Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
It’s a rare thing for me to post anything about kids, but I keep going back to my friend Jill’s blog Supergoodybag because it’s so pretty. It’s fashion for kids and Jill has a really great eye for gender neutral clothes that are still cool.
She’s also styled Beyonce, if you need more recommendation.
She is on Facebook as well, of course.
High heels for men? But of course! Their rules? ” No adult content and men wear heels as men.” Sometimes I wish I could just read things without deconstructing them. “Adult content” means “not a of a sexual nature” I’m sure, but “as men”? No idea what that’s supposed to mean.
There are too many turns of the screw to count now, but Barnes & Noble has just demanded that the magazine Dossier bag its magazine because of the cover photo: featuring a bare-chested male model. Why? Because he looks like a woman otherwise. It’s a pretty stunning image and is being heralded as the “new face of androgyny”.
Stunning.
We’ve got London Fog paring Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) down to size.
Which puts my “yay, the future!” optimism on hold. Because it’s always been okay for skinny white guys to do whatever they want, while women, and actual gay men, will continue to deal with this bullshit.
Okay, someone send me a story that cheers me up again.
It’s not always the male-bodied people who crossdress or who are transgender that wear skirts; sometimes guys who identify as guys do. Sometimes even models do.
At Skirt Cafe (www.skirtcafe.org), skirt-minded men and people of other genders get together to talk about hemlines. As Bob explains:
At SkirtCafe, we are dedicated to the idea of “Fashion Freedom” for men. The basic idea is… if you want to wear a skirt, just do it; now you’re a man wearing a skirt. Men might want to wear skirts for many reasons. Some guys just like to be different, some want comfort, some want to look and feel beautiful, some have experienced gender dysphoria in one way or another. But whatever the reason, we are committed to the idea that we can just do it, as a man wearing a skirt.
We don’t need to go through elaborate makeup routines, or emulate a stilted notion of femininity, or consider changing our body through strong drugs and surgery, or orient our lives around our fashion choice, or call ourselves “Suzi” for the evening, or hide from everyone we know. There is no closet, and no secrets. Unlike the CD community, we really are no different from the woman who decides to wear a buttondown, described in your introduction. It’s just a fashion choice.
We have demonstrated, again and again, that a guy wearing a skirt in public is no big deal — a “non event.” We’ve experienced little or no rejection or discrimination, and we don’t bother much to hide our identity or fashion choice from the world.
Over at New Male Fashion, the blogger asks:
Wouldn’t it be likewise fair for us males in need of displaying our creativity, sense of style, and flare, who enjoy keeping in touch with our “feminine side”, to have the freedom to adopt styles, colours, and garments that were once considered too “feminine”?
Public opinion is moving tardily but steadily in that direction. Designers come up with innovations and creativity in their masculine lines, as opposed to the dullness and uniformity that has been so far the main feature of male garments. New proffers include not only more daring colours and designs, but also male skirts, high heels, dresses, and other garments that used to be kept at the other side of the aisle.
A “New Male” is under construction. Hopefully, a more balanced, understanding, sensitive, creative male.
The statement is beautifully underlined by the photo of the coy “new male” model that accompanies this post, & there’s a lot more like them there, including clothes by Westwood, Pugh, and Baratashvili.
(Ana de Gregorio styled by Ash Stymest, photographed by JM Ferrater.)
He says women who are upset by models being too thin are just fat ladies who sit on the couch and eat chips. I mean, honestly.
There’s a nice blog post about it by Susan Wagner, who in turn quotes Sherrie Gulmahamad:
This raises a rather dicey question. Do the gay men controlling the fashion world also control the messaging about *our* bodies – and is it wrong, considering gay men aren’t really interested in our bodies in the first place?
Which reiterates an observation that I’ve made more than once: that when I experience misogyny spoken by a gay man, it’s often far more offensive than the misogyny I hear from straight men. Not always by much, but straight guys, usually, mostly, kinda, like to have sex with our bodies, whether or not they consider us human and people & all that.
But I shudder to think about all of us modeling our looks after Mr. Lagerfeld, who looks like death warmed over – and warmed by those hot lamps they use to keep the fries hot at McDonald’s. Eeek.