A small but curious sign of the deepening gender divide in our politically fraught times: Male beauty standards are getting really weird.
In the latest salvo, young boys on TikTok are shaving off their eyelashes, ostensibly because long eyelashes are girly. This new phenomenon joins a number of other perplexing masculine trends from the last few years, including doing tongue exercises known as “mewing” in order to achieve the squarest jaw possible, and “going to Turkey” for hair transplants. Somewhat relatedly, a Republican congressman bragged recently that he refuses to drink out of straws because that’s “what women do” (not quite a beauty standard as much as a sort of inscrutable new gender norm).
