Men: the New Women

When I was but a young boy of 16 or so I sprouted and somewhat successfully shaped my first goatee, something I could sport for a grand total of two weeks before the trans-term school holidays finished and some fuckhead would send me home to shave it off and miss the term opening assembly (no great loss).
Of course there was a circle of priveledged few young men that would do the exact same thing each holiday and even though you knew you would be intercepted walking across the yard to your locker and sent to the sickbay to shave or if you were lucky enough to live 500m from school - home, for a shave.
Anyway it was a point of pride, it may not impress the ladies but even the lowly pretty boys would look on at the facial hair sporting juveniles pining for the day that one day they too could have a look that wasn't cringingly calculated to capitulate to assumed demands made by women.
Of course, my school was not Ballarat High School where if one had the means one could sport a full beard from year 8 and the teachers were simply glad you were turning up to school. A school where Bryce could say 'you assume I give a shit' when people asked him what his girlfriend thought of his facial hair.

Whilst not having the basic liberty to grow facial hair if I wanted to, I could still enjoy it in the summer time. What I enjoyed most back in the late 90's about having a goatee was when you walked up or down the street (Ballarat has both directions) there was a clear heirarchy amongst school-boys. When approaching another guy on the footpath hear is how it went, if you are one and they are many you walk around them as they stride through on the footpath. If you were private school and they were public once again you went round UNLESS, if you had massive chops (sideburns) they went around you. If you had a goatee they would factor this in to the sizing up and go around you while averting their eyes politely. If you had a goatee and they a full beard, around you went.
If you were 8 goatees and they but one with a full beard, around you all courteously made your way.

And so it was where I came from. 'Twas neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so' but if you hadn't experienced it, the it was understandable for girls to feel about as perplexed about mens obsession with facial hair as I do about what is fashionable right now.

I will always have a connection with 'Baxter' a high school peer I considered as my antithesis yet managed to get the exact same ENTER score as me. Her year 12 quote was 'In matters of principle stand like a rock, in matters of fashion swim with the tide.' admittedly my own yearbook quotation is possibly some of my worst work ever. And whilst as fashion has gone I have always lagged about ten years behind, I have finally this summer hit a milestone in my inability to stay bouyant on the tide to a fashion I would actively hate and sabotage.

Yes that was all mere preamble. One knows what is cool is not really cool in any authentic, genuine sense when a business as nauseating as RDX has actually nailed it. (watch with music if you dare).

Roger David put simply is exactly the kind of store my mother would march me into as a child and collude with some retail assistant to try and plead and convince me to accept 'thats how they wear them these days'.

Whilst my own fierce sense of self hasn't always served me well (for example I was far too late to discover big pants) generally it has at least prevented me from being the kind of moron that does what he is told.

If you are doing what your mother and agenda-bearing retail assistants are telling you right now, you (specifically someone who would have in other eras been called a man) are wearing hot pants (wtf?) and white 'vintage' shoes (not in themselves so offensive, but these are no Royal Elastics, or vintage adidas street shoes, but what you would expect hitler youth to wear when they go sailing) and pay actual real money for an elaborate (yet unimpressive) haircut.

I mean its pretty much what Ricky Gervais wears in the play he features in in Extras, (chosen specifically to emphasise his inability to be percieved as a homosexual). South Park has already dealt with the topic of straight men emulating gay culture in the crab people episode, and really I have no issue with men looking Gay, Freddie Mercury was one of facial and chest hairs finest ambassadors and I would encourage every young man to emulate him.

No I take issue with the fact that it just isn't masculine. Where are these boys fathers? I thought Emo was flirting dangerously with eradicating masculinity, but ultimately if you wanted t be emotional, fine. If you wanted to be scrawny, power to you. But now it seems every shred of masculinity is gone, and finally I am in that position where philosophically I am consoled Alain De Botton style against unpopularity.

If I were a school-boy today, I would take the beatings rather than be cool and consider myself getting off lightly. Punishment would be fitting in, and this summer at least is one were 10 years onward I could not excuse myself for my youthful folly.

