Are women done with men?
Some are, I suppose—and some were never interested in them to begin with—but on the whole, no, women aren’t quite finished with men, not just yet. But man-liking has become a bit passé, as well as politically embarrassing to admit, at least in fashionable circles, at least on paper. This goes a long way towards explaining the spate of New York Times articles in recent years, by different Styles section authors, but all attributing women’s purchase of whichever designer item to—paradoxically—a rejection of conventional heterosexual femininity.
Six years ago, one could learn that women were wearing bralettes (as opposed to sculpted or push-up bras) because, “‘Women are now dressing for themselves and other women—not for the male gaze.’”
A report on London Fashion Week in 2023 spoke of a number of designers who, together, made up “a movement redefining sexy dressing for the female gaze.” This maybe means women are the designers, but gestures at the idea of women wanting to be comfortable as well as looking sexy, or, perhaps, at the idea that sexy in this meaning is about something other than looking good to men.
Last fall, an article about normal-looking T-shirts that for some reason cost more than $100—and those are U.S. dollars—emphasized their appeal to the “Female Gaze.”
A month ago, an article about enormous sweaters costing even more enormous amounts claim that the sweaters appeared “[a]t a time when women in America have lost rights to their bodily autonomy.” Yet another 2025 story about “adult bonnets” (these can cost more than $200 USD), explains that these are, per their wearers, a form of man-repelling. “‘[A bonnet-owner] sees the growing interest in the accessory as indicative of women not dressing to be noticed by men, but instead ‘thinking about looking cute for the female gaze.’”
I use “man-repelling” intentionally, because while reading the bonnets article, it hit me that I had seen this way of talking about fashion before. I had seen it, to be specific, long before Donald Trump’s first term and the ensuing #MeToo moment. This notion that women are wearing slightly eccentric (or not) designer clothing not because men ask this of them, but rather in spite of the fact that men absolutely don’t ask this of them, is not the invention of any of the New York Times journalists cited above, but rather of one audaciously dressed woman.
***
Leandra Medine Cohen—the second surname arrived when she got married in 2012, at age 23—will one day be studied in Jewish Studies seminars (if there still is such a thing), whenever they do the lecture on Jews and whiteness, on account of her curious place in the 2020 racial reckonings. Leandra was a white girlboss who had a downfall amidst the girlboss-downfall moment, but also, was she white? For one thing, she’s Jewish, and the whiteness of Jewish people is the topic of many exhausting debates. But her self-deprecating humour puts her more in a Jewish tradition than a generically white fashion-commentator one. For another, she’s Mizrahi (on both sides), so if she wanted to claim Jew of Colour status, she’d be well within her rights. But I am getting ahead of myself.
The Man Repeller started in 2010, part of a wave of personal style blogs, which began in the early 2000s but really took off around the 2008 recession. The moment was right for a lowkey alternative to high-fashion glossy magazines, and the technology (easy-to-use publishing platforms, digital cameras) existed. There were tons of fashion blogs (with names like Style Bubble, Style Rookie, Sea of Shoes, and photographer Scott Schuman’s breakthrough The Sartorialist). Sometimes it was a person taking outfit shots, other times street style, or a combination.
As you can probably tell, I was an avid reader of these websites. But this was more a matter of being drawn to the medium than being under the illusion that fashion blogs offered something inherently more accessible than glossy print magazines. Street-style photos would often be of models and socialites at fashion shows. The people casually showcasing their daily looks were thinner and wealthier than most.
Along with fashion blogs, there were group blogs like Jezebel, as well various less-savoury forums, where you could read about how the fashion bloggers were privileged. But… no one would have bothered posting to the internet that the socialites reported on in Vogue were privileged! There it was expected. But something bristled about the way fashion blogging promised relatability and informality, but didn’t quite deliver. The same post-2008 class resentments that made blogs seem more attractive than glossies contributed to their own downfall.
Why The Era Of Personal Style Blogs Must Come To An End http://t.co/EPsdXV6rH9
— BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) June 17, 2013
But by 2013, obituaries arrived for the fashion blog phenomenon. The immediacy of social platforms and smartphones had taken off. Sitting down to post to a bespoke website became a deeply old-fashioned pursuit. Personal style blogging became the bland, commercial phenomenon known as influencing.
Leandra Medine Cohen, for her part, did not close shop when the personal-style-blogging moment faded. Rather, she turned The Man Repeller into a women’s lifestyle website, something to visit alongside Fashionista or Refinery29. But it was closest in spirit if not layout to Emily Schuman’s Cupcakes and Cashmere or Emily Weiss’s Into the Gloss, in that it was also a multi-authored online women’s publication helmed by an aspirational founder.
The mid-2010s evolution of sites that had been about individual well-dressed young women’s outfits into ones offering more general-interest content was always a bit tricky. Additional voices allowed for more diversity, at least budget-wise, as staffers tended not to be as posh (or as well-comped) as the founders. It was also the obvious growth path for these blogs as businesses. But with greater promises of something for everyone came greater demands for the same. When sites had multiple contributors, there was this odd situation where the anchor personality would be posting about upscale vacations, and the employee-composed posts would be more like, here is a nice sandwich I made to eat at my desk. Questions of socioeconomic divergences were at the forefront.
Then 2020 happened. George Floyd was murdered, and a racial reckoning ensued, amidst pandemic lockdowns and general unease. These bloggers-turned-entrepreneurs—now derided as influencers or, worse, girlbosses—were faced with a choice: continue to post as usual, or pivot to Black Lives Matter.
