8 smart men reflect on male sexuality
Everyone has an idea about female sexuality and how it can be expressed through makeup, behavior, or clothing. With male sexuality, everything is much more complicated - its presence and public demonstration is still a matter of debate, to say the least. Meanwhile, today we see exactly how men's fashion after the revision of social and gender roles is undergoing a noticeable transformation.
We have already told how men's fashion reflected different ideas about sexuality at different times and what is happening in this area now. Now we have asked men, in one way or another, connected with the world of fashion and mass media, and particularly men's glossy magazines, about how they understand male sexuality, whether it can be expressed through clothes and how their ideas about their own attractiveness have changed.
I conduct a fashion course at the HSE Design School and I love telling that fashion is not just how to dress - this is the most understandable and obvious way to express what is happening in society. The main thing that I noticed on the last men's shows and that very rarely happens is a clearly outlined common line, a cross-cutting idea. A common thread in London, Milan, and Paris is mixing and shifting men's fashion towards women's. The best overall mood was formulated at the Acne presentation, where the slogan "Gender Duality" was announced. We must understand that this is a more complicated story than just dressing up or what men are asked to dress like girls. Rather, it’s about women borrowing from, say, a strict suit, from a man’s wardrobe, and with proper borrowing, he only emphasizes femininity. Therefore, perhaps, it is time for men to look into the female wardrobe - and this does not hurt to feel like men.
Emancipation was in fact one of the main factors of the XX century. Women tried on and still try on male roles, making them female. Now, apparently, the time has come when men are ready - or at least expected from them - to go back. While women have been actively engaged in self-liberation for the last hundred years, a crisis of male identification has been accumulating in parallel, which now seems to be taking an active form. This, in fact, is like a middle-age crisis in an individual man: we ourselves feel that our role as supports and protectors is being called into question, the whole system is trembling, the male function is being challenged. As in the case of the mid-life crisis, the first thing that manifests itself in problems with sexuality (and the solutions are the same - to buy a car, make a haircut, look at the appearance and figure, find a younger and simpler one). When you look at the show on a boy in a woman's blouse, you realize that this is an attempt by designers to articulate that the functions of the sexes are changing. Fashion is just a sphere that tries to express it. Issues of sexuality and its instability - this is a very urban story. A big city, a crowd of people stimulates the search for their own corner, their role, makes you think about it in general. This, of course, is expressed in clothing. For example, now clearly there is a certain niche that equally applies to both boys and girls. They seem to have no sex or sexuality. Everything looks like we are too bred and the nature of the issue of sexual pleasure is easier to eliminate. Globally, the processes that occur are reduced to the elimination of sexuality, the removal of it beyond the "foundations of social structure." The city consists of singles; Whether they come into sexual contact or not is a secondary matter. You can imagine a fantastic city of the future, where everyone lives on their own, in such small capsules, as in hotels in Japan - but everyone is dressed completely differently. That is, from the fact that the functions and roles of the sexes are mixed and changing, it follows that the joint (sexual including) life is not the basis of the structure of everything - as it still is now. After all, a gay family is also a family, "the fundamental unit of society."
However, when you ask yourself, everything, of course, turns out differently. For example, if I was asked what it means for a man to dress sexy, I would answer as an inveterate traditionalist: a well-fitting modern suit. It somehow still remains the identifier of self-esteem, self-confidence — qualities that are essential and exhaustive for what is called masculinity or male sexuality. There is, of course, an option with a leather jacket, but Humphrey Bogart’s coat, for my taste, wins anyway. And a small nuance: the main obstacle is the bag. All the characters that I liked, from Humphrey to Mad Max, go through life with free hands. Well, the car; I myself do not drive, but the horse greatly adds points to any knight; Nowadays all the sexuality here is in choosing the right design. In general - and in this I, too, as it turns out, is traditional - all this is relevant up to the years 36-38. Then the search mode is turned off (it should at least be turned off; a fifty-year-old man on an open-top Porsche is not even funny, it just doesn't matter at 28 or 32). Personally, it seems to me that real sexuality is manifested precisely after the search does not interfere. But that's another story.
Unlike women's fashion, in which the concept of "sexy" is practically the official term describing a certain aesthetics and time (in particular, all the work of Azzedine Alaya), in male fashion sexuality is a very conventional concept, lying in the field of emotional perception. For all the time I wrote about men's fashion in GQ magazine, I have never used the epithet “sexy” in reviews of men's collections. I rarely met him in the reviews of Western fashion critics. Although, of course, there is a whole fashionable layer, which actively promotes male "sexuality" in the spirit of gay machismo. Suffice it to recall brands such as Versace or Dsquared. However, we are talking more about the physiological component, when clothing in every way sings of the body. At best fits. At worst - mercilessly opens. Many women, according to my observations, find such sexuality comic. In general, it seems to me that any manifestations of narcissism are antisexual - when it is noticeable that the man thought about what to wear is more than three minutes.
