David A. Windham thumbnail

Androgyny is Marketable

There are so very few ideas that I haven’t grabbed from someone or somewhere else. I’ve had this idea for many years and have had numerous conversations about it. I’m gonna roll through a slew of ideas and topics here, so just bear with me. I thought about it again today when discussing current events when I mentioned that the polarization of political ideologies is a reflection of pressure on resources.  I was referencing the criticism of the rolling black outs happening in California1 and the Joe Biden interview with Cardi B2. I’m bending the term Androgyny to to my own whims here. I’m not just talking about sexual orientation or gender roles. I’m using it as a metaphor for anything blended – race, religious beliefs, political orientation, economic status, age, ethnicity etc…  

Micheal Jackson

My first thought about this revolved around music and Micheal Jackson in particular.  I remember vividly a disconnect I had to popular music sometime in the 1980s. Something just didn’t gel with me about what was happening in popular music. Maybe it was my coming of age too cool for thou attitude. Regardless, I started thinking about why things are popular and what makes them that way. Sure, there is talent and other influences too. I’ve also said that it helps to be on the wavelength of the collective consciousness. There is also something else almost as important as talent or artistic merit and that’s marketability. The wider the audience, the wider the impact and spread. We’re all predisposed to relate to things that are similar to our own experience. Micheal Jackson was whitening his skin and shortening his nose somewhat regularly. I started thinking he’s not white or black, he’s not female or male, he’s not a child or a man. This was several years before he would release his single Black or White3 which pretty much solidified my theory that androgyny is marketable. Being a bit of everything is a simple way to appeal to the largest number of consumers. Perhaps Micheal became the ultimate product of this effect. The filmmaker John Landis said in 2017 that the Thriller video was simply a vanity project because Micheal wanted to become a monster4. His death and subsequent documentary films illustrated that evolution as a tragic monster of a figure in great detail. 

By the late 80s, I just wasn’t buying into it any popular music it. This was also about this time that hip hop began to take off. I remember listened to Easy-E every mowing the lawn. Here I was in white bread land just having had my braces removed digging on some of the the dirtiest west coast rap music.  Apart from my distaste, it seamed that popular music was having a bit of a crisis of identity. The Karens were ramping up the complaints about rap music and the overly suggestive overtones in the music videos even though they had been there for years. It seemed that radio formats started to break into niches. The airwaves started to segregate away from top 40 into classic rock, country, urban, christian, oldies, and talk radio6. The airwaves landscape was becoming further and further niched. And although nothing is new about that programming,  the internet has gone further down that rabbit hole to satisfy the most niche of any interest imaginable. Try to find the middle of a chart now. The current Billboard Artist100 has The Beatles at number 37 right between Blake Sheldon and Young Thug5. Look close though and you’ll see those androgyny crossovers sprinkled throughout because they’re marketable. 

I started applying my androgyny theory to everything. David Letterman and Johnny Carson are both mid-westerners. I’ve always ascribed that part of their popularity is related to a kind of  androgyny of regionalism. Age can be androgynous too. Look what happened to the Justin Bieber when he suddenly appeared with a mustache. Why are we always using the term ‘at their age’ like we’re comparing to some sort of ‘ideal’ age. Isn’t the ‘OK Boomer’ thing just another way to distinguish yourself by age?  It works for social economic classes too. I recently watched all of the commercials for the 1976 political campaigns and they were using that same marketability trying to hit that middle ground just like they’re doing this go round7.  Nothing reminds me of this more than the current economic gap trend and when the Donald requested a Van Gogh for the Whitehouse and was offered a gold toilet instead8. Pandering to women, the poor, and ethnic groups has become a quadrennial tradition in an effort to remain marketable. Where is our middle now? In the midwest, it’s white to the tune of 85% with an average of income of about $60,0000 but overall, Caucasians make up a 61% majority that is shrinking alongside of their compensation as a percent of gross domestic product. This explains the whole protectionism mindset phenomenon even though it’s been happing since the 80s9. Reaching the middle seems to be much more of an electoral goal instead of an ideological or policy making because androgyny is marketable.  

I think that a crucial aspect of this cultural aesthetic is its relationship with ideology, which signifies it’s relationship to socio-economic class. We see this all around us where ‘good taste’ and ‘high culture’ represent privilege and symbolic violence and neglect represent the working classes. My point here is that aesthetic judgement is not universal, but rather a learned structure subjective to the cultural, socio-economic, and racial backgrounds. I’m always joking with my better half about folks trying so desperately to wear their class like a badge. It’s become so atrocious here in the southeast to the extent that the majority of folks might as well just wear an arm badge signifying their ‘group’. Although I’ve heard in business over and over about finding a niche, it’s become apparent to me that’s just a way to find making moderate success easier because the widest appeal lies within the androgynous approach of not identifying with any particular class, race, or socio-economic group. 

