tohm's Fashion Week (Or 5 things I don't like about fashion): 4

In the late 1960's Germaine Greer wrote a book that was quite fashionable to read, caused much controversy and little effect. In the past decade Greer wrote a book that caused a flutter of controversy, almost nobody read it, and the fashion world seems to have adopted its message with gusto.

The book of course is: The Beautiful Boy.

Its avowed intention was "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure". It is a study of the youthful male face and form, from antiquity to the present day, from paintings and drawings to statuary and photographs.

I haven't read it, it sounds sort of interesting, but in terms of fashion today's thesis as inspired by this book could be called:

One step Forward, Two Steps Back.

Firstly, I'm going to take a stab but in antiquity it seems to me that society was even more patriarchal and mysogenistic than now (even if we have progressed little), and in that regard to suggest that Michelangelo's or the unnown ancient Greek sculptors that made statues of boys weren't thinking of 'women's visual pleasure' but their own, and if women took 'visual pleasure' in this produce then it was by accident not design.

As I said I haven't read the book but I'm sure Greer would address these points and do so cleverly. It is the limit of my imagination as to why one should argue for 'reclaim' as opposed to 'claim'.

But this isn't a book review. Because long before this book came out, my high-school cronies and I were deriding a minority of students we called 'pretty boys' for their lack of leg hair, disused facial razors, 'girly' hair cuts and neat attire.

High school is the time you are supposedly meant to transform from the boy of primary school into the man of adulthood. (allthough the older I get the longer I think I remained a child in retrospect).

The alpha males had leg hair at the very least, and their shoes were inclined to look like they had kicked the odd footy around and done active things. But even then the tidal wave of emasculated mens fashion was well and truly on the rise.

Now it is socially acceptable for a man to wear tight jeans, have shorts cut above the knee, to wear hats previously reserved for Alex Mack. It's fashionable to be as skinny as possible, whereas when I was in the age bracket where you can supposedly be fashionable it was well known that a guy was better off (ladywise) being fat than being scrawny. You would rather be Toadfish from neighbours than Christian Bale from the machinist.

I suspect since it isn't natural for a teenage boy to become stick thin in vast numbers that these ladyboys are on diets.

Now all this may seem misogynistic, but I just mean it is a step backward. Time to look at the women's reality of fashion:

If I had a Daughter

If I had a daughter there would be two things I would give her at age 12 as my minimum effort to do right in raising her to go out in the world confident and secure.
The first would be to give her a copy of the life story of Casonova to read. Why? Because Casanova is the only man in history famous for using his sexual allure to succeed in life (something widely promoted as completely viable and valid for a woman to do, even going so far as to call it 'empowerment') Hopefully his story which ends in being broke, blacklisted and riddled with STDs will serve to show up that one should depend on 'sexual power' to get were they want in life for the fallicy it is.
The second is a copy of Salt N Pepa's 'Very Necessary' a classic, and in my listening experience, the only true 'Girl Power' album. They are who I want teaching my daughter about sexual identity, feeling sexy, sexual pleasure, self respect and interpersonal relationships.

A healthy example of 'being sexy' (Salt N Pepa) coupled up with an unhealthy example of 'being sexy' that exposes the gender double standards when people talk about body image, fashion etc.

The girls world of fashion in large part appears to say 'make yourself the tastiest bait on a hook you can be then hope a big fish comes along and snaps you up.' Whereas the guys world of fashion used to be 'you are the fucking fisherman, use all the bait you need and eat the fucking fish after clubbing it to death.'

One of the things that got me through the deep funk of realising my hairline was receding was believe it or not, my ex-girlfriend's 'fat days' that she used to have.
After three days of paranoid checking and rechecking of my hairline and wracking my memory to try and think if I'd always not had hair growing out of that part of my forehead I realised 'this must be how ***** felt on her fat days, I am not going to spend my life feeling like that.' and like that I was cured of my depression.

Horrible isn't it? A) that I used somebody else's insecurity to cure my own and B) that I could just say 'fuck it I want no part in this' so easily. This was the advantage that men always had, one of the few genuine advantages, but men are being emasculated, made to feel that 40 is no longer the prime of their life, but it's somewhere between 16-21.

All those other positive qualities that were served in men's fashion I alluded to on day 2 of my fashion week: power, confidence, comfort, athleticism, dependability etc that don't necessarily need be related back to sex are being stripped away and men are becoming Castrati in greater numbers.

In other words, Women's fashion has gone nowhere since the 1960's except perhaps in the sporting attire department - sports bras, gym gear etc. Many would argue they have gone backwards, like in Female Chauvinist Pigs with much of women's new fashions originating from the sex industry, and cosmetic work for vaginas.

Watch Mad men and you'd notice that the writers job can't be particularly hard because women were treated the same in the corporate world as they pretty much are now. The difference is men's fashon.

The one step forward is this: As far as I can tell, women do take pleasure in the appearance of teenage boys. They seem to have an attraction to feminine qualities in a man in much the same way that men are attracted to tomboys. I don't know if its a blanket statement, I'd be more certain that it isn't, but if promoted as a general rule, people are more inclined to follow it when trying to validate themselves via popularity with the opposite sex than stand on their own two feet and forego the masses to get somebody that likes them.

One of the mysogenistic eye-openers is to see how you feel when somebody turns a campaign successful with/on women on men.


