The case against men's shorts in the office

July 9, 2007

There is a campaign afoot to encourage men to wear shorts to work.

No.

I think not.

Listen to me, men, because I was correct on the tie question, a matter that now has you weeping in the night for reasons you don't grasp, but you didn't listen.

It was my affection for you men that led me to warn years ago that abandoning neckties would lead to sorrow, but crucially, not a sorrow that you would be able to perceive. In other words, you would sleep with fewer women, but would never quite be able to figure out why.

Ties could hardly be more suggestive; they're the only phallic symbol possessed by the male except for the actual phallus which no one is going to see much of unless you're wearing a cool tie, preferably one designed and woven by Italians.

Casual Fridays are a sex-killer.

But men ignored me, heading for untucked-in shirts, open collars and the recent appearance of my dear friend, Fortune magazine journalist Richard Siklos, on the National holding forth on the odds that Conrad Black would go to jail for theft. Richard, a handsome man under normal circumstances, was hauled to the microphone in an unbuttoned white shirt on what appeared to be a very humid day in a Chicago studio. He looked like a mug shot brought to life, like a man caught with a fingernail of crack in Plaquemines Parish, La., and facing 45 years in the slammer. In other words, he looked like Conrad might well look, like your standard tie-less man, like a harassed salesman missing his targets, a Taliban without his little pastry hat.

Luckily, Richard is married to a beautiful woman and has a child. He netted them in his tie-wearing years when he still had gravitas.

Shorts circuit

The world moved on. I mean, it got worse. You men are now told to wear shorts to work, by men who don't care about your welfare. But I care about you.

If ties are a mental weapon for getting sex, then long pants are the basic workplace armour. They are a carapace, which is what lobsters have, and it's difficult to break into a lobster. A crustacean will be eaten eventually but the shell is its way of sneering back at you after dinner.

It's the same in the office. Most men have — how shall I put this — chicken legs. In the proper narrow pants, they are Belmondo-ish. In shorts, they are skinny and scraggly things covered in sparse hair.

Men without chicken legs have stump legs, thick, knobbly, mole-covered things that end abruptly in repellent white socks and track shoes (for there is a massive shoe problem when shorts are worn). Call them Dick Cheney legs.

If you allow shorts at work to catch on, you men are in for what we women endure: leg care. This means exfoliating, moisturizing, shaving or applying toxic hair-melter, fake tanning (a.k.a. orange patchwork), calf-shaping legercise, pedicures and toenail-shellacking.

Fun fact: Pedicures for men involve a potato-peeler device shelling thick layers of callused skin off your feet. It's nauseating to watch and sometimes ends in blood. People have died from infections picked up via the attentions of a lax foot beautician.

Is truth beauty?

Beauty is tyranny. The idea that a fine gender could volunteer for tyranny when the sorrows of women are so readily apparent leaves me flummoxed. It's only fair that men should also become harried, insecure, fretful creatures — being human, you are this already — but why volunteer to poach yourself in further self-loathing?

And why publicize it with the wearing of shorts?

Shorts have virtues. Appropriate for camp counsellors. They're a good look for dads getting kicked in the head at the playground as they lock arms to support their daughters practising cartwheels. They are sensible garments for making British prisoners of war look sweet and brave in photos of Second World War Japanese prison camps. The sexually odd Lord Baden-Powell got hundreds of thousands of little boys into shorts via the Boy Scout movement, and this was creepy but ultimately beneficial for someone, I imagine.

But you cannot do an employee evaluation while wearing shorts. If you can deliver it with a straight face, the employee receiving it can't.

And understand this, men: you may have gotten away with wrinkled T-shirts, although not in my house. But linen shirts and shorts require ironing. A board. An electric pressing device. Hours bitten out of a life.

There are always options

When I look at The Day in Pictures on www.news.bbc.co.uk, I am drawn to photos from south of the equator. Because I hate heat, sweat and dust, I am entranced by Southeast Asia, where men and women wear lightweight elegant cotton garments at all times. Nothing looks better on the human body than the shalwar kameez. Why not adopt that?

But no, we must fake the American passion for adults wearing the garments of childhood. It's my problem that I don't like sweatpants, baseball caps and jackets with hoods. I especially don't like them on that channel where women are giving birth while their husbands clog the delivery room in clothes that make them look like superannuated versions of the baby that's about to emerge from the suffering woman.

If I'm going to get legal advice from people in short pants, their underwear winking at me from beneath their sadly wrinkled cotton crotches (a fabric problem caused by shorts' lack of leg ballast), I'm going to find another lawyer.

Somewhere between baby-men in khaki shorts and terrifying women in black burqas is an attractive summer middle ground. Seek it out, men. Embrace it. And we will embrace you. Don't say you haven't been warned.