justira:
onionhighonionandrenown:
peggingwithstyles:
shut
up
...
shut
up
….well. My goodness.
So here’s the thing! Nice clothes — suits, lingerie, or anything else — can make bodies look really good, but they do that in different and often (almost always) gendered ways.
I am reminded of nothing so much as superhero comics, where the male characters tend to be inteded as power fantasies — for the clearly all-male audience — and the women tend to be presented as sexual fantasies, likewise.
Suits tend to invoke as a power fantasy.
Lingerie tends to invoke a sexual (object) fantasy*, as well as an element of vulnerability.
So the analogy in the OP image is pretty thoroughly false. Both suits and lingerie do sexy, sexy things, but society codes them as very different kinds of sexy, and changing the gender of the wearer is transgressive in different ways (and each adds its own layer of hot for different reasons!).
In the end though, the clothes themselves can look great on anyone, because that is one thing good clothes do: flatter the body they’re on. We’re just very used to seeing certain bodies in certain clothes, and that’s a damn shame.
(* Society sadly frowns upon sexuality for women — the expected lingerie-wearers — as opposed to sexualization or sexual objectification. Lingerie is usually expected to be “for” other people, not for the wearer.)
(PS: The OP image can be read in two ways, as far as I can see: “a woman seeing a man in a suit is like a man seeing a woman in lingerie” or “a woman wearing a suit is like a man wearing lingerie”. I think both are wrong, but the first one gets bonus heteronormativity points.)
