Feminists who don’t like men and men who aren’t very masculine tirelessly attempt to “redefine” masculinity. Typically, this consists of finding an effeminate man and telling the whole world that masculinity is evolving and this new feminine man is what it looks like now.
That brings us to the latest attempt to do this with Pharrell Williams at GQ. On the cover, Williams is wearing some sort of weird dresslike monstrosity while channeling the look of someone’s bald-headed grandmother.
Here’s part of the cringey intro to this idea from GQ, which genuinely makes me wonder why any guy is reading “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” when this exemplifies their thinking,
Our society had been wearing blinders that shielded a pervasive culture of sexual intimidation and violence and blatant gender inequality. But some exceedingly brave people—many of whom were the victims of that unequal, violent, and discriminatory culture itself—were in the process of showing everyone the plain truth.
So the essential question that the team and I have been confronting during our first year in this new era at GQ is: How do you make a so-called men’s magazine in the thick of what has justifiably become the Shut Up and Listen moment?
They sound like Gillette. We’ve got this clown from GQ lecturing his own audience because they’re supposedly violent, discriminatory members of the patriarchy while most of them are just regular guys who tuned in to see what kind of suits are in style right now.
Anyway, this abomination of an idea moves on to Pharrell Williams to get his take of something he obviously knows very little about, which is masculinity. In all fairness to Williams, if they’d asked him about being a celebrity or flashy dresser, he’d be perfectly qualified to talk, but asking him about masculinity is like trying to get Shaquille O’Neal to explain what it’s like to be short. It’s just not his area of expertise — and it shows. He really didn’t even have anything interesting to say on the topic. Mainly he just popped off nonsense like this,