While it may seem ludicrous, there’s a bunch of lessons we can learn from Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, the hit TV show from the early naughties that followed a team of sassy gay men teaching straight men how to dress and include feature walls in their horrible apartments. One of those lessons is how privileged men are, as a whole, to be able to have the luxury of not caring about their appearance at all, to give literally no fucks about their personal presentation. The same can not be said for women, who are immediately judged in every way because of their appearance. Another lesson is that straight women WANT the men they are dating to care about their appearance, and that clothes, hair and other aesthetic choices can impact on how desirable they find them. But the final lesson that I find interesting is how unobtainable, how forbidden the nature of an individual aesthetic is to straight men, without the gatekeeper of a queer man or a woman.
One of the things that I’ve always found difficult to reconcile is how wrapped up my choice of clothes are with my perceived sexuality. As someone who was a closeted (pun intended?) bisexual in a relationship with a woman for a long time, there shouldn’t have been many overt indicators to my queer fancy for penis – yet the fact that I have strong aesthetic choices were always one of the reasons people decided I was a gay man.
Now, I do want to point out that my particular aesthetic isn’t flamboyant – I’m not talking ostrich feathers and a trail of sequins, I’m just all about some well-cut jackets. I’m also not saying that there’s anything wrong, or even necessarily queer about flamboyant outfits – just that an old style of outdated tropes used to link gay men with the fashion from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I’d also like to point out that this isn’t about fashion necessarily – a defined aesthetic can incorporate fashion, or ignore it. I tend to ignore it, unless it’s fashionable to look like I own a crumbling mansion in the 1920s. Why are clothes, and the act of giving a damn about them, inextricably linked with sexuality for men? Unfortunately, the answer is that a lot of traditional hatred of gay men, and the method of ‘taunting’ them, is linked to their perceived femininity. So, if you follow the abuse down the rabbit hole, you’ll find that making fun of men for caring about clothes goes all the way through homophobia and ends in misogyny – nobody can accuse the patriarchy of not being layered.
Dude, where’s my wardrobe?
So where does this leave straight men who have a clothing aesthetic? A lot of the mainstream backlash against ‘hipsters’ can be traced to this attitude, of clothes equaling femininity and therefore being bad. Don’t get me wrong – hipsters are a difficult to define sub-genre of people, who are perfectly worthy of being mocked for a lot of things – but a lot of the dominant mocking attitude was because of a defined aesthetic in the men. In all sorts of discourse, making fun of a hipster’s clothing was seen as a very easy and acceptable pastime, a joke that almost didn’t seem to be worth making, as it was so obviously laughable. But when you think about it, their only crime is to give a damn about how they look – as impractical and silly looking as that might seem to some.
It’s this feeling of entitlement to the idea that men caring about clothes is always laughable that astounds me – when’s the last time you saw a male character in a movie who loved clothes and wasn’t flamingly homosexual, or an evil fop? Unfortunately the notion of the ‘real man’ doesn’t list appearance as something that he can care about.
The “Aussie bloke” trope
The notion of the ‘Aussie bloke’ is a weird unicorn, half created by the media to help sell lamb and power tools, and half incorporating a bunch of ill-formed ideas about mateship, patriotism and just having a bloody laugh. One of the weird things I’ve noticed about bloke culture, which has weirdly morphed into ‘bro’ culture amongst a younger generation, is that it can be very supportive as a friendship group, yet always in a way that’s defined against notions of femininity and homosexuality. The mantra, ‘no homo’ comes to mind, a phrase I literally heard once at a barbeque when one man said that another was ‘looking sharp’.
A statement of who you are
It just seems a shame to me, as clothes mightn’t make a man, but they are an expression of your personality, a statement of who you are, and it sucks that the majority of men are allowing themselves to be cut off from exploring that part of themselves, and are instead expected to embody the beigest of all personal looks. And it’s clear to me that straight culture is trying to mutate around the prohibition against ‘feminised’ clothes – the whole fad for sneakers amongst young men at the moment has a very similar thinking to clothes aesthetic. While there are notions of brand, culture and class all mixed up in it, when you get down to it, they are still getting excited about shoes, which is a plotline more likely to be found in Sex and the City than… whatever straight guys watch. I want to point out that in no way is this an article about oppression of straight men – but more an examination of the weird ways the patriarchy has limited their clothes, has consigned them to endless dad shorts and Mambo t-shirts until they are buried in them. I also understand that in the wide realms of problematic shit out there to deal with, fighting for the rights for men to care about nice shirts is extremely far down the list.
But I still think it’s important to start thinking critically about your clothes, about making some decisions. I’m not saying that everyone has to be sharp-looking business sharks, with razor collars and couture cuffs, but I’m asking that you think about your clothes. Perhaps your aesthetic IS to be a bland business boy in a default suit, that’s fine – just as long as it’s your choice, and not societies’.
The poster boy for minimalism
Why Men Should Choose A Goddamn Clothing Aesthetic Already appeared first on The Vocal.