Gucci has inserted itself into the culture war by releasing a weirdly dowdy dress for men at the low, low price of $2600 a pop. The dress, more a publicity stunt for the brand than an actual product anyone will ever buy, is said to be a challenge to “toxic masculinity.”
And it sort of is, in that its drawn an assortment of toxic men out from the shadows to indignantly protest against this alleged insult to their brand of masculinity. I found a few of these guys (and a couple of sympathetic women) posting about the dress on Twitter:
The reactions were more intense over on my second-favorite hive of toxic masculinity, the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit. (On my first-favorite hive, Incels.co, the regulars seem not to have noticed the new dress yet.)
Some suggested that any man wearing the dress would deserve a beating.
“Anyone wearing this is pretty much asking to get beat up,” suggested melkiorr.
“The only thing that will be fluid would be the nose of anyone dumb enough to wear this in public,” joked ppkoto7.
My_name_jeff2 pulled out the t-word.
Now, you can be a tr*nny without being mentally ill! For only £1699.99
Some lashed out at the model himself in homophobic ways.
“That n***a look like a bitch!” wrote HaywoodJabBitch.
“Behold the eternal virgin!” wrote EnvironmentalRest4. “Getting boned by guys doesn’t count, not in this case.”
Throwawayham1971 mocked any man who would go out and buy the dress.
There is a totally gay dude at Gucci laughing his ass off knowing damn well some fucking loser will buy this to try and get laid.
Rocko20002 tried to retroactively claim Kurt Cobain as an ally in bigotry.
Kurt Cobain might have been a feminist simp, but I’m convinced that if he saw this “grunge inspired” monstrosity sold for I’m guessing the equivalent of US $2000, he would blow his brains out again.
Cobain might have been offended by the price tag but he definitely had no problem with men wearing dresses, which he occasionally sported himself as a challenge to precisely that same toxic masculinity that Gucci is supposedly critiquing.
Luciano700 wrote that
If a man wants to cross dress. Fine that’s his problem not mine
But to shove this down our throats when it is clearly not at the preference of most? That’s going a little too far
It’s not clear how a designer selling a dress that no one is obligated to buy counts as shoving anything down anyone’s throat.
Other commenters saw the dress as a legitimate threat to their kind of masculinity.
“They want you neutered and then they’ll laugh at you” wrote ThrowawayGhostGuy1.
Vijaya_Narayana agreed:
They just want to pander to all of the people and organisations that seek to demonise and ostracize REAL masculinity, the world is changing, not for our benefit.
Monkonajourney challenged the very notion of “tocix masculinity” even as his colleagues in the MGTOW subreddit exhibited it all around him.
Fuck these bullshit societal brainwashing propaganda advertisements. Being a man is not toxic. Wearing masculine clothes is not toxic. Getting angry in the right situations is not toxic. Fighting for yourself and your loved ones is not toxic. Competition is not toxic. Standing up for yourself is not toxic. Not taking shit from anyone is not toxic. Growing a beard, building your physique is not toxic. If it intimidates certain snowflakes, that is their fucking problem. Stop trying to feminize men.
Well, if you make your definition of “toxic masculinity” a series of straw men, you’re only going to succeed in pissing yourself off. No, toxic masculinity isn’t any of those things, from wearing “masculine clothes” to growing a beard. Masculinity in itself is not toxic. Toxic masculinity involves a rigid adherence to an exaggerated version of masculinity that’s socially maladaptive and at times dangerous to people of all genders.
Truly righteous anger is not the problem; a man using anger and implied or real violence to control his wife is an example of masculinity gone toxic. Similarly, suggesting that gender-nonconforming men — say, men in dresses — should be beaten up is toxic masculinity.
Say what you will about Gucci’s ugly man-dress, but it certainly brought out the toxic men in droves, exposing their toxic masculinity in their own words.