It seems to me that a man should not transmit sexuality, but self-confidence. Self-confident man automatically becomes sexy. If clothes, such as a suit with a perfect fit, this confidence increases, it means that a man dressed sexy. Of the other attributes of the sexual may be more points. Here I would have put on a good single-breasted suit and glasses for sight if I had the task to look sexy.
Unlike female, male sexuality is a very complicated thing. For a long time about a man did not say at all, sexy or not. The female is still more precisely formulated, because both women and men have followed it. The world was arranged in such a way that women were led by general objectification. In the case of male sexuality, I have the feeling that men were not steaming and did not hesitate on this for a long time. They were engaged in business and they, in general, attracted, and not the body. About a man as a desired object, rather homosexuals spoke. Get at least "Portrait of Dorian Gray." There's just about male sexuality.
The man began to openly involve the body relatively recently, namely in a post-industrial society, when he began to think about such things. For residents of big cities, gender is like a brand, Samsung or Apple: it’s strange to think that belonging to one or another sex determines the sphere of your interests, as it was before. Today this is a role - you can play a man or a woman.
I would also like to recall the trickster image of a man who is also historically sexual. This is an image of a sly, deceiver, thief like Zorro or Robin Hood, an antagonist of a serious and boring husband who jumps onto your balcony. In general, adventurism is an important part of male sexuality that is not related to appearance. The man in the form - it was always supersexual. Iron battens are cool because they are a sign of masculinity. A man in a bathrobe is a boring person. On the other hand, a uniform is still about masculinity, not sexuality.
Sexuality should "hit on the head." Today, it seems to me, for men, this means breaking a certain stereotype. Today in men's fashion there is a movement for the right of a man to wear something transparent, frank, not quite "male", to appear naked. We see how female sexuality is shifted to men. Men take away some tricks from women. I do not know yet how to explain this precisely, but this is a constant reflection and mixing of gender characteristics. Nevertheless, the man remains a man in a transparent skirt, and on huge platforms. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the period in women's fashion, when in the 60s tuxedo was recognized as supersexual. It seems to me that the logic here is similar and consists in the fact that a man’s sexuality is connected with the fact that he can easily open the body.
I think transparent is cool. I was here recently vilified killer Givenchy on the MOD Magazine and realized that this is generally a super cool thing. Because the most practical of all that I wore. Like shorts. Also, it seems to me that sports clothes and clothes made from stretching materials are sexy. True, there is already a thin line of fetish, where sex does not exist. You can walk in latex and be sexy, whether you are a man or a woman. Well, yes, probably, it would be possible to wear latex, and considering that I had worked out for a month in sports, then yes, that would be cool, sexy.
My ideas about my own attractiveness, of course, changed. At school I liked eccentric things, but I dreamed of a gray suit with a needle. There was always a variety show singer in me, and due to the fact that now is 2015, and not 1968, I do not suffer from the fact that she starts to crawl out of me.
We live at a time when we already owe nothing to anyone. You can look visually sexy - and there’s nothing wrong with that. Well, if you do not want, then do not.
How exactly a man’s sexuality should look in fashion today, nobody knows. The very concept of male sexuality began to take shape only after the demand for it appeared. It was formed by new strong and independent women and the LGBT community, whose role today has greatly increased. However, their views on male sexuality, of course, vary greatly. Today, women have the right to choose a sexual partner (even for one night, even if it is permanent) exactly the way a man has always done: “Drisch,” “Dwarf,” “This ass is flat,” and so on. And I’m pretty damn happy about this new state of affairs - if only because it’s not so interesting to play a game with rules that are obviously twisted in someone's favor. But in order to finally accept the new rules of the game, and not just agree with them, a man must learn to demonstrate his sexuality.
For several thousand years in a row, the patriarchal world developed the concept of female sexuality and even brought it to the point of absurdity with pumped tits, hips and an incredibly narrow waist. In the history of fashion, many options were invented, what to pack, how to file, hide or show the charms of girls. There was no such task in front of the male fashion, and they also did not invent any obvious methods of presenting sexuality. Until recently, men's fashion was a product of the patriarchal world, created by men for the purposes of men, so that it would be convenient to hunt, fight or go to parties. And now the fashion world is beginning to take one by one attempt to understand what kind of male sexuality should be. The easiest move is to borrow from those areas where everything is already there: some designers borrow sex techniques from girls, bare bodies, dress up in tight, others - from gays who also managed to work on their views on this issue, wild traditionalists meanwhile still can not understand the difference between showing sexuality and simply beautiful, accepted in society elements of the wardrobe. I believe that the real extraordinary answers are still ahead.