There is an ancient history of the use of androgyny in myth, philosophy, and theology that ascribes the notion of normalcy before the ‘fall of man’10. It’s no coincidence that the snake and staff symbol, the caduceus which is used medical organizations, is an androgynous symbol used to represent hermaphrodites11. I’d even go so far as to assume that the title of one the highest selling nonfiction books of the 90s, the ‘Mars Venus’ series was related to the symbol for Mercury and Plato’s Symposium implying that folks are still mythologizing gender roles. This is also evident in the current religious, policy, and cultural debates surrounding the sensitivity towards gender neutralism. 

International communications, and in return cultural norms, have been somewhat revolutionized by the internet. Cross cultural success is a bit more normal now. If they aren’t searching for the wealthiest niche audience, online publishing tends to fish for the largest audience and that happens to fall right in line with my theory of with being blandly androgynous. Perhaps the creators don’t attribute it to androgyny, but I’d be willing to bet that they do know exactly what is marketable.  The ultimate recent use of androgyny online is the virtual character ‘Lil Maquela’ and her 2.6 million Instagram followers12.  

Lil Maquela

She is class neutral, gender neutral, and her face is a blended mesh of Asian, African, South American, Caucasian, and other ethnicities.  Lil Maquela been around since 2016 and was named one of Time’s Most Influential People on the Internet in 2018. She has a couple virtual friends who are both androgynous too.  Trevor McFedries13 and Sara Decou14 created these characters in a studio. They’ve managed to raise millions in funding15 and start a worldwide trend.  Just like any other pop phenom, Lil Maquela is being capitalized any way possible and she’s a now recording artist too. Virtual models, musicians, artists, and influences have been taking off. I suppose my first inclination to this artificial trend was when I retweeted “Hologram Tupac Keeping it Real” back in 201216. Aside from the fact that these characters are easy to manage, cheap, never age, and won’t put ridiculous requests in their rider contracts, it’s really all about the marketability. I look for human authenticity in art. I would like to hope that eventually other folks will lose interest for the exactly the same reason I lost interest in the popular music of the 80s.  Don’t get me wrong though… It doesn’t mean that I think this trend won’t continue to be commercially viable for the foreseeable future. There is one good thing about this….  the fact that there’s no risk she’ll become a monster.  She won’t require an obscene amount of plastic surgery trying to modify her ethnicity or preserve her age. She won’t become drug addled or acquire any other crazy maladaptive human behaviors. She and the others like her are products that will remain perfectly androgynous because they are marketable.  

20/09/03 – Update: Right in tune with my hypothesis here…. This week saw South Korean act to have a No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100: BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ Could Upend the Music Industry in The Atlantic – https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/bts-dynamite-international-pop-k-sensation-sunshine-rainbow/615928/

  1. California Draws Closer to Rolling Blackouts Again as Stage 2 Emergency is Declared – https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-warns-of-more-rolling-blackouts-creates-15493105.php
  2. Cardi B In Conversation with Joe Biden – https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a33549416/cardi-b-joe-biden-interview/
  3. Black or White – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_or_White
  4. Thriller was made because Micheal Jackson wanted to be a Monster – https://www.reuters.com/article/us-filmfestival-venice-michaeljackson/thriller-was-made-because-michael-jackson-wanted-to-be-a-monster-idUSKCN1BF2GY
  5. Billboard Charts – https://www.billboard.com/charts/artist-100
  6. Meanings of Radio to Teenagers in a Niche – Programming Era – https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08838159309364213
  7. Presidential Campaign Commercials 1976 – https://www.c-span.org/video/?153447-1/presidential-campaign-commercials-1976
  8. Architecture Digest – Donald Trumps Request for Van Gogh – https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/donald-trumps-request-for-a-white-house-van-gogh-was-swiftly-rejected-by-the-guggenheim
  9. Household Income in US – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
  10. Androgyny (history) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgyny#History
  11. Caduceus – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
  12. Lil Miquela – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Miquela
  13. Trevor McFedries (Yung Skeeter) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yung_Skeeter
  14. Brud Company website – http://brud.fyi/
  15. Brud – Craft Ventures – https://www.craftventures.com/portfolio/brud
  16. Hologram Tupac Twitter – https://twitter.com/HologramTupac/status/191801856203300864