Tim Bradbeer gives guys a top hat and tail coat guide for dressing at formals.
My female friends often whine to me how easy it is for men. Ball season comes along, and while women have to stress and worry about what dress to wear, us men get to sit back and relax, knowing exactly what to wear. Easy.
Well you would think this is the case, but the number of times I have seen guys going to an event with a clear black tie dress code, wearing jeans, or a bright blue suit, or no tie at all is unacceptable It’s really frustrating because what to wear and what not to wear for men is so easy, but people still manage to get it wrong.
Now I am all for the metrosexual revolution (having died my hair ginger – intense mango, to be precise – to the disgust of my friends, I am certainly not one to advocate fading into a crowd), but there is a time, a place, and a way to stand out without looking a twat. Maybe get a funky bow tie, a flower for the button hole etc, but when an event clearly states what to wear, not doing so is just frankly rude. If you want to wear chinos, go to Arena, not Buckingham Palace.
Image Credit: uk.askmen.com
As we all seem to live in Exetaaah, it would be easy to see this as a class issue. Some could view male dress codes as a design to out-price the majority of men, in order to keep a ‘quality’ clientele. I disagree with this wholeheartedly; it is not an issue of class or money, but rather of knowledge. Most of the black tie faux-pas I have witnessed in Exeter have been at some of the ‘rah-iest’ events of the year, showing that ‘perceived’ class has nothing to do with it. My dinner jacket is from Marks and Spencer for goodness sake (and washable too!).
All that men need to look fashionable, smart, sexy and, most importantly, appropriate for the occasion, is a little guide to what each dress code really means. And here it is! (You can thank me later)
SMART CASUAL:
Chinos, shirt, no tie, NO JEANS.
SMART:
Suits (like you’d wear to work) and ties.
JACKET AND TIE:
This one’s obvious, but do make sure you don’t just wear a suit. Wear chinos, a tie and some sort of stand-alone jacket (sport, tweed, herringbone, etc).
BLACK TIE:
Black dinner jacket (Americans call this a tux), a bow tie (any colour you like), BLACK trousers, BLACK shoes. This one is the easiest but also the one men get the most wrong.
And for those really special occasions, they should push the boat out!
MORNING SUITS:
A morning suit (jacket with tails), top hat (optional).
WHITE TIE:
(This is the equivalent of morning suit but worn during the evening).
Jacket with tails, white bow tie, white waistcoat, wing collar shirt. Tiaras, crowns and military honours also would be nice as an addition if owned.
So, there it is. Now the summer is here, go out, look great, don’t look like a twat – top hat optional.
Picture this: A small IT firm set up in Exeter employs four people and due to growing demand for its technical products is looking to employ a fifth member. This will be a skilled job and will require some training, and the interview process has narrowed down the candidates to a 28 year old man and a 28 year old woman with identical skills and potential; who does the firm pick?
Much has been done in terms of employment law in the past decade to address the inequality, both in wages and in treatment between the genders. However, much of the legislation has proved counter-productive and often harmful to prospective female workers, especially for those employed in small businesses. Consider the case of maternity leave. An employer has to pay six weeks of 90% pay and then up to another thirty three of £135.45 a week (or 90% still whichever is lower) for an employee who during that time contributes £0 to the company. That can mean thousands of pounds shelled out to an employee while in the meantime a replacement has to be found. A worker to cover the lost manpower is often very difficult to recruit as the work is only to be for a short period of time and especially for skilled jobs this is often both difficult and expensive.
Furthermore, many women lose the willingness to go back to work and want to stay with their child; while the company’s outlay on maternity pay will be decreased, the disruption of their long term plans is not healthy for business plans. For men, paternity pay can be an inconvenience, but as it only lasts two weeks, the impact on the business is minimal. For large companies employing thousands of workers, the small numbers on leave at any one time, providing they are not in important areas, will have much less effect, but for a small business, especially in harsh times, this can prove catastrophic. So, back to Exeter’s IT firm: why should they employ the woman?
Girl, Assaulted.
– On how sexual violence is never consensual.
Photo credits to Swamibu
I am too nice.
