So let's say that it suddenly becomes too warm to keep on the sweater you've been wearing, so you take it off, but you don't have anywhere to stow it or you're worried it may suddenly become cold again soon. So you've just kind of got this sweater that you're carrying around, that you have to keep track of, irritatingly ensuring you probably aren't going to have both hands free while walking.

Solution: tie the arms of the sweater around your waist into a kind of makeshift belt, leaving the body of the sweater just hanging off of you kiltlike, and stop having to worry about it. Unless you for some reason wind up running a lot and the knot starts to loosen, you can put that sweater OUT OF YOUR MIND!!

I like doing this. It's convenient, etc., and definitely preferable to your other options here, which would be slinging it over your shoulder clumsily until it falls off or, horiffically, tying a sweater around your neck so it just kind of hangs down your back, which is in my most humble opinion quite possibly the most pretentious single statement that humans are capable of expressing through clothing. I'm not sure why; just seems that way to me. Plus if you do any movement at all, the sweater falls backward and the knot lands against your throat, vaguely choking you in a fairly irritating way. So that's out.

For some reason, though, there is this bizarre social stigma in males attached to the whole sweater-kilt-tying meme. People don't much express this stigma outwardly or really even think about it, but still seem to avoid wearing a sweater this way because of some kind of mental link between the skirt-like appearance of the thing and some kind of deadly effeminacy. I think this is just kind of silly; i mean, come on, is it really worth having to deal with carrying the sweater all over the place? Is your personal sense of dignity as defined within a wholly arbitrary societally-imposed value system really more important than convenience? (And anyway, i'm of scottish descent, and i happen to think kilts are really cool. So shut up.)

If accosted by closed-minded individuals for your choice of unusable-sweater-disposal methods, you may be able to find some form of vindication by pointing out that in the movie Mallrats, the main character guy ties a sweater around his waist upon entering the mall for the first time and keeps it there for the rest of the movie (which ought to provide any necessary stamp of legitimacy as far as "coolness" goes), and then deflecting any further comments by acting as if anyone who doesn't like Kevin Smith movies is not worth talking to anyway.

deep thought says that where he comes from, they call sweaters that have been used this way "buttwraps".

The above writeup fails to mention what is arguably an even more subtle and treacherous stigma against the sweater kilt. Many males, upon seeing a woman wearing her sweater or jacket in this configuration, will immediately conclude that she is trying to 'hide her fat ass' (as the opinion is most commonly expressed). This is not an entirely unfounded prejudice, as tying a sweater or jacket this way does indeed have the effect of concealing or at least disguising the true size, small or large, of the behind.

Some self-conscious women (and indeed many men too) make deliberate use of the technique for exactly this purpose. Others figure that most people will see right through the sweater trick, and that many will take it almost as a guarantee of the aforementioned 'fat ass' lurking somewhere beneath; these people refuse to ever wear their sweater this way for fear they will misrepresent themselves. It is a sad fact that such reasoning on both sides of the gender divide is allowed to dictate behavior, even when the alternatives offer the many practical advantages described by mcc.

The sweaterkilt is also a feature of contradancing, in that it instantly changes the sex of the person wearing it (for dancing purposes). Let me explain.

Contradancing is done in (multiples of) two long lines, one of men and one of women, evenly matched into partners, who alternate dancing with their partner and successive members of the opposite line. Let's say that there's a dance going on and a few singletons show up: usually no problem, because people are usually switching partners every dance, and a few sit out and clap anyway. But maybe you'll get a lot more men than women or (it could happen) women than men. Big problem. Unless...

I've often thought, since the contras are a way to get all the interested parties of a village in each others' arms, at least for a few moments, whether this, or some similar ruse (I've heard of armbands used to the same effect) wasn't used by some gay men (and women, too) to secretly gain a little time in the arms of their loves...

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