toxic masculinity
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It's International Women's Day. Do You Know Where Your Favorite Retailers Stand?
It’s one day a year, within the one month of the year dedicated to honoring and uplifting women in what is still very much a man’s world. Women’s voices may be more prominent than ever before in history, but equality is not an option without allyship, which is why we’re checking to see which retailers…
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A List of Things Personally Threatened By Billy Porter's Red Carpet Gown
1. My sexuality (of course) 2. My blackness 3. My black male-ness 4. My fashion sense 5. My understanding of how gowns work 6. My relationship with my dad 7. My feelings about carpets 8. My feelings about the color red 9. My feelings about when things like “carpets” and “red” are in close proximity…
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Billy Porter Wore a Gown and You Will Deal With It
The day of the 2019 Oscars, thousands of men—who I’m presuming live in their parents’ basements and holla from the passenger side of their best friend’s ride—had their already-fragile masculinity shattered when Billy Porter entered the Academy Awards resembling the black Cinderella and bibbidi-bobbidi-booed all over the red carpet. Porter, who has made it known…
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Yung Joc Is Officially Hair Goals—Or, He Should Be
Straight black men, we need to talk about Yung Joc’s hair. Unless you’ve been on another planet beneath a rock with your hands over your eyes, you’ve likely seen the former Bad Boy rapper’s increasing love for colorful, daring haircuts. Beginning with a (fairly bad) perm in 2016, Joc’s hair journey has taken nearly as…
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#MuteChrisBrown Too, Because He's Clearly Committed to Being Trash
In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of renewed talk about toxic masculinity, particularly amongst viewers of Surviving R. Kelly and the legions debating the necessity of Gillette’s controversial ad asking men to be accountable. In all of these dialogues, perhaps what has been most striking is how many men instinctively equate masculinity with toxic…
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Watch: A List of All the Things Straight Men Can’t Do Because It’s ‘Suspect’ (According to Wiz Khalifa and Many Others)
In a Breakfast Club interview in July, very tall Pittsburgher Wiz Khalifa expressed dismay at the horror of men eating bananas in public. From Page Six: “You gotta break it in half,” Khalifa, 30, told host Charlamagne Tha God. “If you bite into a banana, you sus[pect].” When Charlamagne began to protest that “it’s just…
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A Look Back at the Reaction to 'Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People' a Year Later
A year ago, a line in a piece from Saki Benibo—an assertion also articulated a year before in a tweet from Mela Machinko—inspired me to write something of my own based on that statement. The result (“Straight Black Men Are The White People Of Black People”) was my most read VSB piece of 2017. It…
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Terence Nance and Damon Young on Random Acts of Flyness, Intentional Acts of Blackness, and the Beauty of Lotion
Four things you don’t really need to know before watching this (but I’m going to tell you anyway) 1. Although this video is 12 minutes of Terence Nance (the creator and star of HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness) and I talking about everything from subverting the white gaze to the performance of masculinity (and the…
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#EvolveTheDefinition: Retailer Bonobos Takes On Toxic Masculinity
What does masculinity mean to you? This is the question retailer Bonobos asks in a new spot asking its followers to #EvolveTheDefinition of masculinity. In the 90-second “mini-documentary,” all different types of men read Google’s definition of “masculine” and compare it to how they self-define, making it clear that traditional textbook definitions are inadequate when…