This is hardly new for male pop stars, and hardly new for Harry Styles himself, but there’s something different about what he’s up to now.
Harry Styles, charming as ever, is using his fame to make a point about sex and gender, incorporating commentaries on the matter into much of his public-facing life. This is hardly new for male pop stars, and hardly new for Styles himself, but there’s something different about what he’s up to now. Staff Editor Madeline Osburn and Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky discuss the situation below. Emily Jashinsky: Gender bending isn’t exactly without precedent for male pop stars, but Harry Styles is up to something very different and very reflective of the New Left’s defining characteristic. Unlike the drag queens of yore, Styles isn’t reveling in being transgressive. On the contrary, he supports the normalization of the transgressive, instead of enjoying the freedom and benefits of making truly subversive art. (This article has a lot of examples.) Don’t you think? Madeline Osburn: When I think of transgressive pop artists, I think of David Bowie and Prince—two men I would never lump together with Harry Styles. Bowie and Prince wielded their gender-bending fashion in a way that was still somehow intoxicating and masculine. Unlike Styles, they were never trying to normalize anything. They wanted to be weird. Whereas Style’s commentary on sex and gender is, as you say, more about normalizing his opinions rather than being subversive. If Styles really wanted to be counter-cultural, at this point wouldn’t it be more shocking to his Gen Z fans to lean into an extremely masculine or “heteronormative” image, for lack of a better term? EJ: That’s probably true given how stigmatized masculinity has become.
