This post is for the pretty men.
Now, when I say pretty, I don’t mean broad shoulders, rippling muscles, carrying power tools and towering over me. I don’t mean that genre of men, though god knows I’m a fan. I am a happy member of the cheering section.
I mean the men with soft skin, full lips, femme clothing. Men with skinny limbs and long hair. Men who like to wear satin and velvet. Men who like to feel pretty.
Pretty (adjective): pleasing by delicacy or grace.
You know who you are. This one’s for you.
There is some serious fuckupery concerning how body image issues are presented. Take a minute and think about who talks about body image. Think about the last time you had a discussion about body image. Think about the language you used.
Nine times out of ten, I’d bet that language was gendered. I’d bet you were talking to a woman. Woman’s issues. Woman’s weight. Women’s bodies. We’re teaching women how to accept cultural stereotypes, and how to fight them. Women’s body issues are vocalized.
Does it not seem a little fucked up that men’s body issues are not? When body image is considered a women’s only issue, we continue to strengthen the idea that only women are judged by their bodies. In a twisted kind of way, we continue to objectify ourselves while we fight not to be objectified. Following from this, we pigeonhole men into the role of the objectifier while simultaneously ignoring them as possible victims of cultural stereotypes.
Men are praised for their attractiveness in totally different ways. They are held to totally different, strictly gendered, strictly masculine standards. These standards, by the way, are almost never standards of beauty. They’re standards of wealth, of skill, of strength, of ownership and possession. May’s attraction is judged by how hot his girlfriend is. Most people look at me. Only rarely do they look at him.
Even the uprise of the metrosexual fashion movement in urban areas perpetuates the dichotomy separating modes of attraction. Metrosexual men can be in touch with their feminine side, can “reject macho stereotypes”, can use expensive hair care products and wear aesthetically pleasing clothes. But god help them if they decide to wear a satin nightie to bed.
This blindness leaves a vast, gaping hole that pretty men keep falling down.
Men aren’t the attracting partner. Men don’t get pursued. Men aren’t androgynous. Men aren’t bisexual. Men don’t want to be pretty. Men don’t want what women have. The most damaging of all? Shut up and take it. Be a man.
Ladies, hate to break it to you. Our bodies are pushed and shoved and stereotyped to within an inch of our lives. And yet, the freedom we’re allowed in breaking gendered stereotypes of attraction is epic, compared with our fellow men.
Why are we so much more okay with women in men’s clothing than we are with men in women’s clothing? I wear boy-cut jeans and a ratty button-down, and I don’t get a second glance, and I’m not necessarily a lesbian. But May wears girl-cut jeans and a ringer tee that I gave him, and he gets looks on the street, and he must be gay. Never mind he’s holding hands with a chick.
We bitch and yell when men want to dress up as women to be humiliated. (I bitch and yell with the best of them.) What about the men who’ve been told, over and over, that a man who wants to be a woman is supposed to feel humiliated?
What about men who just want to be pretty in the only way they’ve been taught is possible: by being more like women?
There is no middle space where “real men” can feel pretty. If you’re a man who wears women’s clothing or makeup, either you’re gay, you’re just getting off on being humiliated like a weak woman, or you’re three steps away from a gender transition and you just haven’t gotten there yet. And it’s such bullshit.
There needs to be some gender fluidity, and it needs to flow both ways.
If a woman opens up and says she’s feeling unattractive in comparison with cultural standards, the common mode is to support her in a sensitive, relatively ungendered way. We’ll talk about her mind, or her ideas. But if a man opens up and says he feels unattractive in comparison with cultural standards, we tell him he’s strong. Bad logic, damnit, bad logic!
But never mind. A real man would never say that in the first place.
11 Comments
I commented on May’s post on this, as well.
Why are we so much more okay with women in men’s clothing than we are with men in women’s clothing?
I find this extremely irritating, also. (Although I’m not sure that personally I could tell boy-cut jeans from girl-cut jeans, but anyway.) I’ve had discussions with male friends recently about the practicalities of skirts & their wishing they had that option.
I’ve seen some discussion in the last couple of years about the extent to which men are increasingly having body-image issues; but yes, the image they’re trying to live up to is “strong” (as opposed to “skinny & certain-type-of-pretty” for women). I think maybe the defined social ideal for both genders is similarly limiting; but the extent to which being outside of that is also OK maybe differs.
I now want to go talk to my (pretty, feminine/androgynous :-) ) partner about his take on this…
They’re standards of wealth, of skill, of strength, of ownership and possession.
You’re getting warmer, Eileen. These are all culturally accepted trappings of power. It’s not the wealth, it’s not the big muscles (well, except for Bitchy) and it’s not the BMW.
It’s the power.
Power means that you can do things, or have them done for you.
“Pretty” is not powerful. Sorry, Eileen, but pretty, effeminate or metrosexualish boys won’t change your flat tire if the car breaks down, or spear a charging stag for dinner. Power means a willingness to do the dirty work, to get things done, to keep at it until you’re out of danger, fed, or protected.
