Notes on Cropped Tees and Fragile Masculinity

Men, man.

A foreword: I will hit this one with all the subtlety of a mis-swung hammer in the egg aisle. I will speak in sweeping and reductive generalisations, leaning on terms that serve the topic at hand but do no justice to the vast and wondrous spectrum of gender and sexual identities that live without, above, and beyond terms like “man” and “woman” and “gay” and “straight”.

And on with it.

Nothing angers an insecure man on the internet quite like a lady who lusts of her own accord. Nothing boils a small man’s blood more than a fully actualised woman of appetite and her roster of fancies that make her wriggle and giggle and flutter and blush without him.

Nothing, that is, except another man in a cropped tee.

I learned this on Instagram, after a silly little reel of mine went viral. Its premise was simple and innocuous: show how a regular-length tee sits awkwardly and disproportionately upon my tiny torso. Then show how a more tailored tee — cropped in length — sits better.

From there, shit snowballed sharpish. What was meant to be a daftly relatable but ultimately disposable clip spiralled into five-point-two million views and some of the most divisive discourse you’ll ever digest over a simple tee.

The women in the audience waxed horny and poetic. Not for me, per se, but for the crop itself. Unanimous fervour for the cake-flaunting, navel-flashing spice of it all. A chorus of thirsty praise for the crop’s smutty, slutty suggestion of tummy. Wanton admissions of desire. Breathless demands to see more. Quivering pleas for a peek at what lay betwixt shirt hem and beltline.

Comments ran the gamut from flushed to feral: My greed disgusts me — I do be asking to see the belly; I need whatever this font of man is. For the women in the comments, it was a full-blown bacchanal; the awaited materialisation of something long lusted after yet unfairly denied by spouse or partner or preferred source of erotica.

For the men in the comments, the crop was just super gay.

Now, I’m an adult; I take no offense at being perceived as gay. And let’s be honest: men’s fashion has borrowed so heavily from queer aesthetics that it borders on appropriation. Straight culture has been quietly siphoning from queer heritage for decades. And frankly, if you aren’t drawing from the same well, you’re simply not putting that shit on.

But I digress.

The fact is, for the vast majority of men in the comments, the cropped tee was a shameful and catastrophic breach of straight masculinity. A sickening deviance from the manly and the brolic. Just dress like a man, bro. Please, bro, I promise: women will find you more attractive. This makes you look feminine. Private Ryan did not die for this.

And the women actively defending the crop? Just fuel for the toxically masculine dumpster fire. A symphony of women celebrating the raw sex appeal of the ittier bittier tee, barely audible above the nagging drone of men telling them they were wrong. Worse, they were lying. A gaggle of the whiniest, tiniest men you’ve ever heard, all tripping over each other to correct women on their own likes and dislikes.

Comically insecure and chronically unfuckable behaviour.

In the final throes of defeat, witnesses described man’s feeble, flailing attempts to reassert dominance. Lurkers and interlocutors alike reported a flurry of the direst, most logically bendy haymakers — all thrown in defence of a cornered masculinity.

Outnumbered and reduced to a laughing stock, several men—being men—reached for the gun:

“We can’t conceal carry in a cropped tee.”

And it was in that final, fragile, sniveling attempt at a drawdown that it all became clear: The men weren’t angry—the men were scared.

Their world no longer made any sense. Their era-old codes had not only failed them but left them stranded without true north. The women didn’t like the things men had always insisted women liked. Everything was upside down.

The remedy was not introspection or reassessment, but a doubling down on old tropes, old ceremonies, old protocols.

Old hate. Old violence.

That meant knuckle-dragging, spittle-specked scorn for anything deemed unmanly. A blanket damning of everything from soft hands to empathy, painting your nails to occasionally washing your balls.

And that’s where it stops being funny. Because this line of thought isn’t limited to the comment section of a throwaway reel. This is a discourse that has taken root in every nook and cranny of the internet. It’s a philosophy writ large in gigabytes of online vitriol and toxicity. Noxious prose that nourishes nothing and unites no one, only chokes and isolates.

And just like that, manliness becomes a wall built in testament to insecurity, then blamed on everyone else for its unscalable height.

The male loneliness epidemic starts to look lab-grown.

The male loneliness epidemic starts to look man-made.

All this over a cropped tee.

If I have a point at all, it’s this: live by the fictions of masculinity and you will soon shrink into a caricature of them. A real man™ is a parchment-thin facsimile of something that never truly existed in the first place. A gossamer-fine fantasy, scribbled in haste on a scrap of paper in a panicked attempt to make sense of something.

And a paper man has only one fate when pressed.

He folds.