Harry Styles, Timothée Chalamet & Jacob Elordi’s “effeminacy” shows how toxically masculine society still is and how racism feeds into it.
TOXIC masculinity and racism go hand-in-hand.
As you may have seen everywhere for the last month, Harry Styles has made the cover of Vogue December issue and in a particularly controversial ensemble. He wore a dress. He also wore a blazer. But he wore a dress — and that fact sparked a very interesting discourse on the internet. You can likely sense a lot of reluctance in my reference to it as a “discourse” and there certainly is. Because on the one hand, it has opened the flood gates to millions of misogynistic cretins but on the other it has also exposed an angle of the conversation that society is so barely primed for.
On the subject of the former, such condemnation of any level of gender fluidity is not new and is punishingly predictable in today’s political landscape. Harry Styles wearing a dress isn’t even new either: he wore a bright pink tutu quite confidently about a full a year ago for SNL. And he is not the only one. Photographer Jacob Elordi, of Zendaya-adjacency fame, appeared on a VMan Magazine cover in some rather tall Rick Owens heels earlier this year.
And Timothée Chalamet, the world’s next Leo Dicaprio, has also shown a “feminine” side when appearing bloused up for Entertainment Weekly in October last year.
But Mr. Elordi and Chalamet did not stir quite as much discussion and hatred as Harry Styles. Probably because there smaller fanbases are almost in entirely made up of preteen Twitter-Tumblr-ian expats that are waiting at the edge of their seats for their idols to make such gender non-conforming moves. Whereas Harry Styles is coming off extreme mainstream success. He is household level fame which gives people who were never fans to begin with a scapegoat when they want to suggest things like that “masculinity is being feminized” as political commentator, and full time Twitter over-user, [REDACTED] wrote. However, this is the easiest form of backlash, a much more prominent “argument” hovering around social media suggest that “he’s doing it for attention”, which seems to ignore the lack of mutual exclusivity between doing something for attention and actual wanting to do it. It is the moderate’s argument, the “I’m not racist, but” of any argument surrounding gender, and an otherwise easy way to show that you “understand” how gender works without ever having to exercise your “comprehension” of it.
But there was also uproarious praise all over. And that praise is what’s interesting. Because while thousands of people came out on Twitter to show how much they appreciate Styles for breaking gender norms, not much later Playboi Carti, adopted a slightly “girly” posture in an image and was almost immediately flamed for it. Just read some of the comments he received on Instagram. Which is where that important angle I mentioned earlier comes in.
A while ago Dave Chappelle was denounced in many places for his transphobic commentary as he rightfully should have been. But within one of his specials he made a small rebuttal to people’s arguments which contained a nugget of truth. That rebuttal being that we are more accepting of Caitlyn Jenner’s transition because “he was” a white male. The nugget of truth being that we are more accepting of Harry Styles, Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and others because they are all white males. Skinny, tall, pale white males.
Dennis Rodman’s “stunts” way back in 90s did nothing to shift the way we see gender and neither did Andre 3000, Young Thug, Frank Ocean or more recently Playboi Carti. Which is not only telling of how rooted misogyny and transphobia are in Black American culture as well as lower income school zones in general, but how the white(and unfortunately, often Black) populace is more prepared to watch a white man repackage and redictate the perimeters of social constructs than anyone else.
It’s always “revolutionary” when the usual white suspects do it, but never when a Black man does it. Which is not a detraction from the aforementioned white males’ statements they are making by taking on this attire. But think to yourself: when was the last time you have ever seen the anorexically skinny, tall, clean shaven, boyish trope be adopted by a Black man or boy in a movie? No, the sexy Black man can only be burly, large and hardened by the world around them. Think back to heroin chic in the 90s. Could a Black man even have a part in that aesthetic?
There is so much conditioning to wait for white male approval in this world and it is difficult to confront. It’s taken years for movements like Black Lives Matter to develop large scale traction and even then it becomes stumped by things like BlackOutTuesday(the only thing worse than COVID to happen this year). But I respect Harry Styles for what he’s doing right now to shake up the conversation regarding toxic masculinity — I just wished he used that same platform to shake up the conversation about why the world’s so much more ready to accept him than someone like Playboi Carti.
