Male Makeup Guru Hits Back at Conservative Critic

It’s 2017 and makeup brands are finally coming around to the fact that boys and men wear and buy makeup — and that they can certainly sell it too. Cover Girl recently added male beauty guru James Charles to its roster of ambassadors, L’Oréal features a guy in its latest TrueMatch commercial, and Maybelline tapped YouTube star Manny Gutierrez (MannyMUA) for its big-shot campaign.

Still, not everyone is ready for men in makeup having a moment — and one such person just happens to be conservative Blaze blogger Matt Walsh, who tweeted an image on Jan. 6 of Gutierrez rocking a full-on glam makeup look, along with an apparent warning: “Dads, this is why you need to be there to raise your sons.”

Gutierrez didn’t seem to see the tweet until late last week, when he added a powerful response to Walsh’s shade.

“My dad actually works for me and is SO PROUD of me,” he tweeted. And in case there was any question about that, Gutierrez posted an image of a text message his father wrote, directed at Walsh.

“Let me begin by telling you that I’ve always been there for my son and will ALWAYS be there for him. Not only am I proud of what he has accomplished, but I’m more proud of the person he has become,” the elder Manny Gutierrez wrote. “I know the words you speak are from lack of knowing anybody from the LGBT community. If you did, you would soon realize they are some of the most real and kind hearted individuals that walk this planet of ours.”

Walsh waxed poetic about the issue with not one but two posts on the Blaze, the first on Jan. 10, imploring fathers to help make their sons manly. “One of our primary duties as fathers must be to show our sons what true masculinity looks and acts like…” he offered. “It’s not enough to simply tell them that they must be men. I have to provide for them a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute demonstration. ‘This is what a man is. This is what he does. This is how he carries himself. This is how he behaves. This is how he dresses. This is how he speaks.’”

Walsh blamed the media, the government, and Hollywood for distorting the traditional ideas of masculinity, claiming that our children are being taught that “the best kind of man is a woman. He’ll absorb this lesson even as girls learn that the best kind of woman is a man. The result is a generation of children who do not understand or appreciate their own nature and wish only to be something other than what they are.”

Still not finished expressing his grave concern over Manny’s upbringing, Walsh wrote another blog post on Tuesday defending his comments, saying that he wasn’t implying that Manny wasn’t raised right — he was simply saying that a good dad doesn’t raise his son to wear makeup. “I never said, ‘This dude, specifically, was raised by a crappy dad,’” he wrote. “Rather, I said ‘this sort of dude is why dads — plural, universal — need to raise their sons.’ Much like I might point to a liquor store robbery in the inner city and say ‘this is why inner city kids need dads at home.’”

Walsh argued that he wouldn’t have had to express his indignation at a boy wearing makeup if the media weren’t propping him up as an inspiration, “demanding” they be celebrated.

Manny, by the way, has more than 2 million subscribers on YouTube, 3.1 million followers on Instagram, and 546,000 followers on Twitter, compared with Walsh’s 28,000 on Instagram and 82,000 on Twitter.

But Manny, naturally, already has a word for those who aren’t too keen on seeing boys in makeup. He says it at the beginning of all his videos: “If you don’t like this video, if you don’t like me, please don’t f****n’ watch it.”

Related:

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