masculinity
When it comes to men, I don’t like facial hair. I detest tattoos. I dislike guys who slob around all the time. Maybe you will understand what I do like if I say that this picture excites me so much that it takes my breath away:
by Michael Appleton
It is a beautiful photograph so redolent with masculinity that I feel I could resurrect an old-fashioned activity and swoon. You can smell the room, right? That gentlemen’s store smell.
When I was little, my father would take me with him on his Saturday morning errands: the dry cleaners, the tailor, the market, etc. We’d always stop at a certain men’s clothing store. It didn’t make bespoke suits, like the shop pictured above, but it did smell of men’s clothing. There was a long shoehorn I used to play with, a contraption that produced a flame for your cigarette or cigar, and some butterscotch hard candies. I don’t know what my father did at this shop every week; I think he just went to check stuff out and to talk to the men who ran it.
But the store in the picture: you wouldn’t go there merely to browse. In fact, the picture looks less like a store than like the corner of a man’s dressing room. I look at the dressing gown, the shirt, the jacket, and I think of the man who would wear them, how he would look in them, and how his body would look underneath them, when he took them off, or when I took them off him. I can smell his shaving foam: Taylor’s of Old Bond Street. I can see the jacket on him, or being taken off and hung over a study chair. I imagine his cuff links, being threaded through the cuffs, or unfastened to roll sleeves up to the elbow. I can feel the heat of his body through the dressing gown, his hardness when engaged in a kiss. The man who wears these clothes is a man who understands something essential about what it means to be masculine, and that something does not involve track suits or tattoos or vegetarianism or a lack of grooming, any more than it involves emotional illiteracy, sports obsession, extreme skepticism, or compulsive topping. I can’t find the words to describe the potent masculinity in this picture, but I am drawn to it inexorably, as the feminine has always been drawn to the masculine ever since opposites began to attract.
Yet, my kind of feminine does not possess a waspish waist, stiletto heels, makeup, or a flirty little personality. Mine rides a bike to church and there changes into stockings and a skirt knee-length or lower. Mine wears tomboy shorts in the garden, or gray flannel when summoned to a certain type of study. Mine can surrender to love while seeking surrender in return. It can work a Melita drill, cook pizza from scratch, scuba dive to 170 feet, make algebra lucid, or deal with children who suddenly start to cry. It isn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it craves this.
by Michael Appleton
English flannel with Twist? Yes. Please.
