It’s the Crude Dude, Dude
May 1st, 2008 by Edward Keenan in Act Like A Man
Just to tie up some loose ends after my post about Kay Hymowitz’s “Man Child in the Promised Land.” (Earlier knotting took place here and here.)
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” formulation is the best and only way to be a man.
That “corrective” already existed in Screw and Hustler generations ago, and it seems the innovation of Maxim culture is to cut out the beaver shots so that the boorishness comes out of the plain brown wrapper and into the mainstream. And generally when someone tosses out the word “classist,” I take my working-class-raised, latte-sipping butt to another room because the conversation’s about to get insufferable, but Dave’s point is taken.
I take Hymowitz to be something of a cultural conservative (while I’m generally not), but I don’t think she meant to endorse Playboy as any kind of ideal (indeed, she says that comment was “risible”). In any event, the whole Playboy lifestyle is actually kind of a forerunner to the Maxim Nation, in that it meant to liberate men (at least in their soft-focus fantasy lives) from the shackels of the conformist suburban, nuclear family. Still, what that philosophy-and-fine art throwaway does indicate is that Playboy still aimed for at least the appearance of grown-up sophistication. Those are class markers, sure, but they’re meant to speak to the aspirations of the readers to be refined men, comfortable with themselves and their sexuality and engaged with the broader concerns of the world. As silly as it sounded when spoken as a defence, Playboy was actually often worth reading for the articles, since in its quest to be seen as more than a skin mag it commissioned some of the best writers of its era and paid them the best rates they’d ever see. It dealt seriously with politics and art and the culture in addition to selling hedonism and the female form. Maxim shows significantly less skin but also throws overboard even the superficial attempt to treat men as serious people. Or women — the Playboy man obviously wanted to see a Playgal’s knockers, but Hef’s quote also demonstrates he’d view the head above them as worth engaging in a legitimate conversation, too. Maxim assumes its readers are semi-literate horndogs and gives them jokey tips on how to pretend they give a shit what some walking boobjob is saying.
So if by “welcome corrective to classism” you mean revelling in your status as an unsophisticated rube in a way certain people would associate with a lack of education or privilege, I guess Maxim is that.
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 locker rooms.
Again, to give Hymowitz credit, she does note that it is a self-satirizing culture. She may not be really hip to the extent of the joke, though, especially since, as she told me on the phone, she’s old enough that she has children “older than me.” (But as I mentioned in my first post, there’s an undertone of “it’s funny because it’s true” buried in all that “laugh at me because I’m so offensive and I’m in on the joke,” kind of humour). I do think there’s something refreshing for men in acknowledging their more crude urges, at least initially, especially since many men have grown up feeling like they have to be ashamed of the fact that women’s bodies turn them on, that they’re perpetually horny and would prefer to be non-monogamous if given the choice, that they admire toughness and that they’re prone to sloth. But there does come a point that one wonders when the thrill of being able to acknowledge those urges will wear off. When you first learn to take a crap in the toilet, you’re really pleased to tell everyone you’ve done it. (Trust me, I have a two year old, so I know). Later, if you don’t have weird issues, you’re unashamed by the fact that you take a shit once a day but you realize the whole world doesn’t need to know every time you do, and most people would prefer to be spared the details. It’s not the acknowledgment that men like to roll around in mud that I personally find odd, it’s the loud-and-proud ownership and celebration of piggishness as a core identity.
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.
Here’s where I think Hymowitz and I do actually part ways to some large extent, though again not completely. We see the same symptoms of suspended adolescence when we look at men (her from a distance, me in the mirror somewhat) and, in what initially surprised me, we drew on the same cultural markers to diagnose it. But I think Hymowitz comes to this from a perspective of wondering about the status of the nuclear family because she believes the nuclear family is a bedrock institution of society. She’s primarily concerned with the effect this man culture will have on the family. She took the same approach to the culture of achievement and independence among young women in the Man-Child sister piece, “The New Girl Order.”
I have used marriage and fatherhood often (perhaps too often) as signifiers of adulthood on this blog primarily because they’re obvious and they’ve been — as I’ve mentioned in recent posts — key elements of my own maturing. But I don’t think getting married and popping out kids is the only way to act like a man and I think the family was facing turbulent times well before Half-Life and South Park came along. I think there are and have been other ways for men to be manly besides through fatherhood in the past, and though we still require parents of all stripes (obviously), I’m wide open to the possibility that all sorts of new family arrangements could be healthy innovations that take society forward.
