The conniptions about Harry Styles in a dress are the desperate cry of losers in a culture war
Harry Styles is a 26year-old popstar. He’s talented, unfathomably famous, worldly and charming. In Styles, a combination of youth, confidence and the aesthetics of the moment have fused into a compelling beauty of great commercial appeal. Unsurprisingly, he has just appeared on the cover of Vogue. He is wearing a ruffled Gucci ballgown, under a velvet jacket, inflating a balloon.
Online, the American Right have lost their shit about it. The tone is of panicked heralds sounding trumpets against an oncoming gender war.
“Bring back manly men!” cried a rightwing commentator who is promoting a new book.
“The POINT of Styles doing this photo shoot is to feminize masculinity,” bleated another with a Facebook distribution model for his work.
Their adherents chimed in at full social media volume, echoing claims that a gorgeous young man playing designer dress-ups was an obvious Marxist plot to destroy norms and shred tradition. “It is an outright attack,” claimed the book-promoter, who really should be shown some photographs of the Soviet march on Berlin. When Marxists attack, they tend to use tanks and plant flags on the Reichstag, not muck around with Vogue photoshoots.
As a bleeding-heart, Marxist-feminist snowflake who never met a victimhood I couldn’t fetishise, I view the Right’s conniptions about Harry as a desperate cry of pain. The culture wars that so many of them fought for a Thousand-Year Trump have certainly polarised discussions of gender, race and sexuality around the west, but they haven’t brought them victory.
The Trump project they championed now lies in smoky ruins, overrun by an extraordinary democratic coalition of liberals, leftists and also those conservatives who’d just plum had enough of this gestural nonsense. In this context, the strange outcry against Styles reads like a band of ousted imperialists spray-painting “Democracy sux!” on a smashed wall.
One of the more accessible analyses of the after-Trump cultural reckoning comes from post-nonsense Republican Tim Miller this week. Whether it’s potshots at Styles, calling Mexicans “rapists” or defending monuments to the traitorous Confederacy, these people’s “crusade stopped being about anything other than causing their opponents pain a long time ago”, Miller says.
He’s right; the attack on Harry Styles is no tactical strike. The actor/singer/model/dreamboat has been photographed in all manner of tutus, kilts, heels and fancy manicures before this. He’s hardly likely to renounce his famous passion for costume because of some Trumpist mean tweets. His mum and fans are publicly praising his playfulness, while Vogue – not actually a socialist enterprise – understands the value of earned media at least as well as an outrage factory of internet personalities do.
If there’s a “POINT” to the outrage, it’s not really to exert influence in debates about performing social gender. It’s just to be publicly unpleasant about the influence of others, like Styles, and to affirm some tribal costume markers to keep grinding their grift among those who remain uninfluential and aggrieved.
Styles’ antagonists have to know that more magazines will be sold for their furore, not less. So will clothes, and to a generation of kids who – in vast numbers – no longer always dress themselves according to old dictates of gender, or even necessarily define themselves in gendered terms.
As tempting as it may be to think that there’s ideological sincerity to the American Right’s gender anxiety, it’s worth considering that beyond some retrograde attachment to oldschool woman-hating, their criteria for determining “manliness” are slippery and fluid. The “manly man” president lionised these last four years as a rightwing icon also wore stacked heels, and likely wore more makeup in his coronavirus ward than Styles did at his last stage gig. The gender politics of the Styles critics aren’t about policing a masculine/feminine binary as much as a building a border wall of “our group good, and others bad” and constructed entirely of pointing.
Adults who have less points to prove are – conclusively – the larger audience, and one to whom the Styles shoot is well-targeted. The sly stage beauty whose use of costume entertains both in the present and the erotic theatre of the mind is ancient stagecraft. Vogue knows, as Styles does, moralising conservatives aren’t the only ones with a commitment to “tradition”.