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@ naglfar
I am with you on bringing back full skirts I had a 50s style full pleated skirt it was perfect short enough for cycling and the pockets where huge I could fit books in them
@Naglfar
True. It takes years of dedicated practice to reach that level of jackass. If they had spent that effort meditating, they’d all be fucking buddhas by now.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Median real income in the US peaked then. Maybe people sense that, in some ways, things were at their best in that decade, and that fuels a lot of nostalgia for it?
@Naglfar
I immediately laughed hard. I guess that means, YES. Take screen shots, though! Gods, I’d love to see them work themselves into a riot about this. You just know that suddenly MRAs who – on any other day – insist that STEM fields are for men only & women can’t hack it (pardon the pun) will now scream that all the programmers & circuit designers in the entire world are women and their most loyal soy boy cuck-beta slaves.
@ surplus
Over here the 70s is sometimes referred to as “The decade that fashion forgot“.
So there’s maybe a bit of a thing with boho types for the sort of ironic kitschiness of it all?
It certainly wasn’t a boom time here economically. ‘Winter of discontent’; ‘going cap in hand to the IMF’; ‘poor man of Europe’ and other cliches.
Still, we got punk out if it!
@Big Titty Demon
You know what’s funny. I actually looked at that dress and just based on how it looked I **assumed** it was going to be cheap quality that wouldn’t last 10 washings.
@Crip Dyke
I feel like I have a bit of an obligation to let David know beforehand that it’s me, otherwise he might think it’s real. Poe’s Law applies here.
@North Sea Sparkly Dragon
100% true. Technically, a ‘plaid/plaidie/feile-mhor*’ is the garment, while the pattern is tartan. Essentially a decent sized wool (usually) blanket that’s worn wrapped around the waist and pinned over the shoulder in a toga-like fashion. Usually a shirt is worn underneath. The kilt is basically a plaid that’s been fully wrapped and then all the top bits removed and a waistband added. It was created by colonial English aristocrats, then made part of the uniform of the Scottish regiments and thus spread in Scotland proper. A kilt calls for ~5 yards of fabric, a plaidie ~9 yards. (This difference is best bet I’ve been able to find for an origin for ‘Whole Nine Yards’, as a quartemaster’s report from the 18th century specifies the lengths above)
*Lit. “Great Kilt”, a back formation after the introduction of kilts, or feile-bheag.
@Crypt Dyke
You know, you’re not wrong. It does look flimsy. But I would be scared to wash something that cost that much anyway, and hence would never buy it from that alone. Aside from many other high fashion exploitation and sustainability soapboxes I could get up on but I reckon probably most people are already near a similar page in the chapter here.
Looks like a dress I wore in the second grade in the early 70s.
Don’t like that dress either, but funnily enough I can imagine Kelli Mayo of the band Skating Polly wearing it. She wears some very ’70s looking clothing in their videos.
@Alan, I have always heard the ’70s referred to as the decade that taste forgot (the wallpaper! the plates and mugs! orange, brown and green, oh my, not to mention the purple) and FSM knows I wouldn’t miss the blatant sexism and racism even more unquestioned than now, but iirc it was also the decade when the UK’s gini coefficient was at its lowest. Maybe that buoyed up a certain degree of optimism and hope for the future.
And then came 1979 and Thatcher …
“Ugly” is an understatement. Whoever designed that sartorial monstrosity should be arrested and made to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Nobody of any gender with the slightest ounce of taste would be caught dead wearing it.
@Cyborette @Ohlmann
Ok, in general defense of people like the dude in the picture and myself, I would like to point out that I spent more than 25 years as a “rail thin” guy who never looked “too healthy”, what with the easy to see rib bones and all.
Despite some concerns from doctors at my appearance, MRIs, CAT scans, and other tests never found any issues except for my bones being less than the desired density and nearsightedness. Although I have gotten lazy in my old age (33), been eating less nutritious food than I should, and picked up thirty pounds, back in the day I regularly engaged in martial arts, parkour, running, walking, etc. As a result, I have always happily noted that in general, I am usually one of the healthiest people in any given room by most metrics. I can outperform the average person in most athletic endeavours, have never needed any kind of regular medication, etc, etc.