Really, the 80s saw some pretty horrible kitsch and craptacular fashions and styles, but dignified people working in the banking sector today can look back and forgive themselves 20 years on for the follies of youth. They even regularly reminise with the poor taste parties and 80s night events. Short of 'How I met your mother' nobody reminisces about the 90's because really they were too dignified. You can't really ridicule Doc Martin shoes, flannel shirts or dying your hair black (although it doesn't work for red-heads).

What I'm saying is that perhaps this summers hot-pants for men and white shoes combo may be my absolute tolerable limit. Speaking of taking a beating, what confuses me most is that this isn't a fashion simply dopted by the inevitable highschool kid that hangs out purely with women in highschool and revels in gossip and hates sports. Its like all the guys, and it trips out my objective Alley-discomfort meter. That is I come across the kind of guys that have in years gone by, traditionally worn rugby jumpers or football jerseys and thrown beer bottles out of moving cars at unsuspecting pedestrians, say things like 'all girls are sluts they just don't know it yet' and will generally have some kind of sexual harassment suit to handle at one or two points in their careers.

These are guys that I shouldn't be comfortable approaching in an alley-way, I would generally clock in a 5 or higher. 9 if they are drunk. But when they are wearing hotpants and white shoes and styling their hair in a public mensroom, I feel like I should be mugging them. Sort of the equivalent of Scotsmen wearing full sequined ball gowns instead of kilts. It's down right deceptive and dangerous. Maybe its more like a poisonous tropical fish putting on the scales of a snapper instead of its usual brightly coloured garb.

Things that are dangerous should look dangerous. Heroin addicts should look like heroin addicts. Police should look like police. Adolescent thugs should look like adolescent thugs, not dandies a loser like me feels I should teach a lesson.

Fortunately I have never had anger issues, and know that when I get angry, I'm angry at myself feeling so uninfluencial that I can't persuade, even by example men to retain their masculinity or at least dignity.

Or perhaps this is simply how fashion had to evolve. For us shocking our forebears involved facial peircings, dressing like an angry hobo in order to increase our hostility beyond what was socially acceptable in adult society. But now that that's done how could the next wave of youth rebal against what we had done and now sold out on? Could it be that they needed to reduce their hostility below socially acceptable levels? Is scoring a -10 on the Alley-discomfort meter actually the new way to rebel? I guess its sort of like Tibetan monks who defy Chinese rule by simply soaking up the machine gun fire. Rebellious? Yes. Sympathetic? Yes. Effective? No.

I'm also more aware that an Australian kid simply cannot be fashionable. It's a golden fleece that exists only in mythology. Simply because for a kid to be cool in Australia they only have to be relatively more with it than other Australian kids, but can still be way behind the bell curve of what is fashionable in NYC, Paris, London. Which surprises me, back in the 90's there was an excuse to be behind the bell curve in Ballarat, you had to wait 4 years before news of what was fashionable in New York (or Seatle as it may be) reached our shores. Triple J performed the function the internet does now. It was able to place phonecalls to overseas, read Rolling Stone magazine at work and find out what was cool. It was a massive middle man for everyone between the ages of 12-29.

Now Triple J is redundant, but one habit remains - Australian kids need their fashion to be created for them and then sold to them. That's probably what saddens me the most.

I used to joke that Rip Curl and O'neal and shit had employees stationed outside Ballarat Op-shops, waiting to see what kids wore out, then they would simply sew their brand onto whatever article of clothing and sell it to the remaining kids at 2000% of the price. (yes 2000). A classic snide and synacal observation from my youth that turned out to be more or less, exactly how fashion companies actually work.

So Roger David is the conduit of New York fashion trends for a nation of people who cannot forge their own identity (yet are probably infinitely more patriotic than me). While the kids can find out what they want to be wearing instantly, they have to wait 6 months for the commercial sector to give it to them for Christmas.

Also incidently somebody finally documented 'Grunge' in a photobook the style that had to die. I picked it up thinking 'this is going to be good' (as in sarcastically) because I maintain grunge consisted of little more than simply exerting no effort fashion wise. I'm older and wiser enough to realise that kids of my generation exerted much effort and expense to emulate the 'no effort' look and always will), but true to form this book consists of 80% punks who called themselves Grunge, then about 5 or 6 pages of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana (aka the seattle music scene).