Confessions of an Ex-Preppy

Today I start my exploration of a dark forest full of dangers at every turn: the January 2010 issue of GQ. Wish me luck. If you want to protect your intelligence, be warned that reading GQ can be hazardous to your IQ. But if you know how to protect yourself from it — that is, if you have an IQ over 80 — you can emerge intact with valuable bits of treasure that are buried inside.

The cover provides a mild shock that momentarily tests my resolve to undertake my journey and forces me to remind myself why it is worth the risk to my mental faculties.

January 2010 cover of Frat Boy GQ

Is it worth dealing with page after page of Frat Boy GQ just to find those few pages out of Grown-up GQ? See, when you subscribe to GQ you actually get two magazines in one. It is as though two completely separate magazine staffs write under the single banner labeled “GQ.”

The staff of Grown-up GQ seems to be composed of mature, thoughtful, sophisticated gentlemen who are no less traditional than they are contemporary. They would feel at home with the gentlemen of any age because they dress and behave with high standards, and they go below the surface of things. They show me all kinds of details about style, nuances that I would miss on my own because I do not have much experience with men’s fashion.

By contrast, the staff of Frat Boy GQ seems to be composed of immature, stupid, shallow peasants who seem to actively work at keeping their intellectual and emotional development from going past that of adolescence and who are going to take Western civilization back to the Dark Ages unless we figure out some way to keep them down.

For Frat Boy GQ, women don’t even exist. You will never see them in its pages. Frat Boy GQ likes girls, and the younger and nekkider the better. These are not women who will challenge the frat boy to grow up, make him think, or encourage him to share his introspection or thoughtful analysis of the world around him. These girls are interested in only one thing: having sex with a frat boy. With covers like these, it’s kind of ironic that the G in GQ stands for Gentlemen’s. BQ would be more appropriate. You get two magazines in one: GQ and BQ.

The covers aren’t always so stupid, so it’s invariably a mild shock when I pick up a new issue of GQ and see the cover of BQ. But as much as I loathe BQ, I know that it is what I must endure to reach the nuggets of style gold in GQ. And they are there. I’ll show you in a future post.

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.

A couple of nights ago I was thinking about the cult of youth and celebrity that controls the mainstream fashion magazines, trying to figure out what’s my complex about anti-intellectuals and what’s objectively verifiable. I called magazine editors my “enemy,” and that’s a pretty strong word. Are they really my enemy? What’s the truth about magazine editors, and what’s just coming from the demons in my head?

Feeling insecure yet?

One advantage for the editors is that putting celebrities on covers provokes a response of insecurity in us. By setting the standard impossibly high — that all of us men should emulate eternally young alpha males — the editors increase our sense of unworthiness. This reminds me a bit of fundamentalist Christianity, where there is the deep feeling of unworthiness that comes when you realize that you will never measure up to God’s standards. In men’s fashion journalism there is the chronic feeling of unworthiness that comes when you realize that you will never achieve alpha male status. Forgive us, Most High Magazine Editors, for we have sinned. We have developed wrinkles and have not made our first million and haven’t achieved anything particularly noteworthy in your eyes. We are not worthy to grace thy covers.

Just as individuals can have complexes, so can cultures, and a feeling of unworthiness is one of Western civilization’s favorite cultural complexes. We’ve been working on that one for thousands of years. The editors of men’s fashion magazines and the advertisers who support them benefit financially from us feeling a constant sense of inferiority because then we’re that much more in need of their product. They appear to be selling information on fashion, but what they’re really selling is redemption. They say they can save us from our uncoolness, if we only listen to the word!

Only impatient Americans could believe that instant coffee could taste better than fresh coffee or that you could stock your closet in under an hour.

This month’s cover of Men’s Vogue has a headline that says, “STOCK YOUR CLOSET IN UNDER AN HOUR.” Instant salvation, my brothers! Somebody say amen! Man, I have totally been headed down the wrong track. I was thinking that my clothing might be an outward expression of my inner character, and that it was going to take a year or two to experiment and find out what kind of fashions are best for me, but now the editors of Men’s Vogue enlighten me that there’s no need for me to think deeply about what I should be wearing. I just need to thoughtlessly follow their formula. I’m sure it’s completely irrelevant that the clothes they recommend are made by the some of their biggest advertisers. The magazine editors are the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the fashion world. They are trying to convince me of my original sin — my inability to make fashion decisions for myself — and therefore of my dependence on them to show me the way.

The contents for Men’s Vogue has this intriguing item: “IN THE BAG: Three real men hunt for a fall wardrobe, returning spruced up and unscathed.” The mention of “real men” caught my eye. It’s a tacit admission that the boys they put on their covers aren’t real men but are artificially manufactured products of the U.S. celebrity-making machine. So I turned to page 124 to see what the editors of Men’s Vogue consider real men:

• an executive from the upper echelons of the New York art gallery world
• a 30-year-old venture capitalist who says, “on any given day, I might go from a formal board meeting to speaking at a conference to a casual meeting in a university lab with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist”
• a doctor in Manhattan who is married to an architect

Well, then. If you’re young, attractive, famous, and wealthy, then you’re cover material, but if you aren’t famous, then you’re just a “real man.” Not only am I not an alpha male, I don’t even qualify as a real man.

The most honest editors would say, “We’re not evil, just greedy. We put beautiful morons on our covers because it makes more money. We’re just giving people what they want.” True, but that is just the mindless mantra of corporate journalism. The editors are cowards. They do not hold themselves to the highest standards. They care more about their magazine’s sales and ad revenues than about fashion, which is just a way to make money for them.

The magazine editors may not be evil. But what is evil is the part of us that deals with insecurity by compensating in unhealthy ways: compensating for a small ego by building up one’s muscles into a grotesque caricature of a male body,¹ wearing puffy down jackets², or buying a Hummer³; compensating for the cowardice that led one to avoid National Guard service by cloaking oneself in the flag and invading another country based on lies; or compensating for one’s general insecurity as a man by mindlessly following the style choices of the editors of men’s fashion magazines.

Just a few of the ways the insecure male ego has found to compensate.

The magazine editors couldn’t manipulate people if they weren’t weak enough to be manipulated in the first place, like the people who think it makes God happy when they send money to multimillionaires such as Pat Robertson. There has been such a failure in this country to develop healthy models of masculinity that there are hundreds of thousands of men who mindlessly swallow the advice of magazine editors and advertisers who cynically appeal to their basest instincts.

Real men. Ha. The editors of Boy’s Vogue wouldn’t recognize a real man if he walked up and kicked them in the balls.

1. Note that I do not mean to imply that all bodybuilders have small egos. Only most of them. [↩]
2. Note that I do not mean to imply that all wearers of puffy down jackets are insecure, especially if said wearers are prone to pop a cap in my ex-preppy white ass. [↩]
3. Note that I definitely do mean to imply that anybody buying a Hummer has not only a small ego but also a small dick and absolutely no grasp of foreign affairs. [↩]