It is mainly, of course, because of the “human stain” far right commentators that are Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro that anything tends to get blown out of proportion. In 2020, we were foolishly made to believe that singing songs of affirmation about one’s wet ass pussy or a man deciding to wear a dress wouldn’t be met with anything more than a subtle eyebrow raise. But because some cabals (without any balls, to play up the gender stereotype angle of this entire “debacle”) are content to keep America forever in a twentieth century state of mind, the “outrage” was funneled through the mill of social media.
Owens laid down the gauntlet upon the cover’s release with, “There is no society that can survive without strong men. The East knows this. In the West, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack. Bring back manly men.” First of all darling, what movie have you been watching where you’ve ever seen a man’s image not being entirely crafted of a house of cards buttressed by a woman? The myth of “manly men” is as false as the myth of New York being the greatest city in the world. And if they are “manly” in the way Owens is talking about, their tendency is to veer quite noticeably toward fascism, coldness and general displays of being an automaton. Second of all, way to take the assessment of a man in a dress to the nth degree. It’s for a Vogue fashion shoot for fuck’s sake. Thirdly, it seems like Owens isn’t the only one with amnesia about straight men dressing “femininely.” The epicene fashions of the eighteenth century, with all of its bombastic rococo leanings, would apparently be too “womanly” for a man to wear today (powdered wig included). What’s more, the intent of Styles’ outfit was likely to honor the fact that he is the first male to grace the cover in the magazine’s history (others who appeared on it in the past did so with women at their side).
Owens, naturally, also failed to exhibit any understanding of the fact that society’s long-standing support of toxic masculinity has been indoctrinated into us all, and we have only recently started to make the attempt to deprogram. Thus far, it doesn’t seem to be going all that well, and, ironically, the U.S. at large seemed more open to a straight man wearing a dress when it was someone more “butch,” namely grunge/Gen X spokesperson Kurt Cobain, who immortalized his predilection for wearing floral print house dresses on the cover of a 1993 issue of The Face. Brad Pitt, who was less practicing of what he sartorially preached in magazine photo shoots, would likely not be caught wearing a dress outside of the “just for publicity” realm. Still, his uber laddish image in a form-fitting frock was enough to make people reassess their views on “masculinity.” Photographed by Mark Seliger (who also captured Cobain on camera, though not in a dress), the spread appeared in a 1999 issue of Rolling Stone in conjunction with the release of Fight Club. It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek costuming choice considering the machismo behind the narrative of this classic David Fincher movie.
Yet here Pitt proves the very thing that angered a separate faction of non-Candace Owen types for engaging in the straight man’s privilege of “queerbaiting.” Instead, when an actual queer or trans person plays with gender, it’s “sissy.” Only recently has Billy Porter almost single-handedly paved the way for being “respected” as a gay man with “style” for his quote unquote over the top garb. Note, of course, that Porter isn’t described as “fluid” or “nonbinary,” which makes it easier for him to “get away with” putting on women’s clothes as someone more neatly categorizable for having a specific sexuality. Styles, on the other hand, for as much as he can declare, “There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something,” has made a calculated move. One that many others who are actually from the LGBTQ+ community have fought to exhibit for decades.
Along with other straight men like Zach Braff, Elijah Wood remarked of Owens’ accusation (in something of a non-statement), “Masculinity alone does not make a man. In fact, it’s got nothing to do with it.” Maybe what does is the ability to understand that it is still a straight man’s privilege to appear in such dress for the sake of “putting on a show” (David Bowie and Iggy Pop also being guilty parties). To wield it for their “platform” of purported “openness” and call it progressive when the fact is, it’s been done to death throughout history. The more shocking thing would have been for Styles’ ex, Taylor Swift, to have appeared on the cover outfitted in her “The Man” attire. But that still would have applied to the established norm of straight white folk grafting queer culture. Maybe, in the past, straight men (and even women–gasp!) were needed to appear this way as champions of shattering a glass ceiling. In the present era, however, the best favor any straight person could do would be to leave the “grand” displays of cross-dressing to those who are not “just playing.”
As Alok Vaid-Menon summed it up, “Make no mistake: trans femmes of color started this and continue to face the backlash from it. Our aesthetics make it to the mainstream, but not our bodies. We are still dismissed as ‘too much’ and ‘too queer’ because we aren’t palatable enough to whiteness and heteronormativity.” The issue at hand, then, isn’t that Harry Styles wore a dress and got a bit of positive attention and defense for it, it’s that actual trans people of color do not get that treatment when they do (and have done for quite some time) the same thing.
