Us and Stuff We Don’t Like

I am sitting on a plane as I type this. Before we left for the airport, the topic came up about how some people would wear pajama-like clothing to airports for flights. One of the viewpoints was that this act was wrong because it was a breach in etiquette. Now, those of you who know me know that I am no fan of etiquette. I will concede that some of it is useful in that having certain customs helps a society get along more smoothly; in dealing with others, it helps to have somewhat of an expectation of what the other person will do. What one wears to the airport, however, does not fall into this category. Instead, I believe that it falls into another category of etiquette that we label “fashion”. Fashion is a much more arbitrary beast – basically nothing more than a collective preference, and it frustrates me to this day.

I’ve got no problem with people wearing what they think looks nice. Instead, what really frustrates me about fashion is people’s (including myself) response to it. I can comprehend why people like what is currently in style. If a person becomes very familiar with something, then they acquire a taste for it – the same as with food. If many people are wearing the same style, you grow accustomed to it and like it. At this point, you have an entire group of people for which a large percentage all likes a similar style. If it ended here, I’d be fine with that, but people take it one step farther; they believe that their preference (for that’s all it is, and we must never forget that) is right, like in a more absolute sense. They believe that there is something intrinsically right about the fashion and intrinsically wrong from deviating from it. It is at this point that people begin to judge, and when people begin to judge others based on arbitrary preferences, bad things start to occur. People look down on each other; gulfs can form; it may be something as simple as just not being comfortable with each other.

A little later, at the airport, I saw this woman checking in. She was of the “granola” variety – her face and figure honestly were pretty good, but she had these huge, long dreds and more body hair in certain areas than I do. My first thought was that she needed to shave; she needed to change that look. Then I thought that women did not always shave legs and pits, so this used to be the norm, and during that time, did all the guys go around thinking, “Man, all that hair is gross,”? No, they would have liked it just fine. Right now, smooth legs are simply a majority preference. I can still have my preference, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that she needs to change anything. She is who she is. And I end up judging just like everyone else. My frustration stems not only from what I see it causing others to do, but what I see it causing myself to do as well.

Now, the takeaway from all this for me (and this is stuff that’s been running through my head for years) is that we must be extremely careful with our knee-jerk reactions. We see things we don’t like, and that naturally causes a negative response within us, and the natural response to negative emotions within us is to project a label of “bad” or “wrong” on the cause of those emotions. While that may be something useful for surviving in the jungle, to apply it to other people is not always the most appropriate response. In cases of fashion, our negative response is not caused by anything they did, but by our own preference for the familiar. We see someone who is different and automatically believe that our dislike for what we see says something about them. In actuality, that dislike and how we react to it say less about the other person and more about ourselves. It’s our own problem, not theirs.