Asia's metrosexuals: Mirror, Mirror... By Ling Liu (Time) Updated: 2005-10-28 09:04 So Aerosmith's Dude Looks Like a Lady is now the background music for the
region's fashion zeitgeist, and gender confusion is the order of the day. "When
I got to Asia, I had trouble differentiating between gays and straights," says
Norm Yip, a gay, Chinese-Canadian, Hong Kong-based photographer who released a
book of portraits called The Asian Male earlier this year. Yip is not suffering
disorientation in isolation. When two Hong Kong TV stations decided to host
separate male beauty pageants this summer, producers had to wrestle with the
amorphous definition of modern manliness. "Everybody knows the standards with
female beauty, but how do we judge men?" asks Wilson Chin, the executive
producer of the Mr. Hong Kong pageant, held in July by local network TVB.
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