Femininity is a flex for top-half men

When I write that society punishes men far more for performing femininity than women for performing masculinity, I often get a “huh?” response.

First of all, I am not making this up. OG MRA Herb Goldberg said it in the 70s. bell hooks said it in the 90s. Celeste Davis and Ruth Whippman are saying it today.

If you think I’m full of poop here, it may be because you’re in the top-half. This is why I keep talking about “bottom-half men.” Because the top- and bottom-half are pulling apart.

That means that many people don’t realize that the top-half and bottom-half of society police gender very differently.

For example:

This is pop singer Harry Styles wearing a Gucci dress for the cover of Vogue. (If you want to know how hip and happening I am, know that I Googled “dress to awards show guy in boy band” to find it.)

Contrast Styles wearing a Gucci dress for a Vogue cover shoot to Harper Steele wearing a dress into one of the blue-collar, flyover country dive bars she used to love before her transition. She told Will Farrell she was afraid that someone would literally kill her.

Consider who gave Styles shit. Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens had a field day. The former said it was "a referendum on masculinity for men to wear floofy dresses." I mean, yes.

But Black gay actor Billy Porter and non-binary Desi performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon also pushed back, for slightly different reasons.

Vaid-Menon pointed out that it didn’t feel great for a white man to represent gender neutral fashion when "trans femmes of color started it and continue to face the backlash from it.”

Porter said, “I had to fight my entire life to get to the place where I could wear a dress to the Oscars ... All he has to do is be white and straight."

According to Boymom, YMRI, and (I believe) Opportunity Insights, Black and Hispanic men are, on average, more invested in performing masculinity than white men. Many men perform masculinity to protect themselves from violence, which Black and Hispanic men are more likely to face.

Black and Hispanic men are also, on average, more likely to be among the bottom-half than white men. In terms of averages, trans femmes of color are either at, or very near, the bottom.

Republicans and Democrats are increasingly polarizing along educational lines.

People with degrees and the Democratic Party have both chosen to take the “high road” on cultural issues, according to Noah Smith.

Rob Henderson derides the top-half’s socially liberal opinions as “luxury beliefs.” The We Have Never Been Woke guy argues that accepting and protecting trans people, for instance, is more than simply an opinion more often found among “symbolic capitalists,” who are overwhelmingly in the top-half, but increasingly a marker of and requirement for social inclusion.

Like many culture war issues, gender egalitarianism is quickly becoming an important dividing line between the Democratic Party, people with degrees, and the top-half more generally on the one hand and the GOP, people without degrees, and the bottom-half writ large on the other.

Which means that while bottom-half men beat each other up for acting like pussies, for top-half men, it’s a flex.

Remember Pajama Boy?

In this reality, a man who performs femininity – whether wearing a flannel onesie, declaring himself a feminist, painting his nails, or actively listening (especially to someone who is not a man) – is signaling that he thinks he’s in the top-half. He’s saying, in essence, “I can do this safely because my social context not only allows it, but a lot of my peers will call me brave.”

Filmmaker and actress Olivia Wilde, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actress Jameela Jamil, actor Elijah Wood, and Rolling Stone writer EJ Dickson all applauded Styles for his Vogue cover.

I doubt many men consciously think any of this, Styles included.

Nor do I think it’s a bad thing, at all.

Aforementioned hater Billy Porter also said of Styles, "He doesn't care, he's just doing it because it's the thing to do. This is politics for me. This is my life.”

Well, yeah. That’s often how progress works. Other aforementioned hater Vaid-Menon also called Styles’ cover "a sign of progress of society’s evolution away from binary gender." I agree with both statements.

I think, personally, that it would be great if more people who had the least to lose got out in front and took a risk for the sake of social progress. J. Edgar Hoover should have thrown the first brick at Stonewall rather than leaving it up to Marsha P. Johnson. But here in reality, the people with very little to lose usually go first, for obvious reasons. The most privileged often go second. Over time, as more and more people stick their necks out, living our lives becomes less risky for the rest of us. I think that the people who have the power, resources, etc. to chase trends owe it to everyone else to violate enough dumb norms to get shit from Ben Shapiro and an attaboi from AOC, at a minimum.

I think this disconnect makes bottom-half men harder to empathize with.

According to Boymom, boys living in communities that more strictly enforce gender roles perform worse on reading and other not-math subjects in school than boys who live in more gender egalitarian communities.

We’ve coded doing well in school, particularly in reading, as feminine. It’s also important to know that the book provides evidence, which comports with evidence I’ve seen elsewhere, that boys and girls have similar levels of intellectual ability, on average. Boys seem to be falling behind girls in school primarily due to differences in behavior, rather than intelligence.

It appears, therefore, that a boy’s investment in performing masculinity correlates negatively with academic achievement (outside of math, which is still coded masculine).

It’s probably pretty hard for top-half folks to understand what it’s like to equate performing femininity with mockery, social exclusion, and the threat of actual physical violence. It’s true that bottom-half men are doing the violence. But a norm doesn’t require all that many enforcers. There are very likely way more bottom-half men acting macho to avoid getting beaten up than men doing the beating.

In Boymom, Whippman writes that most parents in her circles (top-half) seem to want girls.

I remember, growing up in Alabama, that a few of my friends’ parents really obviously preferred their sons to their daughters. I only really noticed it, I think, because these sons were very clearly shitheads and the daughters were actually quite cool. So it didn’t seem like a matter of parents preferring the better or easier child. I wasn’t ready to believe I was actually seeing a sexist trend until I saw it in my little sister’s friends’ families too.

I suspect that my life trajectory helps me imagine a boy hearing his father telling him to “be a man,” which he then understands to mean “don’t be too into reading, it’s girly.” Then he’s bewildered when people with college degrees are mad at him for not having read much Betty Friedan.

I’m not here to take anything away from Harry Styles, guyliner-wearing guitar players, or the furry tail sporting male Bay Area software developers (but I repeat myself). They are all stunning and brave. I’m just saying they’re a little less brave than the guy in the Amazon warehouse in Omaha who admits that his wife earns more than him.