Rapper DPhill Spanglish Man is a on a mission to blur the lines between genders and look good while doing it. He’s started what he likes to call the XY movement, I think it sounds fantastic but I’ll let him explain it himself.
I’ve always been in awe of men/women who aren’t afraid to step outside the norms of what’s considered acceptable when I was 16 my best friend was a guy who would where eye liner, nail polish and women’s T shirts I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. Along with people Courtney Love, David Bowie and Morrissey now I think I can add mr Spanglish Man to that list.
As you can imagine DPhill’s been getting allot of heat for this but judging from the interview he seems to be really serious about his intentions and I wish him all the luck in the world.
Sure, pink can be masculine of feminine or whatever, same as black. But not that dress
. That dress looks like something Grayson Perry’s Claire persona would wear.
Isn’t it ironic that I don’t consider those things to be feminine?
I consider them to be “reserved for women, under threat of serious beating”, but not feminine.
My dress has an aesthetic flair that cocktail dresses can never have. My dress itself, whoever wears it, is aesthetically pleasing, a cocktail dress is made to make the body of the wearer pleasing to the eye. Hence cocktail dresses are accessory for visual porn, rather than actual clothing, to me. They also tend to be very expensive for the amount of fabric and coverage they have.
Fishnets and eyeshadow are also associated with punk culture, and “wanting to look older” for teen girls. Because Astor in Dexter S5 looks so much more “mature and feminine” when she looks like a smashed (from alcohol) raccoon (she is supposed to be 12, the character anyway)… I’ll take my natural look, thank you. I also had a 14 years old girl chase after the brother that’s right after me in age, from when he was 18 to something last year (he just turned 27). She wanted to look older, so she put in tacky huge earrings (4 inch rings?) and super-barn-make-up (like the result of Homer’s make-up shotgun invention). It only looked less innocent, but not more adult – certainly not more feminine.
Because it’s mostly associated with women, make-up will appear superficially feminine, but I take that it’s mostly a feature that’s about either liking it in itself (which takes some questioning about what you do like) and about differentiating from women. The same way men might avoid pink, or go in men-only sports. It’s sometimes about insecurity about your sex (ie you fear some people could take you for the other sex, so buy into every stereotype possible to lower that chance – seems to be a phase young girls/teens go through (going all pink and princess), and trans women soon after transition, too).
I’m not attracted by those ‘feminine attire’, either to wear, or to date someone who does. Doesn’t mean they can’t wear it, it’s just not attractive aesthetically or romantically to me, partly because mainstream culture uses them like the standard social convention that people have to follow by default (and that counts for a lot for say, 12 years olds, who aren’t sure how to express their sex identification, and want to avoid rejection). The fact that it’s the default, the Hollywood standard, means I’ll necessarily question it more – because many will just take that standard because it’s effortless thinking, as opposed to genuine liking.
The looks that lolita fashion imitates, minus any corsetry (it’s entirely optional, for people with an even bigger budget, and who like the looks or feeling), is innocent. It’s not meant to buy into “sexy is everything” culture, in fact it actively works against it. And people who wear it are mostly (young) adults, not meant to impersonate children. So in Japan, it attracts attention because it’s unusual (and they often assemble in parks there), but it isn’t used to attract sexual advances.
I didn’t say black was more masculine, only that gothic lolita (which has a pattern of white+black AND is more dark-themed, as in darkness, evil, vampire, werewolf etc) was more masculine than sweet lolita. Or at least more acceptable to dress as for a guy.
You know, speaking of gothic and gender bending, anyone else here ever do any black lipstick, mascara, mesh shirts, or corsets? You want to talk about a sexual masculine icon, Brendon Lee’s The Crow went off like explosion in my neck of the woods. One of my best friends was such a hard-core goth…
I remember, he’d moved away while in middle school and then his parents divorced and he moved back into town to live with his older sister. He snuck up behind me in the hall, in high school, and, like, gave me a ‘Boo!’ I whip around and I see this guy with his purple coif, lipstick, face paint, and big dangling earrings and I’m thinking “Aw man, the goths are gonna start scoring points off me?” Then I recognise him through all the glam. I shout his name and, while I’m not a hugger, we had a reunion embrace in the hallway that must have been quite spectacular to look at.
