Does wearing a suit make you feel uncomfortable?

Wow, and I thought we women could be petty and judgemental with each other over clothes!

 

Flattering ourselves as hard working men exposes the fragility of male identity whose fundamental purpose is sexual.


The deeper our feelings of sexual inadequacy fills our subconscious, the more desperately EGO must compensate with increasingly puffed-up projections of our male identity.

Suits serve the desperately forlorn need to project the appearance of confidence and success within the competitive primate sexual hierarchies of business, religion and politics.

Forlorn, because those who know how to decode our collective archetypes can see through, not only these superficial suits, but through our puffed-up male identities, right down to the naked hairy smelly primate facts of life.

As long as there are men who submissively surrender their own unique individual spirit paths, and like hysterical women, spinelessly seek in business, religion and politics the security and authority of hierarchical father-figures, no child will ever be safe from the desperate anxieties of the sexual inadequacies hiding beneath their suits.

 

That is true in a way. Corporate take-over. But pardon me, it was as if I could hear mozart zinging melodramatically all over the last paragraph. "Desperate anxieties of the sexual inadequacies hiding beneath their suits" is almost comical.

Would you like to expand on the hysterical women as well? I can see you've spent awhile deliberating the evils of the business world, and perhaps forgotten that for many it is survival and a way of life, something they enjoy. ..and spineless is every bit as appalling or chauvinistic a statement as any "hierarchical father-figure" in a suit.

They are men. In work-appropriate clothes.

 

Ok, I've studied fashion history and just can't stay out of this.

I have a small business (shameless plug: http://hipforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=408) and I find suits a turn-off, and I don't like doing business with people in suits. But then my business is hippie vending, so I can get away with it. Suits are bad for business, in my case. Of course, I may have to deal with them when I'm breaking into the gallery scene.

As I said I studied fashion history and costume design in college, and there actually are sexual projections worked into the design of business and formal attire. Suits were first introduced in the 17th century (I think, it's been years, could have been the 18th) from Persia, and the caught on like wildfire, probably because they're actually more comfortable than the business and formal attire of the day, among other reasons. Suits are cut to emphasize certain "erogenous zones": expanding the chest and shoulders in men, for example, and frequently more fitted towards the waist, making the wearer appear larger and more powerful. The use of shoulder pads and wide lapels at various points in fashion history also have served to enhance bulk and give the illusion of power. This tradition is older than the suit; before men were wearing suits to convey their power and status, they were stuffing their codpieces.

The conventions regarding womens clothing over time have been even more stupid. Don't even get me started about panniers, corsets and bustles. Even the designs of modern women's professional attire objectifies the body. Consider how short skirts are seen as more sleek and professional than very long ones and pants suits, and high heels are more professional than flats, emphasizing the length of the leg. What long legs have to do with professionalism in either men or women is beyond me.

This much I know, anyone who expects me to show a little leg in order to prove my professional competence deserves what they get because I haven't shaved my legs in years! Huzzah!

It's trendy nowadays to get all huffy and complain about the objectification of womens bodies in fashion design, but it happens with men's clothes too. Not that I give a fat damn, or think that it's worth hurling insults and making personal judgements about. Either way, they're just clothes. I'd be just as happy if we all went around naked. Well, except in New York winter. The point is, we'd all look just as stupid, and it'd actually be less sexual. Or maybe you guys should just go back to stuffing your codpieces.

m6m, I'd kind of like to hear your explaination regarding "hysterical women", too.

 

Mozart, huh? WOW, thanks!!

Humor aside, the last paragraph needs to be a little provocative, not only to plant the seed deeper, but to provoke further discussion.

Short on time, I have to pack a lot of visual imagery in a short space.

And it would be a comical statement, except that the anxieties generated by our inadequacy causes a neurotic methodical organization of aggression and violence that now threatens the life of every child on this planet.

Women are the first to repond with fear, but men are all too often very close behind in their fear-driven response.

Also, I use phases such as 'like hysterical women', 'effeminate fears', 'spineless', 'submission to hierarchical authority', 'seeking the security and authority of the patriarchal father-figure', to rub-in the fact that fear-driven civilized man does not live-up to our subconscious male archetype of the fearless male.

And to bring forcefully up to our conscious awareness that subconsciously we know we are inadequate as men, and that civilization is an expression of deep feelings of latent homosexuality that haunt all inadequate men.

Archetypal analysis is not the same as stereotyped judgements of moral values.

But those who most desperately cling to delusions of our suited superiority will always attempt to reduce any analysis to judgement, and any collective archetype to a stereotype.

Appropriate only because it is fashion, and fashion is no accident!!

 

Wow, it's not that big a deal. They're just clothes. If some man get off by wearing a tie who gives two shits? If you want to adress the issue of the overly agressive and machismo filled man, driven to compensate, through actions and appearance, for his "latent homosexuality," (and I'm not quite sure why thats so bad except that it's latent) then go for it. But address it at the source, instead of needlessly trying to enlighten those who are forced to take on this facade because of their fear of rebellion or those that simply think it's a smart way to dress.
Besides, isn't the thought of man as a calloused rugged laborer one of those "puffed-up projections of our male identity."

