Why Can’t Men Wear Dresses (Redux)?

Back in September, I did a blog post called “Why Can’t Men Wear Dresses?” It was inspired by how painful it was for my father to put on pants as he was recuperating from hip surgery. He needed a nice loose dress, but there was no way he’d accept one or, for that matter, that the aides in his nursing home would put one on him.

It’s one of the great ironies of the power of gender norms that an elderly man in failing health can wear adult diapers but not dresses.

But the pressure on men to conform...