A "slightly gender-ambiguous athlete who reads either as a pretty hot boy or a trans-girl, and not particularly a person who falls into the realm of how people see beautiful."

There's a 6'8" female basketball player — Brittney Griner — and the NYT article about her is on the subject of how she "redefine[s] feminine beauty ideals."

The quote in my title is from a model casting agent. I guess women, more than men, if they happen to grow really tall, think of becoming models, rather than basketball players. But Griner is a basketball player. Why discuss her as if she is a model? We don't much care what the male basketball players look like or think about stretching our concepts of male beauty when they don't conform to conventional standards.

"Or is the Ralph Kramden Barack Obama’s fault?"

Guy Trebay has a question... about potbellies.

Hipsters, by nature contrarian, according to Dan Peres, the editor of Details, may be reacting in opposition to a president who is not only, as the press relentlessly reminds us, So Darn Smart, but also hits the gym every morning, has a conspicuously flat belly and, when not rescuing the economy or sparring with Kim Jong-il, shoots hoops.

“If we had a slob in the White House, all the hipsters would turn into some walking Chippendales calendar,” Mr. Peres said. Instead, the streets of Williamsburg are crowded with men who are, as he noted, “proudly rocking a gut.”...

“I sort of think the six-pack abs obsession got so prissy it stopped being masculine,” is how Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out, explains the emergence of the Ralph Kramden. What once seemed young and hot, for gay and straight men alike, now seems passé. Like manscaping, spray-on tans and other metrosexual affectations, having a belly one can bounce quarters off suggests that you may have too much time on your hands.

Why does there need to be any special reason for a man to have a potbelly? It's the natural tendency. You only need a reason not to have a potbelly, and it needs to be good enough to offset the natural tendency. The fact is, it is more important for a man to fight the natural rounding of the belly than it is for a woman, because a round belly is feminizing. It speaks of fertility and pregnancy. The "pregnant man" has never been a good look.

***

And quit wearing shorts!

"For spring 2010, he engineered minute wrinkles into clothes to render them less serious..."

"... did away with socks (and, sometimes, even shoes); cropped well-proportioned trousers above the ankles and yet stopped shy of the Pee-wee Herman height now obligatory among early adopters. He built exaggerated, almost pagoda, shoulders into natty blazers (worn over jeans)...."

From an article about how the new fashions for men are all about comfort.

"It’s a little creepy to see this ancient bald man in knickers."

Let me blog Guy Trebay's amusing rant about famous people who need to change their style. The whole thing is good, but what tipped the scales to bloggable for me was the prime men in shorts material:

“People pick on Madonna unfairly,” [said Joe Levy, the editor of Blender], speaking of the star’s fanatical self-transformations.

It is certainly true that, in her role as seeker and radical self-improver, Madonna has provided a shiny alternative to a pop landscape that, without her, would doom audiences of the world to the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Shakira or, shiver, Angus Young.

Mr. Young, in case you’d forgotten, or never knew, is a guitarist and founder of the Australian metal band AC/DC. And he has been performing in the same stage garb for almost his entire career.

That is to say he has been wearing knickers and a schoolboy cap for twice as long as Miley Cyrus, the tween moppet, has been alive and honing a hapless sex-kitten routine.

Mr. Levy put it this way: “It’s a little creepy to see this ancient bald man in knickers.”

Angus Young? More like Angus Old. But Angus can do what he likes. I'm not going to invoke my "Men in Shorts" rule against Angus Young.

"Wilma Flintstone pearls"/"gobstopper fake pearls."

Can you out-write WaPo/NYT fashion writers Robin Givhan/Guy Trebay?

"The Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back..."

"... and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.... [W]hen designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate."

Guy Trebay draws the line.

"Fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual..."

Unless it's not:

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” [said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton.]. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid."

But let's get to the meat of this article, written by Guy Trebay for the NYT, the part about Hillary:

[F]ashion is ... often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

For some reason, Trebay declines to name the WaPo fashion critic. (Jealous?) Anyway, of course, it's Robin Givhan. (Here's the Bloggingheads segment where I talk with Robin about the Hillary cleavage to-do.) Back to Trebay:

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Well, of course she knows, which is why her campaign mobilized against Givhan. (More Bloggingheads about that, if you're up for it.)

How political is that "gay cowboy movie"?

"Brokeback Mountain," the high-class film everyone thinks must be called the "gay cowboy movie," is doing extremely well in the few theaters where it has opened -- in NYC, LA, and San Francisco. The question is whether Middle America is in the mood for this sort of thing. Here's how Frank Rich analyzes it (TimesSelect link):

The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful, four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone, starting with the riveting Heath Ledger. The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.

Got that? We're sick of this damned President, so we want to see cowboys make love. I don't like the constitutional amendment and related political pandering, but I can't imagine how being tired of all that would make me more likely to go see a big outdoorsy melodrama with the selling point that the lovers are both men. In fact, the notion that to go to this movie is a political statement makes me less likely to go see it. The movie purports to be high art, not some tedious demonstration of good politics.

A serious movie about a gay love relationship may very well make a more effective political argument than a movie that presents itself as political argument. But writers must write, and they will spell out the political argument that the movie only implies, thus making it harder for the film's unarticulated, inherent argument to influence people. But the political baggage is not accumulating as fast as it might have. Rich notes:

As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre. Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."

Oh, no! Those social conservatives are supposed to be backward louts! Have they learned the elite technique of restraint? Damn! They were supposed to be ayatollahs. How am I going to crank out these columns now?

Only now am I realizing that I'm writing about a TimesSelect article. Too bad it will be hard for you to read the whole thing. Well, elsewhere in the freely accessible parts of today's NYT there are other insights into the "gay cowboy movie." (Really, the guys are shepherds, but there's no shepherd movie genre, no iconic character The Shepherd to play off of by changing some key element.)