And yet, throughout my time on this planet, people who can’t run a mile to save their lives, eat fast food more often than not, and are on various meds feel the need to tell me I am too skinny and need to put on weight for my health…
@ opposablethumbs
I had to google that.
Yes, I won’t miss bosses chasing their secretaries round the desk or the black and white minstrel show, but I do have a soft spot for avocado bathrooms.
Everyone’s hating the dress, huh? And here I thought it was kinda cute…
@Alan
Finally got rid of our avocado tub last year. It came with the house. I really didn’t want to change it – it was a 6 foot tub, and the only one we’ve ever had that I could have a bath in without coiling up. The prices of those now, we went for a standard size replacement and I’ve regretted it ever since. 🙁
Am I the only one noticing that the model has a hang-dog facial expressiona nd body language? Is that normal for Gucci?
Isn’t that common in general for models?
.45 : I meant by “seeing the ribs” as a a common sign that something is wrong, not as the end-all tell tale of underweightness. If only because some people seem to refuse to store fat here and have actually impressive legs and arms and visible ribs.
As a side note, don’t very skinny people get hurt significantly more in combat sport ? If there is something I hate it’s when I get hit directly on bone, but since I don’t do the whole “fighting” part it’s hard to say if it’s really a problem.
@.45
Ugh, my apologies. And my sympathies.
@ ohlmann
Not if they’re doing it right (although it often goes wrong!)
In combat sports (and fighting generally) people are taught “Strike hard to soft, and soft to hard.”
What that means in practice is, that whilst you might use your fist (hard) against your opponent’s stomach (soft); if you were to strike their chin (hard) you would use the heel of your hand (soft). That helps prevent injury to yourself.
Even with things like Muay Thai you’ll note that shin to shin strikes are avoided. People might strike the thigh with the shin; but if they are going for a knee they’ll aim to make contact with the front of their ankle, which does provide a measure of protection. And it’s the same with defending. People will block strikes with the muscle at the side of their shin.
Many Thai fighters and other kickboxers will do all sorts of exercises to create microfractures in their bones to strengthen them anyway. Purely coincidentally, Thailand has the highest rate of (shin) bone cancer in the world.
Of course, a lot of combat sports do allow for some form of padding; whether that be gloves or shin protectors.
@Alan
Oh that’s fascinating, thank you! I learned the hard-to-soft part in self defense classes, and “strong part of your body vs. weak part of your opponent’s” (for attacks against joints), but not soft-to-hard strikes. That makes a lot of sense.
remembers the time teenage me socked a guy in the ribs and broke my hand, sigh
@Cyborgette @Ohlmann
Just for clarification, I’m not raging upset or anything. More calm observational tone. (While I haven’t exactly worked up statistics, thanks to skinny jeans and metrosexual stuff today, I think it has became way more common to see skinny male model representation than in my youth, but still, look at magazines and popular media. Men’s Health doesn’t exactly feature the Don Knotts type, and if a skinny guy is the hero in a movie, he is usually an awkward nerd who struggles in society and romance, can’t fight, and wins by a combo of luck and brains. Well, unless he gets all Steve Rogered. Again, not bitter, just observational.)
Anywho, you’re probably right, I imagine very skinny people don’t do well in cage fighting or full contact Muy Tai UFC type stuff. However, I did a couple styles of Tae Kwon Do, and two different traditional Jujitsu styles that with the notable exception of one of the Jujitsu styles, were not particularly strenuous. I wasn’t exactly the best student in class there, though I was never seriously hurt, just thrown and pinned a lot.
@.45
Ah okay. Still, I think you were right to call me in on this. I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of body shaming myself and like… I should know better, even if lashing out at men along those same lines gets really tempting.