Retrosexuality's a Drag

There's an annoying trend in journalism these days toward trend reporting. The New York Times leads the pack in this dubious field. In fact, back in the April 1998 issue of GQ, Daniel Radosh wrote a trend piece about the rise of trend pieces. Kinda hurts the brain. In that vein, The Philadelphia Inquirer recently ran a piece called Manning Up, that claimed there was a trend afoot for men to dress like Jon Hamm's character in Mad Men. Supposedly these guys are in search of genuine masculinity and are using an AMC drama's characters as templates.

Not only is this basically a form of asinine cosplay, as Aaron Traister pointed out on Salon, but it has been done far better for years by the English. The Chap magazine has been selling to men who wish to permanently live in the English countryside in the days before Churchill could muster any respect and after the Kaiser had lost his.

This is simply Don Draper drag. It has as much to do with a real search for masculinity as women drinking cosmos with friends after watching "Sex and the City" had to do with feminism, despite what Caroline Hagood has to say. Dressing in sharkskin suits is just as much cosplay as urban guys driving pickups and wearing cowboy hats. These are not expressions of masculinity, but grown men playing dress up. There just happens to be a tendency among men to try to ascribe certain values to their costumes. Wearing wranglers and driving a F-150 shows that they're rugged western individualists but sporting a gray homburg tells the world that they believe in their grandfather's values. One can practically hear the Sam Elliot and Wilfred Brimley narrative voices going through their heads as they walk by. Wearing a hat, be it a ten gallon hat or a trilby, will not connect men to society in a meaningful way, and isn't that what all this horseshit is supposedly about, men's role in modern society?

Traister made a good point about how his father would have been a retrosexual role model, but was unhappy. Hell, GQ is constantly telling men to put on suits and act like their grandfathers, but this was a magazine that was thought of for years (and by many still is) as a gay men's magazine. In the early 60's when the Don Drapers walked the earth, they still thought people telling them to get their suits tailored seemed queer. Look at the way the Beats shunned those oh so retrosexual ideas of masculinity while sneering at convention. In short, men have always been fucked up about about their masculinity, and no trend piece in the New York Times is going to change that.

I have a feeling that these trends are nothing more than hipsters passing out of their skinny-black-jeans-and-vinyl-phase. They know they're too old to rock that look forever, but have never existed without a posture. Don the accoutrement and strike the pose, it's just as easy as riding a fixed-gear bike and primping bed-head was after college. Maybe it's a trend.