Vera Wylde, the cross-dressing persona of a straight man in Vermont, believes the contradiction is rooted in sexism-toward women.Īs a drag performer and vlogger, Wylde-who uses feminine pronouns when in character-often fields assertions that she must be gay.
That's not to say women who wear "masculine" apparel are completely within the bounds of social norms, but they're generally more accepted than a man who may wear "feminine" looks. A number of brands, like WILDFANG, capitalize on the connotation. In fact, in female fashion, "tomboy" looks are more than acceptable-they're downright stylish. Looking at how those listeners responded to the "JEFFERY" cover art makes clear a longstanding double standard: that women can openly wear men's clothes, as long as they don't go too far, but a man wearing a dress remains a social taboo. "We've got a whole generation of people-anyone born after 1985-who, from their earliest years, were surrounded by these very binary representations of gender," she added, more or less describing the vast majority of Thug's millennial audience. "And if he has long hair, wears something different or plays with something a girl would play with, that makes him a girl in their minds." "At that age, what makes a little boy a little boy is what he's wearing, what his hair looks like, what he plays with," she said. "I wonder how much of that is us going back to how we were at four or five years old," Paoletti told VICE, explaining how toddlers acquire enough cultural capital to know whether they're something called a boy or a girl.Ĭhildren from the age of two to around six rely on cultural cues they don't yet understand biological sex, Paoletti explained. In seeing the social-media response to Thug's apparel, she questions whether there's a childhood connection there. In 2012, she published a history of children's clothing, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, which chronicles the decline of gender-neutral apparel for babies and toddlers and the rise of highly gender-specific clothes in the mid 80s, explaining how consumerism helped drive the rapid move toward gendering clothing for young children. If the whole scenario sounds childish, that's probably because it's rooted, at least partially, in the recent origin of markedly distinct clothing for boys and girls.Ĭlothing historian Jo Paoletti, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, has spent nearly four decades researching gender difference in fashion. A man veering too far in the wrong direction on this binary is pejoratively deemed "gay," for example, not conforming to the relatively strict visual codes associated with "real men," a conclusion that seems to spring from the same fallacy that says gay men exhibit feminine characteristics, and that any man demonstrating effeminate qualities must be gay. This stems from the fact that gendered clothing relies on the rigid constructs of masculinity and femininity. But examining the reaction to Thug's apparel choices underscores a specific fact: that a man who transgresses the arbitrary rules of what "masculine clothing" can be still spurs controversy in 2016. He isn't even the first rapper to play with gender expectations in his style. To be sure, Thug is far from the first male musician to wear a dress-the legacy of cross-dressing rock stars stretches back decades, from David Bowie to Prince. (The latter is not an unfounded accusation, given some of the rapper's lyrics.) But the knee-jerk reaction of some social-media users was to question the rapper's sexuality, which raises a larger-and more interesting-question: Why do so many people label a man wearing women's clothing "gay" in the first place?
To others, he was appropriating queer culture. To some, Thug's gender-bending style was groundbreaking, especially in an industry defined by hyper-masculinity. Fans and critics responded with starkly contrasting opinions.