You know what a suit says? "I spent time and money on my clothes" No more, no less.

Do you think you can't go to work "carrying hundreds of heavy asphalt roofing bundles every day through-out the hot summer" in a vest and tie? Think about it.

 

It's crap like this why I find psychology and philosophy completely lame when taken to seriously and literally. Most people who are into it like you apparently are are fanatical about it just like those into religion and truly believe that they are so much more 'evolved' than those who don't look into things so deeply. They study and study and study and say yep, this is the exact reason why people act certain ways.

There is some merit to it all, but for fucks sake, being so into it as to define the psychology behind the how, where and why of what people wearing suits is all about is pretty damn ridiculous.

Go about your business digging trenches wearing your dungarees and haines t's and I'll go about mine wearing a suit. I promise you I work just as hard as you do. Wearing a suit has nothing to do with it nor the fact that I do so have any revelance to who I am as a person and it sure as shit has no play on whether or not I'm submissive and am failing at following my own unique 'spirit path' or I'm hiding my 'sexual inadaquacies' beneath my CK pinstripes.

 

If the suited man wasn't a collective archetype, wasn't the ubiquitous symbol of the suppossed success and confidence of hierarchical man, then you would be absolutely right, it would be a waste of time.

But it is an archetype, and analysing archetypes reveal alot about our collective subconscious impulses and motives.

However, our conscious motives for wearing something that happens to also be an archetype can be, and usually is, totally different from our subconscious motives, and usually especially different from our collective-subconscious motives.

I didn't like it either when I first started reading Jung and Freud, but the boys of Madison Avenue spend three-hundred billion dollars a year successfully manipulating our Freudian impulses.

That's totally right, it is one of those projections.

And I used the technique of using one projection against the other projection.

I just wanted to torpedo the suited 'I'm such a hard worker' superiority complex, before I went after the pathos of male sexual-identity within hierarchical social environments.

Which is all part of the interior landscape of the suited archetype.

 

Thanks for elaborating.

Your projections has one large gap inbetween that can cause misgivings in some who do wear suits. You've superimposed one image on another to expose a superiority complex which is supposed to give way to an undeniable weakness. The ultimate "latent sexuality".

There's unconscious, subconscious, conscious and superconscious. Over-application of Freudian theories are a bit on the nutcrack end. Nevetheless, I'm glad to see your posts.

What are your thoughts on the pathos of male sexual-identity within hierarchical social environments? Let me guess.. there once was a man named The Godfather.. [here enter all hysterical women whose deepest desire is to achieve (meaning grovel and service?) MANLY (but wait! latent effeminate homosexual) boss and protector].

 

Psychoanalysis is dead in everything except literature.

 

We all have what we consider very legitimate motivations for putting on suits, as we do with all fashions.


These legitimate and true motivations are what we call conscious motivations.

But our legitimate conscious motivations are only half-truths.

They are only those truths that our Ego safely allows us to project into a society whose social environment is this hyper-competitive hierarchy of ours.

But those motivations that are not so flattering, and can be used in our competitive society to make us look bad socially, are erased from our conscious mind, and are instead repressed deep into the subconscious, as if they never existed.

And, should anyone dare to drag-up our repressed subconscious motivations, we deny they exist, and instead drag-out the list of our acceptable conscious motivations as proof to dispell any doubt on the matter.

Moreover, when we are part of a group, the aggregate of all our individual subconscious motivations become even more powerful as collective subconscious motivations.

It is these more powerful collective motivations that generate the social environment where we are compelled to wear fashions such as suits to begin with.

The gap is because the superiority complex is the incomplete half of the inferiority/superiority complex.

It's called a complex because it contains two or more variables, in this case deep feelings of inferiority are compensated by the neurotic preoccupation to constantly feel superior.

The unconscious and the subconscious are interchangable terms for the same interior space within our psyche.

Ego erases all of our uncomfortable truths from our conscious minds, and hides those truths by repressing them deep into the depths of our subconscious mind.

One difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is that, unlike the conscious mind, the subconscious mind doesn't lie, it can't lie, it doesn't know how to lie.

Superconscious, if I remember, is our collective social conscious more often refered to as the SuperEgo.

SuperEgo reinforces the repression of our individual Egos with the combined weight of social and peer presure.

In one word, repressed.

To that, you can add these: Fear-driven, insecure, inadequate, self-castrating, latently homo-sexual, and thus and finally, Patriarchal!

Hysteria is an over-exaggeration technically, but it does fit the common perception of woman responding fearfully to danger.

In a fearful environment, woman is subconsciously motivated to return to the security and authority of the father.

Thus, she seeks the security and authority of a hierarchical alpha-male father-figure.

The irony is, that those males who are the most neurotically preoccupied with alpha-male ambitions, are motivated by the need to compensate for a greater sense of inadequacy.

Yet, in a fearful environment, men, unfortunately, also become 'hysterical' and are willing to castrate themselves by also becoming obedient to the authority of whoever can at least appear as an alpha-male.