My own views on male sexuality are damn traditional - probably because of my very traditional upbringing. It seems to me that a man looks exactly sexy, and not just beautiful when he demonstrates his natural strength and aggression. Strength works well with sports equipment, partial or full exposure, and tight fitting things. In other words, with clothes that says: you are a strong, nimble, fast, and generally Greek god. I think in the near future there will be a mass of new ways to demonstrate the male body, except for short shorts, cut-out T-shirts and mesh, which almost always look awful.
Aggression is a much more subtle thing. It is easiest to emphasize it through cultural references: references to aggressive radical subcultures, military service. Relatively speaking, in order to look sexier, you can, even being a drishch, replace your jacket with a bomber jacket, which will emphasize the figure and cause associations with right-wing hooligans. Skilfully selected sportswomen can look more advantageous than jeans in terms of sexuality. But I am sure that my personal perception of male sexuality already now looks quite archaic and should be revised as soon as possible. I myself am really looking forward to this, because without movement, it is stagnant.
Traditionally, male sexuality is always masculinity and, accordingly, the desire of men to emphasize it. Silhouette, body, muscles, muscles, volitional chin, that's all - this is sexuality for most girls and gays. In Russia, this is Mikhail Porechenkov, on whom in the West there is always a Jason Statham or Liv Schreiber. Surprisingly, along with this, Russian girls love bright and licked gay images. Take, for example, the Italians with Pitti Uomo - a very specific topic, and the girls trudge.
The reaction to the show of Rick Owens is clear. We are not accustomed to perceive the naked male body. The traditional setting: do not go with the **** (male sexual organ) out, and keep it from someone inside. There is an answer to this conservative society. Get at least the final show of the heroine Anuk Ame in the movie "High Fashion" in 1994, where naked models were walking along the runway. The banal truth turned out to be the most fashionable there: how we came into the world, so we leave it, naked. In fact, male sexuality is a devil in the eyes, a modest style of dress and a sense of humor. Visual sexuality is if Dsquared's advertising campaigns are multiplied by Philip Plane and Dirk Bikkembergs. As a woman - from Cavalli.
Interestingly, none of the fashionistas looks sexy: too many things and all their strength is spent on appearance. Men also have less sexuality with fashion than women. Whatever fashionable thing a girl puts on, in almost all cases she needs to be slim, fit, athletic. A man, in order to be fashionable, may in general be nonsexual, with whatever belly and shortcomings. He will easily fit into Nazir Mazhar's shorts, and with Rick Owens's skirt or coat. A man has more opportunities to drape himself and stay fashionable than a woman, but less - in this whole fashionable fashion stay sexy.
The sexuality of a man is in the area of character, not external attributes. This is primarily an attitude, feed (someone calls it confidence in the eyes). But clothes as a sign of sexuality for men is something optional. Take simple things: a T-shirt, shirt, pants - which fit well and emphasize its virtues, courageous silhouette. Sexuality appears when self-confidence and charisma are attached to this set. Although I want to believe that just a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans are very sexy. The image of such male sexuality from the 90s is close to me. This is how I dress.
In addition to underwear among the things that carry a sexual charge, sports ammunition is also listed. An obvious subtext is closely associated with her: a person plays sports, he is in good physical shape and, consequently, he is sexy. Any subcultural things like heavy boots, a bomber and a shaved skinhead head carry a not less strong charge. But for me personally, sexuality is primarily associated with humor, self-irony. The more ironic a person is, the less complexes he has, the simpler he is to himself, and the more relaxed his dressing in clothes. It seems to me sexy when a person is relaxed and not afraid to seem ridiculous.
My ideas about my own attractiveness and her presentation changed quite seriously over time. As a result, a few years ago I came to the already indicated formula: a white T-shirt and jeans. But before that, quite strange stages were going on, there were even skinny jeans with a panties. Now I understand that any man in them looks asexual, as this is not quite correct with respect to masculinity. Therefore, I am very skeptical about the modern fashion flirting with gender, the most illustrative, of course, in the case of Jonathan Anderson. Еще любопытнее в этом отношении последняя коллекция Gucci, за основу которой новый креативный директор Алессандро Микеле взял гендерную амбивалентность. Судя по всему, даже тяжело заряженный люксовый бренд (читай, первоочередная цель которого - коммерческий успех) готов к такому курсу. И это, конечно, привлечет новую аудиторию. Но что, кроме мужских брюк, увидит в ней среднестатистический покупатель-мужчина? Много женской одежды. И, конечно, почешет репу: "Это так теперь модно? Что-то непонятно, короче".