As you might imagine, lifestyle bloggers with no particular demonstrated interest in or knowledge of these topics had little to add beyond performative gestures and promises to do better. There was immense pressure on founders like this to speak out, but also once they did, they opened themselves up to charges of hypocrisy for not doing more for social justice.
What happened at Man Repeller? Declining revenues, a changing political climate, and a shifting mission. But it's really a story about what happens when we ask too much of our clothing: https://t.co/2HLaLM6L6K
— Rachel Tashjian Wise (@theprophetpizza) December 4, 2020
The specifics of Leandra’s rise and fall are better–documented than many actual news stories, and that’s not even getting into the drama surrounding a 2021 podcast appearance where she was accused of white privilege while her host, in turn, dipped just the slightest toe into antisemitic waters. Effectively, the rebranded Repeller wasn’t going to survive the pandemic with multiple contributors, and its founder opted to not keep it going, as versus handing the reins to the employees. “Leandra’s Man Repeller has always been problematic,” read one of the published postmortems, which gives a sense of how the less-nuanced commentary went. The (relatively) more-nuanced was more like, Leandra had her moment—but her moment was up.
If you’re making a 2020 time capsule, you need the bit from the conclusion of the GQ Magazine story, “What Happened to Man Repeller?” It’s about how “former employees are mourning the site that could have been. ‘It could have been a space for nonbinary fashion,” says [one former employee]. ‘It could have been a space for Black women’s voices. It could have been a space for queer folks to really take over.’” What’s so extremely 2020 isn’t the notion that such a website ought to exist, but that a website created by Leandra Medine Cohen would have to be that thing.
But she is back, if indeed she was ever gone, with The Cereal Aisle, a Substack venture written in her voice, with personal style and street fashion to match. She also spoke about her solidarity with Israel post-Oct. 7 during an hour-long interview last March with Rabbi Justin Pines of the Jewish Broadcasting Service, on how getting dressed can be a spiritual experience. The vibes, they are a-shiftin’.
***
I am not the first to think of Leandra Medine Cohen in the context of our current moment’s relationship to fashion. Consider this recent nose-pinching endorsement:
And let’s give credit where it’s due—despite her flaws, Leandra Medine gave us the perfect rubric for sartorial dissent. Channel your inner Man Repeller, throw on those “birth control” glasses, and get ready—the next four years are going to be a wild ride.
— mccmorgan.bsky.social (@mccmorgan.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Gotta love that “despite her flaws.” But the point holds—Leandra Medine Cohen does deserve credit for the way fashion’s talked about today!
And then, I started to think about what The Man Repeller was about, and wondered if the pre-#MeToo 2010s were even speaking the same language.
The concept was not about trying to repel men, something readily accomplished with a pair of unflattering sweatpants, no designer wardrobe required. Man repelling, in the Leandra sense, was something entirely different.
It might seem banal, but a lot of commentary about style will be along the lines of, why would a woman wear that skirt/that hairstyle, men don’t even LIKE that? As if there’s no other possible explanation for why a woman would do something. It isn’t about putting men off as an end goal, but about having an interest that men find incomprehensible.
The Man Repeller was rather high-end, but the essence of what Leandra was getting at cut across socioeconomic divisions and amounts of closet space. If you’re truly destitute, none of this is relevant to you. But many the middle-class woman has been asked, by a bewildered husband, why she needs a pair of black boots if she already owns one.
Man-repelling was feminist, yes, but not rooted in misandry. It was more about asserting—Bechdel Test-style—that women have hobbies men don’t see the point of, and that this is not women making a judgment error of some kind, but simply how it is. Women, even feminine and heterosexual ones, don’t exist only for men.
Now, one could counter—and I remember some doing so at the time—that The Man Repeller was a funny thing to call a project whose purpose was celebrating women doing their own thing. I get the ‘don’t think about an elephant’ aspect to this, the way something called The Man Repeller paradoxically makes you if anything think more about the male gaze. But also, what would you call it?
The Man Repeller was about a love of fashion that’s indifferent to what’s flattering. Flattering, or for that matter practical, or office-appropriate, or affordable.
In a Refinery29 article from 2020, yet another of so many essays pondering Repeller’s kaput-ness, Irina Grechko concluded that the ascendant blogger had been original in her moment, but then the world caught up with her and her notion of “man repelling” became both mundane and obsolete:
“While 10 years ago, the concept—dressing in defiance of the opposite sex—was lauded for its girl-power approach to dressing with complete disregard for the male gaze, now the (very heteronormative) idea that we ever dressed for men seems wildly outdated.”
The same comes up in the GQ downfall article, in which a journalist is quoted as saying, “The idea of deflecting the male gaze seems so antiquated.”
What’s fascinating to my 2025 self is how extremely not obsolete this is. Yes, a 15-year-old Harper’s Bazaar essay from her about dating notably lacks the disclaimers about how this is heterosexual dating that the same article would doubtless contain if in the 2020s: “Can You Be in Fashion and Still Get a Man?” seems like a headline from another world. And yet, most women continue to be interested in getting men, and most men in getting women. If it were so last season to conceptualize fashion in ‘heteronormative’ terms then why do fashion journalists go on speaking about women’s self-presentation as though it would have anything to do with men? And why all the articles about high-end T-shirts and bonnets designed or purchased with man-repelling in mind?
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