Some of the old-timers still talk about how the local banking managers would shake hands with men coming in to ask for a loan, and figure that rough hands meant a willingness to work, and were good risks.
Yes, there is much in our society that is screwed up, and that’s one of them. We - as a culture - need new definitions. Power is no longer measured by muscle power, but by horsepower, RAM, bandwidth. Unfortunately, our primitive brains haven’t caught up.
I’d write more, but Beej wants me to finish digging some hole in that field. I’ll get to it.
Right after my tea break.
Tom-
I’ve talked before about divorcing power exchange from gender. Because changing a flat tire or getting my dinner? I can do that myself.
What I’m trying to get at here is that May, and men like him, cannot exist in a state that is both pretty and powerful. Women can.
I am both pretty and powerful. May is powerful by many of the trappings you and I named. (He has money, he’s smart, he’s a hard worker, he can provide for me and protect me.) He’s pretty by many of the standards we hold. (He has smooth skin, a shapely body, delicate features.) But he can’t be both things at the same time.
I don’t think we need new definitions of power. Then we would simply have the same problems in updated versions. I think we need new ways of combining ideas.
Juliet-
I would love to hear you (and your partner’s) take on this!
I concur; the issue doesn’t seem to be which roles are more specific, but rather which are more confining.
Years ago, I had a big argument with a partner after referring to him as pretty (he was, outstandingly). He interpreted my remark as dismissive, and as an attempt to put him in his place (and this was a boy who wore my clothes, jewelry and eyeliner). I can understand an urge to be seen as pretty, but it is one of those terms that carries a lot of hidden weight.
However, I live in a country where prettiness in a man is not seen as emasculating or as “weak” - on the contrary, it often confers a power all of its own.
However, I live in a country where prettiness in a man is not seen as emasculating or as “weak” - on the contrary, it often confers a power all of its own.
Z, I would love to hear more about that. Would you mind elaborating?
Much of this is true among gay men.
My primary attraction has been to androgynous, feminine males. I don’t mean crossdressers (not that I reject them). But the soft somewhat swishy guys.
Some years back when I was online trying to meet guys I had a profile that clearly stated this preference. Gay men would IM and email me to tell me what an evil creep I must be to want a guy like that.
I hate sissyphobia in all its variations.
Richard, I will second your experience with my own (admittedly limited) explorations of the gay community.
Wikipedia has, as usual, a very helpful (stub) article on sissyphobia. Eileen, you should check it out. Also read the article on effeminacy, which is equally enlightening.
Eileen, without giving away where I live, I’ll just say that I think the reaction to physical beauty is somewhat different to how it is in the US/UK, although while thinking about how to respond, I realize I’m fuzzy on the details of why think so. It’s not rude to stare, here. You know, when you’re in public, that you will be looked at, and not covertly - and that’s just when you’re standing at the bus stop.
It’s a macho society, but “metrosexual” would not be seen as an insult. My daughter’s male friends shave their legs when they play sports and have their eyebrows waxed… and these are not sophisticated inner-city slickers - they are just as likely to be construction workers as university students, and more than one lives on a farm.
I’d sum it up very simply by saying that it’s less about the tyranny of beauty, and more about the celebration of it - but that’s far too simplistic and vague. I don’t even mean that it’s easy to be a pretty man making the most of his prettiness: “gay” is still an insult. But it is probably easier to admire someone for the way they look, and for a man to enjoy his physical appearance, without feeling that that admiration and enjoyment detract from an appreciation of anything else less ephemeral.
And as usual at the moment, I now feel more confused about what I meant to say than before I wrote it down.
Getting around to catching up on stuff after the shock that took me off the blogs for most of the week …
I wrote about prettiness in men last month. Though I didn’t mean by it what you are, quite, it’s a related thought.
I’ve actually had a fair number of conversations with my liege about his body-image issues, which are related to him being heavier than he would like to be. (And also less in-shape.)
I also frequently point out that I find him beautiful/pretty, which used to, I think startle him on the ‘that’s a gendered word, isn’t it?’ principle. But there’s this place in my mind where I stash memories of this, and I have so many, this sort of utter radiant beauty that I am utterly compelled by, which is a huge part of our power dynamic. And that’s still private space, some, but …
… a while back on my LJ I wrote that a lot of people don’t have the guts to be beautiful. Using an idiosyncratic meaning of ‘beautiful’, there, one rich and genuine and utterly of themselves rather than partaking fully of ‘this is what it means to be beautiful’ signals. I should go retell the myth again in my blog ….
Tom hits it right on the head. Power can be an aphrodisiac, not to mention it’s probably a hell of a draw for women brought up to see men as an image of power and protection.
And I’ll assume he’s being sarcastic about how the pretty boy’s and or metrosexuals can’t change your tire etc. I think we all know they can as well as anyone else. It’s just a matter of the women that think they cannot.
I think it is interesting how men that are getting away from what’s traditionally seen as masculine (the repudiation of anything feminine. Are looked upon with a certain amount of disdain.
Often by the same women that will complain about the restriction of emotions, sex without intimacy etc.
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