Who do you want me to be?

He doesn't drop the flamboyance until he wants to, though. And the framing, lighting, angles etc only serve to emphasize their attempts to loom even more over him, aggressively get into his space, gesture right at his face to unsettle him, and his refusal to be intimidated by these fundamentally pathetic responses that are by no means free from real danger, just silly and contemptible nevertheless. It's not that he's too disdainful or amused at his own hijinks to understand how easily this could go very wrong. He simply has no respect for these men and enjoys leveraging their own hang-ups against them.

His eye make-up is also more than usually noticeable in the close-ups in this scene—even compared to other scenes in the same episode—which seems maybe not unrelated!

Even among the heroic main three, I think it's obvious that McCoy's characterization is profoundly caught up in an attempt to recuperate the kind of white Southern masculinity that men like Roddenberry were intimately familiar with, to imagine how it could grow towards something better in a drastically improved if still imperfect future society, without completely denying the reality of the baggage attached to white Southern masculinity IRL.

There's a reason the bigotry against Spock as, specifically, a biracial person is so often filtered through the white Southern country doctor. There is no need to #bothsides this or downplay it as gentle insincere ribbing that doesn't seriously bother Spock and has nothing to do with bigotry; Spock is visibly and regularly tense about it in the context of the larger atmosphere of wariness and hostility directed at him because he's biracial and culturally identified with the more alien-to-his-colleagues side of his ancestry. This is placed in the mouth of the resident white Southern guy for a reason.

And there's also a reason that we get an ongoing thread around McCoy's resistance to registering the weight of horrors that are distant or abstracted from his personal experience and gut feelings (especially glaring in "The Conscience of the King" and "The Immunity Factor" but not only there), mingled in with his deep well of decency and strong principles about medical ethics and compassion for suffering he sees before him. TOS in general seems very aware of the limitations of even a profoundly well-meaning man of that kind, while also framing him as invaluably clear-sighted about cutting through sophistry and bullshit.

Spock, meanwhile, is defined against that kind of country wisdom and emotional gut decency for both better and worse (depending on the occasion). His expression of masculinity is deliberate, cerebral, urbane, elegant as well as abrasive, and framed as fundamentally remote and exotic where McCoy's is familiar. Spock is given a lot of sympathy and structural preference in the narrative (Nimoy consistently has about twice as many lines as Kelley throughout the show, despite playing a less talkative character), a favor rooted in his borderline-implacable presentation of himself in terms of gender as well as culture.

Spock is someone who can describe himself as both a man and not a man in the space of a single episode. He's arguably styled more like female Vulcans (like T'Pring and T'Pau) and less like purely masculine ones. But he's simultaneously a man/not a man in a very stable, singular, largely inflexible way. He also possesses the most purely unassailable masculinity of anyone on the Enterprise in the eyes of someone like Charlie Evans, who I think is correct in identifying Spock, rather than Kirk, as the real challenge to him in terms of masculinity (Charlie's desperate attempts to make Spock concede defeat in gendered terms lead to his seething frustration that physically punishing or controlling Spock can't break Spock's masculine superiority, and only serves to antagonize Kirk).

Anyway, I don't think either McCoy or Spock in a million years would play with gender presentation the way Kirk does in something like "Tomorrow is Yesterday." In their different, opposed ways, both are too straightforward and unbending and fundamentally concerned with presenting the truth as they see it. But in this respect, Kirk is different. As I was saying in the above post, his presentation of himself is all about fluidity, performance, responsiveness to circumstance—not only in regard to gender roles, but very much including them. He's versatile, tricky, highly theatrical, difficult to pin down to any one persona.

And of course, Kirk is a lot more prepared than the others to just lie, deceive, scheme, and/or seduce his way out of trouble. This could have been framed as a sort of macho James Bond-type thing, and I think some episodes vaguely make a stab at that, but by and large, the show is very aware that he is not that kind of masculine figure and doesn't want to be. The emphasis on his private ambivalence (and a cold-edged pursuit of his own agenda in more than dialogue), the particular ways the camera frames and eroticizes him, and his delivery and mannerisms make this "mode" feel very much more noir seductress than Bond, even as Kirk's chameleon-like quality is driven by profound convictions about his goals in doing it, his fundamental humanity, what really matters.

