I’ll grant you I find it mildly offensive when I see a young man walking down the street and it looks like he’s about one sneeze away from walking out of his pants because they are seven sizes too big…
That said, I think it’s your right to dress like an unemployable idiot if you want to.
Seriously, this really feels like a freedom of speech issue to me–I’m not sure government has any business telling you what you can and cannot wear in your private life.
The argument that as a style it came from prison clothing doesn’t hold much water with me. After all, if the trend among male prisoners was to shave their heads, would they pass city ordinances that required all men to have a certain length of hair?
If you walk around in just your underwear, there are towns which
will ticket you for indecent exposure. If it were just “baggy” pants,
there’d probably be no way they could make these sort of laws (at
least not constitutionally), but I’m sure there’s enough indecent
exposure precedent to disallow showing your arse by dropping
your pants too low.
Honestly, I can’t believe that this style is still around. People were
complaining about it when I was in high school 15 years ago. It
should be passé by now…
Dave Barry, in one of his year-end summaries, said something to the effect, “By this time next year teenagers will be dragging their pants behind them.”
I’m with you, James, it’s none of my business, nor any legislatures’ for that matter, how anyone wears his pants. I think lawmakers pass stuff like this when they’re procrastinating over doing something difficult but important. Passing a budget, for example.
Personally, I’ve had it up to here (holds right hand parallel to ground, high above head) with US (that’s “us” and “U.S.”) making laws to prevent people from being stupid. I like the “unemployable idiot” thing. It really hits home. My brother has dredlocks. Now, I’ve seen some very nice dreds - on black people. My brother is very white, with blond hair, and his dreds make his hair look like it got caught in an electric mixer. While he assures me it’s clean (and I tend to believe him), it looks like hell, and he’ll never get a job at the front desk of a hotel (not that he’d ever try, either).
All this said, should there be a law against dredlocks, because it harks back to Rastafarianism, which allows pot smoking (reference needed), and that’s illegal here and now?!
Absolute Rubbish!
Now, I have long hair (very long - when it’s “out”, it’s to my waist), which I keep neatly in a braid all the time. I work for a software company, so I can pretty much get away with it. However, I’m well aware that with my appearance being what it is, I could never win a public office. And I’m not stupid enough to think that it doesn’t matter (whether or not it should matter is a completely different argument). I’m 38 years old, and the length of my hair has absolutely no bearing on anything in my life - right now. If suddenly I choose to enter the political arena, I would cut my hair. No questions asked.
For the same reason, I think it’s stupid that there are seatbelt and motorcycle helmet laws. If you’re stupid enough to put yourself into a motor vehicle, and travel at a high rate of speed, and not protect yourself, you’re your own worst enemy. If the only reason people will wear a seatbelt, or a bike helmet, or seatbelt their kids is because they’ll be breaking the law if they don’t and they might get a ticket, or some other rubbish, what are we teaching people? This is the lame “because I said so!” reason that we have to give our kids sometimes rather than requiring people to actually think for themselves. And don’t start attacking me with “what about protecting the children” thing. Of course we should be protecting our children. But is threatening someone with a ticket the way to teach people to buckle their kids in the back seat? Or shouldn’t we just be raising public awareness, and educating people?
Don’t know why that got me ranting - I haven’t ranted here for while - but there it is. Have I gone into rubber room territory?
I have never understood the term “indecent exposure”. What is indecent about the human body, or parts of it?
I mean, even if you take it from a religious point of view. “Created in the image of God”. So, God is indecent?
Now I have to admit clothes are practical for protection and because it can be damned handy to have pockets, but I wonder where in our evolution or development or whatever you want to call it we went from wearing animal skins for protection to deciding it was indecent not to cover certain parts of the body. And indecent is different in different cultures too. In some cultures it would be indecent to expose the ankles…
And before you ask… No, I don’t wander naked through town on a Monday morning because… Pockets are kinda’ handy, some people might take offence and I don’t want to upset anyone and… I might get arrested. (But around here it would be warm enough.)
That said, when I wear clothes (which I normally do in public), I do wear the clothes. I don’t go around with them hanging off me like I’m wearing hand-me-downs from someone twice my size and got distracted halfway through dressing. That just looks dumb, but if someone wants to look dumb, I reckon that’s his prerogative. And as long as they’re not exposing certain body parts, then even the silly laws on “indecent exposure” would not apply…
Police forces is several cities are begging cities not to ban them. They say it levels the playing field between a 16 year old hooligan and a 45 year old cop in a foot race. Apparently the young thugs often trip when their pants drop to their knees on a dead run.
Baggy pants, with gluteal crack apparent, doesn’t do it for me.
But I’m not 14, and have lived incarceration-free.
Young folk, both male and female, in the “industrialized world,” are prone to adopt styles that trip the gag-reflex of oldsters.
