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In October 2020, on the website Refinery29 , Irina Grechko offered a version of the then-standard interpre- tation of Man Repeller ’s downfall: While 10 years ago, the con- cept—dressing in defiance of the opposite sex—was lauded for its girl-power approach to dressing with complete disre- gard for the male gaze, now the (very heteronormative) idea that we ever dressed for men seems wildly outdated. Millennials don’t need to be convinced to dress for ourselves or wear what we like. Let alone, Gen Z—who favour a gender-neutral way of dressing … If everybody’s the man repel- ler, nobody is: certain aspects of the nebbishette became so much a part of mainstream women’s culture that nebbishette itself was rendered obso- lete as a type. Medine Cohen may go down in history as the last nebbishette icon, having been so successful—or just so well-timed—as to help usher in her brand’s irrelevance. But the outspoken, at times perfor- mative, man-indifference that caught on over the past few years is not a victory for the nebbishette. Rather, it is a denial of the fact that hetero- sexual womanhood is by no means “wildly outdated,” but a fact of life for most of us. What the nebbishette gets right is that you can be attracted to men without your primary focus being how you come across to them. Nebbishette is not a pose (let alone a reality) of being a woman unconcerned with men. When the nebbishette chooses sneakers over heels, it’s not a screw- you to the male gaze. It’s an acknowl- edgment that, even in stilettos, she’d be a nebbishette, so she might as well be comfortable.
viewer at home is a Jewish woman on the couch with her gentile husband. At least, this was my own experience watching Nobody Wants This. There’s a subtlety and nuance to nebbishette, to the way it is more stance than identity, that does not fit in an identity-focused age. Today’s hyper- literal observers don’t know what to do with the kind of woman who has a pose of plain and unmarriageable, but who may well be gorgeous and married. But such women, such nebbishettes, were a dime a dozen in the New York of my 1980s–1990s childhood. THE LAST NEBBISHETTE IN 2010, Leandra Medine Cohen, a young Jewish woman in New York City, started a personal style blog called Man Repeller. To understand its significance, you need to trans- port yourself back to 2010 and prior, to eras before our current age, in which clothing is designed more for what women feel like wearing than for what men want to look at. Much like Woody Allen positing dorky Alvy Singer as a romantic lead three decades earlier, it felt fresh and surprising, in 2010, for fashion tips to come bundled with a ‘who cares what men think’ message. In earlier eras, glossy magazines paired fashion pages with advice on how to catch a man’s eye. These were self- evidently part of the same project. Man Repeller disrupted this link. On this since-unpublished blog, and in a self-deprecating voice harken- ing back to Allen and other nebbish- es and nebbishettes of yore, Medine Cohen chronicled her outfits, looks that, however high-end or revealing, were too strange to register as alluring to the male gaze. The blog succeeded, took on staff, and morphed into a general-purpose women’s fashion-and-lifestyle site.
THE LAST STRAIGHT WOMAN Phoebe Maltz Bovy Signal, May 19
In place of my usual book review column, here is a Jewish meditation on straight womanhood — not an excerpt from my new book, but my attempt to foreground the Jewish subtext I had in the back of my mind while writing it.
Then, in 2020, Man Repeller closed up shop. The full story of how that came to pass is itself a heck of a saga, involv- ing the awkward place of Jews (in this case, a Mizrachi Jew) in the 2020 racial reckoning, but is beyond my purview here. What matters for this brief his- tory of the nebbishette is that Medi- ne Cohen’s shtick—showcasing out- fits that appeal to fashion-conscious women but repel the male gaze—went from cutting-edge to yesterday’s news, as her outlook (or, more precisely, a twist on it) went from provocative to mainstream.
46 SUMMER 2026
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