in an age when the quality of hats is generally so low as to act as a real deterrent to ever wearing one. A typical fedora of, say, the early 1950s that might have cost $20 or $25 was of a quality, especially in the felt it was made of, that can only be approached by hats costing hundreds today.
But I like hats, so I wear them. I know it’s just terribly, terribly unfashionable, but I can’t say I care much. In really nice weather I often dispense with them, but in intense sun, rain, snow, or cold I want a hat. Unlike many of my neighbors, apparently, I’m willing to make some concession to weather in the way I dress- I don’t go out in sneakers or sandals and shorts in the snow (seen it), I don’t wear a t-shirt alone in sub-freezing weather (seen it), and I refuse to go out in the pouring rain, even when it’s been raining for days and can’t exactly be a surprise, without a rain jacket, hood, hat or umbrella (see it almost constantly, people out walking their dogs wearing nothing but cotton and soaked to the skin, often shivering. Brilliant).
Sorry, past a certain point I don’t care if it IS fashionable to dress like an idiot for the circumstances. If it’s raining out and not so hot and humid as to make it absolutely stifling, I want a hat. If it’s even misting, I want a hat. If the sun is beating down, I want a hat, and if it’s very cold I want a hat. A single good (by mid-20th Century standards or earlier) hat will go a long way to helping you deal with any of that.
So, I often put up with some odd looks and occasionally outright ridicule. Coming out of the building I was working in one rainy evening, a lady in the lobby started loudly humming the Indiana Jones theme fanfare. People in crowds have yelled “Hat!” at me (why, I don’t know), said “Howdy” sarcastically (quite a bit East of the Mississippi, and I was not wearing a cowboy hat, even pointed and laughed. There is CONSIDERABLE cultural resistance to a man wearing a hat these days.
So be it.
So, one day I was a little surprised but not shocked when the subject came up one morning at work, and a very pleasant, polite young lady asked; “But aren’t you afraid that people will think you’re sexist?”.
Seriously? Oh, crap, I guess I’ve fallen behind the curve again, I’ve failed to keep up with EVERYTHING the PC/”Social Justice Warrior” crowd has chosen to attack in male behavior.
Some google searches turned up a few articles and a number of videos of women railing against men wearing hats, particularly fedoras. Mind, they weren’t “real” fedoras, they were apparently some sort of hipster-fad stingy-brim “fedoras” that looked almost completely useless, just a fashion statement, and some of the comments from the men confirmed their complete cluelessness, they seemed to think that wearing this cheap consumer abomination associated them with the 18th Century or the middle ages in some way. Hey, it’s just off by hundreds of years, which would have taken seconds of research to find out if they cared to, but apparently it’s not important at all.
I gather that somewhere there have been some small subset of men wearing hats like these and behaving like jackasses toward women. Sigh. We can’t, of course, paint women with a “broad brush” based on the behavior of a radical feminist male-hating minority, but when there’s a similar objectionable group of men, we’re all guilty.
Never mind.
I guess it is a gender issue, and probably even “sexist” by modern definition, in the sense that anything that men do that is not about women is “sexist”. This is amply illustrated by the number of Youtube videos featuring young women patiently explaining that they don’t LIKE fedoras, don’t find it at all attractive- the underlying gynocentric assumption being, of course, that just understanding that women don’t find it attractive should end the practice and all discussion… because of course men should have no interest at all in doing anything women don’t like, for any reason.
I just can’t help but wonder- how would women react if men started commenting publicly, ridiculing them and deriding them for something that THEY decided to wear in this age?
I still wear hats. If women don’t care for it, I’ll just have to live with that somehow. I’m not standing bare-headed out in the rain for anyone’s fashion sensibilities, and I don’t care much how many men are fool enough to do that.
– Robert the Wombat