I posted these images in a different context a couple of weeks ago, but in terms of the femme fatale comparisons often made, I think it's worth comparing some of the visual language around him to how the literal femme fatale noir icon of Hollywood, Lauren Bacall, was shot in her films:

Yeah.

But in general, I think Kirk cares vastly less about living up to any particular masculine role than most other men, including McCoy and Spock. Instead, he's most bothered by the reverse, having the range of ways he might choose to present himself confined or limited. This is all the more the case when he's forced by a person or situation to take on a role that seeks to define him in narrow, restrictive terms, particularly in terms of gender (something also emphasized as early as "Charlie X," where he's viscerally uncomfortable with the "strong, masculine, paternal authority figure" role he has to be repeatedly pressured into; he's markedly more comfortable and light-hearted around exerting maternal authority in "The Changeling").

Additionally, he takes extremely visible enjoyment in defying and/or escaping any attempts to confine or trap him into specific conventional roles (ideally with as much drama as possible). He gets a kick out of needling the military douchebros in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," obviously, but he clearly has an equally great time outmaneuvering Harry Mudd in "I, Mudd" by flipping the script from frustrated masculine authority to maximum diva:

The crew laughingly ditches Mudd in his self-inflicted extremely gendered nightmare scenario, but Kirk is clearly the ringleader. Even as they all mockingly leave, the only ones to give bitchy little hand waves to Mudd as they go are Kirk and Uhura (Kirk's frequent partner in crime stylish controlled performance).

Even when Kirk isn't having quite so much fun directing an impromptu community theatre trolling production, TOS still makes a point of repeatedly veering away from the distinctive, strong masculinities of McCoy and Spock with him, I think. With Kirk in particular, it keeps swinging back towards the aspirational, freeing quality of just not giving a fuck about living up to contemporary men's masculinity hang-ups without being distant or hostile about women, either (generally the reverse, in fact). There's something intrinsically optimistic about the ever-present possibility of Kirk adopting a different option from his stable of gendered roles as seems appropriate, rather than committing to any particular restrictive ideal of Being a Man.

TOS rarely lets us forget the very male fantasy around his muscular, physical strength and attractiveness, and approximately 80% of all women wanting him regardless of his own feelings (though this is sometimes genuinely, purposefully chilling, and he gets tossed around and beaten up a lot; TOS does go out of its way to homoerotically remind us over and over that Spock is physically much stronger than Kirk). But at the same time, it insistently underscores the ways Kirk escapes the traps of conventional masculinity by being comfortable in his own skin:

And his entire perspective as a person is grounded in the immense value he places on freedom, aspiration, choice, striving, discovery, adaptability. He insists the greatest danger to people is being prevented from these things, either because their agency is somehow curtailed by outside forces (something he tends to regard as fundamentally oppressive and evil) or by their own fear of the unfamiliar (more understandable, but still essentially a failing). This isn't equivalent to his fluid navigation of gender norms and resistance to being defined by any conventional frameworks of masculinity—those are only one part of it—but I think it's pretty clear that these perspectives and preferences are all tightly interwoven in his experience:

We're the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We're tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference. We're human.

It's not even that his way of understanding/engaging with gender is perfect or anything; it's very true to how he feels, but not by any means for everyone. But I do find the contrast between his theatrical performativity vs the alternative but inflexible supreme masculinity of Spock and the comfortable familiarity of McCoy's just really fascinating—and extremely surprising from their reputations, especially Kirk's.

But even fan spaces that dislike Kirk Drift tend to have a strong preference for binding him tightly to masculinity even beyond what Spock and McCoy get. Some is no doubt influenced by the movies, which work to masculinize him (as the original "Kirk Drift" article pointed out, iirc!), but it was definitely a shock to have so much of a sense of not just the awful pop culture take on him but also even the friendlier, not at all dudebro fannish takes that define him so overwhelmingly with masculinity, and then to watch even sketchy episodes like "Who Mourns for Adonais?" and realize this is the character they're talking about: