THE OTHER F WORD

By which I mean "femme" – though some might say "faggy". Let's dish about the recent men's shows, sex, and the science of self-expression.

A few weeks ago I asked my mom to help me choose which black lipstick selfie would be the cutest choice for Instagram. She laughed and said, "My sister and I used to do that." It was like I was five years old again, sneaking into my parent's bathroom to marvel at the sea of compacts laid out on the counter and the powder-caked puffy heads of makeup brushes—except this time, I wasn't afraid of getting caught.

When people ask me what my blog is about, what the focus is, I always feel left in the lurch. It seems wrong to say I’m a menswear blog, not just because I post about other stuff, too, but...“menswear”? Really? I'm coming around to calling it a "queer men's style site." When I was a kid I had no other associations for that word—queer—outside of its rhyming with “smear”, but nowadays there's something like comfort in the term. I like that it says other. I like that it suggests something amorphous, something unexpected, something that deviates. I like the idea that you can use it as a verb and a noun. I like that it's open and inclusive and ambiguous. “To identify as ‘queer’ is to be at ease with your own masculinity and femininity,” said writer Rohin Guha in his viral essay, On Gay Male Privilege. “You’re not constantly having to fear for your own gender expression.”

There was a time when the idea of sharing that side of myself that likes to play with makeup would have terrified me and made me feel unbelievably vulnerable. Now I'm broadcasting it to not just my mom, but to two thousand strangers on three or four different social networks. It's a bit self-indulgent, admittedly, but I'm just glad that the stigma associated with being open about what makes me different—or, really, the same as any eight-year-old girl—has dissipated.

ON OWNING MY SEXUALITY

This outfit is what your grandmother might good-humoredly refer to as a “getup.” I think the effect achieved is a sort of Hasidic/Japanese cultural mash-up as reinterpreted by Mary-Kate Olsen. One guy actually said to me, “Shalom,” in passing. It’s a look not tied to any particular expression of my sexuality, a look that says, “I don’t need you to want to have sex with me. I don’t need to be conventionally attractive to feel good about myself!” And I owned that. I felt that. Until my train arrived and as I stepped onto the car, I saw the cute guy I’d given my number to some months before.

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ON PUTTING YOURSELF OUT THERE (ONLINE)

I'm not sure where to start this post, as it's coming from a place of indignation and frustration (indignant frustration?) and I don't want it to read as a rant. The other week I published another piece on The Huffington Post (you can read the first here) that was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek look at a year in my life without sex. People - or, rather, the subspecies Internet Commenteri - seemed to take it a bit differently. It got so bad that one thread compared me to Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. "His whole story is a lie," chimed in one reader (referring to my decision to define sex more narrowly as penetrative sex, for the purposes of a tagline - so sue me.) Others described my writing as, "self-absorbed" and "pointless"; "I couldn't even finish the article for yawning," said another.

There were just over sixty comments total and just about fifteen click-throughs to my blog. These people did not read my piece and then seek out my other essay on the site, nor did they make any attempt to better understand who I am as a writer - or human being - by contacting me via email or Twitter. It is 2012. It is not difficult to get in touch with someone and more than that, it is almost repulsively easy to get in touch with someone like me - someone with active accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube and Flickr. My email address is in multiple places online. You can Google me. All of this takes just slightly more effort than being already logged in to your HuffPo account at work, feeling bored and lashing out at a stranger. A lot of the comments were weirdly aggressive and inflammatory - why would I dignify such vitriol with a response? Why did these people even bother to read the entire article? Why didn't they stop after the first paragraph when thinking, "this isn't my cup of tea"?

I showed the piece to some friends, some of whom liked it, some of whom were a little indifferent. Duly noted - moving on. It may not be my best piece, but it was an idea I had and I wanted to push myself to put it out there. I did. And then a bunch of people hated me. "Comment trolls" are a common digi-plague (you can read a Salon.com article about them here); I think the nicest thing I've ever heard about online forums for discussion is, "they make me lose faith in humanity." I know not to take the attacks personally, but it's hard not to be at least flabbergasted when the attacks are so personal. There's an immediate leap from, "I dislike this article," to, "I fucking hate the piece of shit who put this in front of my face." Newsflash, troll: you put it in front of your own face!

Getting ranty, I know...so here's the video (NSFW [language/sexual content]){Mom, that means don't watch this} I made to supplement the post, or at least better clarify the tone I meant to take when writing. What about you? Have you had to deal with comment trolls? Is my indignant frustration justified (say yes or I'll eat your face!)?

UPDATE: I feel I should mention that I did receive positive feedback via social media, Twitter in particular, and I really appreciate that! This post was to simply voice to my bewilderment at a phenomenon of sorts...not to focus on the negative. Thanks to all of you who were encouraging!

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SOME BOYS LIKE ME

Today's post is inspired by the above photo, though it's a topic I've been ruminating on for quite some time and it feels topical now since menswear is showing and what not. When I shared this photo from Daniel Hurlin's collection, "Perfect Blue Tamara," on my Tumblr, someone reblogged it and felt the need to comment:

this guy is so hot, why stick him in weird pyjamas and a stupid jacket? #cozitsfashion?

And I was all like, "homey don't play that game." Number one: Oh no, is he not trying to be hot for you? How dare he! Lord knows the only reason to get dressed is to impress your judgmental ass. The worldview that an outfit must be specially arranged to conform to someone's idea of what's "hot," infuriates me and is baddumbwrong. Number two: Just because YOU think this outfit is "weird pyjamas and a stupid jacket," doesn't mean it actually is. While I generally keep the tone of *fruitpunch apolitical (well, liberal a.k.a. sane) and lighthearted, lighthearted can still want to smack some sense into internet users whose blithe remarks are casually indicative of straight-privilege. Educate yourself! Hurlin's notes for the collection declare, "He deconstructs the patterns of classic menswear, manipulates cuts, compartmentalises bodies, isolating certain parts, or suddenly revealing others: a mosaic of faded colours which sometimes makes one think of Kazimir Malevich. Employing violent contrasts, Daniel Hurlin creates an attractive fiction where elegance conceals a trap which is as delicate as it is deadly." BAM #knowledgeispower

The commenter's attitude and the resulting pissed-off-edness it awakened within me brought to mind the gender-bending, convention-thwarting work of a designer whose work is always captivating, Walter Van Beirendonck. My apologies if any of the below images offend with their "not hotness":

Granted, there are plenty of other designers whose work continually challenges the status quo, I'm just rather keen on Van Beirendonck's styling (the colors! the hair!) I feel it's important to reference progressive menswear designers for their perspective on male sexuality, as popular attitudes toward dress and what is/isn't appropriate for a "gender" is a dialogue we conduct daily through our sartorial choices. This isn't to say that I personally am fighting the good fight for men wearing cropped-sleeve polka-dot sportcoats and embroidered satin drop-waist kimonos (I just made that up, that doesn't even make sense) - Lord knows I enjoy wearing pants and, increasingly, baseball caps. But when it comes to Fashion, a good menswear designer, to me, presents a collection that reflects (and distorts) cultural attitudes and encourages a dialogue about masculinity and I, a consumer, take note of that and keep it in the back of my mind while getting dressed. (Kept in my mind as of late: J.W. Anderson's latest collection.)

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IN THE MOOD FOR LUV

We now take a break from our regular programming to kick off The Love Week, because Valentine's Day is trite, but I'm in the mood for something themed. Our first order of business is sort of courtship, but mostly sex, really. Pretty much everything I learned about sex I learned from women who don't want to have it with you because you're a triflin' ass motherf***er.

The late nineties/early oughties were obviously the golden age of life on Earth, as evidenced by the stills and videos in this post. The music I listened to at that time has always informed the way I articulate my self-worth, i.e. lots of sass and cynicism grounded in the knowledge that I am the best thing ever and I hope you realize that before I'm gone outcha life forever. We start our adventure with TLC's Silly Ho, my favorite song off their 1999 album, Fanmail. It easily trumps No Scrubs with its indelible chant, "If you really wanna find/someone to get some behind/I ain't the one for you", although I highly encourage you to click through to that video as well for the styling and set design.

I was (and am) a huge Aaliyah fan and this plaintive single from the best years of Timbaland productions decries a skeezeball whose girl would obviously leave him if she only knew he couldn't stop trying to get fresh with the embattled songstress. The message, "it ain't easy to get with me," is sort of my defining life mantra (and also why I'm chronically single - boys r stoopid!) Also, these videos make it readily apparent that my pants are not wide enough. None of our pants are wide enough.

Unfortunately for all of us, the video for Missy Elliott's Sock it 2 Me is not available to be embedded, but you can find it here. The above screencap should be incentive enough, I'm sure, to click through to the totally batshit crazy, apparently Megaman-inspired video. The song details how ready Missy is for you to "sock it" to her because her hormones are, "jumpin' like a disco" and features an insane guest verse by Da Brat at her finest. I like that Missy's got a sex drive and she's not afraid of it, as we can tell from the enchanting line: "I'm at your house around midnight, don't fall asleep/It'll just be me on a late night creep."

Foxy Brown is one of those late-nineties female rappers whose oeuvre is packed with only a few recognizable singles, but the cover art for her album, Ill Na Na, has always stuck out in my memory for its low rent intensity. The video for Hot Spot is just about the greatest thing since sliced bread if sliced bread is code for softcore snow fetish porn. My favorite line comes quick, so listen close or you'll miss it: "MC's wanna eat me, but it's Ramadan."

Kelis is one of my favorite artists, even though her sound has changed completely from the days of this Neptunes-produced track off her second album. In it she declares, "the good stuff's right here," and proves true to her word with a dip-dyed afro and roller disco sex party. I've totally got the "good stuff," too, but I prove it by packing away my weight in butter and dancing around in my underwear, alone. Same difference.

This song is admittedly a bit more recent (2006), but it features possibly my favorite line in any song ever: "I know I'm a hot hot shawty/but you gotta slow down/you don't know me." Have truer words ever been spoken? And by someone wearing so much carefully applied purple sparkle eye shadow?

And we end our journey all the way back in the 80's, where all journeys must end, with Janet Jackson (Ms. Jackson, if you're nasty.) I grew up listening to Janet, thanks to my mother's diva fandom, and she just doesn't get better than Control and its follow-up, Rhythm Nation. And this video: The hair! The shoulder pads! Multiple male dancers in lycra crop-tops! There's just no better way to say, "I'd rather not be having sex with you, thanks."