If you’ve been on social media — particularly Twitter or Tiktok — at any point during the last couple of months, you may have interacted with the novel excitement surrounding men who wear shorts with five inch inseams. It’s the new male fashion trend taking us by storm, and I personally have found it really fun to engage with. In the conversations I’ve had, five inch inseams have been a fun, pithy, light-hearted topic that is comedically relevant. It’s relaxing in its unproblematic-ness. Yes, it’s straight women drawing a sort of box for straight men to fit in (to reference an exercise we did in our Critical Thinking In Sexuality Course freshman year) but it’s chill, no one is fighting about it, and it has yet to evolve into a Conservative talking point.

Today, after a lunch with my friend where he shared with me that he had biked fifteen miles earlier to purchase a pair of five inch inseams, I got to thinking a little bit more about the culture surrounding the movement. As male fashion trends go, it’s one in a long line of comedic social media fashion commentary. Not long ago, we were laughing about men who got the “Justin Bieber” haircut, or swooning over men who knew how to cuff their jeans properly. My memories of society-influenced male fashion trends are all fairly positive ones. And interestingly enough, when a man or boy violates these trends, it doesn’t actually seem to cause any negative outcomes at all. A couple years ago, the “frat” outfit — Vineyard Vines and a snapback — started to have a negative connotation attached to it in the eyes of straight female society, but the boys who wore those outfits just started to wear them more prouder. And when they did, they became someone’s “type.” Almost any male who goes against the expectations of a straight male — for example, gamers, dadbods, emo/goth, skaters, the list goes on and on — is accepted and seen as attractive to some subset of straight female society. 

I can’t say the same for the female fashion trend. For one, female fashion trends tend to be much more soft spoken. You wouldn’t find straight boys on TikTok in 2012 — if it had been around at the time — making friendly jokes about girls wearing Uggs. Instead, you’d hear other girls whispering about it at the lunch table or around lockers. Additionally, a misstep in the world of female fashion is a much larger faux pas. You don’t hear about women who have “let their bodies go” being embraced nearly as often as you hear about dadbods. In fact, there is an entire subsection of male attraction that favorites older women who managed to maintain their young looks (MILFs). 

In Critical Thinking in Sexuality (CTIS), a health and sexuality class we were required to take freshman year, we did an activity that I referenced earlier. We were asked to draw a box, and write inside the box ways in which women were asked to fit into society. Then, we were asked to do the same for men. It was an important exercise, because often people don’t view men as oppressed by the expectations society places on them. However, my thoughts surrounding this idea of fashion trends have opened my eyes to the way that men get more wiggle room even within these expectations than women do. I don’t feel this way about all of the limitations placed on men. One of the major ways that men are harmed by masculinity, suppression of emotions and the expectation not to care — don’t seem to be double bounded the way less serious things like fashion trends appear to be. But in the smaller world of fashion and trendy behavior, men’s choices seem to carry less fatal weight. 

The idea that men get more leeway than women in society is not a new one. A more educated perspective will show you that the masculinity that harms women harms men as well. I am not negotiating this take. However, it is interesting that we can find privilege even within situations that involve stereotyping and “box-drawing.” When society draws lines for men, instead of creating an in-group and an out-group, it appears to just form two identities. Men can wear the five inch inseam, or they can wear eleven inch inseams. In the latter example, the rejection of the culture forms a “look” in and of itself. Their status is not threatened. It seems that what is in fashion must flow so much more freely for men. For women, pursuit of staying “on the inside” of the new trends is a constant hunt to stay relevant and respected, rather than being handed a memo that outlines two possible directions we could choose to go.