ABSTRACT
Leandra Medine and her Man Repeller blog, especially in its early iterations, claim to focus on women’s fashion interests rather than cultural expectations that women should concentrate on attracting men. However, Medine and the lifestyle blog reference men and masculinity through varied online features. Medine contradictorily articulates women who are man repellers, references men, claims that she is not addressing men, asks men if they are attracted to certain looks, and self-identifies as masculine. This chapter attends to the ambiguous words and phrases that accompany such shifts, including Medine’s use of the term “bowner” as a reference to bows, women’s pleasure, and male-oriented erotic excitement. Critical literature on singleness and heterogender, or the correlation of binary gender and heterosexuality, offers ways of considering how men, masculinity, and heterosexuality remain important features of man repelling. This includes Medine’s early articulation of the man repeller as a single heterosexual woman who is not interested in romantic relationships with men and more recent replacement of the single man repeller with her heterosexual wedding experiences, married position, and role as mother. This chapter concludes that while associated with women’s empowerment, Man Repeller forwards the interests of men.
