I Don’t Take Advice from Gals on How to Be a Man
Back to what I was discussing in my post of July 30th: learning to make distinctions I haven’t been making before. After that post I got a little carried away by a tsunami of anger created by spending too much time reading men’s fashion magazines. I have to watch that stuff. Makes me crazy. However, I have to have one more quick rant, because it sets the context for some thoughts that come from my happy place.
There seems to be some weird kind of self-hatred in men’s fashion magazines. These magazines are based on the idea that a man gets some benefit from thinking about what he wears, and they always have great spreads with models (instead of celebrities) showing current and affordable clothing with thoughtful pointers on what kind of nuances to look for. But so many times these same magazines act as though spending time thinking about fashion is boring or difficult. They’re schizophrenic.
Take the article I mentioned in my last post, where three “real men” (meaning that they’re merely young, attractive, and wealthy, not famous) are interviewed about how they buy clothes. The article, written by a woman who, according to her LinkedIn page, has been out of college for all of three years, starts out by saying, “Let’s face it: Guys hate shopping.”
Let’s face it: Gals hate thinking about politics.
Look here young lady, I am a man. Why is it that calling a woman a gal would get your ass sued so fast your head would spin but it’s perfectly okay to call a man a guy? Stop using that stupid word. That is so unbelievably condescending. Imagine that I, a man, wrote an article for Vogue or Cosmopolitan that began: “Let’s face it: gals hate thinking about politics.” That’s right, you can’t imagine it, because there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that such a sexist, pigheaded moron would even get as far as a phone call with an editor at a women’s fashion magazine. But it’s okay for women to dumb all of us down, and apparently there’s so much self-hatred among men’s magazine editors that they hire twentysomething gals who think they know what it’s like to be a man.
A Men’s Vogue kind of guy: “Gimme my suit jacket, hon, I have to close this deal!”
This gal says the objective of shopping should be “to keep it swift and painless.” She says we should shop for clothes “with all the urgency of closing a deal—pick one brand, one store, or one neighborhood and knock out everything at once.” The cover of that same issue has a headline that says, “11 DEAL-CLOSING SUITS.” Ah, closing a deal, that’s a manly activity I can relate to, me being a real man and all. Can you imagine a corresponding article in a woman’s fashion magazine to act as though closing a deal is a typical feminine experience? This is an asinine stereotype of masculinity, and by the way, it’s not even a very good way to make deals. The best deals come through a patient process of back and forth, of two sides getting to know and respect each other. Only alpha males in movies urgently close deals; real men don’t. This gal wants to show us men how three men “get in, get out, and get on with their lives” as though shopping for clothes couldn’t possibly be enjoyable or meaningful. Why should I take advice on what to wear from someone who thinks shopping for clothes is like going to the dentist?
One person our gal interviews is an art-world executive who says, “I have no opinion. Just hand me stuff. I have two jobs—I’m too busy to shop.” First of all, anybody who has two jobs is twisted, and the editors of men’s fashion magazines should not be holding up sick people as my role models for anything, including what to wear, even if having two jobs means they close twice as many deals as the rest of us. This workaholic has a disease and needs treatment; don’t be his enabler. Anyway, he likes to go shopping with his son because he says that “otherwise, my attention span for shopping is about the same as his.” So if he hates shopping for clothes so much, then why the hell is he being interviewed? To get ideas about how to shop, why not interview somebody who actually likes to shop?
This article is totally ridiculous, and it’s totally representative of mainstream men’s fashion journalism. One cult of guyness controls all three major men’s fashion magazines, and it also permeates our culture judging by the popularity of Beavis and Butthead, and Homer Simpson, and the fact that a frat boy could even get close enough to the presidency to be installed in a judicial coup d’etat. One narrow model of masculinity is being given far too much power over us, and I will fight it with everything I have. It’s personal. All my life I have been injured by so-called teachers, managers, and peers who actively persecuted my sensitive, feminine side. This cult of guyness, this poorly disguised self-hatred, has real consequences in individual’s lives.
Men have it very difficult. Feminism has contributed to a culture of discrimination against perfectly benign masculine qualities such as assertiveness, especially in bastions of fanatical political correctness such as my hometown of Berkeley. So many Birkenstock-wearing men around here have completely internalized the feminist criticism of masculine qualities. But if we’re too soft and sensitive we run the risk of being called gay, which doesn’t really mean “gay” but rather, “not masculine enough,” the same way a person with one white parent and one black parent can be called black but not white. The June/July 2008 issue of Details has an article titled “Does Everyone Think You’re Gay?” in which it lists things to avoid if you don’t want to be called a faggot. One of them is tennis, which is the closest thing I have to a religion, so fuck all you assholes over at Details. Also on the list are Mini Coopers, vodka cranberry cocktails, E.M. Forster, and yogurt.
Question for the editors at Details: What’s the most gay sport here?
The fact that this is tongue-in-cheek makes such a ridiculously arbitrary definition of masculinity no less hurtful because it encourages us to doubt our masculinity at every turn. It’s especially annoying given that so many of the advertisements in men’s fashion magazines express a vision of masculinity that is strongly influenced by gay sexual aesthetics. The ad columns of men’s fashion magazines have a well-rounded picture of masculinity, but the news columns are stuck in the mid-20th century frat-boy caricature of masculinity. This is another aspect of the schizophrenia of men’s fashion magazines that I will explore in future posts. I think that gay men have a hell of a lot to teach straight men about what it means to be a man, and it’s far deeper than the superficial stereotypes exemplified by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
In America, it wasn’t even until 1920 that all women could even vote, but women have made a huge amount of progress becoming more balanced, winning options to pursue traditionally masculine roles and qualities. But men are decades behind this curve of integration of qualities of the opposite sex. It is more acceptable for men in my generation than in my father’s generation to show traditionally female qualities such as sensitivity and an appreciation for yogurt, but dysfunctional attitudes such as those of men’s fashion editors still have way too much power over our lives.
Well, this post is already a healthy length. So much for keeping this rant brief and going to my happy place. My next post will start describing my search for my own approach to beauty in men’s fashion. For now, I need to calm down. I think I’ll go practice my serve to release some tension. After all, using sticks to smash the daylights out of small furry things has been a pretty manly thing to do for tens of thousands of years.