From this story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030530/80/e17da.html
The stupid Swazi king is blaming trouser-wearing women for the world’s ills.
For all I know this may well be tucked away in the OT, but does anyone have the actual text?
Deuteronomy 22
5 A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this.
Cool, thanks. So it doesn’t specify what men’s or women’s clothing actually is?
I wonder also if the Lord God appreciates King Swazi’s selection of his TENTH wife (or eleventh?) from a topless video?
No, it doesn’t specify what men and women’s clothing is. If I recall correctly, pants/trousers weren’t even invented at the time of Deuteronomy. They weren’t know in the west until 1200 or 1300 or so.
So, in theory, if you had a culture were pants were women’s clothing and skirts were men’s clothing, then under that Biblical text it would be wrong for the men to wear the pants and the women the skirts.
Another case of man reading his own ethnocentrism into a holy text.
One of my mother’s friends was rebuked by her pastor for wearing trousers to church.
Her response was to go to Marks&Spencers and buy a pair of ladies trousers.
She gift-wrapped them as gave them to the pastor.
He opened the parcel and said “I can’t wear these, they’re ladies trousers”.
She replied “My point exactly!”
irishgirl - what a fantastic woman! I bet he never commented on her clothes again 
irishgirl - cute story!
istara - I think that Bible passage was probably intended to forbid impersonating a person of the opposite sex. But that’s just my guess.
I just can’t see the threat of a woman wearing pants. What could possibly be the objection? If anything, it would seem that there’s less hooha access with pants than with a dress or skirt.
The objection, as explained to me by my mother (who used to carry a pair of trousers in her large purse and change from skirt to said trousers as soon as she was out of view of her mum), is that the trousers outline a woman’s shape in a way that a “proper” skirt does not. I really don’t get it, but, whatever.
That passage is talking about dressing to look like the opposite of whatever gender you are.
A truly fun story IrishGirl
I think SnoopyFan and LadyDisco are right. If pants on women are all right by whatever culture (nowadays, most of them) then God’s ok with it.
Asked and answered.