I Wear Clothes, and a Mask

I don’t like clothes. Sure, clothes have their time and place. But as a rule, ideally, in most conditions, it’s better to not wear clothes than otherwise. Specifically, the kinds of clothes we’re expected to wear, that societal pressures and the law insists we wear.

Pants. Long pants. They are complete garbage. Long pants were invented as a puritanical torture device. They used to be woven from wool and pubic hair. Look it up. Hot and itchy, perpetual discomfort, self- and societally-imposed torture. It was the intent of puritans that they all be as miserable and suffer as much as possible, and it worked.

Shirts, too. Those were also made of wool and scraggly hair. You’ve heard of hairshirts. Those weren’t just worn by monks or other cultists because they were stupid self-loathing wretches plagued by superstitious paranoia and self-loathing. Regular people would wear those shirts too, for similar self-hating reasons.

As the fashion and textile industries advanced, aided by slave laborers who made the clothes and the trained bulimics and anorexics who wore them as living advertisements, clothing became much more attractive and slightly more comfortable. But never truly comfortable, and the comfortability quotient has often dropped precipitously with increased attractiveness. Clothes are still a burden, a form of torture.

Pants crush and bake genitals and testicles. They’re meant to make us not only uncomfortable, but eventually impotent. Never have I worn a pair of pants that didn’t inflict upon me some degree of cock and balls distress. The closest it’s possible to come to comfort is with big billowing pants with low and spacious crotches. Those sorts of pants of course look terrible, and might as well be skirts. They fall just short being skirts. We would be so much better off if we wore skirts. Kilt wearing Scotsmen are smarter than all other men. Except when their kilts are made from wool, and possibly pubes. Middle-Eastern men, too, who wear robes that might as well be shapeless dresses, are smart. All self-respecting men of the world should be wearing skirts and dresses.

Forgive the male-centric nature of this argument thus far. I have no doubt that clothes are a burden to women and their genitals as well. But for the life of me, I don’t understand why so many women choose to wear pants instead of skirts. It is fair to note that women don’t have low-hanging sensitive dangly bits to be crushed by the inseam of a pants-crotch, or squeezed unmercifully in a pant leg. But, that women are expected, regardless of their personal preference or breast size or support needs, to wear bras is stupid as hell as well.

Why are we so ashamed of our torsos? Centuries of domineering puritanism. But why should we still be bound by the insecurities and demented occultism of old-timey religious nuts? I prefer to go shirtless as often as possible. Part of this owes to that I used to be a fat man who hid his big gut and moobs in baggy clothes, and that I’m now making up for lost shirtless time as a fit man who likes to show off his abs, pecs, shoulders, and frankly amazing back muscles. But mostly it’s about comfort. There’s nothing wrong with nipples and skin, or fat or muscles, or hair. There’s not even anything sexual about any of it, other than that which has been artificially assigned to it by the aforementioned lunatic puritans. Even if tits and tots were inherently sexual, why should we be ashamed of them? Fucking puritans.

Shoes are pretty terrible too. They have their uses, if you don’t want to step on broken glass or drop an angry beehive on your toesies, for example. Most of the time, though, we don’t need them. We’re better off walking with our feet free, able to breathe, building strong, healthy calluses.

Weather and company and activity permitting, the most I want to wear most of the time is a pair of light cotton shorts and flip-flops, and frankly that’s already a concession and more than would be ideal. If it’s cold, I’ll layer. If I’m running or doing heavy physical work, I’ll wear running sneakers or steel-toed boots.

But, you know what? On an almost daily basis I wear shirts, and shoes, and I wear goddamn pants. From time to time, I go all out. I’ll wear nice pants. Nice ones. Form-fitting. Pretty fabric. With a motherfucking Italian leather belt cinching them tight around my waist. I’ll wear an undershirt and a sharp button-up. And you know what? Sometimes I’ll even tuck the tails of that bitch into my pants. Sometimes, I will even wear a tie. A goddamn tie. Ties are nooses. They’re a stupid piece of fabric that serves no purpose other than to hide shameful buttons and provide an enemy with the ready means to strangle you to death.

Today, I went out into the world. I wore pants, a shirt, and shoes. And I wore a mask. I wore a strip of fabric covering my mouth and nose. Was it comfortable? Did I enjoy it? Stop asking stupid questions. The mask feels no more pleasant on my skin than any of the other articles. I didn’t wear any of them for my personal pleasure. I put on my clothes and my shoes and my mask for the sake of other people. Because I understand that they (a few of them, anyway) don’t want to see me naked, or breathe in a potentially dangerous virus I might be carrying. Am I infected with Covid-19? No. Do I look great naked? Yes. But I respect that the public hasn’t signed up for a show or a bout of terrible illness. So I cover my nudity and my germ-holes.

There’s more logic to wearing a mask than there is to wearing clothes. If I strolled fully nude into Trader Joe’s no one would be in danger. If I go in without a mask on, they could be. Yet few people question the former, and too many won’t shut up about the latter. Wearing a mask is no more a civil rights issue, a matter of liberty and freedom, than are the rules and social norms dictating that I wear a shirt, pants, and shoes in public spaces. To help anti-maskers better understand this, I suggest that henceforth we wear nothing but masks in public. We go everywhere and do everything naked, save for the strips of fabric around our lower faces. That is healthy, and socially conscientious. That is true freedom.