Politics And Male Fashion

Interesting take:

It is interesting to me that during the Bush administration the men’s fashion designers were designing for the slight and the androgynous male, but now that the slight and metrosexual male is residing in the White House, designers are trying to butch things up — just like they did during the namby-pamby Carter era.

Well, no amount of chest hair or weird NFL United We Serve commercials where the president is catching a football with smiling children, is going to make this administration suddenly macho and manly. Nancy Pelosi is the toughest politician in Washington, and it’s safe to say she’ll keep her necklines from plunging.

Real men need to fight the cultural scourge of swing fashion trends. Real men are not trendy. They’re classic. No one wants to see lithe and androgynous men. And no one wants to see a man’s chest hair, either.

More important than the silly trends and those that hawk them is the underlying cultural acknowledgment. There is no dressing up capitulating, weak behavior. Pictures of President Obama catching a football or lining up a putt with Tiger Woods or shooting a basketball with his campaign logo on it will not make up for the fact that his actions are weak and scraping. While there is no question that President Bush burnished his image with cowboy boots and brush clearing, it would have rung hollow had he not had the gumption to back up the image. President Obama’s problem is that the image and the action don’t match.

Real men demonstrate manliness — not from superficial photo ops. So men, either you got it or you don’t. Showing heavage will display nothing but insecurity or a strange disconnect from what normal women find appealing. Leave fashion trends behind. Embrace the kind of masculinity that is self-evident: decisive, common-sense action. It’s not something one wears. It just is.