Looking Sharp

Joe Killian
The Carolinian

The second year I was an Community Advisor, over at Mary Foust Hall, they put on a semi-formal. At around 5 p.m. there was a knock at my door. It was a kid down the hall, asking if he could borrow a tie - and if I could teach him to tie it. I did.

Twenty minutes later there was a second knock. It was a kid from one floor up, asking if he could borrow a jacket. I found him one.

Before I'd closed the door another kid appeared, asking if I could show him how to polish his shoes. Out came the Kiwi and the brushes.

This happened to me over and over again, throughout all the years I was a CA and Head Resident. And I enjoyed it. It was one of the few ways in which I could bond with my male residents that didn't involve video games - and one of the few ways in which I could do my job (teach them something, provide some guidance) that didn't involve my busting them for drinking or drugs.

But it did occur to me...these kids are my age. Why don't they know this stuff?

In a way I was lucky to have grown up in the family I did. Oh, it didn't seem that way at the time. When you're in grade school your mother sending you to Catholic school seems like punishment. But they drilled into me from an early age that the way you look affects the way you feel. Though I'm still not a big fan of school uniforms I can't argue with that logic.

I can remember my dad, a career Marine, teaching me to put a crease in my pants and shine my shoes, repeatedly hammering into me the idea that having pride in your appearance tells people a lot about the sort of person you are. It seemed, at the time, like the sort of noise with which fathers have bored their sons for generations - to no discernable effect. But , right around the time I became seriously interested in girls, my dad suddenly seemed a lot smarter than I'd ever realized.

Probably most of all I have to thank my aunt for telling me to stop looking like a slob and tuck in my shirt in that brief, flickering moment in which Grunge was in fashion. A smart, strong woman with classic style, she made me realize that, fair or not, it's often important to impress people with how you look in order to get them to care about what you say or how you think.

Looking around the campus I notice that women don't seem to be wrestling with how to make themselves look presentable. On the contrary - I'd argue most women my age spend almost as much time considering and then modifying the way they look as we spend trying to figure out how to get them out of all those carefully considered clothes. It's an easy out to say that women are simply more style conscious than men, more intelligent and therefore generally more socially adept. Just one of those curious little quirks of gender. But it isn't true. How many gay men do you meet with closets full of hooded sweat shirts and baseball caps?

My friend John Russell - now writing for the the Village Voice - once told me he thought straight men avoided thinking of and dealing with clothes because fashion consciousness was a threat to their masculinity. It was one of John's countless (often paranoid) theories of gender and society...but I think he had something with this one.

Until the acdendency of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and the scourge that is the "metrosexual" there weren't many men who were comfortable admitting that they cared about their clothing at all. Caring about their appearace equalled vanity, and vanity equalled femininity and there was nothing feminine about them, damn it. Curiously some of the only men who openly wanted to look sharp were our grandfathers - men who'd fought World Wars, saved civilization as we know it and came through all of it smiling to marry our grandmothers and raise our parents, the comfortingly masculine scent of their cigars clinging to them as they bounced us on their knees and smiled serenely knowing they were the men we'd never be.

I'd argue it's an unconscious masculine insecurity that's the cause of whole generations of men now failing to actually become men - remaining video-gaming, explosion loving, professional wrestling fanatics in cargo pants and sneakers seven days a week. These are twenty and thirty-year-old boys who have forgotten that there's supposed to be something more to life than fast-food, bad porn and the next Jackie Chan movie.

But being a man is great - and it should mean never having to apologize for your tie. We have to - as a generation of men - put the effort we expend on bench presses and skirt-chasing and beating the latest version of "Halo" back into the endeavors of real men. And that, my friends, whether you like it or not, means caring about the way you look. So break out the shoe polish and, if you're not sure how to do it yourself, go ask your CA. That's what he's there for.

Joe Killian is a long-time writer and Life Editor for The Carolinian. You can check out his blog at www.joekillian.blogspot.com.