If Hymowitz does believe, as you interpret, that “men lack some sort of essential morality and have to be coerced into making meaningful contributions to their community and to society,” I don’t agree, though the difference might be a matter of shading. I don’t believe much in an “essential morality,” at least not when it comes to sex roles or sexuality in general, but I do think, as I’ve written before, that the lack of a social expectation to grow up and accept responsibility plays a big role in people’s decision not to do so. My interest in this doesn’t stem from some kind of revulsion at the moral state of men, it comes from my own sense (and that of some of the guys I see around me) that something was missing from my life, that I didn’t feel grown up, didn’t feel like a man, and that there are a lack of comfortable ways to manhood that didn’t seem either cheeseball, offensively old-fashioned or artificially new-agey. All of which, you know, is an ongoing conversation here.
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Posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:24 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.
May 1st, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Where Maxim really departs from Playboy is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: smut. As a reader, I prefer Playboy to Maxim for the reasons you cited, but actually, I’d rather be reading The New Yorker or The Walrus than either of them, because I’m not interested in getting my porn and my intellectual stimulation from the same source. And neither is anybody else, judging from how Playboy’s numbers have declined precipitously since the ‘70s.
It’s a truism that women hold the balance of power in relationships until they start thinking about children, ie. until they need a man; if marriage rates are declining among twentysomethings it’s because modern women are more interested in establishing their careers in their 20s than they are in starting families. What men do in the meantime, and beyond, is a worthy subject of discussion; I objected to the piece in the first place because Hymowitz lumping together things as disparate as Dave Chappelle’s savvy racial commentary and Judd Apatow’s movies (which portray their protagonist’s immaturity as a problem to be overcome, not celebrated) with Maxim and videogames is lazy and distorted, the imagined cultural diet of a grotesque strawman that doesn’t much resemble the twenty-something men I know.
We should all be revolted by the man who embraces “the Maxim lifestyle” but I really don’t think there are that many of them — the majority of Maxim readers, I suspect, keep those urges under the mattress where they belong. That’s why the tone is so jokey: ‘we don’t mean it, we know it’s wrong, this is just us letting off steam.’
The Playboy-era man and the Maxim-era man are essentially the same guy, but the Maxim man isn’t pretending to be getting something from his smutty magazine other than smut, nor is he as dumb as the rare, possibly-entirely-made-up stereotypical reader of said smutty magazine.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Thanks for the ongoing discussion, Dave. Your points are all very interesting. Just a couple notes:
*I think you and many of the other internet critics of the Child-Man piece, among many worthwhile arguments (especially about the rose-coloured lens she puts on marriages of past eras), fall somewhat into a trap you accuse her of being stuck in. You (and Adventures in Guyland, for example) think she buys the pop-culture satirical fantasy world of Maxim, etc a little to literally and projects those cartoonish intentional distortions onto the people who indulge them as fantasy. But I don’t read her piece quite like that. I think she’s taking a lot of real-world statistically legitimate information about the state of men and exploring the culture surrounding them. She uses the exaggerrated and obvious signifiers of the culture at large (as we all do) to sketch out a general attitude that she thinks is a key contributor to the trends. Any composite so built is obviously going to represent very few actual real people, who are almost universally more nuanced in their perspectives. But women who read Cosmo have for years fought the impression that it represents their true character — that changes not at all that it does shine a light on certain things they value in some ways and presents an exaggerated but still interesting glimpse of their more purient interests and fantasies. One needs to read Frat Pack movies and Maxim with a large grain of salt, but they are still somewhat revealing of the “downward mobility” that many men dream of (NOTE: I got that phrase from Dave M. himself in a private communication).
*That said, I also think that those of us who, say, went to Ivy league schools and work in media (or who, like me, just work in media) can underestimate the degree to which many, many men do interpret this stuff literally as some kind of ideal. If you’re unlucky enough to spend much time in the boom-shaka nightclubs on Richmond Street in Toronto or go out to a Girls Gone Wild taping, for example, you see that its partly our classist assumptions that lead us to assume we’re all in on the joke.
*You put your finger on my biggest problem with Hymowitz’s piece exactly, though, and originally I planned to make it a big feature of my response until I, uh, forgot to. (did someone say something about bongs?)That is: how the hell do the Daily Show, The Simpson’s, South Park and Chapelle wind up in the same cultural discount bin as Maxim and Tucker Max? She confuses the critics of the culture with its proponents, which represents a fairly large analytical failure.