To the Women of Her Campus,
I want to start off by apologizing for tarnishing the Her Campus community with the article I wrote, “The 4 Fashion Trends that Guys Don’t Understand.” It was grossly inappropriate and unfair to bring those kinds of statements and attitudes into a community in which women are meant to feel safe and completely comfortable. Worse, it was presented under the veil of “Her Guy Friend,” when it represented just about everything you would hate to have in a friend. Ultimately, I think one commenter put it best when they called it, “beyond offensive and ignorant.”
Simply put, I thought that the safest way in which to approach the topic of a male’s perspective on women’s fashion was to reduce it to the two elements that are easiest for a lot of men: humor and sexuality. And, as you all accurately noted in your comments, I did not even do those two things well. Instead, I wrote the sort of article that belongs on Barstool, or any number of men’s blogs, whose readership is composed of other males equally unable to move past stereotypical misogyny and approach subjects as rich and potentially enlightening as perspectives on fashion with any sort of maturity and class.
On top of that, I took on the subject with a criminal lack of depth. If I was really going to talk about a guy’s confusion over female fashion, I could mention yoga pants, sports bras, or pretty much any skin-tight article of clothing. Something truly confusing to men should not be something they do not like to see, but something that they cannot fathom wearing, and I can personally say that tight clothing makes me extremely uncomfortable. I could have acknowledged the bravery that it takes to wear such tight clothing, and the fact that men generally lack that type of bravery. Rather than tackle the article with honesty and intelligence, however, I chose to write what I knew was the safest, most conformist and heterosexual position on the matter.
Ultimately, your comments were completely spot-on. I assumed that the most interesting perspective on women’s fashion was what men wanted to see, and not what women wanted in their own clothes. And I did so using clothing that made that job easiest, because it was different, when in reality all four items are pretty cool and definitely attractive looks. If anything, the one thing you didn’t cover in your comments is my absolute cowardice in hiding any real opinions behind the façade of the “sexist asshole,” who, at this point, only exists because of people like me. I truly value your response to my article and the otherwise hushed issues that it brought to my attention, and I appreciate that the readership of Her Campus made it so clear that they wouldn’t tolerate this sort of article in their space.