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Two and a half years ago, I moved into my first studio. Five of us crammed into a windowless box, with a bright pink painted floor, in south London. One of the artists I was sharing with — and am still to this day — was Rachel Hodgson, a Polyester contributor since the beginning. One summer’s day spent with no exposure to natural light, Rachel and I conceived the idea for Non Threatening Boys*. Well, it wasn’t our original idea per se, we’ve borrowed it from one of the greatest teen girl characters of all time; Lisa Simpson. Sensitive, self aware and disliked by her peers: I can’t imagine I’m the only millennial woman that related to Lisa growing up. In multiple episodes of the now-trash, once great, tv show, she can be seen thumbing through her favourite magazine, ‘NonThreatening Boys’. From that moment onwards Rachel and I have always spoken about making the fictional mag a reality. There’s no denying the toxicity of masculinity. It’s a dangerous thing; a set of spoken and unspoken rules that have arguably caused more damage to our society than anything else. Unlike other issues of Polyester, this isn’t a straightforward celebration of what lies within this zines pages. It’s not a co-sign of how men are still currently allowed to reign supreme over our lives, writing our rules and setting the status quo. It’s certainly not an acceptance of the patriarchy. But what started as a tongue in cheek poke at masculinity has grown into a much more nuanced, complex collection of work.
Without artists and creatives asking questions about the role of masculinity, without comedians pointing and poking at the glaring holes in its DNA, and without people attempting to rewrite what masculinity means entirely, the more that it’s insidious traits are left to run riot. That’s why, for the features in this issue, we’ve chosen people that are truly challenging and changing the stronghold of masculine ideals. The male gaze extends to everything, as it still exists as the default in our wider world. When talking about the female gaze, we so often take the position of femmes shooting, or viewing, or creating work about other femmes. But through this zine, I’ve become more interested in how femmes view men. Across this issue, you’ll learn about women that create work exposing the utter disappointment men often are — especially when dating. You’ll also find writers penning slightly unhinged love letters about their fave problematic actor, and a deep dive into why teen girls of today still choose to litter their bedroom walls with pin ups of boys torn from magazine spreads. Masculinity won’t disappear from our lives. I have been quick to dismiss engaging with it in any meaningful way the past. But putting this issue together — and bearing witness to all of the work going into dismantling the dangerous patriarchal framework we live within — has made me slightly more hopeful for the future.
Founding Editor-In-Chief Beauty Editor: Mona Leanne - mona@polyesterzine.com Socials Editor: Hatti Rex - Hatti@polyesterzine.com Assistant Editor: Jemima Skala Interns: Izzy Stokes. Ashley Saville Cover shot by Savanna Ruedy, featuring Benito Skinner. Special thanks to: Kiersty Boon, Gina Stewart, Carlyn McNabb, Bridget Meyne, Kiersty Boon, Alfie Gleeson. Cover illustration & illustration throughout by Rachel Hodgson.
COPYRIGHT & DISCLAIMER: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in part or whole without written permission from the publishers. ©2019 Polyester Gamble limited and The views expressed in Polyester zine are those of Editor in Chief, and are not neccessarily shared by the publisher, these parties cannot be responsible for them.
because there aren’t that many trans icons in the public eye,” he says. “Sometimes there is this expectation for me to keep people updated and to do like voice updates or pictures and I don’t necessarily feel like I need to do that all the time. I’ve been trying to find a more healthy relationship with social media where I’m not constantly updating about my life and I’m actually going and experiencing my life instead of tweeting about it. I guess I feel the same way about my transition. I’m just trying to experience it first-hand rather than like constantly doing 24/7 updates. For many, transitioning isn’t a finite process; it’s a constant renegotiation of everything you think you know and reframing that within new parameters. Since Ian started transitioning a few years ago, it was a difficult road to self-acceptance. “I originally came to terms with my masculinity with a sort of self-loathing. I hated myself for how
“This idea that, men have to be tough and they have to assert their masculinity. It’s all about dominance. It’s all about human greed and power”
I felt, and I wish that I could have fixed it… Then I didn’t really know what masculinity even meant to me. I turned to the media and what society said a man was, and tried to be very macho and tough, and that wasn’t me. That didn’t fit.” Instead, Ian decided to find his own sense of masculinity. “I started experimenting with makeup again and clothing and wigs and stuff. I realized that fashion is genderless, and makeup is genderless. All those things that I enjoyed doing before I came to terms with my masculinity are still fun things that I am allowed to do. When I came to that realisation, it just freed up my ability to express myself and just really fully love myself for who I am. I love wearing earrings and cool makeup.” Since moving to LA to pursue his acting career, Ian notes of his own gender expression that it has become much more fluid. “I started wearing skirts recently – it’s great! Boys can wear skirts, girls can wear skirts, anyone can wear
Words by Jemima Skala. Feature images by Shelby Lorman. Lorman The internet age has undeniably changed the face of modern feminism, for better or for worse. The slightest whiff of inclusive politics in a tweet or Instagram caption is seemingly enough to go viral these days. Platforms like Instagram and Twitter have helped to perpetuate an ironic double bind: on the one hand, they have made the movement accessible and attractive to new generations of activists through the proliferation of feminist slogans; on the other, our feminism has become one-dimensional, expecting too little of people before we laud them as our Feminist Heroes. Someone who is both a victim and beneficiary of this is New York-based Shelby Lorman, the illustrator behind popular Instagram account Awards For Good Boys. Awards For Good Boys
illustrates the ways in which we all are too quick to self-congratulate for doing the bare minimum in terms of activism and social consciousness. She describes herself in the context of her work as “first and foremost someone who is creating comedy, but I happen not to hate women.” She can’t help but laugh at this one. In the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, Shelby noticed that men were being held up as heroes for doing performative activism, like retweeting political statements without reflecting those in their personal lives. To call this out, she started doodling examples from her personal life, particularly her escapades in the world of dating, and posted them on Instagram. So, what is a good boy?
