Gyms have been reporting a rise in lower-body workouts for men. Of course it helps if you have good legs. They are often covered in softer hair and blemishes, and displaying them has a strange vulnerability – a state of nature rather than one of undress. They are sporty, useful, athletic, deeply revealing, lightly erogenous, ultimately unthreatening. He was masculine, but he made you feel safe.”Īn exposed thigh projects the qualities of a soft lad. Connell from Normal People was definitely that: sporty, calm. “I think what people really want at the moment is a kind of soft masculinity, a soft lad. She agrees there was something about Milo’s thighs that was hot, but says it’s not so much about women ogling thighs as what a shorter pair of shorts represents. I ask whether she thinks women are excited by the sight of a hamstring. I speak to a lot of people about sexuality and almost everyone is starved of touch – but there’s still that fear of not knowing how to approach each other, not in a creepy way.” “I think men and women are trying to negotiate that space and it’s difficult. “I find it impossible to say,” says Vogue’s sex columnist Annie Lord. Happy landings: Elton John arrives home from his holidays in 1981. Is it even OK for men to dress more sexually? It feels morally unacceptable to discuss men being provocative in a positive way. It seems almost impossible to talk about a summer of free love when men continue to attack the freedoms of women. Covid has dominated the news for the past year, but in the brief spells it has disappeared from front pages it has tended to be replaced by grim stories of sexual predators. The pandemic has not changed the fact that when we hear about straight men’s sexuality it is often in terms of unwanted advances. Yet we are a long way from the naive days of 1960s sexual freedom. There has been a reported “double-digit” increase in Durex sales in the first quarter of 2021, compared with a year ago. After a year stewing in our own sweatpants and endless lonely hours WFH, the thought of human contact feels overwhelming. ![]() Social media had been frothing at the idea of a “hot vax summer”. The government has given a national directive to go forth and bonk – how else can one describe the recent announcement from Barry Whitehall himself, Michael Gove, that overnight stays and “intimate contact between friends” would now be allowed? This trend for showing more skin has come at a time when Britain feels at its most sexually charged since the free love summers of the 1960s. So the rise of the thigh is a tiny bit remarkable, because it suggests an idea that has been out of the public imagination for a long time – that men might want to dress in a way that is unapologetically sexy. While a few men in the public eye – Styles, Tyler, the Creator and Lil Nas X – become ever more daring in their fashion choices, the average high street has become ever more conformist. But they do represent a bulwark against the normification of men’s fashion over the past 30 years. Tom Selleck and John Travolta were wearing budgie smugglers decades before the TikTok hem-raisers. The Times claimed: “Legs are the new abs.”Īs trends go, short shorts are hardly new. Vox declared it to be “thigh-guy summer” – their calm, measured writer arguing that “Ancient Greeks sailed to fight for a woman Americans would let Milo’s thighs pulverise their skulls.” Wall Street Journal style editor Jacob Gallagher suggested this will be a “one-inch inseam summer”, blurring the line between short shorts and Christmas cracker hats. Others take a more direct approach: one girlfriend quietly hems all of her boyfriend’s shorts to make them shorter.įashion journalists have clambered over one another to coin the name for this trend. Most of the videos are posted by women, claiming that they would never date the perfect man if he wore shorts longer than 5.5in. ![]() ![]() On TikTok hundreds of videos have been posted at #inseam and #5inseam. Brief encounter: Normal People star Paul Mescal dares to bare.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |