Those paying close attention to the footnotes over here will have noticed my link to Kay S. Hymowitz’s piece “Man-Child in the Promised Land” in the City Journal, a quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute. She and I are thinking about similar things, and in similar terms, and she gives a good overview of the evolving situation I’ve called “guyliness.”
It’s really worth reading in its entirety if you’re interested in this stuff, but I thought her dissection of Knocked Up really gets to the point of the celebration/critique the movie offers of guys:
What sets Knocked Up apart from, say, Old School, is that it invites the audience to enjoy the [Single Young Male]’s immaturity—his T-and-A obsessions, his slobby indolence—even while insisting on its feebleness. The potheaded 23-year-old Ben Stone accidentally impregnates Alison, a gorgeous stranger he was lucky enough to score at a bar. He is clueless about what to do when she decides to have the baby, not because he’s a “badass”—actually, he has a big heart—but because he dwells among social retards.
And then offers what I think is a key observation:
It is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn’t know how to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will come along and show you.
The tradition of men putting women on pedestals as objects of reverence and adoration is as long as the opposite tradition of degrading them (generally not the same woman at the same time, and generally a writer invoking this is expected to type the words Madonna-whore in here somewhere). And in my booziest days of wishing some lost love or newfound crush would ride in on her white horse to save me, I was generally thinking more in the tradition of Leonard Cohen
Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them.
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
Or Bob Dylan
Suddenly I turned around and she was standin’ there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
and less in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm. But the more I think about it, the more easy it is to see an emerging strain of male fantasy that mirrors the plotline of a romance novel or fairy princess story. A plain-Joe dude in distress hoping that Princess Charming will pluck him out of the lineup at the ball, see his potential, and make him into a handsome prince or at least, as Jack Nicholson’s really old-guy character said in As Good As It Gets, make him “want to be a better man.”
And then it’s like when you learn a new word and hear it dozens of times in the following days. Reading the freebie commuter newspaper on the subway yesterday, I see über-guy Ashton Kutcher talking about how he fell for an older, wiser mentor woman:
“Demi was the first person who would call me on my s**t. She didn’t need me. She straight up didn’t need me. She wanted me, but she didn’t need me, so she could put it on the line. I’ve literally just been voted the world’s most eligible bachelor and I’m like, ‘I’m going off the market. I’ve found the one.’”
And then today, same paper, different man-child saved from his personal dragons by the love of a good woman:
She told me, “I’m not doing that [drug] dance with you. I’m drawing a line in the sand here.“ She was absolutely clear about it. That doesn’t mean that other women, business associates, movie directors, insurance companies, judges and law enforcement hadn’t been clear about it too. It was that, before I met Mrs. Downey, I just didn’t give a goddamn. What changed is that I cared.
I’m learning the business of building a life. Instead of getting instant gratification by getting high, I push my nose as far into the grindstone as I can. The honey, the reward, is the feeling of well-being, the continuity, the sense that I am walking toward a place I want to go.
Bonnie Fuller is on to something: stars are just like us! Except better looking and with way more money.
UPDATE: Further thoughts on this subject, including responses to some of the comments below, are here and here.
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