SO I encourage all you men to try out this compliment: "My, you look fertile today."

I say that all the time. I never did get married, for some reason.

Maybe the trick is, you have to say it to women?

And thus another light bulb goes ON at No Left Turns dot edu.

Hey, I don’t know the scientific reason, but I really encourage my wife to wear a skirt every day (and don’t mind seeing other women wear them too!).

Will, a good friend and fellow bachelor, took all my good lines. Julie, as always, thanks for your posts and comments.

Hahaha, I suppose it’s just a joke too that some of this science with progesterone could be well on the way to saving lives.

This must be why my post-menopausal wardrobe is nearly all slacks. I had previously thought it was my having a decent regard for the sensibilities of others.

Did you see this
sad piece? A heavy, middle-aged man who is surging with testosterone is liable to be real trouble. Of course, the study was done in France and may be meaningless for Americans.

Fellas, it’s not just a skirt, women ought to be in heels. Just today, at Pennsylvania Hospital, I was seated across from a woman with a great build and killer legs. You can’t help but notice, can’t help but repeatedly notice....

I agree with Dan - the young ladies at a local college ruin a decent skirt with those stupid flip-flops. That does absolutely nothing for me except to think, why bother with the skirt?

Tony, great minds... thinking alike. Those flops ought to be banned. If Congress really wanted to address an important social issue, they would prohibit women with shapely legs from wearing sandals, flops and low heeled shoes.

I was going to suggest, yesterday, that you guys try to wear high heels and see what it is like. Then I caught this piece of news on Drudge.

Kate, that article isn’t available now.

Gentlemen, while I of course know what you mean, and felt a lightening of my tread a few years ago when all the signs in Manhattan pointed to return of heels and skirts, don’t you ever forget that there is often not that great a difference between the woman who wears tight skirts and high heels, and the advertiser who plasters her image on a billboard, both of whom (besides possibly making you crash your car) are playing upon male-kind’s visual proclivites for their own purposes. I say this fully thinking there is something appropriately feminine about the skirt/dress, and something not simply sexy but royal about the high heel.

Likewise remember that there are four types of women who don’t wear heels: 1) those with feet that can’t take it, 2) outright slobs, 3) the "casual" masses (the ones who--yawn--seem to live in an Old Navy ad) and 4)those trying to dress more chastely but in a contemporary fashion--that is, they slyly use causalness for the sake of modesty. The last group is of course the most interesting. Some of them are the sort of young people of whom Pasternak said "It was right, of course, for adolescents to go through a frenzy of purity but they were overdoing it." Others of them seem to be calmly singing inside to themselves the old Shaker hymn, "’tis a joy to be simple, ’tis a joy to be free." And then there are the ones you see wearing finely styled flats or low heels that could never be described with a goofy word like "flip-flop," often the artier types, or the more intelligently feminist ones. There is self-respecting and male-respecting quality about these styles of dress that any serious conservative has to appreciate, although there are more feminine ways women have of dealing with the natural problem/opportunity of the male eye.

I am sorry. It was an article, with pictures, of Michael Jackson wearing high heels in public. These were a pair of women’s pumps, of the sort you guys are appreciating in the thread. He was on a stroll with one of his children. It was irresistable in the circumstances, but probably made TV, so perhaps you all have seen it.

I wore high heels nearly every day in New York, long ago when I worked in Lower Manhattan, near Wall Street. That was a day when I could run in the things to catch a bus. It takes a certain dedication to be able to wear high heels all day long, and when Carl says "royal" I think of how few practical jobs one can do while wearing them. We women often complain that the most delightful shoes are the most painful. Yet, as Julie says, we "dress up" and on occasion, I wear those shoes anyway and even dresses. To run into the bedroom an "outright slob" in my housekeeping clothes and hurry out some time later, transformed, ("Mom!" the boys would say, "How do you DO that?!") made it a pleasure to be seen and appreciated even before leaving the house. I have often wondered why and why the pleasure in it, to be honest, doesn’t diminish with age. Reading this thread reminds me; it is just the way we are.

Carl, apropos to #13: one of the most delightful exercises of typology I’ve seen in a while.

Perhaps to keep the thread going, may I ask the eternal question: Do women dress for themselves, other women, or men? Kate and Julie, I await your replies. (Guys can chime in, too.)

Paul: You are such a man. Why else would you think that we dress up for one reason to the exclusion of all the others? Women are multi-taskers and capable of enjoying multiple pleasures. We do not have to focus our brains to pick one at a time, as men seem to do. But I will not say more on this subject because I do not think it is wise to give too much away lest the mystery become too transparent and, therefore, boring. And besides, now I have to go buy some shoes.

Don’t worry Julie, this thread couldn’t get any more boring!

And yet, here you are Phil!

Paul, As Julie suggests, we dress up for all of those reasons you offer. I would say, we also dress up because it is expected of us. As you are expected to wear a suit on certain occasions, we are expected to wear dresses, heels and so on. As with ties, jackets with non-functioning buttons on the sleeves and other such conventions, it may seem silly, impractical, uncomfortable, but it is expected.

Julie, Tell me, privately, if you prefer; what mystery are you talking about?

Nice post ......hahahahhahahahhah