Jay: When I was a kid, i wanted to dress like that, but when you’re 14 and get maybe $5/week in allowance–fishnets, skirts with lace and chains, and black makeup are seriously out of your price range. (And good luck getting my mother to stop by Hot Topic!) I tried to compensate by wearing shirts with loose sleeves in dark colors, but…if it’s not designed to be goth, it generally doesn’t LOOK goth.
By the time I got my first job and/or was handy with a sewing machine, the urge to be a Child of the Night had faded. I used my hard-earned cash to buy Disturbed CDs instead.
@ The L
Yeah, this trend was right about the same time I got my first job. Later on my little brother was able to put together some outfits way more awesome than mine, because they had er, wotcha call, Hot Topics(?) all over the place by the time he got up to that age. I was goth-lite by comparison. My best outfits actually had bits borrowed from the above friend. (Who says dudes never borrow each other’s clothes?) He was fiscally much better off than my family was, but even he stretched his budget out by getting together with his girlfriend to make a lot of their clothes themselves.
I used to date a lot of girls who dressed that way… kind of stopped a few years ago. But I’ve got to say, very few of them would have regarded themselves as performing masculinity when they put on their makeup, corsets etc etc.
@ Hugh
Oh, I mostly meant teh Menz. Although, in line with what L said, my only g/f who was goth with me couldn’t afford, or wasn’t that interested in, most of the glitzy stuff ,and she didn’t get much fancier than dark colored clothes, jeans, boots, hair-dye, make-up, and a couple of studded leather accessories. Heck, even her hair dye was often kool-aid powder, and her make-up came right out of a Halloween supply kit you could get at Kmart.
So, I guess if you counted her look against the look of the guys she dated, she was gender bending a bit herself.
I was thinking about this the other day, and it reminded me of a short film I saw a while ago about gender variance. It was done in the style of a 40′s public information film and started with a group in a park and a woman who wanted to play football with the guys and a man who wanted to sit and do knitting, then someone else came along and jumped straight in with the concept of transgender as a way to solve their problems.
This is something I’ve noticed, that frequently when people are challenging gendered assumptions it’s often the case that they’ll use the transgender/gender variant argument, to say that the people who are doing whatever it happens to be or dressing in a certain way are doing so because they are something other than male or female. This may be the case, but it seems strange to me that this is the default argument for many people rather than pointing out that a woman who plays football is no less of a woman and a man who knits is no less of a man. In fact in many ways this is a far more radical perspective on things.
Transsexual people are often considered, in the mind of most people, to be a third sex, not “really” the sex they claim to be, and not really the other, either (even as they say that you are the other sex, because they want to third gender you without acknowledging that there can be non-binary identities).
Transgender people are either considered to:
-”Play” with gender roles to fuck people’s expectations (genderfuck is exactly that)
-Be a weird token minority for their gender or sex (or both, why not)
-Be doing it for a sexual thrill or a ‘perversion’
-Be doing it to escape the shackles of gender normativity in expression (ie social cross-dressing without sexual stuff even entering), at least some of the time
-Do this as part of being gay or lesbian, either because it’s seen as one following the other (never mind masculine gay men and femme lesbian women), or because it’s seen as what you do to fit in in your subculture (sort of like adopting the subculture ‘look). <- and some (not all) do this for real in the LGB community
-For entertainment (mardi gras, pride parade, drag shows)
If I ever saw a men walking down the street in a skirt and high heels, I would remain completely indifferent.
Girls can have a “tomboy-ish” style and can pretty much wear whatever they want and it’s all considered acceptable. So why couldn’t man do the same?
At the end of the day, a man is still a man. It doesn’t matter if he’s wearing cotton, polyester, wool, a skirt or pants and whatnot. LOL He is still a man.
It changes nothing. So who cares.
“Girls can have a “tomboy-ish” style and can pretty much wear whatever they want and it’s all considered acceptable.”
As someone who’se friends with several masculine looking women, I’d just like to point out that a woman who dresses in a masculine way does not get an easy ride by any standards.