My latest "Feminist Dissident" post is up over at GlennSacks.com. Please to check it out at your leh-zhure. Here’s a taste:
Where I’m moderately unusual, for a straight white guy, is that I enjoy talking about clothes. I like watching Project Runway and What Not To Wear (w/Clinton and Stacy). I like looking at men on the street and trying to intuit something about them based on the clothes they’re wearing. I like writing about clothes. (See The clothes men wear, once more,this time with rappers, It’s raining Toms, and The clothes men wear.)
I bore my wife with long soliloquies on the necessity of having a few really good pairs of jeans.
I like looking at this shirt (h/t Manolo for the Men),
and saying, "Wow, what a shirt!"
I mean, really, that’s a beautiful shirt. So beautiful, in fact, that if I had the $18,000 (or whatever it costs) to burn, I’d buy it, ignore the bemused voice of David Duchovny in my head telling me that if I wore it, I’d be violating the prime directive of Duchovny chic—Never Look Like You’re Trying—and I’d flaunt it. Because Jeebus, that’s a nice shirt.
Of all the harms that gender stereotypes have wrought on men in America, one of the silliest—though not one of the gravest—has been the perpetuation of the idea that it’s unmanly to care about, and talk about, clothes.
We can talk about how cars look, how planes look (how all modes of transportation look, really, with the exception of really femme ones like the scooter or the Segway). You can wax sentimental about the skills of your tattoo artist, or admire your buddy’s iPhone. You can even, in certain specific circumstances, compliment a guy on his clothes—when he’s wearing a tuxedo, maybe, or just got a nice new leather jacket.
But tell a guy, on an average Tuesday, that you like his new Gap khakis, and well, I don’t think you get gay-bashed anymore, but you’re gonna get a queer look. And you’re sure not likely to get into an interesting conversation about how much better plain front khakis are than pleated khakis. And that’s sad, because, after all, pleats are awful.
