Dress Codes

 I admit, I'm an artsy type, so I know much of this only second-hand, but my impression is:

In the 1990's, many offices started the practice of Casual Friday, when things such as chinos and polo shirts were accepted in the office on Fridays, in places where everyone had previously had to wear suits. 

Different places had different policies concerning socks. Massive honkin' triceps were optional.

Whether it was acceptable not to tuck the polo shirt into the chinos before casual wear was okay any day of the week, or the other way around, I don't know, but I do know that things have become more and more casual in many offices, to the point where in many cases there are no longer any dress codes, and it would seem strange to waste any time enforcing dress codes or objecting to what someone chose to wear to work.

In many offices, none of the above-described changes have happened yet. Some workplaces have progressed only to the point of Casual Friday with the Lacoste tucked in and the belt matching the shoes and by God you better wear socks, and some have no Casual Fridays.

And, of course, this is all a white-collar phenomenon. It doesn't apply to blue-collar work. 

A completely different essay describing the time when white-collar workers actually wore white collars and blue-collar workers actually wore blue collars, could be very interesting.

Is the line between white-collar and blue-collar actually beginning to blur? Are there now jobs which are neither 100% the one or the other? I don't know.  If there are such jobs, that would sound like progress to me. It would sound as if some parts of the world were finally beginning to be allowed to see what some other parts were up to.

I was about to write that many places do not have official dress codes, but that conformity is fairly rigidly enforced by peer pressure alone, and I was about to mention the US Congress as an example. But I googled it first. Turns out they do have a dress code, and that Senator John Fetterman, wearing a hoodie and shorts these days, votes from a cloakroom adjacent to the Senate floor, not from the floor of the Senate. Also, you remember all that nonsensical outrage about Michelle Obama going sleeveless? The Congressional dress code calls for sleeves.

What is Congress actually able to do if someone violates the dress code? Is the more important question not what they can do about, but what they are likely to do about it? I mean, Fox News and the New York Post are certainly doing their upmost to stir up outrage about Senator Fetterman's hoodie and shorts, but I'd be surprised if the Senate actually took even symbolic official action against him. The guy's just out of the hospital fachrissakes.

At this point, at the very latest, some extremely progressive, but simultaneously traditionally-minded fashion-focused readers are going into tirades about the beauties of traditional business attire.

And they're right. They're right exactly as far as they own wardrobes, and no further. See, the thing is, about Casual Friday, and about abandoning dress codes altogether and officially giving your blessing to anyone dressing however they Damn well please, is, that you can still wear immaculately fabulous business suits every day, even on Fridays, because that is the whole point: you don't tell anyone that they're not dressed correctly, and they return that courtesy. You can try to keep those beautiful habits of dress alive, but you're going to have to do it on the strength of the actual beauty of the clothes. You can persuade with beauty, when dress codes are no longer there. You can no longer coerce. 

I don't hang out much in places on social media -- or for that matter, in the meat world -- where people love suits, and suits are the main topic of discussion. But they still come up every now and then. For example, when people debate whether or not it is "correct" to wear a G-Shock in the office. I myself am so far from being table to take that question seriously, that I can't even write it without quote around the word "correct."

But there are people, they still do exist, who take such things very seriously. People who are actually horrified when some wears a G-Shock with a suit. In my opinion, anyone who is horrified by that is INCAPABLE of serious thought. Well. People disagree about such things. Hopefully we can still discuss them, with respect and goodwill for all

In my opinion, there are only bad reasons for insisting that everyone in the office wear a suit (or for example, insisting that every student in the school wear a uniform). If you can get them all to dress alike, more than a century before Thorstein Veblen first pointed out how conformity of dress helps to enforce conformity in other things, it will be much easier to keep them from objecting if the firm lies, or steals, or dumps poison into the air or water, or promotes a culture of predation or hatred against its female employees or its employees of color, etc.

Self-Stimming vs "Acting Normal"

As long as I can remember, I've had a strong urge to do certain things when I'm tense. For example: rock back and forth, flap my hands, clutch my head with both hands, and make all sorts of vocal noises ranging from moaning to screeching. It relieves a lot of the tension. At some point before I was full-grown, I don't remember exactly when, I noticed that other people seemed to consider this behavior weird, and so I stopped doing it unless I was alone. I kept doing it, I just would always go off by myself first, away from everybody else, including my siblings and parents. On rare occasions the need to rock or screech or flap, or what have you, was so powerful that I would run off in the middle of a class or a date or away from a workplace. If I was asked later why I ran off, I would lie, saying it was a bathroom emergency or a sudden attack of nausea or something like that.

Then a few years ago I found out that I'm autistic, and that all of those behaviors are very typical for autistics who are wound up. Collectively they're referred to as self-stimmimg.

I don't try to hide the fact that I'm autistic -- actually, I'm diagnosed as an Asperger, but it seems to me, and apparently to a growing number of professionals in the field, that Asperger's and high-functioning autism are one and the same -- but I still generally don't do the self-stimming behaviors in front of other people. More than generally. The only exception I can think of at the moment, when I deliberately let someone see and hear the whole thing, without holding back, has been with a psychotherapist who specializes in treating autistic adults.

But I'm wondering whether I should bother to try to hide this anymore. I thought about it a lot yesterday. It was a long difficult day, and late in the day I was in a crowded public place and I felt an urgent need to rock or screech or something. Actually I couldn't stop myself from making a few unusual noises, and I clutched my head a little bit. But before I let loose completely with the self-stimmimg behavior, I got off by myself first, as usual.

If people see and hear me doing those things, they definitely will find it weird. There's no question about that. A couple of other questions occur to me, though: Does it matter if they find it weird? and: Do I already seem weird to them anyway, trying as hard as I can to "act normal"? Am I actually fooling anybody?

If a parent or caregiver of an autistic is reading this and has been wondering what to do about moaning, rocking, whooping, spinning, screeching, head-clutching, hand-rubbing and so forth, my advice is, one, let them do it, as long as it's not something that hurts them like banging their head against something hard, and two, try to find out what is stressing them, because they're doing all of those things because they're stressed. Oh, and three, don't worry if the behaviors don't stop altogether after you've addressed the sources of stress. A certain amount of it is normal even when everything is pretty much hunky-dory. Autistic, neurologically-typical or none of the above, nobody has a totally stress-free life.