Let’em strut their primative wares. No laws…unless the thing starts to lurch into public nudity. Then…since all humans don’t look like Brad and
Angelina…the law will need to, er, crack down.
Any city I lived in with a council that wasted its time with shit like this, I’d be starting up a campaign to get half of them fired, because they palinly have not nearly enough to do.
You know, the whole indecent exposure argument brings up a whole different level of irony…
From what I’ve read, in previous times, public nudity, though certainly not commonly encountered, was not considered in and of itself not nearly so indecent as it is today.
I could be mistaken, but from many things I have read my impression is that in the 1800’s in the U.S. the public appearance of a naked person would have been more likely to have caused people to rush to his or her aid than to try to charge or arrest the person.
Now we live in a society where a woman can be stabbed to death in a public store and people will step over her dying body and walk away without even dialing 911.
Somewhere down the line I think we lost track of what the word “indecent” really means.
i know how to get rid of this fashion statement. old people and parents should adopt it as their own. teen-agers would look clean cut or die of mortification.
Off topic… but the reason I’ve always seen cited for seat belt and helmet laws is the cost to tax payers. Here in Texas, for example, a person may demonstrate that he has enough personal insurance to cover the cost of a potential accident and receive a sticker to put on his motorcycle license to drive without a helmet.
Seat Belts (taken mainly from > http://www.ci.vidor.tx.us/buckleup.htm> )
As you may know from experience, automobile crashes happen without warning. Every 14 seconds someone is injured in a traffic crash and every 14 minutes someone is killed. In an instant, a family’s life can change. No one can quantify the emotional cost of losing a loved one. But the financial and societal costs of crashes are both real and tangible: Crashes cost America more than $150 billion a year — an average of $580 per person. How can we reduce these costs? It’s simple: get more people to buckle up themselves and their children.
The cost of unbuckled drivers and passengers goes far beyond those killed and the loss to their families. We all pay — in higher taxes, higher health care and higher insurance costs. On average, inpatient hospital care costs for unbuckled crash victims are 50 percent higher than for those who are belted, and society bears 85 percent of those costs, not the individuals involved. Increasing national seat belt use from the current 69 percent to just 90 percent would save an estimated 5,536 lives, prevent 132,670 injuries, and save America nearly $9 billion every year.
To save lives and protect children, we must do more to raise adult seat belt use in this country. According to national crash data, when a driver is buckled up, children are buckled up 94 percent of the time; however, when a driver is unbuckled, children are restrained only 30 percent of the time. We know what works: Strong, primary-enforcement seat belt laws — those that allow police to stop and ticket a driver for not wearing a seat belt — and stronger enforcement of those laws. Stronger laws and enforcement get drivers and their child passengers buckled up. And it will save us $9 billion every year.
Some will argue that it is a matter of “personal freedom” to drive unbuckled. But the fact is, in our society personal freedoms stop where other people are injured or killed. We do not have the personal right to put another person’s life in danger, or to put an undue burden on others because we are careless with our own lives. This is especially true when it comes to children’s safety. Crashes are devastating to unbuckled children. A child unrestrained in a 30-mph crash is like a child dropped from a third-story window. We don’t let parents drop their kids from third story windows. Why would we let them jeopardize their lives in an equivalent way? It is not their right. Further, an unrestrained person is a missile in an accident, who goes shooting through the car. This increases injuries inside the car, and outside. And it costs us as taxpayers a lot more money.
Nobody is immune to the deadly and costly effects of unbuckled drivers. Traffic crashes are the leading cause of on-the-job fatalities. Crashes drive up costs for health and disability insurance and increase workers’ compensation expenses for employers. These costs are passed on to consumers. It costs us all when someone drives without a seatbelt.
Buckling up is still the most effective and immediate way to save lives and reduce injuries from crashes on America’s roadways. Unlike so many of the complex problems facing America today, we have the solution. It is so simple: just buckle up. And because we are all personally affected when even one person does not buckle up, we all must be a part of the solution.
I don’t think he’d get far before he started shedding hardware if ha actually tried to walk like that. And his right leg might just look a little stiff…
My take probably belongs in the rubber room. That said, there is already the so-called crime “driving while black.” Now some places want to make another one for their books, “walking while black.”
That said, these pants are embarrassingly distracting. A man has to hold them up with one or both hands, or they will slip to the knees while walking or getting up from a seat. It is overtly sexual. On public transit it borders on disgusting.
I’m sure it is affiliated with black males in other areas, but it isn’t around here. The pants style in question (with the waist line around or below the butt) is associated with hoodlums who have nothing better to do than harass other people, and it is just as likely that they’ll be Hispanic, Black, White, or other.
Clothing styles don’t seem to break along racial lines as much as they do along economic lines around here.
