The Male Gaze is Uncool

For the first time, womanly coolness requires ignoring what men find visually attractive.

You can say many things about the below outfit and styling. The woman is (unless you plan on being obtusely oppositional for no reason) objectively attractive. She is wearing an outfit that highlights what makes her body attractive to men. This is the platonic appeal to the male gaze outfit.

You can buy this dress here if you want.

And I’m not just saying that because I have a porn-addled idea of what men are into. Trad guys keep insisting your average man fantasizes about hand-knit cardigans and modest linen skirts stained with raw milk and the blood of slaughtered oxen, but that’s not really true. When I polled a bunch of people (including straight men) on their preferred outfits for women, a dress almost exactly like that randy blue number topped the charts for straight men.

But (especially if you’re a woman) you might notice that this dress is painfully uncool. Cringe, even. Perhaps worse: millennial. In fact, despite constant headlines gaslighting me about how bandage dresses like this one are “coming back,” I have yet to see any real evidence of this, either on social media or in real life. In fact, bandage dresses are inherently antithetical to today’s womanly ideal of coolness, because for what might be the first time ever, there is virtually zero intersection between aesthetics that make someone look cool, and aesthetics that strongly appeal to the straight male gaze—and this is no accident.

I am not happy to say this, but ultimately, the male gaze is just not cool. And if you want to be cool, it requires not just indifference to the male gaze, but rejection of it. This isn’t a random trend or coincidence, and it’s also not really about fashion. But like all fashion changes over time, it says something fundamental about our current culture.