Why The Stereotype of the “Manly Man” is Bullshit as Gender Expression- As Shown through Performers on Magazine Covers
Stereotypes and gender are both socially fabricated concepts, so when Harry Styles is making waves for the clothes he wears in a Vogue photoshoot, he is just wearing a dress, nothing more. His clothing choices in magazines are not implicitly a statement and a problem. It is very common for creatives like singers to look less traditionally masculine in their media appearances. Styles receiving backlash about a magazine cover speaks to the history behind masculinity and its fragile construction throughout the media as a stereotype. People are upset over controversies like this because the media is able to break down the idea of masculinity by simply putting these images into the world since it challenges the stereotypes (which are believed to be fact) over reality. Performers media appearances should be seen as creativity and expression rather than label them as disruptors of the natural order of masculinity. A “manly man” is defined as someone wearing more rugged or traditionally masculine clothes such as a suit or button-down and pants, and it is important they do not wear anything that could be perceived as feminine or what a woman could possibly wear, inclusive of dresses, skirts, and makeup. They are meant to look strong and powerful in this stereotyped disposition. Traditional gender roles being held in places like magazines are problematic in how they limit the freedom of expression and bodily autonomy of people, leading to a cultural shame if an individual does not abide by these arbitrary rules, which is clearly seen in performers who are constantly being scrutinized for what they wear as a direct result of the stereotypes presented to how they are expected to look in the media. Magazines have long photographed performers and done many “risque” photo shoots knowing that what they put into the media will be consumed with the traditional lens of masculine and feminine stereotype based off of the trends at the time and personal biases which have shifted every few years. The claims of what they should be wearing are subjective and discretional, not a fact of how individuals look to be acceptable and good public figures. The response to performers who dress without the male stereotype in mind is so hateful and negative without any true basis for why they should not dress however they please. Musicians and performers dressing feminine in magazines does not diminish their masculinity because it is a construct rather than a rule of what a man should look like, as created and distributed by media outlets. The stereotype of masculinity in the male gender is broken by celebrities like Harry Styles, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie to show that the response to men in media is incorrectly shaping that the male gender should look “manly”, which is shown in literature including Rosalind Gill on “Gender” and Ellen Seiter on “Stereotype” from the Keywords for Media Studies, Richard Dyer’s The Role of Stereotypes, Flowjournal.org’s article by Erin Meyers called “The “Ordinary” Celebrity and Postfeminist Media Culture”, a New York Times article called “Enlightened sexism: The seductive message that feminism’s work is done,” and Samantha Close’s Flowjournal.org article called “The Political Economy of Digital Platforms”.
Gender is an often-misconstrued concept that is prevalent in so many aspects of the media and how people present themselves publicly within it. A chapter from the University of Minnesota’s Sociology breaks it down:
“If sex is a biological concept, then gender is a social concept. It refers to the social and cultural differences a society assigns to people based on their (biological) sex. A related concept, gender roles, refers to a society’s expectations of people’s behavior and attitudes based on whether they are females or males” (Sociology, UMinnesota).
The media follows this traditional socially constructed idea of gender and places certain behaviors and attributes to people based on their perceived gender. Men are expected to be the domineering “masculine” persona by dressing a certain way, ignore emotions, and feminine clothing, and anyone that does not follow this socially constructed blueprint is shamed. These behaviors are stereotypes, limiting the expression of individuals to show themselves to the world as they please because of the boundaries that shame and judge if they are not contained to them. In media, stereotypes are defined by the Keywords for Media Studies as systematic representations, repeated in a variety of forms from jokes and cartoons to news broadcasts, feature films, and television series” (Seiter, 190). Stereotypes come in many forms, from race, age, economic status, and even hair color. In the case of gender stereotypes specifically, the media has held strong to their “macho man” portrayal, and even in a world where individuality is much more accepted and celebrated in all forms: if a viewer sees a less than stereotypical man in media, they will receive backlash and it still remains a major topic of discussion as to what is considered a correct way to dress as a male identifying individual in the media and society as a whole.
Many male performers have blurred the traditional gender stereotypes by wearing dresses, skirts, makeup, and anything that is viewed as “feminine” in their shows and media appearances. This is not a new occurrence. However, after all of these years of men publicly breaking the given social rules on how to dress in media, it is interesting to note that society is still at a place where men dressing feminine will undoubtedly make media headlines even though this is not a new phenomenon. The most recently noted musician who has created an outcry is Harry Styles with his Vogue magazine cover photoshoot. Styles is featured wearing a runway dress and various other traditionally feminine pieces of clothing in other photos from the shoot, as well as being the first solo male on the cover of American Vogue.
