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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Just took a stroll through mgtow2 which is suppose to be less hateful and misogynistic than it’s original sub but it’s already full of “women are inferior in every sense and haven’t contributed anything to society besides their wombs” posts. Women live rent free in their heads for the longest time, despite trying to go their own way.
Also
Just many cis men really think that they’re a different species altogether. The number of times they spout something like this. Is it anti-biology? ignorance? Misogyny? All of the above?
@Tohka
A lot of TERFs have tried to claim a similar argument that AMAB and AFAB people are different species (one on Twitter informed me that AMAB humans had more in common with male chimpanzees than AFAB humans). In their case it appears to be a lack of biology knowledge and rabid misogyny and transphobia, and I’d imagine it’s similar for MGTOWs.
For what it’s worth, breed is usually used for domestic or farm animals and are still part of the same specie – believe it or not, but a chihuahua can reproduce with a Great Pyrenee, even if I suspect they would need help. It don’t make the claim any less intelligent since, you know, people breeds animals opf the same breed together to accentuate traits, and I don’t think breeding males with males will go very far.
The closest I see among human to a “breed” is the too-tightly-knits royal family in Europa (or egypt for that matter). But I don’t think they actually got any recognizable trait. You can recognize a Labrador at sight, but good look distinguishing a distinguished member of the English Royal Family from the average englishman.
The claim about AMAB being closer to chimpanzees is obviously meant as an insult, but “close” is mostly subjective and not very well defined. Is it supposed to be behaviorally ? Genetically ? Culturally ? Something else they would make up on the spot ? If someone said that to my face, I would probably challenge them to say in which way. I like see people trip on their own arguments, and it’s *very* likely that anyone making that argument know less about chimpanzee behavior and biology than me, because else they wouldn’t try that angle.
@Ohlmann
Various royal families did start to produce some rather distinctive faces after years of inbreeding:
@Naglfar, Crip Dyke
(I apologise for the autocorrect I didn’t catch last time, Crip Dyke.) It looks like the gadget has an out after all, according to the BBC.
@Big Titty Demon
So much for that plan. I guess we’re back to the drawing board.
@ Naglfar, and also Nequam (and anyone else who likes dresses with pockets), I’m a little o/t here now but I wanted to tell you this. ?
Ok, this is probably going to sound like an ad, but I buy all my abayas at eastessence(dot)com. They’re basically floor-length dresses. They all have nicely sized pockets, or at least the jersey-fabric ones I buy do, and they’re customizable for length and sleeve-length. I guess if you didn’t want floor-length, you could cut it off? If you don’t sew to do hems, jersey at least just rolls a bit and doesn’t fray. I’ve never bought their more fancy ones, though.
That orange dress is…well, to each their own, I suppose… Men, choose better dresses than this! Nicer fabrics! Colours that flatter you!
@ bookworm in hijab
If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the difference between an abaya and a jilbab? From the pics there appears to be a degree of overlap.
The dress sort of reminds me of comedian/voice artist/kids’ show host Chuck McCann cosplaying as Little Orphan Annie, except he definitely wore it better:
Alan, no real difference, except I think in Indonesia “jilbab” also includes the headscarf? Tbh my friends and I use them interchangeably, but abaya seems like the more common word.
Species and breed mean different things in biology, but when someone blathers about “male species” or “male breed”, they mean the same thing – or rather there’s equal lack of meaning. It’s just a somewhat conventional rhetorical expression for someone who wants to sound dramatic. It sounds vaguely fitting to the gender essentialist thinking, where men and women are seen as clearly different things.
Thus, when someone’s actual concern is “they want to undermine traditional masculinity”, it is rhetorically expressed as “they want abolish the male gender”, which may be loosely conflated with “they want to abolish the physical existence of male humans”.
@Naglfar
From a purely genetics perspective, I can see how someone might think that, actually, though you have to deliberately misunderstand a whole lot about genetics and compare two separate numbers measured in different ways in order to say it.
The difference in genetics between humans and chimpanzees is generally believed to be somewhere around 1.2%, though that number is measured based on only comparing the specific genes that humans and chimpanzees both share, so it’s ignoring a lot of genetics that only exist in one or the other; if you measure all the sites, it’s 4-5% higher. See https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics
Whereas a naive idea of the difference between men and women is that the Y chromosome is only about 40% the length of the X chromosome, and that’s one of 46 chromosomes, so the 60% difference of 1/46 is about 1.3%. Of course, that’s measuring everything, rather than only active genes like the previous number, and there’s some duplication on the X chromosome.
So if you completely ignore the fact that those two ‘differences’ were measured in utterly incompatible ways, you could make that argument.
@Jenora Feuer
This is basically what every TERF/alt-right appeal to “science” boils down to.
@ bookworm in hijab
Cheers for that; that makes sense. I was familiar with abaya; from the markets; but jilbab was a new one for me. But as I like to learn one new thing everyday, that can be today’s.
@Alan
More specifically, abaya comes from an Arabic word that originally meant a kind of goat’s wool cloth, or a garment made from same. Said garments being typically a long coat or robe, the word eventually started meaning any similar garment.
Jilbab is Ge’ez in origin, borrowed into Arabic, from a word meaning covering, wrap, or veil. These days it has also come to mean robed garments in general.
@ dali
Ah cheers. I guess I’d better start calling them Jilbabs then!
Alan, I usually get “hey I like that…dress…thingy…that you’re wearing! It’s pretty!” Which always makes my day.
Jenora, I actually took a screenshot of your comment; it was really clear and I can forsee a time when I’d want that info handy to use for combatting ignorance. ?
@ bookworm in hijab
This reminds me of the keffiyeh/shemagh thing. Although it’s perhaps not surprising that one of the most practical pieces of clothing in the world is found in so many countries and thus has lots of names. Of course unless they come from the city of Kufa then technically they’re just sparkling headscarves.
It was in relation to keffiyehs that I first heard to term cultural appropriation. I was at a showing of a film called “Arna’s Children“. There was a surreal scene afterwards. Myself, an ex IDF commando friend, and the director of the film and some of his Palestinian friends all ended up in a pub in a place called Shadwell. So you had this somewhat eclectic bunch of people all getting on like a house on fire in a pub that was decked out in St George’s flags and shall we say other items of ‘patriotic’ symbolism.
But anyway, one of the women raised the issue of keffiyehs. She had no problem with anyone wearing them generally; just Westerners adopting the black & white checkered one. To her, you had to earn the right to wear it, and spending a couple of weeks visiting the camps didn’t count. Not when you could go home afterwards.
It was a really interesting evening, and one of my favourite memories. It’s all a bit wistful now though as the director was killed a few years afterwards; in circumstances he’d predicted on that very evening. I’m glad we kept in touch until then though. He was a pretty amazing guy.
My problem isn’t the dress per se, but the fact that it looks like something a little girl would wear in the 1970s. When I wear a dress, I usually opt for a sleek boat neck or a crisp shirtdress.