SNP’s word of the day: Epicene
Word: Epicene
Meaning: Either lacking in distinctive male or female characteristics or possessing both male and female characteristics. More often used for effeminate males (sissy boys) than for masculine females (tomboys or what-have-you), so we’ll go with that.
Usage (suggested): “That’s so epicene it’s obscene.”
You should know it because: Um, hi, Andrej Pejic? Jon-Jon Goulian? James Franco and Kalup Linzy? The many drapey, fedora’d imitators of Pirates-era Johnny Depp? Increasingly, epicene—while not necessarily gay—men are the rage. I don’t mean metrosexuals; that’s so ’00s, and, besides, the idea then was that you were so confident in your bull-market masculinity that you could put on a pink shirt over a waxed chest and look somehow, via juxtaposition, even sexier. (I never bought that, though.) Nor do I really mean androgynous, although lexically speaking, it’s nearly the same word as epicene (a little stronger, maybe closer to hermaphroditic). But while androgyny connotes a lifestyle, epicenity’s more of an attitude. It’s a careless, or less-to-prove, approach to being, and dressing like, a guy.
It’s not so extreme as men in skirts; more like a softening of masculine dress codes, a literal letting-down of your hair. Partly, I think we’re seeing men dressing like “straight fairies” (to quote a years-old salon.com piece) because the two decades most in vogue again are the ’70s (golden age of glam rock and feminist theory) and the ’90s (a time, at least in my mind, when all guys were sensitive, silken-haired slackers who smoked clove cigarettes and loved Elastica).
Camille Paglia described it well in her 1985 essay “Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene,” in which she calls sexuality a parlour game, with interchangeable masks and rule-bending genders. Wilde’s men are “feminine in their careless, lounging passivity,” she says, while women have a fierce man-type wit.
Next time you go to the park, note the number of boyfriends lounging carelessly in rolled-up, pastel chinos and very soft, well-draped tees: that’s the epi-scene today. What about the much-heralded post-metro return of the “manly man”? All those dudes in heritage boots, raw denim and plaid, with cave-age beards and serious tattoos—butch drag, essentially? They’re still around, but that’s been happening for long enough that I’m bored. And besides, for every trend, there’s another equal and opposite trend. I mean, it’s just physics.
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