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Andrej Pejic is a very thin, very tall man with long blonde hair and a striking resemblance to Karolina Kurkova; at the last New York fashion week, Pejic modeled in five men's wear shows and four women's wear shows. He also closed the Jean-Paul Gaultier couture show — clad in the traditional final outfit, a wedding dress.

Pejic has worn his hair long and cultivated his androgynous appearance since childhood, when he played with dolls and dressed in his mother's clothes. Then, he was made to realize "there was a line between being a man and being a woman...When I was about 10 years old, I did everything I could to act like a normal boy but it was hard," he told a Polish magazine. To the Telegraph, he said, "Around the age of 14, I decided to experiment with my look. As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do. I really tried being someone else during that period. It was hard for me — not being able to express myself and feeling I had to be someone else." He added that he had not made up his look "for attention."

skinny and androgynous, two qualities that are not highly sought after in men. His look disturbs some people, who think he embodies the secret wish of gay male fashion designers to dress hipless boys instead of dressing women, who think he must be unhealthy — but anyone who mistakes Men's Health models for paragons of hale living needs to read this — or who simply find him unattractive.

But Pejic is a man. And pictures of shirtless men, in Western culture, are not considered "obscene." So why is Pejic's cover getting the same treatment as a porno mag? What message are the big bookstore chains sending — that the male torso is only appropriate all-ages viewing when the man in question is ripped?

Does the Barnes & Noble newsstand have a minimum biceps standard, no skinny dudes need apply? (Why it is exactly that women's toplessness is considered inappropriate for magazine covers in this country is a question for another day, but this debacle does call into question the general ridiculousness of these standards.)

Pejic himself seems very unconcerned by the reactions that his appearance can inspire. "Sometimes I feel like more of a woman, other times I feel male," he said earlier this year. "I'm sure most people think of me as a woman. It doesn't bother me anymore and I feel fine about it...I don't consider my looks unusual."

"The thing about Andrej is, if you see him, he is very, deeply androgynous," says Parrott. "But he is also very comfortable with that. It's a shame that everyone can't be as relaxed about it as he is."

Jezebel decides that the thorny issue of how feminists simultaneously bemoan ‘double standards’ of how men and women’s bodies are perceived in our culture, and also campaign for the censorship of images which ‘objectify’ women but not men, should be left for ‘another day’:

Why it is exactly that women’s toplessness is considered inappropriate for magazine covers in this country is a question for another day, but this debacle does call into question the general ridiculousness of these standards