GOP political pundit Candace Owens took aim at an unlikely source in singer-songwriter Harry Styles when the English musician became the first man to grace the cover of Vogue magazine alone this month. Styles appeared in a dress, blowing up a blue balloon, which seemed to trigger Owens as if she didn’t know she could wear dresses and blow up balloons, too. “There is no society that can survive without strong men,” Owens tweeted on Nov. 14. “The East knows this. In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack. Bring back manly men.”
Owens, who has accomplished little more than fading notoriety for being hateful, got perhaps a little more than she bargained for and definitely more than she deserves in a tweeted response from Styles Wednesday. Although, of course, he didn’t actually tag her or mention her by name. Don’t be silly. He simply tweeted, “Bring back manly men” with a photo of himself in baby blue and ruffles and eating a banana.
The tweet was shared more than 245,000 times and liked more than 667,000 times and oddly enough, seemed to evoke an inner Styles fan in Owens. Although she continued her Twitter rant of contempt aimed at him, she also seemed honored that Styles mentioned something she tweeted. “When people try to tell me I don’t have influence, and then @Harry_Styles dedicates an entire post to my tweet. I inspire global conversation,” Owens said in her followup tweet Wednesday.
A more accurate synopsis of Styles’ response might be that Owens inspired mockery, but I was prepared to let her have the barely there victory of having attracted attention. Twitter users: not so much.
“She sounds like a fan,” Democrat Frangell Basora tweeted. “Unfortunately, her hateful comments are inspiring violence against gender-nonconforming people and it is atrocious. This isn’t something to be proud of, @RealCandaceO. It isn’t a discussion when people’s safety and lives are put at-risk.” He added: “These comments do far more harm than any good imagined to both parties and to our social order. America is the land of the free. The homophobia and the transphobia that comments like yours inspire are dangerously found elsewhere in the world.”
If Owens had actually read the Vogue article she linked to in her quest to shame Styles into a stereotype of masculinity, she might have actually learned something.
Styles said in the article:
“You can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself.”