First, there's Manola Darhgas:

Less than two weeks after its release, "Brokeback Mountain" is already on the verge of being embalmed in importance. A lightning rod for attention even before it opened, the film has earned plaudits from critics' groups along with predictable sneers, and provoked argument over its gay bona fides. That "Brokeback" is a landmark is a matter of empiricism; its merits as a work of art are a matter of taste. What has gone missing is that this is also that rare American film that seamlessly breaches the divide between the political and the personal, the past and the present. Here, against the backdrop of the great American West, that mythic territory of rugged individualism and the Marlboro Man, is a quietly devastating look at masculinity and its discontents.

Then, there's this piece by Guy Trebay in the Styles section:

But to gay men trying to forge lives in a world where the shape of masculinity is narrow, and where the "liberated" antics of the homosexual minstrels so often depicted on television can seem far off, the emotional privation and brutal violence of "Brokeback Mountain" seems like documentary.

"That could have been my life," Derrick Glover said one bitter cold afternoon last week, referring to the film, which he had seen at a special screening a week before in Jackson, Wyo. A 33-year-old rancher, Mr. Glover comes from a family that has worked the land around Lusk for generations. His father still runs 300 head of cattle....

"They always define it as coming out of the closet, but I don't consider myself to be out of the closet," Mr. Glover explained. There is a reason for that, he said. "Where I live, you can't really go out and be yourself. You couldn't go out together, two guys, as a couple and ever be accepted. It wasn't accepted in the past, it's still not, and I don't think it ever will be."

This is really the most interesting of the three articles I'm linking in this post. Trebay goes to Wyoming, where the story in the movie takes place and where Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998, and interviews some gay men about what life is like for them:

The experience was "extremely, extremely lonely," [rancher Ben] Clark said, leaving him feeling so isolated that he more than once contemplated suicide. "I could not accept being gay because of the stereotypes that were drilled into me," he explained. "Gay men are emotionally weak. They are not real men. They are like women."

Like Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in the film, Mr. Clark dated women for a time, bowing to the pressure to be "normal" although, unlike them, he never married and led a double life. There's a joke out here about how one goes about finding a gay man on the frontier. The punch line is deadpan: "Look for the wife and kids."

Fortunately, Mr. Clark said, "I never did get married, because I never wanted to hurt a woman like that."

I've made fun of the Oscar ads for the movie, because of the way they emphasize the relationship between the men and their wives. This ad campaign is laughable for intentionally hiding the nature of the central love story. Nevertheless, the story of the wives interests me greatly. And the political argument inherent in this part of the story is, I think, especially strong. Those who would try to prevent or inhibit men from forming lifetime bonds with each other ought to give more thought to what happens to the women they marry. Those who think a man should struggle against his sexual orientation and find a way to form the classic marriage relationship with a woman ought to think about what they are advocating for the woman: a lifetime relationship with a man who has only feigned sexual attraction to her.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of interesting discussion. I especially like the part where Palladian says: "Geez, all you straight people can think about is sex, sex, sex. Here we are having a conversation about love and art and all you can think to add is some base, puerile and off-putting remarks about genitalia 'fitting' together, as if it were some sort of dirty Lego set."

"We wanted something intimate, and we listen to Tori Amos when we're alone."

Fashion designer Rolf Snoeren explains his inspiration:

The headlines in Thursday's papers will be "Pillow Talk" or "The Big Sleep," and there will be sniggers at the breakfast table when people catch a glimpse of a model in a red duvet dress with a fat white pillow tucked behind her head. The Viktor & Rolf show, at the ancient Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, was something. Beautiful in its dreamy use of white cotton shirts with eyelet ruffles, and highly conceptual in its evocation of the bed as the center of family life, Viktor Horsting's and Rolf Snoeren's show was an ode to love, with Tori Amos at the piano.

"We wanted something intimate, and we listen to Tori Amos when we're alone," Mr. Snoeren explained. "All good things happen in bed."

And Tori herself plays at the fashion show. Tori lovers should not miss the beautiful picture at that last link of Tori flailing her crimped orange hair about. She's wearing something big, magenta, and liquid. Ah, but avert your eyes from the text Tori lovers. Tori loathers: there's plenty here for you to savor:

Naturally, given the Lawrence Welk tendencies of [Viktor & Rolf], the live music for their show yesterday was provided by Tori Amos, the pop music klaxon.

Held in a space where what passes for experimental theater is usually staged, the production had as its centerpiece a black grand piano played by Ms. Amos, a stiff and stately piece of furniture herself. Her long hennaed hair was arranged in pre-Raphaelite crimps, and she wore quilted red trousers and a red satin blouse.

After greeting the audience with deep Kabuki bows, Ms. Amos took to the keyboard and began banging on it and keening as the English kewpie-doll mannequin Lily Cole appeared wearing quilted trousers and with satin pillows strapped behind her head like a weird Elizabethan ruff.

Red? The blouse sure looks magenta to me! In aesthetics, it's all subjective, I suppose. But no: that blouse isn't red!

Klaxon? Being a lawprof, I hear "Klaxon" and think of the Erie doctrine, but the definition I'm picking up from the dictionary is "A trademark used for a loud electric horn." So presumably, the writer (Guy Trebay) means to say that Tori clashed with the "Lawrence Welk" tone of the designers? And the designers are wrong that Tori is intimate?

"All good things happen in bed"? Then why are we at this damned fashion show? Maybe that aphorism makes more sense to a person whose name is -- it looks -- pronounced "snorin'."

Fashion is a strange other world.