Harry Styles is a well-loved singer and has been seen wearing “metrosexual” (Gill, 84) clothing during performances and media appearances. The term “metrosexual” describes him as young heterosexual with liberal political views and an interest in fashion (Oxford Dictionary). Even this idea of a new, progressive straight man is stereotyped into what he is or is not. What if a musician just wants to dress nice? Does there always have to be a deeper implication of what it means about how an individual dresses? The media, in this case magazines, releases these images of performers as another form of performance and a consumer product, similar to their own careers and thus they are able to reveal the stereotypes placed on gender expression and the problem with scrutinizing artists for their through clothing choices.
Styles has been known to wear non-traditional clothing, but always spoke about the creativity and fun of it rather than the deeper meaning he is displaying as a message (whether conscious or not) in the media. He tells Vogue, “there’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means — it just becomes this extended part of creating something.” He has become a symbol of both inspiration amongst liberals as well as hate amongst conservatives in the media. Media has had the power to take a set of photographs and turn them into political symbols based on the stereotype of the manly man that unjustly defines what clothes are acceptable by men as an entire gender. Social constructs change overtime the same way that high heels, skirts, and wigs used to be worn by men, and the roles were flipped, and are now distinctly feminine. During a shift in media theory in the early twenty-first century, there has been a new model of gender representation which “tend[s] to see meaning as fluid, unstable, and contradictory, and… emphasize the media’s role in constructing subjectivity and identity” (Gill, 84). The media has shifted with how it displays gender, so by presenting masculinity in a different light from the macho stereotype, it does not destroy masculinity or culture because it was always socially constructed, meaning it can be changed. Gill also mentions how in the case of advertising products to women that they “make them feel powerful (but won’t actually change anything)” (Gill, 2008). The same case can be applied to Harry Styles clothing choices in Vogue, as people are giving his photoshoots and media presence a power that does not change who he is as a person or how he presents himself as a man, and yet the backlash shows him as wildly problematic for dismantling the West, as Candace Owens says. According to a tweet by Owens, spearhead to the “bring manly men back” campaign against Styles, she says “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.”
The fact that someone can be so offended that people are not all representative of a gender stereotype and that their clothing choices do not affect who they are and their successes shows the problems within the stereotypes created by previous, more masculine media representations of men (especially considering Styles is a performer and expressive in the clothing he wears in the media as a celebrity/musician for fun and visual looks over masculine expression). Harry Styles supporters mention in the comments of Owen’s tweet how “manly is whatever you want it to be,” which helps to show that magazines and the media can display these creative musicians creating a different kind of performance in their clothing with a photoshoot, but that does not change their level of masculinity because magazines show art, not personality and a specific gender. Yes, some people who wear feminine clothes in the media are gay, transgender, or do not line up with any sort of gender binaries, but just because someone wears a dress does not mean that they are not manly. Vogue has been important as a media source to be able to present a take on masculinity to the public, but the media does not define intangible and everchanging aspects about a gender through the content they put out, especially since traditional gender construction of the man and woman’s characteristics is a stereotype in itself.
