The New Middle Ages Are Upon Us: Men in Tights

This has been in the works for years, ever since as long ago as the new millennium, trend guru Lidewij Edelkoort predicted a Postmodern reversal to the Middle Ages.

Dutch magazine Elsevier this week has a view on the latest fashion accessory, after hoodies and kilts, meet the new man in tights!

The male as fashion victim makes an encouraging role reversal from a feminist point of view! Let them adorn the high street for a while as the living evidence of a distorted self image!

Read the Mail Online on the issue of leggings for men.

But the most important reversal to the dark ages is actually in the mind (no insult to the epoch intended). That has been on the cards for much longer. At least two centuries have lapsed since the onset of the reactionary Counter Enlightenment movement, the Nemesis of Spinozist free-thought!

French-Suisse philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau set in train a retro-active movement when he opined that the entire culture thing is actually a perversion of the man's natural state. Generally his ideal is assumed to be the primitive tribes person - an archetypal image known in psychology as "the noble savage".

German Romanticist thinkers, Messrs Kant and Hegel clinched the back to basics deal with their assertions about the unknowable universe and the extraordinary notion that reality entirely depends on how we look at it.

Men in tights are the cherry on the irrational cake that has been gathering pace - going from strength to strength - in the last couple of years.

As baseless, unscientific delusions get confused with profound insights into the universe and the soul of man, what used to be derided as 'old wives tales' passes today for the highest inner wisdom.

Facts are irrelevant ... reality is whatever we want it to be!