Or rather, I am not too nice in a general sense but instead too nice to one particular sex, because apparently social, or should I say sexual, etiquette now requires that the pleasantries of daily life be applied only to members of one’s own gender. Well, cheers for the warning…
Yes it is true, whilst quietly ambling my smiley way along the path of life I appear to have unwittingly stumbled across the final frontier of sexual politics. Allow me to rewind: the year 2012 has seen me land myself in some rather sticky situations – and not the kind I (granted, optimistically) anticipated or desired. Contrary to my usual lot in love, i.e I’m planning the wedding and they still haven’t accepted my friend request, I have recently been on the receiving end of unrequited feelings; and pretty it ain’t.
So how did this terrible tragedy worthy of Ancient Greek theatrics come to pass? Well I happened to make myself some rather wonderful male friends. Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? We exchanged many a joyful smile, a happy tale, feelings of mutual understanding cemented over a pint here, or a cup of tea there. All appeared to be good with the world, until BAM, it all came falling down in epic catastrophe when they went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I love you’ (relating me and them to the beautiful Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman is a bit of a stretch but roll with it). Now, of course I totally understand that feelings cannot be controlled and I for one have always advocated honesty in all situations, however I was then made to feel guilty when such emotions were not reciprocated. Oh yes, I was charged with the most depraved crime of all: leading someone on. I, my friends, was a bitch. Ouch.
Photo credits to Marsmet451
Now, forgive me if I’m missing something here, but this is surely less an issue of a ‘naïvely’ friendly girl like I and more the problem of some hitherto uncharacterised breed of man which appears to be platonically inept. A smile is not an invitation; a cup of tea is not a contract. If I were to interact in the same way with a woman not a question would be asked. A penis changes nothing.
In layman’s terms: I don’t want to sleep with you. I don’t want to marry you. I’m just being nice.
Jeez.
But, this is where things get serious… because such stories do not always end there, and as I have learnt the hard way these seemingly harmless situations can take a turn for the sinister. I was sexually assaulted just over a month ago, and the most ridiculous thing about it all is that it has taken me a month to convince myself that someone putting their hand down my leggings and ripping off my underwear constituted a sexual assault. Such is the peril of accepting casual sexism as ‘a part of life’. All I knew is that walking home that night I felt so ashamed; not ashamed of what had happened but ashamed of myself: that I was someone who invoked such behaviour, that I was she who was deemed the type of girl who would accept such infringement of my bodily agency.
Dazed and confused I couldn’t speak of what had happened to me, but I knew that I had to confide in someone. Alas, naïve little utopian me could never in a million centuries have foretold the response I would get:
‘You should have seen it coming, you’re just too friendly’
And so I shut up and boxed up, racked with self-doubt and even guilt, determined to never talk about it again. But I couldn’t forget, and suddenly in the abyss of the grey area I was awakened by the black and white that had been screaming at me all along. This act was NOT consensual.
‘You should have seen it coming, you’re just too friendly’.
‘She was wearing a short skirt, so she deserved to get raped’.
No matter how much a man argues that a woman was smiling at him, batting her eyelids or wearing revealing clothing this will never afford him the right to treat her body as his own, or to assume her desire for sexual contact. Our society’s craving for hurly-burly macho men has for too long been complicit in the validation of sexual violence; a sexual violence that is all too often concealed under the mask of ‘joking around’.
And herein lies the age-old conundrum: how can a woman stand against an issue that is so often dismissed as simply an – if slightly pervy – act of fooling around? How is a woman supposed to lambaste an institution which makes jokes of wolf-whistling, bra un-doing, arse groping and breast ogling and which defends itself against its discontents with a rather (un)colourful vocabulary of “frigid”, “slut”, “cock tease” and all those in between? Can such women really be blamed for their hesitation in seeking justice when a line so visible and logical is so frequently blurred on a patriarchal whim?
But we know that these men cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. We must hold them accountable for their actions if we are to hold any hope of pursuing a society where all are free, and where violence does not equal power.
So what to do of this problem? … Off with his balls? Hang him from the nearest bridge? Put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his days?
