It’s always intriguing to see articles pop up about the feminization of men’s fashion. The general thrust of these articles is that it’s cool to see big strapping men dress in feminine fabrics and swirly skirts.
A recent Daily Mail article about Gucci’s creative director, Allessandro Michele, is no exception. The designer believes that “men have been scared to show who they are” and that they are embracing the freedom that donning “colourful and flamboyant outfits, including skirt[s] or dresses” brings to their “concept of masculinity.” Michele’s concept of this new masculinity is visible on his Instagram page, an example of which is below:
I hate to tell Michele this, but I think he has it backwards. It’s not really that men have been scared for generations to show who they really are; it’s more that some men in our day are scared to be who they really are: straightforward, masculine men.
Unfortunately, such backward thinking is endemic today, not only in the realm of skirt-swishing men but in many other areas as well. And it’s this backward thinking that explains why we have so many feminized men.
G. K. Chesterton explained this issue in a 1912 essay published in A Miscellany of Men. “The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day,” he wrote. “Indeed, if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent.” In order to pass along their backward thinking to others, they must be ever-present, constantly dripping their propaganda in the ears of society so that their way of thinking becomes normal.
“It is he who writes nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific or sceptical [sic] sort,” Chesterton continues. These individuals focus their writings “on Eugenics and Social Evolution and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it,” he writes, signaling that we would do well to be wary of those who prop themselves up in ivory towers or present themselves as advocates of social-justice ideologies. Furthermore, these individuals promote a feminist mindset: “it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.”
Those who think backward, Chesterton explains, are like those who approach a common instrument—such as a fire poker—and look at it not through eyes of plain common sense, seeing its original use and purpose, but through confused eyes. “This object is crooked,” they say. “We ought to have straight objects.” They try to sound wise, but they end up sounding foolish because they ignore the poker’s natural purpose.
Because this backward thinking is so prevalent, Chesterton encourages his readers to take a step back and observe what is going on through a rational lens rather than through feelings or propaganda. “Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want,” he writes, “not what recent legal decisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies proved that we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shall some day want.”
We see this a lot today, whether through the feminization of men or the rise of transgenderism or even the trend of critical race theory. Kids especially are fed the idea that they are trans or bisexual, some strain of being other than the one they were born with. Combine this with the constant power of suggestion delivered by the propagandists, and we have the perfect conditions for drifting into unnatural practices—such as men dressing like women and acting like them.
Our society claims that it is helping men find their identity by enabling them to embrace their alleged feminine side. Yet the truth is that a masculine man doesn’t find his identity by twisting his purpose and mimicking the opposite sex. Instead, his identity comes by embracing the man he was meant to be.
As Chesterton concludes, we are in the topmost branches of the tree of history, the little twigs who are trying to take the tree in a direction different from which it has always grown. The wise ones, he writes, are those who resist “this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender,” and happy are those who remember “the roots of things.”
Our roots, and subsequent happiness, are not in men acting like women and women acting like men. Only backwards thinking would propose such a thing.
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Instagram-allesandro_michele
Annie Holmquist is the editor of Intellectual Takeout. When not writing or editing, she enjoys reading, gardening, and time with family and friends.
