when words lose their meaning (5)

I stumbled upon Kasmeneo’s fashion photo stream via the Sociological Images blog. Kasmeneo regularly wears women’s clothing and posts photos of his outfits on flickr. While I have no objection to him wearing women’s clothing**, I am disappointed with his choice of vocabulary to express his opinion on the matter:

Fashion is one of my major hobbies… and mainstream men’s fashion is much too boring. So I take most of my clothes and shoes from the women’s department, as there’s just much more items, styles, colors, and materials to choose from.
That’s also my personal statement regarding equal rights - they include the right of clothing choice. What you see here is what I wear everyday, at work, in town, for shopping, whatever. And I hope that publishing my pics here can convince some men that nice clothes and shoes are not a girl’s privilege. It’s all there, you just have to take it - just like the girls do with our stuff.

The term “rights”, whether “equal rights” or “human rights”, is constantly co-opted for the purposes of demanding or justifying our desires. The line between our postmodern consumer wants and the “basic rights and dignities to which all humans are entitled” is gradually blurred.

I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day “the fight for human rights” or “violation of human rights.” But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights.

~ Milan Kundera, quoted in Richard Stivers’ "The Illusion of Freedom and Equality"

If right implies choice, choice suggests desire. Indeed, right as an expansionistic concept is a metaphor for desire… Rights easily become the desires that advertising presents to us as needs, the fulfillment of which is left open to our choices.

~ “The Illusion of Freedom and Democracy” Richard Stivers

* In order to keep up with trendy summer blockbuster movies (Terminator Salvation, Star Trek) I am officially rebooting this series.
** To be fair, he makes the clear point that women do wear men’s clothing and it would be unreasonable to impose a double standard for matters of fashion. Furthermore, he actually pulls off the look fairly well. I really don't think men look that bad in skirts.