I've been wanting to respond to this for ages but struggled to organise my thoughts. A lot of really excellent replies here and I'm glad a lot of women have noticed the same pattern but also have some thoughts on it beyond just "ewww men need to wear pants because dresses are for women!".
I think a big part of the problem is that femininity is inherently sexual, women just get gaslit into thinking it isn't from the time they are children. I don't think any sexual dimension to femininity would make it inherrently fetishistic but since men are not tabula rasa and they inevitably bring their own patriarchal BS into it that they're more familiar with, in most cases, yes, it does end up fetishistic. Men are only really interested in femininity if it's inherently malegazey and reliant on patriarchal ideas on female inferiority. So they get into it for their own autogynephilic fetish or to get other men off (or both at the same time). There is for sure a lot of interest in male femininity from women, but it rarely factors into the motivations of even the men interested in women, because nothing women do ever does.
Frankly, men could use some humility and feeling the magnifying glass on them for a change. Femininity could teach them to feel something just from making themselves appealing and nonthreatening to the people around them, which as it is, they don't really experience or care to. They are usually fixated on obtaining power for themselves and subjugating others, or if "temporarily embarrassed" in their pursuit, either jerking off to it or moping over how unfair that is while shitting on women, often with the same men who are "temporarily embarrassing" them.
As a result, male gender nonconformity almost never rejects patriarchal expectations because men are all hoping to benefit from it in some way, even if indirectly via submissive fetishes, reveling in the patriarchal victim complex, or trying to cash in their NiceGuy coins for sex and worship. The best you can get out of them is hearing them mention how gender roles are bad, but only insofar as they get in the way of their own fetishes. The second this mindset has to be extended even slightly to the groups they are used to exploiting, it's back to the same ol' hierarchy. Almost none of these men are fine with women foregoing femininity, because despite all their "genderfuckery" posturing, they are very much stil entitled to a hot babe for all their still very much one-sided phallocentric sexual fantasies.
Most men get into this through porn categories, sex communities and a really maladapted obsession with patriarchal dynamics. A lot of men like this will parrot libfemmy "down with gender roles!" attitudes so as not to get in hot water for their creepy behaviour, but in reality, they would have little interest in the whole thing if they weren't getting off to the contrast between the image of a mighty superior man and an infantile, submissive, inferior image of a woman. It also tends to go hand in hand with misogynistic roleplaying like calling an anus a vagina, just to drive home the fact that these men aren't even trying to pretend that femininity is anything separate from being a woman, i.e. sex object.
At the same time, I think sometimes people act like they are approaching GNC in a fair way, but then are only really allowing it for a tiny minority of lithe, petite men who can "pass" as women, and any men outside of that narrow standard should be better off unkempt and with holes in their underwear. Which again shows an unwillingness to shake up the status quo: we'll allow a couple of exceptions if they are practically indistinguishable from women, but at the end of the day women are the ones who need to be sexualised and objectified, and men should be ugly and masculine and focused on more important stuff.
Quote:I find it's more likely to happen in straight men but gay men can have their complexes for it too.
I think with gay men, they benefit from there being an audience for femininity that matches the patriarchal norm they find familiar and appealing - i.e. horny men. Men care a lot about what other men think and they evaluate everything by androcentric (and ofc phallocentric) norms. There is certainly a large audience of women interested in feminine men, but men never cared about adapting to what women want and would rather waste time writing incel textwalls about how unfair it is that women have standards and don't find their plethora of chronically-online fetishes sexy (clits are not even in the picture to complain about, unless they're a TIM roleplaying that their dick is a poor neglected clit). Gay men are able to form some sense of validation from their attractiveness in a community where that is met positively by men whose approval they're used to covetting, whereas feminine straight men get nothing out of being appealing to women unless it gets them one-sided patriarchal sex with very conventionally attractive women.
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