Thus creating a social environment that ends up making a woman's apparently irrational choice rational.

 

Wow, that's pretty insulting.

 

Mother nature's no insult, and the natural facts of life is we're all too human.

How can we claim to be compassionate if we can't love each other for the reality of who we are, but love only if it fits the pretty phantasies we prefer about ourselves.

Oh, by the way, your post about why suits are cut the way they are was great, I read it three times.

 

Good suit or sport coat makes me feel more attractive. Beyond that it's a grown up look. Every man should own a few suits, and sport coats. I even suggest thrift stores if you're down for that sort of thing. I am. One of my favotite sport coats I wear is from Kohls and I paid $40 Usd for it. And as it's been explained here, women like it! Cheers.

 

I prefer wearing one

 

I haven't owned one since the 60's--last time I needed one for a funeral--I rented one.( dammit,I'm so fuckin' okie sometimes)

 

Well, I do own one. I just don't wear it.

 

uggh, I've certainly given some observation to your views since last posting in this thread and re-visiting this again, I think you are WAY over analyzing things with your views.

I've made it quite clear that I have no issues what so ever wearing a nice suit to work. Outside of work, I'm about as casual as a person as you can find. Shorts and T-shirts are the norm for me this time of year.

If your drivel about heirarchical social environments and pathos of male sexual-identity are so dead on, explain to me this. There are several eastern european men who work at my hotel. Due to their lack of command of the english language, they work in positions such as dishwashers, housekeepers and maintenance where verbal guest contact is minimal. Their uniform is pretty standard industrial dickies pants and work shirts.

You know what though? ALL of them show up to work and leave from work in suits. Whenever I see them outside of work, they are wearing suits too.

Interesting to look at. I wear shorts and T-shirts outside of work and a suit at work. They wear fine suits outside of work and the equivalent of shorts and t-shirts at work.

My point is that some people wear suits because they like the way they look in them. Its that simple. Their really isn't a an 'absolute given' psychology or sociologically reason why people wear certain things.

People who psycoanalyze simple things such as dress like you have here and speak in absolutes about them drive me nuts. It especially drives me nuts when you cut down those of us who do wear suits to work and suggest that we don't work physically as hard as those that don't. Ask any dishwasher in the hotel I work at, I bust my ass in my blue stripe Nautica as much or more so than anyone else. What I wear has nothing to do with how hard I work physically.

In conclusion, some people wear suits because they like to wear a fucking suit. It's that simple. No need to overanalize why they do so and speak in big words on a website to validate your anti-establishment angst driven beliefs.

 

uggh, again, people who speak in absolutes drive me nuts. they tend to spew info to others because they want us to open our conscious minds, yet they themselves are the most close minded thinkers of them all who rarely think for themselves and result to speaking big words from the text books of crazy men. Such preaching really isn't all that different from overzealous religion fanatics or as I dissaffectionately refer to them - jesus freaks.

I still believe in individuality and that that is what's human. Nurture/society ect does play apart in peoples choices, but nothing is ABSOLUTE. It's unfortunate many psycologists and psychiatrists think in such terms. They'd do a lot more good if they'd listen to their patients for what they have to say instead of comparing what they want to hear to the case studies they've read.

 

Absolute belief in the comforting deceptions of everyday normality replaces individuality and self-determination with nothing more than Ego’s survival strategy of safe social conformity.

Fashions of mass conformity make us feel socially acceptable, and help us to hide our basic primate motivations behind the comforting fabric of our SuperEgo’s fabricated collective deceptions.

But, when we begin to see through the transparent nakedness of the Emperor’s New Cloths, we begin to liberate ourselves and future generations from slavish fear-driven conformity to become for the first time a healthy realized individual.

It should be no suprise that Eastern Europeans should desire to conform to hierarchy's fashion dictates, or that they would feel comfortable tying neutered limp phallic symbols around their necks.

Eastern Europeans, even slightly more than other Europeans, have been bent-over and raped by a fear-driven sadistic hierarchical authority for hundreds of generations.

To expect such men to stand erect as realized individuals is as unrealistic as expecting them to create a healthy wholistic non-hierarchical communalism in a mere two generations.

We all saw how pathetically ineffective their classless communal efforts were, and that’s to be expected, not only from East Europeans, but from all men born and bred to submissively serve hierarchical authority.

And it’s to be expected that such effeminate submissiveness would reveal itself in their fashions of preference.

The provocation was designed to strike a raw-nerve within inadequate male identities exposing their desperate attempts to compensate by clinging to a deceptive work-ethic.

A deceptive work-ethic whose repressed sexual motivations are but an unhealthy by-product of our work-ethic's most powerful subconscious impulse---an impulse to avoid life, and fulfill the death-wish common to un-healthy and mentally imbalanced creatures.

The harder Ego represses our individual spirits to ensure our survival, the more we, the-repressed-individual, subconsciously desires our liberation through death.

The unhealthy paradoxical psycho-dynamic of hierarchical man!