Первая функция одежды - закрыть от наготы и уберечь от неблагоприятных природных условий. However, we are all people of culture, and the concept of sexuality walks very strongly from representative to representative, from country to country. Different people find different things to be sexual. We know that even asexuality can be sexual for someone. The question in the cultural background is how you were brought up, what surrounded you in your childhood. In Russia, in principle, it is not customary to speak freely on topics related to sexuality. Probably, complexes inherited from the Soviet Union still make themselves felt. And then nine months a year, Russians are forced to wear a wardrobe. It is more difficult to talk about sexuality if it is not as visual as that of the more liberated Southerners. In Russia, a sex symbol is a peasant who is like flint, behind which is like behind a stone wall. There is a suspicion that for the masses of our country the best exponent of such an idea of male sexuality is our president. But I look at him somehow even awkwardly.
Fashion, I think, is the repeater of sexuality. The question is who, how, for whom and for what purpose broadcasts its sexuality. Frankly or aggressively, indirectly or covertly. A bearded lumberjack in a sweater with deer and a sleek macho with a piercing look in his underwear Calvin Klein - both of which in the picture, of course, broadcast sexuality. Next come the controversy over whom their sexuality is directed. This is if you use examples of paper gloss.
What is happening with the men's fashion now is generally difficult to consider, using the well-established definitions of sexuality. In Russia, unfortunately, it is still easy to become the first guy in the village, just wearing a pink t-shirt. Or immediately the last - beauty in the eye of the beholder.
Until recently, I shot for Russian advertising and gloss mainly men and, to be honest, both there and there are sample ideas about how a man should look. Therefore, it so happened that the concept of sexuality almost did not fall into my field of vision. I managed to cope with the frame without going into aspects of external sexuality, which seemed to be under my own censorship or the prohibition of editors-in-chief of publications like GQ and Esquire. For me, the attractiveness of the masculine image has always lay somewhere in the field of charisma, calmness and hidden power rather than in demonstrating secondary sexual characteristics that I would prefer to hide in the frame.
If I had a task to look sexy, for a start I would have to rush to the gym. However, I don’t have any complexes on that score, so I’m not disappearing there. Although, I confess, I did a couple of times in the changing room of the pool.
I was incredibly lucky, Katya Bogdanovich dresses me from head to foot. I fully trusted her with her appearance. Our views on men's fashion are almost the same. In the clothes she chooses for me, I feel like I have never been before. In addition, the idea of its own attractiveness is also completely vaccinated by it. She says that nature has rewarded me. Okay. As a child, I hated a mirror, and now I tell him: how good that is me.
I do not think that a man should certainly broadcast external sexuality. At least apart from the mind and sense of humor. This is what I like about modern men's fashion: it is no longer constrained by the macho code, it does not hold on to signs of sexual differences, it is ironic, light and complex at the same time.
In Russia, a sexy man is a strong man. The one who is able to protect a weak woman from a billion threats that are fraught with a harsh life. Accordingly, sexual clothing in Russia is one that allows a man to appear strong. Perhaps somewhere on the Strelka or in Kamergersky Lane, this is not quite true or not completely true, but in general, this is exactly the case.
I have three stories. First, about the "House-2". I regularly watch "House-2". Only in this way, without getting out of the Garden Ring, one can more or less understand what is happening in the country. Most of the guys who come to Dom-2 and who stay there and become stars are guys with well-defined biceps. The girls of the project are fighting for such (and then the same guys beat the same girls, but this is another story). These guys dress up so that the muscles are visible: sports shorts, t-shirt.
Secondly, about my fitness trainer. Until Moscow, he worked in a distant Siberian million-plus city. He had a client, a young guy, a representative of the local entrepreneurial elite. The client, as expected, shook his biceps, but at some point decided to "dry". As soon as the volume was gone, the local partners immediately said: “Something you looked like a woman.”
The third story is about the new flagship Gucci boutique, which opened in Petrovka in the fall. In all Gucci stores in the world, when a man buys a suit, if you need to adjust the sleeves, do it, removing the top in the armhole. In Russia, this proved impossible. The Russian men, normal, not fat, turned out to be too big biceps. I had to shorten the sleeves below, and for this, for a lot of money, I ordered some kind of special machine that cuts through new buttonhole loops.