In the media, gender stereotyping “come[s] to be [a] powerful popular means of reading and understanding masculine identities, endlessly recycled in marketing, PR, academic, and journalistic texts until they come to seem like reflections of reality rather than particular constructions” (Gill, 84). So when Harry Styles breaks this stereotype, he shapes and defines himself as going against the masculine identity while in reality, he is merely wearing clothes that the media disagrees with because of their own creation of the projections of a “manly” musician. The Vogue magazine is making history because he is the first man on the cover, but they are in turn creating fuel for the fire of a preexisting contempt for gender fluidity and individuality which has been a much argued over issue in media as images and performers specifically have done as they pleased with their clothing choices, regardless of the stereotypes placed on them. Richard Dyer explains how “this is the most important function of the stereotype: to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly where the palę ends and thus who is. Clearly within and who clearly beyond it. Stereotypes not only, in concert with social types, map out the boundaries of acceptable and legitimate behaviour, they also insist on boundaries exactly at those points where in reality there are none” (Dyer, 21). By putting a singer wearing a dress on their cover, the response is to treat this in the media as if this is a new phenomenon, threatening tradition. In reality, it is not a fresh take and simply puts a musician in typical “show-clothes” that millions of people have seen in their public appearances before, but because it infiltrates magazines, and therefore considered a larger part of the public eye and influence in media, it is condemned for aiding in the destruction of a gender that is believed to need to look masculine in order for society to survive. Candace Owens says that “no society that can survive without strong men,” when a photo of a man wearing a dress is not even a determining factor for how someone behaves. A photograph of an outfit on a magazine represents art and fun, not a Marxist and society-breaking attack, as Owens believes that the media can and is doing. The media is very powerful, but a magazine will not change a culture and Harry Styles wearing what he wants as a performer is not even breaking expectations of performers before him. When a piece of media breaks tradition and stereotypes, in this case being a Vogue magazine, it creates mass outcry because when these types of photographs hit mainstream media, people assume it will shape and change their society and way of life even though this fluid and “new” expression of fashion was already present and the only difference it makes with the individuals that dress this way and the people who see it, is they can no longer put it in a box when it is put into the publics’ vantage point in this way. Seiter mentions that “hoped that individuals would hold these “habits of thought” only lightly and would be ready to change their knowledge of a stereotype when new experiences or contradictory evidence was encountered” (Seiter, 191), showing how stereotype was never meant to be taken as fact, but should continue to be changed and taken away as people like Styles break the boundaries. The assumptions that performers like Harry Styles need to dress masculine to keep society in check is such an over-exaggeration because clothing may empower people to feel their best, but it does not define them as manly or not since it is a malleable stereotype. Performers fashion sense is a clothing choice, based purely on visuals and creativity rather than gender.
Aside from Harry Styles not being problematic to the male gender, only its outdated stereotype, he is also not the first performer to dress this way in the least bit. Freddie Mercury made waves for his outlandish and feminine attire as well. He appeared in many shows and music videos wearing skirts, makeup, and high heels, mentioning in a 1973 interview that “glamour is a part of us and we want to be dandy. We want to shock and be outrageous instantly.” He was featured wearing a sequin leotard on the cover of Classic Rock Magazine, which was very bold especially for a time in the 80s where people were much more closed off to the breaking of traditional masculine and feminine stereotypes than now in 2020.
He was not adamant on telling people he wears feminine clothing because of his gender expression, but nonetheless people’s reaction to his media appearances such as the magazine cover “suggests a particularly interesting potential use of stereotypes, in which the character is constructed, at the level of dress, performance, etc., as a stereotype but is deliberately given a narrative function that is not implicit in the stereotype, thus throwing into question the assumptions signalled by the stereotypical iconography” (Dyer, 210). This quote is in regards to film, but actors are quite similar to the musical performer in how they are putting on a display or show, and while it can be personal in how one portrays themselves in media, it is also a performance in itself. Richard Dyer explains how the field of media has been able “to emphasize the paratextual aspects that make the “star-as-a-person” indistinguishable from the “star-as-performer” (Dyer, 1998). This means that the lines of where the performance fashion ends and the personal clothing starts becomes intermixed, making it even harder to define what is masculine expression of gender as a person and just being a performer looking to wear shocking outfits. Freddie Mercury wore clothes he thought would shock people, but that never diminished his success as a man. To argue that wearing feminine clothing on the cover of a magazine is detrimental to society implies that you cannot be successful without abiding by made up, malleable stereotypes that have no actual impact on the talent, intelligence, or power in the real world. The media reflects and plays off of reality, and magazines are designed for a consumer culture, placing conversation over fact and so we cannot take performers wearing dresses as a political viewpoint, but rather, a form of entertainment and expression.