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Benny Drama: Sometimes I think it’s really funny, the kind of things that people are attracted to. There is this very specific kind of masculinity, where they’re masculine but they’re sensitive. I think the culture of that is very fascinating, and fun to poke at. In my live show, I talk about having crushes on straight men when I was in high school and college, before I came out. I realised when I came out how low my standards were. I couldn’t help but notice that in so many of the straight male heartthrobs that we have created, how little they have to do; as opposed to how much we expect from women and how much they have to do. We’re like ‘Oh no, this character is like super sweet because he isn’t psychologically manipulative or a totally toxic person’, and in reality that’s the least we should expect and that doesn’t deserve praise and full glory. Anything that pokes fun at the media’s portrayal of a ‘perfect boy’ is so, so funny to me. I do feel very liberated in mocking this idea, and I hope it makes all my followers feel better too. I’m glad that there is a sensitivity — if it’s real and it’s honest, that’s great, I’m fine with them showing that, and I hope that it is there. It’s more that we expect queer people, and black people, and women, to do so much, yet we expect so little of straight white men. Just bare, bare minimum, and then full glory of course. It makes absolutely no sense, and that’s where comedy can come in.
Olivia Graham: If you’re familiar with Benny Drama, you will understand, I had to ask about the star sign series. If you’re not familiar, essentially each Zodiac season, Benny releases a video portrayal of ‘Dating an [insert star sign]’. Conventionally the conversation around star signs seems to go either one of two distinctive ways: either, people are entirely dismissive (your loss @ciswhitestraightmen) or, they’re taken seriously (well in @queerswomenandfemmes).
But I think your approach is something a little bit different all together. Your astrology videos are about dating, and what’s interesting about conventional representation of dating culture is how uninteresting and excessively basic it is, because it is all based around heteronormativity, and how society conceptualises every single dating experience around heteronormative ideals of romance and relationships. What is interesting about your videos is how you play on that. I feel like through this series, you’re playing a part in queering astrology whilst still taking it seriously.
Benny Drama: I hadn’t seen astrology explored in comedy unless it was entirely shitting on it. That was so annoying to me. And yeah, whenever I can mock heteronormativity I absolutely do that. You can see that in the Taurus video. In the videos I have made conscious decisions about the characters and their sexuality, like Hayley is straight, and Kayleigh is queer. But, some people have come at it and are like, ‘Do a female Taurus’, and I never really thought of them as so aggressively gendered. I obviously made them as an impression of a person, but I urge people to read between the lines, and sometimes think beyond the character and think of the dialogue and the lines I’ve included. I want them to be super inclusive, and in my head there is a balance.
Olivia Graham: Continuing with discussing heteronormativity and sexuality, I wanted to know more about a recent video of yours titled, ‘Live footage of me in the closet’, and what it was like for you to release the video. For readers context, the video is a queer person aligning themselves with toxic masculinity to be straight passing.
Benny Drama: I posted it around the three year mark of me coming out. I thought, I usually poke fun at
Words by Hannah Ewens. Artwork by Savanna Ogburn Pamela Des Barres, an excitable teenage Beatles nut, plastered posters on every inch of her wall. “Everywhere I turned in my bedroom, their four faces beamed at me,” she wrote to me. “I had to kiss Paul’s picture every night before sleep. My teenage imagination ran wild!” All her paper-kisses turned into real flesh and blood ones, as if pubescent dreams had the power we all wished they did. Pamela would grow up to be a professional music fan and lover to the stars throughout the 60s, penning the tell-all memoir, ‘I’m With The Band’. She’d always been with the band – in every form, 2 and 3D, watching them pose and preen and draping herself over them after shows. No more infamous groupie exists, her sexual back catalogue full of names like Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon and Jim Morrison. Her memoirs were later scoured by Cameron Crowe for inspiration for the film Almost Famous and subsequently studied by Kate Hudson who played the groupie lead. “I had to have every poster of Paul in existence. I mailed away for some of them, and snagged them out of magazines being very careful with the staples,” she remembers today, adding that she still has every last piece of memorabilia in her ‘Beatle Box’. My teen pin up posters can only be rotting away in a landfill somewhere after I pulled them all down, at various ages of development. I can remember all the main
ones though. A massive black and white one of The Rasmus when I was 9 or 10, which I used to stare at while listening to their album Dead Letters and imagine putting the crow feathers in his hair. I’d lust after carefully cut out Kerrang! posters of every hot emo frontman holding a pair of roses or covered in blood. Kurt Cobain would get a longing look whenever I left the room as he played an acoustic guitar on a HMV monochrome laminated sheet. I’m just a girl in the world with a large laminated picture of my boyfriend and true love and meaning for living on the wall, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I can’t specifically remember which ones I used as masturbatory material to but you can bet that absolutely would’ve happened. That was the 00s. The power of the pin-up has never died, never faded. Throughout the 2010s, magazine art editor Paul Lang spent his days looking for striking and unique shots to turn into posters. “When I worked at We Love Pop, we had a poster called Page Forty PHWOAR!, which was just an excuse for us to treat our readers to a nice pic of a nonthreatening hunk, preferably with his shirt off.” Exclusive shots were ideal, even vital,