But somehow I feel uncomfortable with this course of action; I know that this brutality cannot be forgotten but I’m at a loss as to how I can regain peace of mind after such a violation of my sense of self.
And so instead I pick up my pen. It may not be the perfect solution, but it’s a start. One woman slapping a man round the face, however satisfying that may be, will only serve to scrape the surface of an issue which runs deep into the make-up of our society; a society which consistently opts to blame the female in order to deny the crimes of the male. I don’t have all the answers, I wish I did, but I do know that two wrongs can never make a right and that instead we must find a way together to confront this mentality which on a daily basis endorses the defilement of women in the name of the oldest alibi in the book: ‘banter’.
The wise and beautiful Kimya Dawson once sang:
‘I want to bash your head in with a crowbar, but the cycle of violence has to end somewhere’.
So what’s been getting me all hot under the collar, I hear you cry? (Well, not cry of course – we all know real men don’t do that). Well, I am afraid to say that I have a bone to pick with the male race, one which involves the age old notion of availability.
Before you get all defensive I am not writing in reference to the rather girly idea of emotional availability. I myself am often privy to the attentions of already attached males (married, coupled up etc). I do concede that everyone needs a little fun and flirtation in their lives but it appears to me that such men think little of the destruction they cause along the way.
The sad truth is Gents, that the girl involved rarely sees the liaison for the all too brief distraction that it is to you. A bit of ‘harmless’ texting here, a dashing of sexual innuendo there and BAM… She’s fallen. Yes, it really is that simple. If the female community had a pound for every exchange of those dreaded words: “He’s never going to leave her for you…” Well, we’d probably just have all of you killed off, and IVF our years away in a pink-hued heaven.
Now far be it from me to be tangential here lads, but there is another cruel twist to this saga of subterfuge. Namely that it would be nice to be able to walk down the street every now and then without fear of your ever-so-psycho other half deciding to use you as an unwilling participant in her demonstration of a public lynching.
I don’t want to break any hearts out there but this simply has to be said: You are not 007, you are not MI5/CIA or even KGB – you are [insert generic name here] and somewhere along the line you will get found out. However, us girlies still like to believe that the sun shines out of your proverbial and that you are a little lost lamb who can never be blamed for his misguided actions.
So, who gets the blame? That’s right (crikey, you guys are quick learners) – the girl, the ‘temptress’, Belle du Freakin’ Jour. So, not only do we have to deal with the ‘love of our life’ (sorry, it’s a girl thing) turning out to be, let’s face it, a bit of a turd, we also have Lady Macbeth and, undoubtedly, the rest of the female race on our case. Oh yes, hell hath no fury greater than a woman scorned (kudos, William Congreve). We are pariah-ed, damaged goods, sluts. Our only consolation being the abolishment of burning at the stake in 1790.
So as you can see, finding oneself to have become ‘the other woman’ is a situation which is certainly less than ideal and one which holds absolutely no hope whatsoever for a future romance. And yet I am most ashamed to say that, when found in such a situation, I also never want to believe it. Oh yes, we fall for it time and time again. When the realisation finally hits -(usually when Mr The-One very suddenly becomes Mr Where-Da-Hell-Has-He-Gone?) the damage has already been done. Cue heartbreak, duvets, Titanic and chocolate. Not to mention the all consuming guilt you feel for being duped into breaking the bonds of sisterhood. It’s not pretty, I can tell you.
So lads, next time you feel the urge to wink at that cute blondie in the Ram, or chat up some bodacious babe in Arena, spare a thought for the delicate hearts you are playing with. Because I can tell you now, that while you go home to tuck yourself up in bed with your chosen one, a poor girl like me goes back to her empty bed and spends the next three days crying into her cornflakes and playing the infamous anthem of reluctant mistresses: “Don’t marry her, have me.” (Beautiful South, you should check it out).
So, dear friends, as we come to the end of this lesson, I shall conclude this humble offering of the naked truth, of the elephant in the room, of the intricacies and complexities of the human spirit, with the immortal words of none other than your friend and mine – Fatman Scoop: Be faithful. Please?
exeposedev 