Weiye Loh's Library tagged Androgyny → View Popular, Search in Google

Sep

2011

Mr ‘Thing’: Pejic and his Prophet | marksimpson.com

Pejic, who sometimes models women’s fashion, sometimes men’s (though guess which gets more attention), is the chap memorably described by US FHM in a widely-reported hissy fit as a ‘thing’ that prompts them to ‘pass the sick bucket’ — despite his popularity with their own readers. And more recently as a ‘creature’ and ‘a fake’ and symbol of ‘abject misogyny’ by outraged female columnists citing him as the ‘final proof’ that they were right all along, that high fashion is run by an evil gay paedo conspiracy against women that wants to do away with ladies altogether and replace them with ‘young boys’.

Though perhaps the outraged feminists of both left and right should welcome Pejic with garlands since he means that women can finally opt out of the fatal gay embrace of high fashion altogether and leave the gays and their Ganymedes to it….

Whatever Pejic does or doesn’t symbolise about the world of high fashion it seems to me that he and the scandale surrounding him definitely, dramatically personifies something that is going on in the wider culture that feminists, along with everyone else, are often far less keen to notice

www.marksimpson.com/...mr-thing-pejic-and-his-prophet

- Preview

Gender Androgyny Gender Stereotype Fashion

t in the last couple of decades the male body has become ‘objectified’ in mainstream media as much as the female variety. The way that ‘beauty’ and ‘prettiness’ is no longer the sole preserve of women. The way that glossy magazines with men’s airbrushed tits on the cover have become the most popular kind — with men. (Which lends a special irony to the banning of a mag that featured a topless Pejic on the cover by Barnes & Noble — they knew Pejic is male, and don’t ban topless males, only females, but were worried the image ‘might confuse their customers’.)
the way that colours, clothes, accessories, products, practises and desires previously thought ‘feminine’ have been greedily taken up by men – and often relabelled ‘manly’ in a way that only succeeds in unwittingly satirising the very concept of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’.
2 more annotation(s)...
- The way, in other words, that gender is undressing itself. Or at least, teasing us with an elbow-length glove or two and an unhooked bra-strap.
- “It’s not like, ‘Okay, today I want to look like a man, or today I want to look like a woman,’ ” he says. “I want to look like me. It just so happens that some of the things I like are feminine.”
  “I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.’ But, you know, to me, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really have that sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am. The fact that people are using it for creative or marketing purposes, it’s just kind of like having a skill and using it to earn money.”
  “”
  I identify as what I am.
  How very dare he! No wonder people rush to call him ‘it’ and ‘thing’….

May

2011

Barnes & Noble Censors Cover Featuring Androgynous Male Model

Barnes & Noble recently took an unusual step — the bookstore chain required the magazine Dossier wrap its new issue in opaque plastic before agreeing to stock it. The problem with the cover? Nudity. More specifically, the nude torso of the famously androgynous male model Andrej Pejic. Barnes & Noble was concerned customers would mistake Pejic for a shirtless woman.

uk.jezebel.com/...aturing-androgynous-male-model

- Preview

Androgyny Censorship Gender Equality

Barnes & Noble recently took an unusual step — the bookstore chain required the magazine Dossier wrap its new issue in opaque plastic before agreeing to stock it. The problem with the cover? Nudity. More specifically, the nude torso of the famously androgynous male model Andrej Pejic. Barnes & Noble was concerned customers would mistake Pejic for a shirtless woman.
"I've been talking to all my friends who work in magazines, and nobody I know has ever heard of anything like this happening. Especially with a guy. Guys are shirtless on magazine covers all the time."
8 more annotation(s)...
- Dossier asked if the stores realized that Pejic is, in fact, a man. The response, relayed via Dossier's distributor, was that the stores were aware of this fact but were still insisting on the opaque covering because "the model is young and it could be deemed as a naked female."
- Andrej Pejic is a very thin, very tall man with long blonde hair and a striking resemblance to Karolina Kurkova; at the last New York fashion week, Pejic modeled in five men's wear shows and four women's wear shows. He also closed the Jean-Paul Gaultier couture show — clad in the traditional final outfit, a wedding dress.
- Pejic has worn his hair long and cultivated his androgynous appearance since childhood, when he played with dolls and dressed in his mother's clothes. Then, he was made to realize "there was a line between being a man and being a woman...When I was about 10 years old, I did everything I could to act like a normal boy but it was hard," he told a Polish magazine. To the Telegraph, he said, "Around the age of 14, I decided to experiment with my look. As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do. I really tried being someone else during that period. It was hard for me — not being able to express myself and feeling I had to be someone else." He added that he had not made up his look "for attention."
- skinny and androgynous, two qualities that are not highly sought after in men. His look disturbs some people, who think he embodies the secret wish of gay male fashion designers to dress hipless boys instead of dressing women, who think he must be unhealthy — but anyone who mistakes Men's Health models for paragons of hale living needs to read this — or who simply find him unattractive.
- But Pejic is a man. And pictures of shirtless men, in Western culture, are not considered "obscene." So why is Pejic's cover getting the same treatment as a porno mag? What message are the big bookstore chains sending — that the male torso is only appropriate all-ages viewing when the man in question is ripped?
- Does the Barnes & Noble newsstand have a minimum biceps standard, no skinny dudes need apply? (Why it is exactly that women's toplessness is considered inappropriate for magazine covers in this country is a question for another day, but this debacle does call into question the general ridiculousness of these standards.)
- Pejic himself seems very unconcerned by the reactions that his appearance can inspire. "Sometimes I feel like more of a woman, other times I feel male," he said earlier this year. "I'm sure most people think of me as a woman. It doesn't bother me anymore and I feel fine about it...I don't consider my looks unusual."
- "The thing about Andrej is, if you see him, he is very, deeply androgynous," says Parrott. "But he is also very comfortable with that. It's a shame that everyone can't be as relaxed about it as he is."

Shiftless Bodies « Quiet Riot Girl

This image of the male model Andrej Pejic was censored by the bookstore chain Barnes and Noble, because it could be mistaken for a picture of a topless woman

As the Jezebel article states, other magazines featuring covers of shirtless men have been stocked by Barnes and Noble, but the men in question have been muscle-bound metrosexuals.

What does this tell us about gender anxiety and attitudes to ‘obscenity’ and nudity in the 21st century?

quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/...shiftless-bodies

- Preview

Androgyny Censorship Gender Equality

http://uk.jezebel.com/5802115/barnes–noble-censors-cover-featuring-androgynous-male-model
in the light of that recent photoshoot for Abercrombie and Fitch in Paris, where over one hundred male models got their tits out for the whole of Paris to enjoy.
3 more annotation(s)...
- I also think this serves as a reminder that the feminist campaigns in the UK by organisations such as OBJECT, to cover up lads mags and to put them back on the ‘top shelf’, may lead to similar incidents of censorship here.
- Jezebel decides that the thorny issue of how feminists simultaneously bemoan ‘double standards’ of how men and women’s bodies are perceived in our culture, and also campaign for the censorship of images which ‘objectify’ women but not men, should be left for ‘another day’:
- Why it is exactly that women’s toplessness is considered inappropriate for magazine covers in this country is a question for another day, but this debacle does call into question the general ridiculousness of these standards