Woman who do not wear head coverings at church are not defying anything. Let’s be perfectly clear on that point lest we mislead folks.
Second, now that you are past 20, you should have learned that hat wearing at mass is not acceptable. It sounds like a temper tantrum stomping around screaming, “I should be able to wear a hat if I want! Women can so why can’t I? I’m a big boy now!”
All just to show the point that his wife should ( in his opinion) wear a head covering at church? Bullying his wife not leading her.
To the OP, I say - go ahead, wear that hat to church. Risk having the priest make mention of it by not displaying proper respect. Not something I would do just to make MY point - but have at it. We all have free will ( and so does the wife).
Let’s be slightly more clear than your perfection: uncovered women are not defying any positive law of the Church. They
are however, defying
many centuries of liturgical tradition, with roots dating back, if the Bible is a trustworthy source
, to Christianity’s infancy. That tradition, having as it does scriptural recommendation, is even stronger than the tradition of men uncovering their heads. Why, then, do you act as if the tradition for men is sacrosanct but the tradition for women is freely mutable?
Just as there is no canonical requirement that women cover, there is no requirement for men to bare their heads (outside of rubrics for ministers). And as the examples I offered seek to demonstrate, there are plenty of young people out there who simply have not inherited a culture in which wearing hats indoors - even in churches - is unacceptable. Yet when those young men and boys come into a church you propose browbeating them for breaking a norm of a culture which increasingly is not theirs, all the while saying that exerting pressure on women to conform to a tradition with actual biblical warrant is unthinkable.
Let’s try to make the cases equal - the rules regarding hats are only recently weakening, so let’s think ourselves back to 1965 (18 years, BTW, before women could legitimately stop covering their heads at Mass). We’re all under the mistaken impression that there is no longer any requirement that women cover their heads. Still, we know that socially it’s just disrespectful for her to attend Mass uncovered, just like the Romans won’t let an individual in shorts into one of their churches. Would you then say the woman was disrespectful for worshiping uncovered despite the lack of precept? If you would, then would you be okay with decades of disrespect resulting in a new norm? Would any one individual have been justified in breaking the cultural norm in the name of evolving standards? I think the answers to these questions need to be applied equally to the situation of men’s and women’s heads, and I think the fact that they are not is what the OP was trying to point out. Even if I’m wrong about the OP,
I would still like to point out the double standard involved. And for the record, I never pressure my sometimes veiled wife to be more consistent with the practice.
And, if his wife asks him “Honey, does this outfit make me look fat?”, his answer should be “You look beautiful as ever in it, dear wife!”.