I could find this add on youtube because there appears to be a lot of men deriding it as one of the worst ads ever. My own reaction when a middle aged man says 'because you're worth it' or whatever is ridicule. As in 'seriously guys, you think that will work.'



Tempting though it is to reject such campaigns as doomed failures to go along with man-gagement rings (although apparantly these too are becoming more common).

But these campaigns seem to work for/on women. They buy the line 'because you're worth it' because L'Oreal hasn't dumped the line yet, and they seem to be successful in some way.

It's terrible I know, that it remains the status quo that even in western societies a woman's independance is still ip service only. The engagement ring designates them as property, the expense is compensation for their sex, the numerous expenses that make free sex 'more expensive than prostitution'* are running strong and growing stronger.

Japan is definitely a fashion capital in this regard, where sex is widely recognised as a financial transaction (remembering that for any statement made about a culture, the variation between individuals that comprise it will be greater than their similarity to the whole) and the phenomena of 'compensated dates' where teenage girls sleep with 40-50 year old salary men in exchange for Prada and Louis Vitton hand bags are frequent enough to get a widely recognised name (that isn't paedophelia) and boyfriends regularly achieve the pet names of 'meishi-kun' and 'ashi-kun' (Mr. Meals and Mr. Legs, an allusion to their only supposed positive qualities - legs refering not to their shapely legs but the fact they have a car to chauffer the girl around in).

This is the future of fashion, where a girl will trade sex for a handbag to a man she cares little for in order to achieve meer 'acceptability' as the status quo. Men in turn will pluck their eyebrows into shape, worry about their weight, hair line, and whether to shave their legs above the knee or risk wearing shorts below the knee.

I think its easy to hate any money making strategy on insecurity, and it applies equally to men and women. Women shouldn't be made to feel that their worth depends on their ability to attract somebody with actual power, choices and opportunities and that their life is effectively done and dusted by the age of 25.

To say that something needs to be done about it, is hopefully redundant, but the direction fashion is taking is the opposite. Even the vainglorious superficial yuppies of 'American Psycho' preserved their masculinity between herbal mint gel face masks and rogaine applications. Now the masculinity is being stripped away... from who? Everyone.

The men aren't just being sorted from the boys. Many are being blocked from even trying by modern marketing campaigns. A world where men apply foundation, get laser treatment on their beard zone, and where engagement rings is not so implausable as before. But if men start wearing engagement rings it won't signify they are some woman's property, but property of De Beers.

I hate the trend towards 'emasculated fashion' rampant in mens fashion today. Plain and simple. It took me a while to get on board the big pants-homeboy train but once on it I felt that we were making as a society a very linear form of progress.

Did you know that the Japanese Shoguns deliberatly wore oversized robes to conceal their actual proportions? Check it out:

Toyotomi Hideyoshi - first man to unify all Japan's warring states.

Tokugawa Ieyasu - founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, one of the most dominant and longest running family dynasties.

You may note that neither men are what one would call 'lookers'. I don't know what derailed the Japanese 'big-robes' movement, but fashion clawed its way back:
either that or takehiko inoue is a fashion stick in the mud like me.

A man can be cool, powerful, charismatic and sexy without being a 'looker' that's fashion doing its job. In many ways, mens fashion was superior to that of 'the fairer sex' because there was so many varieties and flavors.

It's easy to be dismissive and say 'skinny leg, relaxed fit it's just another style' but a relaxed fit looks like a coiled spring, like a muscle ready to be flexed, it could conceal a leg that could crush your head like a paper cup, or it could contain a chicken leg, there's no mystery in a skinny leg jean. You see a guy that can't defend himself in an alley (even if he actually can). Furthermore, skinny jeans aren't going to suit a fat guy, fortunately guys seem to have the remaining sense to where loose pants if they are fat something big girls seem to be crushed into by media and mother combined.

But if the campaigning behind says 'your worth is in your looks' (which is what L'Oreal is actually saying) then the fashion needs to be thrown out with the bathwater. (Am I mutilating metaphores here? George Orwell would be ashamed of me). What I mean is, that it may 'suit' some people of some builds, and in that sense be a harmless 'style' to be chosen from many. But fashion never works like that, there's a status quo to belong to, and there's the marketing campaigns that reinforce them. Opinion makers are never going to be hurt by fashion. (just offended like I am) But there seems to be men that fear the worrying trend towards castration along with me, at least according to this poll.

In the intrest of fair and balanced there is this thoughtful blog post I came across while searching for the above link. It may not be gushingly pro-adrogynous fashion, but at least it presents another side to the argument I seem incapable of thinking of myself.

It may be that I am not secure in my sexuality, or feel insecure and thus desire to express 'hypermasculinity' all I can say in my defence is that I don't feel like it and nor should my concerns extend to men who are not myself.

I certainly know I am not in the upper eschalons of masculinity, and I think the whole debate hinges on what 'femininity' means. Germaine Greer in 'The Change' wrote:

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

I think women haven't achieved this 'like themselves' status yet, even going below the ages of 50. I think few think of the appeal of being a 'grown woman' and this as a 'feminist' text I assume reflects on femininity itself.

In the 'State of The Female Union' addresses, I think as a statement of plain fact, women occupy an inferior position in self-determined societies, as such whilst we can ascribe many positive qualities to femininity, I think it would be the rare man that would actually want to take their position in society to access them.

Women need to brought up from the monochromatic fashion ideal of 'Young and Sexy' men don't need to be brought down to it.

*I read this somewhere, it isn't mine, but I can't remember who said it or where.