Reheated (130)

“I’m surprised how many men say they’d never even consider wearing a skirt,” says Mr Phineas Harper. “It’s still vanishingly rare to see normal men wear normal skirts day to day.”

Possibly, this is because it tends to look contrived and rather silly, even when celebrities do it. A contrivance that suggests, not so much a high-minded “dismantling” of “gendered fashion,” or “a small step towards gender equality,” as Mr Harper would have us believe, but something closer to tedious self-absorption.

The kind of thing one might expect from a disingenuous, noodle-legged Guardian columnist, say.

But apparently, this craving for attention, for being the skirt-wearing star of any social gathering, all this radical flouncing, will somehow liberate British women from their supposedly grim, downtrodden existence.

Those of you with an urge to behold Mr Harper in a skirt – complete with tights, trainers, and dickie bow – can do so here. A second ensemble, featuring a bold leaf print, also awaits your applause. Readers are welcome to say whether the word panache – favoured by Mr Harper – is one that comes to mind.

Though I’d suggest that the author’s own fashion statements rather solve any mystery as to why said garment hasn’t been widely adopted by the menfolk of the nation.

It occurs to me that politics really shouldn’t occupy that much space in a person’s life. It isn’t the kind of stuff a life should be filled with, such that it dominates one’s outlook and everyday activity, even one’s dreams. The result is very often a kind of bad mental opera.

And boasting of how you’ll teach your children about their “white privilege,” a recipe for affectation and neurosis, endless pretentious guilt, doesn’t seem likely to help matters enormously.

And if Ms Brown’s children should have the goodness in them taken away, as she puts it, this seems unlikely to be a result of a Trump second term, and more likely to be due to a figure much closer to home and more prominent in their lives. Say, a mother whose mind has, in her words, been consumed.

Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure what loving one’s body might mean, beyond the obvious off-colour jokes. But apparently, it’s something that one is supposed to proclaim as an accomplishment, a credential of progressivism. I have, however, noted that it tends to be announced by people whose declared triumph in this matter is not altogether convincing, and whose basis for doing so is generally much slimmer than they are.

It must be quite strange to go through life feeling a need to boast in print of some pointed behaviour – specifically, “showing my sons what a real woman’s body… looks like” – as if this feat of not wearing knickers were somehow radical, empowering, and a basis for applause. And to then have to justify this lifestyle affectation in ways that are somewhat contradictory and not particularly convincing. As if no-one would notice. It seems a lot of effort.

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.

You see, by issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.