Kevin Esser: “Male attire had always, more or less, been specific to gender, but never to sexual orientation. The naughty unisex protocol of the previous twenty years had been replaced by a stern protocol of dualism. Girls and queers had laid claim to short-and-tight, to skimpy-and-sexy, so boys, not wanting to be seen as sissy or gay, began a frenetic scramble to establish a new and exclusively hetero male protocol that would mark them as separate, that would proclaim their own straight, macho identity. By the rule of opposites, this new uniform of Hetero Correctness replaced short with long, tight with loose, skimpy with baggy, sexy with shapeless.”
An argument central to Esser's essay is that when gays started asserting their right to total acceptance coupled with a right-wing movement towards repressing images of male sexuality led to heterosexual males to not only want to cover up their bodies (by wearing baggy clothing on their bodies, which they proudly displayed along with heterosexual women during the Sexual Revolution) but even disfigure it (especially during the Grunge scene in the early 1990s). He does not blame gay identity politics or right-wing censorship as the sole causes, but rather the deadly cocktail of both happening at the same time.
And that is just the beginning. The rest of the essay argues that while women happily enjoy a monopoly of being sexually alluring by wearing revealing clothing, men have have not only given that monopoly up to women but that this is in gross error, because instead of showing attraction (and attempting to attract) women, men instead are more interested in showing their revulsion towards other men. If that weren't enough, Esser then goes on to argue that today's conformity differs from yesteryear's conformity in an important respect: conformity now means being the pressure to be the same and celebrate that sameness, whereas before the pressure was to "conform" to individuality and to do so by showing what yo' mama gave you. What's worse, heterosexuals have painted themselves in a corner: since defining what it means to look like a heterosexual as being opposed to looking like a homosexual, straight guys have locked themselves into their sexually repressive fashion. By "going back", the clothing heterosexual males wear will identify them as gay, when before, heterosexual males were wearing the same revealing clothing as gays were.
There is an exception to the above rule, Esser reports, but, for that, an interesting comparison of America with the Middle East, and the significance of analyzing baggy clothing, you're just going to have to read this remarkable essay for yourself.
