Infamous ultra-conservative YouTube channel and fake university PragerU managed to get ratioed yet again this month when they decided to share their extremely tired and boring opinion on Harry Styles, and men’s clothing choices in general.
Perhaps sensing there was controversy around Harry Styles’s gender expression, and yet utterly failing to understand the actual context of the discussion (hint: It’s about queerness and the borders of appropriation, not whatever 1950s nonsense this is), PragerU went with the classic old man shakes fist at cloud take of “men shouldn’t wear dresses.”
Obviously, because this is 2023, this played out exactly the way you’d expect, with the internet rushing to share pictures of themselves in a wide array of dresses.
From the sublime.
To the merrily ridiculous.
I don’t know if they were hoping to play the algorithm by posting outrage bait, as their current Twitter bio claims they’re subject to “severe censorship on Big Tech platforms” (because, you know, it must censorship and not that people just aren’t buying their stale conservative grift) or if they actually thought the internet would rise up to agree that yes, men in women’s clothing is a grave threat to humanity. If the whole point of this was to up engagement then I guess we’ve given them what they wanted, because the responses to this set of tweets have probably brought them more attention than they’ve had in quite a while.
On the other hand, as far as conservative outrage machines go PragerU is pretty ineffectual at this point, and it’s arguably a decent trade-off just to see them get so thoroughly schooled by such a diverse range of people, all united in their understanding that this take was so thoroughly stupid.
Even the libertarians got in on it to point out how what qualifies “men” and “women’s” clothing varies widely by time and place.
Because gendered clothing, like every other aspect of gender roles, and indeed gender itself, is a social construct.
Seriously, as people have repeatedly pointed out, men wearing high heels, wigs and makeup was the height of masculinity back in the founding father’s day. Not to mention skirts and tight silk stockings were worn by all those knights and rulers they admire from the parts of European history they hold up as being when “men were real men.” You can’t worship one group that dresses like that and denounce the other as the fall of civilization, pick a struggle.
Anyway, if you go to the original tweet you’ll be able to find as fine an array of thirst traps as you’d ever wish to see, so we can all thank PragerU for that.
(featured image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Casamigos)
