Waiting for Princess Charming
April 18th, 2008 by Edward Keenan in Act Like A Man
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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Posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 1:06 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.
April 20th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I find the idea that men being “rescued” by women is somehow a bad thing, or that the men are “like, way stupid, dude,” to be unrealistic. Men learning things, regardless of their source, is good. I think the fact that men who learn from women, or are positively influenced by relationships with women, are ridiculed, speaks volumes about our gender training. It’s as if being ignorant is preferable to learning from someone who we’re wrongly taught to believe is innately inferior (a woman.)
April 21st, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Um, I don’t think Edward Keenan suggested that this is a bad thing at all, acidbill. His point is simply that we often think of a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued by a big strong man. Interestingly, there are many modern day examples of clueless guys being taken in by strong women.
April 21st, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I don’t have anything really clever or insightful to say, but I do have to comment on “Knocked Up” as a fairy tale for men. I really like that concept; fairy tales for boys have consistently depicted boys as adventurers, while girls are hopelessly saddled with the “waiting-to-be-rescued” syndrome. The only problem I did have with knocked up was the utterly one dimensional portrayal of the female characters. Sure, I know women like that, but then there are women like me, who are, you know … normal and stuff, and probably have more in common with the guys in that movie (I’m thinking of the poor beleaguered husband who plays fantasy baseball to escape the dull reality of his suburban life) than the women.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:34 am
i really hope you’re not actually identifying with that article, since it assumes pretty much the worst of men under 30. for a start, Maxim culture — vile as it can be — is in some ways a welcome corrective to the outrageously classist idea that having the time and inclination to pursue Hef’s “jazz, Picasso, Nietzsche and sex” forumlation is the best and only way to be a man.
it also assumes that the most vulgar aspects of this strain of male culture are taken entirely seriously by the men consuming them. the behaviour attributed to Tucker Max is borderline sociopathic, and you’d have to be something of a sociopath yourself to condone them. it’s an outsized projection of a crude fantasy — the boor who gets to indulge even his most forbidden urges. what’s changed is that men aren’t as embarrassed to put these urges in plain view, instead of stashing them away in private clubs, bars women weren’t even allowed into, and lockerrooms.
what’s really appalling is that hymowitz doesn’t pause to consider that maybe a culture that expected men and women to couple up before they fully understood the necessity and gravity of that commitment might have something to do with the spike in the divorce rate over the last few decades. the child-man generation is by and large the generation born of the societally-legitimized divorce, and if there’s a lesson any sane person would take from growing up among the remnants of a shattered marriage, it’s that maybe you shouldn’t enter into heavy commitments like marriage and children until you’re good and ready.
hymowitz appears to believe that men lack some sort of essential morality and have to be coerced into making meaningful contributions to their community and to society. that view is so lopsided it’s frankly repulsive, and if this is the esteem in which the average modern 20-something female holds her future partner, no wonder men want as little as possible to do with them. pass me the bong and the controller, bro, and barricade the door.