Mercury is pictured wearing feminine clothing in shows and photoshoots and magazines, but he was also careful to never be open about his sexuality in these presentations of fashion. The media took his gender and what it is supposed to look like and stereotyped him that he should present as traditionally masculine, especially during this time where being “feminine” as a man was a much more strict stereotype and box to be placed in as the stereotypes around gender and sexuality was a big topic as the lines were being blurred. Freddie Mercury’s fashion in the magazine cover and persona has raised “questions about masculinity “in crisis” (Gill, 84) even when his personal position was to utilize clothing as an attention grabbing, artistic expression rather than an expression of gender and it certainly was never intended to stereotype him when he was trying so hard to be ambiguous about how he is defined. Media sources like magazines have “come to be powerful popular means of reading and understanding masculine identities, endlessly recycled in marketing, PR, academic, and journalistic texts until they come to seem like reflections of reality rather than particular constructions” (Gill, 84). So when people give these performers backlash and try to put them into these stereotyped constructions of what a man should look like, it is really just based off of the recycled and curated material and commentary put onto people for years by the same media sources that challenge it later on that has permeated into our opinions of what the media should like and the power we give to it under the claim that what someone wears in a magazine changes how 50% of the population should look and act. We now know to be our version of real and “correct” gender construction from a perspective that was created for consumers to consume based on stereotypes they created, not tell facts of life, making them malleable as time goes on depending on the shifting in public opinion which changes the media in turn.
David Bowie has also been very influential in his clothing choices as a performer in the media. He was well-known for his androgynous character “Ziggy Stardust.” He wore makeup, mixing feminine and masculine in the outfits he wore on stage and consequently in magazines. An article in The New York Times says how “there are ample lessons about physical self-scrutiny and behavioral self-regulation because it is always and only the most attractive… best-dressed who will get preferential treatment and the love and approval of others” (Douglas, New York Times). While it was specifically referring to women in the media, it is interesting to compare it to David Bowie as he broke so many gendered stereotypes to look “manly,” and his expression in his fashion in magazine covers (synonymous to that which he wore on stage) still did not diminish his success as a performer and actually made him more successful in his shocking clothing choices. The media including magazines aided in breaking barriers to gender stereotypes by providing a platform in which he could wear what he wanted, although the stereotypes around what his clothing choices showed to the world would remain. Keywords for Media Studies mentions how “stereotyping is at the core of everyday thinking about media effects because they function as cautionary images-warning who not to be-as well as models of available social identities” (Seiter, 190). David Bowie served as a complex image for the media because he was able to challenge how gender was represented in media, and even began paving the way for people like Harry Styles interest in dressing how he wishes. By displaying himself so openly in media, he put his fashion in history to be talked about and shown the malleability in media stereotypes of gender. It is the conversations that were started that continue today that make the difference. Bowie showed his style as both an individual and as a performer in his magazine and media features, and we can see the results that many years later, society has not fallen because David Bowie publicly blurred the gender lines and broke stereotypes on men looking “manly” in the media.
Harry Styles, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie are just a select few of the many performer men that have presented their non-traditional fashion choices in magazines, but they all share a similar theme in that fashion was a form of self-expression. All of these men have been viewed as ahead of their time and created great waves in the reaction to their presence in media, but they all have showed that just because they wear sparkles or dresses or makeup, it does not mean that their masculinity is diminished because masculinity is defined by the individual, and that can mean something different for everyone. The stereotype that what it means to be a “manly man” is a completely wrong and single-minded, hard-cut rule because media has shown that it has malleability since there are these very complex presentations of these performers being masculine, feminine, and non-conforming in so many ways, yet they are all still strong and unquestionably not destroying what it means to be a man because of their confidence and strength in how they present themselves in places like magazines as a different kind of performance. Stereotypes are not rigid, and can be changed through the continuation of normalizing non-stereotypical men in media.
References
Douglas, S.J. (2010). Enlightened sexism: The seductive message that feminism’s work is done. New York: Times Books, 264.
Dyer, Richard. “The Role of Stereotypes.” Media Studies: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp 206–211.
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Gill, Rosalind. “Keywords for Media Studies: Gender.” Keywords for Media Studies, NYU Press, 2017, pp. 83–87.
Harry Styles on Dressing Up, Making Music, and Living in the Moment | Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/harry-styles-cover-december-2020. Accessed 17 Dec. 2020.
Metrosexual_1 Noun — Definition, Pictures, Pronunciation and Usage Notes | Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.Com. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/metrosexual_1. Accessed 17 Dec. 2020.
Samantha Close /. DePaul University. The Political Economy of Digital Platforms Samantha Close / DePaul University — Flow. https://www.flowjournal.org/2018/10/digital-platforms/. Accessed 17 Dec. 2020.
Seiter, Ellen. “Keywords for Media Studies: Stereotype.” Keywords for Media Studies, NYU Press, 2017, pp. 190–191.
“11.1 Understanding Sex and Gender.” Sociology, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing edition, 2016. open.lib.umn.edu, https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/11-1-understanding-sex-and-gender/.
