A "slightly gender-ambiguous athlete who reads either as a pretty hot boy or a trans-girl, and not particularly a person who falls into the realm of how people see beautiful."

There's a 6'8" female basketball player — Brittney Griner — and the NYT article about her is on the subject of how she "redefine[s] feminine beauty ideals."

The quote in my title is from a model casting agent. I guess women, more than men, if they happen to grow really tall, think of becoming models, rather than basketball players. But Griner is a basketball player. Why discuss her as if she is a model? We don't much care what the male basketball players look like or think about stretching our concepts of male beauty when they don't conform to conventional standards.

The female female impersonator.

An interesting category, but who would we put in it? Guy Trebay starts with Wendy Williams. (It's an article about Wendy Williams.) But who else? He suggests Phyllis Diller, but then he backs off:

But Diller was a comedian...

(Ahem. Diller lives. Born in 1917 and alive.)

... and so are her spiritual descendants, people like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho, women sharp enough and shrewd enough to wade into the cultural scrapheap that is gender and recycle all the trashy signifiers they find there for laughs.

Williams is different, Trebay says, because she's a talk show host.

Like a kooky media divinity, a god in a comic book myth, Williams, 45, is permeable, superpotent and with no observable boundaries. She performs tricks on the air that involve her surgically amplified bosom. She suggests to guests like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, the confrontational star of “The Apprentice,” that she look into facial fillers to correct the marionette lines that frame her stiff, practiced smile. She vows to keep her audience up to date on her vaginal toning. She cries, but then on television lately it’s hard to shut off the waterworks.

“You just have the audacity and the unmitigated gall to say what you think and let the chips fall where they may,” Williams said.

Nice. But I'm more interested in the general idea of the female female impersonator. The first person who sprang to mind for me is Dolly Parton. And Marilyn Monroe. And then Courtney Love, Madonna, Lady Gaga.

And as long as I'm in YouTube, here's the great Phyllis Diller:



And here she is with Groucho Marx — and she's the one with the drawn-on eyebrows — and here she is with Liberace.

Anyway, the topic for discussion is female female impersonators. And Phyllis Diller. And eyebrows...

"Or is the Ralph Kramden Barack Obama’s fault?"

Guy Trebay has a question... about potbellies.

Hipsters, by nature contrarian, according to Dan Peres, the editor of Details, may be reacting in opposition to a president who is not only, as the press relentlessly reminds us, So Darn Smart, but also hits the gym every morning, has a conspicuously flat belly and, when not rescuing the economy or sparring with Kim Jong-il, shoots hoops.

“If we had a slob in the White House, all the hipsters would turn into some walking Chippendales calendar,” Mr. Peres said. Instead, the streets of Williamsburg are crowded with men who are, as he noted, “proudly rocking a gut.”...

“I sort of think the six-pack abs obsession got so prissy it stopped being masculine,” is how Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out, explains the emergence of the Ralph Kramden. What once seemed young and hot, for gay and straight men alike, now seems passé. Like manscaping, spray-on tans and other metrosexual affectations, having a belly one can bounce quarters off suggests that you may have too much time on your hands.

Why does there need to be any special reason for a man to have a potbelly? It's the natural tendency. You only need a reason not to have a potbelly, and it needs to be good enough to offset the natural tendency. The fact is, it is more important for a man to fight the natural rounding of the belly than it is for a woman, because a round belly is feminizing. It speaks of fertility and pregnancy. The "pregnant man" has never been a good look.

***

And quit wearing shorts!

"Wilma Flintstone pearls"/"gobstopper fake pearls."

Can you out-write WaPo/NYT fashion writers Robin Givhan/Guy Trebay?

"The Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back..."

"... and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.... [W]hen designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate."

Guy Trebay draws the line.

"Fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual..."

Unless it's not:

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” [said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton.]. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid."

But let's get to the meat of this article, written by Guy Trebay for the NYT, the part about Hillary:

[F]ashion is ... often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

For some reason, Trebay declines to name the WaPo fashion critic. (Jealous?) Anyway, of course, it's Robin Givhan. (Here's the Bloggingheads segment where I talk with Robin about the Hillary cleavage to-do.) Back to Trebay:

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Well, of course she knows, which is why her campaign mobilized against Givhan. (More Bloggingheads about that, if you're up for it.)