Quote:
Originally Posted by Pressing-On
Oh, okay. The pictures you posted weren't origins in ancient history. I'm not really interested, yet, at what is going on now. The pictures you posted were more modern times. I wanted to reach back further - 1500 AD and earlier.
For instance, some have stated that Chinese women in the rice fields always wore trousers, but that isn't true. It was the ancient Chinese soldiers who wore them first. It is a tedious picking, because you have to be inside of a subject to come across what you are looking for.
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I see. So you just didn't want to talk about my pictures.
It's really hard to research this subject, because reliable sources are few and far between and many of the best ones are offline. (books/libraries/universities/experts)
Personally, I think that within a culture there are understood ideas about what is feminine and what is masculine, but those ideas can't be universally applied. For centuries, many cultures have worn fairly unisex clothing with the exception of European countries, and it seems important to me to remember that the Bible was written in Hebrew--not English, French, German, etc. We so often look through things with the American or European microscope, but if you view scripture through the light of those times--when men and women wore very similar clothing according to history, you have to then wonder what even constituted cross-dressing. It had to be something more than wearing clothing that has a similar cut or flow; it had to extend into motives, mannerisms, behavior, etc.
From that perspective, the origin of women wearing pants becomes irrelevant to me, because the scripture was written in a time when men and women wore somewhat unisex clothing. That would render the popular Apostolic application rather moot. It would render discovering the origin of pants rather moot, although we can have an intellectual curiosity in any direction. (And I'm curious about it, too.) In our culture, pants are definitely not exclusively masculine, but at the same time, most of us can spot a cross dresser. Why is that? You can line up 10 women in pants and we can tell which one is truly trying to pass herself off as a man. Which woman is "manly." Occasionally, I've encountered women with masculine traits in skirts--right in Apostolic realms. Women who I had to consciously give the benefit of the doubt, because in my mind I was thinking "lesbian!"
IMO, a woman participates in cross dressing by cross dressing. By deliberately taking on manly traits and characteristics and trying to appear to others as a man. It's not so simple as putting on a pair of jeans.
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