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!

"For spring 2010, he engineered minute wrinkles into clothes to render them less serious..."

"... did away with socks (and, sometimes, even shoes); cropped well-proportioned trousers above the ankles and yet stopped shy of the Pee-wee Herman height now obligatory among early adopters. He built exaggerated, almost pagoda, shoulders into natty blazers (worn over jeans)...."

From an article about how the new fashions for men are all about comfort.