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Friday, May 7, 2010

The Only Thing to Fear is... John Mayer's White Legs

Singer John Mayer is currently on tour in Australia, and when he showed up this week somewhere to play tennis, writers and bloggers everywhere went into meltdown over his shorts. A straight blogger described them as "scandalously short", and even uber-fey, gay columnist Ted Casablanca used the phrase "itty-bitty shorts". Scandalously short? Itty-bitty? Really? Jesus, people, get real.
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(john mcenroe in the 1970's)
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We've noticed a lot of these type of reactions in the past couple of years as the hemlines of men's shorts start to inch back upward. We're not sure if the widespread panic is a sign of a deeply ingrained homophobia or another example of Americans' unbelievable ignorance of their own cultural history.
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(ronald reagan in his youth)
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For the past 100 years, only a couple of times in American history did men wear shorts that weren't "short-short". In the 1950's, the popularity of longer Bermuda shorts came into vogue, and every so often since the 1960's, surfers' "boardie shorts" made it acceptable for men to wear longer swimsuits, but for the most part, from the 1920's until the mid-90's, men were perfectly comfortable in short shorts, both as swimwear and as street wear.
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But then in the mid-90's, Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, the phenomenally popular sports star, the most dominant of his day, began to wear his basketball shorts longer, (after he had worn very short shorts on his earlier North Carolina college team), and soon, young men and boys everywhere copied their idol's look. And as all fashion trends tend to go to the extreme end of the spectrum before they start to swing back, soon the look in men's shorts went from simply longer to being ridiculously long and even, at times, blousy and floppy which made them resemble women's skirts.
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(michael jorden, in earlier days,
wearing short shorts)
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But now, a good 15 years after Michael Jordan started the trend in longer shorts, the length of men's shorts is starting to inch back up the thigh. Every major men's fashion designer for the past two years has been showing shorter men's shorts. So why the national panic?
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(muhammad ali: sonny liston called his shorts "gay", and look what happened)
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Some of the panic finds it origin in homophobia. Gay men have become much more visible in American society since the mid-90's, and as homosexuality becomes more visible, some see it as a welcome respite from the dark ages of repression, but many American men are still scared to death of homosexuality. So to gird themselves against anything that might even slightly smack of "effeminate traits", which in their ignorance translates to "gay", these men wrap themselves in uber-masculine attire. And to these men, showing too much leg skin is seen as "effeminate", and thus "gay". Even some gay men, in an attempt to be accepted by mainstream society, desperately feel the need to
"butch it up", and are only too eager to follow the lead of their straight male counterparts. Thus the examples of gay men being even more critical of men who wear short shorts than straight men.
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(navy seals training to fight terrorists, in short shorts)
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(a typical American man on a beach in the 1930's)
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But the "itty-bitty shorts" panic is also an example of the typical American disease of "cultural ignorance". Americans, as a rule, are bored by history, and they quickly forget what was commonplace in American life even a few short years earlier. (Remember when it was revealed that Sarah Palin didn't know why we fought World War II?) So with this in mind, note that the mid-90's was a good fifteen years ago. It's been fifteen years since American society has seen men in short shorts. Anyone under the age of 21 to their mid-20's has never known a world in which men didn't wear long shorts. So it's somewhat easy to understand that this generation would find the return to short shorts a little unsettling; they have absolutely no knowledge of, and no interest in learning about, anything that happened before they were born. But what about all the people who are clearly old enough to remember men's short shorts, even having worn them themselves? What are they so afraid of? These are the people whose fear confuses us the most.
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(michael jorden playing for north carolina in short shorts)
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But for whatever reason the current panic over shorter shorts exists, people, get over it. They're coming. No fashion trend last forever, and the trend of men's long shorts wore out its welcome years ago. Knee-length baggy shorts long ago stopped looking cool or fashionable, now they're de rigeur for rednecks and residents of the Jersey Shore, and more times than not, they look as laughable as clown pants. In other words, just as with any other fashion trend that stays around too long, now they just look silly.
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(elvis presley, a notorious horndog
in short shorts, and it didn't seem to
hurt his sex appeal)
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Coincidentally, just as longer shorts were brought into mainstream acceptance by one sports star, another sports star is making short shorts acceptable again. Soccer star and current Sports Illustrated cover boy, Christiano Ronaldo, has been widely photographed for the past three years in short shorts, and thanks in the part to the bevy of sexy supermodels who are only too anxious to invade his personal space, there is absolutely nothing "effeminate" or "gay-looking" about Ronaldo. Many retailers have reported that whenever these photos of Ronaldo, in his "itty-bitty" shorts appear, their sales of men's short shorts spike upward.
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(surfer "boardies" from the 1960's)
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And, of course, we should remember a point which is always forgotten whenever we discuss something that "appears to be gay". What's wrong with being gay? To consider something less than admirable because it appears to be "gay" is to accept the notion that being gay is somehow less than acceptable, and is worthy of scorn.
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Haven't we moved beyond that? So if you put on a pair of shorts, you look in the mirror, and you think the shorts look too "gay", and you then discard them for that reason, you've got a problem.
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(navy seals from 1992 - we'd love to see you walk up to them and call their shorts "gay")
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So get over it, American men-folk, you can't hang onto those clownish, granny bloomers forever. And if your only real fear in showing some leg is that you have skinny, chicken legs, then that's why God made leg squats.
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(current world soccer superstar and notorious
supermodel womanizer, Christiano Ronaldo)

1 comment:

Jim said...

Bravo! Gay or straight the time has come for real men to reclaim the right to show a little leg. I'm bored-to-tears with 'shorts'that resemble skirts, in length and fullness! So do the workout gentlemen and flash some thigh. After all it's just fashion.

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