Ok, so the other day we were walking around in the shopping district and my partner pointed out a sort of mismatched couple. I didn’t get a good look at them but she said the man was sort of ordinarily dressed but the woman was wearing very revealing, body-enhancing clothes. My partner said “something about those two just screamed ‘mail order bride.’”

Like I say I didn’t get a good look, and in the high-end, high-tech, international-flavored area we were in it’s entirely possible it was just that.

On the other hand, this morning as I was exercizing I started thinking about that “men make women dress” meme. I keep bringing it up, and I’ve said in the past that in my experience most men are pretty clueless about what women wear, and often very happy to be with them no matter what they wear. (For instance outside of maybe banks and retail I don’t think most men really care what women wear to work as long as its not distracting.)

None of this would be interesting except for a little thought that trickled into my head, unbidden: market survey after market survey show that in the vast majority of couples women select or outright buy the clothes their partners wear.

—-

Back in the Victorian era another extremely popular meme was that women fainted at the mere sight of blood. (Another joke of Victoria herself, I suspect, and another that was taken as fact by her too-humorless subjects.) Gentlemen, it is supposed, weren’t aware that women deal regularly with quite a bit of blood and consequently went to great lengths to “protect” them from the mere sight. Much hilarity, plus smelling salts, ensued.

Anyway, I’m just wondering if there’s a connection here. I’ve always felt women dress far more for themselves and, especially, for other women. And now that we mention it, they (stereotypically and statistically) also dress men. So is this “men make women wear sexy clothes” another one of those what’s-wrong-with-this-picture things like the Victorian fancies about the sight of blood?