So, there’s a certain knitting book, about knitting for men, written by a certain male knitting blogger. It’s quite nice, and if I were in the market for a beginner-intermediate knitting book with patterns, I might consider buying it. There are a number of rather fetching patterns, and the instructions are top notch.
We should point out that the author of said book is gay, and is something, I believe, of a radical faerie. Just to contextualize…
I’ve read, in my travles through the knitting blog world, about how the patterns are rather nice, but a bit “metro” or “hipster-y.” Which irks the hell out of me.
Now the author of said book has already objected to the categorization of the book as gay/etc, and thats all well and good, but I’d like to issue the following commentary.
When people say “the patterns are kind of metrosexual/hipster-y” I have to say, 1) what you’re thinking and not saying is that the patterns look gay, and 2) hipstery? what? how dare you!
The metro-sexual phenomena--if you can call it that--has always irritated me in principal, mostly because it became a way to be flagrantly assimilationist about gay/queer male culture. It also muddies the waters, and makes it possible for people to say “he’s kinda gay acting” without sounding stupid. I have a number of other little complaints, but we’ll leave it at that.
On the basis of that, I was going to leave the whole mess alone, but a couple of times now, I’ve seen the aforementioned comparison or equation of metrosexual with hipster. The logical product of that is that hipster is gay, which I think is patently false, and perhaps more insulting.
Arrrg.
Anyway. I don’t think this counts as the blog entry I told you all to expect, but whatever.
Cheers.