Dresses v. Pants

Grandma and I have been on the go since the lobster dinner. (Yes, the lobster was good. It's hard for me to consider any lobster bad, except for when it's a whole lobster (not just tails) and it's a female and they have the eggs inside that are all smeary greenish-black and icky. In the words of dear Grandma, "Blech.")

Hmm. Is that sexist, to not like the female lobsters for their reproductive smeariness? Maybe if I were taught from a young age to like the green-black goo, I would love it. Anyway.

Yesterday we went shopping for 7 hours. 7 hours! I do not like shopping, and I especially do not like it for 7 hours. But it was very sweet to watch my grandma, whose favorite food is ice cream, enjoy her ice cream soda during a brief break. She was in what can only be described as some sort of tantric trance. And then we went to dinner at a fancy-ish restaurant. I wore pants and a silk top, which prompted the following observations from grandma:

Grandma: "Is that what you're wearing?"

Me: "Yes."

Grandma: "Don't you ever wear dresses?"

Me: "No, not really."

Grandma: "I love dresses. They're my favorite. I hate pants. Blech."

Me: "I like pants. I don't really like dresses."

Grandma: "Yuck. Blech. I hate pants. They remind me of boys."

Which is not to say that Grandma hates boys, but rather, that she hates girls who wear pants and so, in her mind, look like boys. Her way, my guess, of expressing disapproval for her pant-wearing, woman-loving granddaughter in her own special passive-aggressive sort of way. The thing that I never understand about this line of thinking is that if a woman is wearing pants, or has her head shaved like I did before law school, or doesn't wear makeup or shops in the men's department, and considers herself a woman, why do we (societally) say that she "looks like a man"? Why don't we see her as a woman who wears men's clothes? And historically, do we have any sense of who the women who cross-dressed were? Was it only women who were lesbians trying to pass as heterosexual couples? Any books to recommend on this topic?

P.S. To answer massagelady's question, Grandma (sadly, in my opinion) does not have The Clapper. However, she does have a brand new cane that meets the contours of her palm in a wonderful, hi-tech kind of way.