…is you don’t talk about acting like a man. The second rule of acting like a man is, well, you know.

Forgive me if this post descends into an exercise in free association but this is a truth of traditional masculinity so self-evident that it’s hard to understate, or to quickly get a big-picture handle on. You’ve got your strong silent type. Your actions speak louder than words. Your walk softly and carry a big stick. It permeates the archetypes of Hollywood heroes: the gunslinger may be wounded inside—he almost certainly is—but he ain’t talking about it, and while he can certainly draw down on you if you force his hand, he isn’t going to waste a lot of breath telling you about it. (more…)

Last Friday, just as I became preoccupied with planning and hosting a two-year-old’s birthday party and then launching into a nightmarish hell of day-job research, The Shelf cried out to me for my opinion about Tree of Smoke and its particular appeal to male-type people and further, the relationship of men to literary fiction that plays with genre conventions.

To which I say, um, well gee, it would appear you have a point, since, um — ahem — well, it’s a spy novel with, um hey, look over there at that shiny object!

Still there? Oh, alright. The thing is I haven’t read Tree of Smoke. But I’ve now added it to the pile — and I’ve now read Jared’s post and the NY Times review, which makes me an expert on the subject by Internet standards. So as for Jared’s core question to me (why would this kind of great book appeal more to dudes, and why is that the case for genre-exploring lit fiction in general?), I feel qualified to put forward a fairly straightforward theory (more…)

Consider this the start of a blogroll with benefits — I’ll update it periodically and your own additions, objections and suggestions in the comments section give it a whole Web 2.0 interactivity thing that’s been missing from so many inaccessible blog sidebars. Cause as you can see, this blog ain’t got no sidebar. (more…)

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.)

Dave M declares his allegiance to the bong and says he hopes I really didn’t mean to give my agreement or approval to Hymowitz’s piece:

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.

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Driving a cab (or just “driving cab,” as the drivers themselves call it) is one of those jobs that remains overwhelmingly dominated by men. There are women in the business, but they’re rare — I got a ride from one a few weeks ago and interviewed her on the spot about her job, as I do almost every driver I meet, and she claimed to be the only female cab driver she personally knew.

It’s also one of those unglamourous positions, like, say, front-line combat soldiers, men’s room attendants and restaurant dishwashers, about which almost no one discusses the patriarchal glass floor that women are having trouble descending below. It’s a shitty job, and a dangerous one, and I get the impression very few women are interested in taking it up. (more…)

This is why:

Apparently now with added moral complexity.

Christopher Goodwin at the Sunday Times of London laments “The sorry state of masculinity in American movies”:

Segel’s flaccid member looks pathetic and laughable, especially because it’s attached to a body that is doughy and pallid. It can’t seriously be accused of being capable of anything, let alone of breaking a taboo. So obviously devoid of sexual intent, it symbolises not so much his character’s abject emotional condition at his girlfriend’s rejection of him, but the sorry state of masculinity in American movies today.

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Megan McArdle at The Atlantic points out the macabre reaction of the governor of Florida to the Supreme Court decision allowing resumption of the use of lethal injections for death-penalty executions. (Florida Governor Charlie Crist said he was “grateful that the Supreme Court rendered the decision that they did,” according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune.)

McArdle quotes at length from Camu’s The Plague, in a passage that has Tarrou relating his memories of seeing his father prosecute a capital case; focusing on the pathetic humanity of the criminal and the cold-blooded thirst for vengeance his father showed: (more…)

Viewing Knocked Up as a fairy tale about a male damsel saved by a brave princess answers (even if it doesn’t excuse it from) its most frequent critique: that the female characters are humourless scolds, and not very well realized ones at that. Dana Stevens put that complaint forward at Slate way back when the movie was fresh, and Bridget brings it up in the comments on my earlier post:

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.

The thing is that it isn’t really a movie about gender relations, or about pregnancy. It’s a movie about one guy’s struggle to become (more of) a man.

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I don’t very often tell the story of how I proposed to my wife Rebecca. That’s her on the right in the photo above (my son Colum is on the left, the fetus(es) that will become our next child (or two) are slightly to the lower-rightish).

There are people who go to elaborate lengths in their proposals and a mini-industry dedicated to celebrating their romanticism. Famously, there are the much-derided guys who get their “Julie, will you marry me?” message flashed momentarily onscreen at baseball games and whatnot, a high-risk idea that could possibly backfire (even if the backfiring is often planned, as demonstrated by a rash of declined-proposal hoaxes recently). My cousin Adam’s then-girlfriend Loretta, who lived a six-hour drive away, sent him on a wild chase involving custom-made crossword puzzles hidden in lockers and multiple gifts in various places that finally led him to a Niagra Falls hotel room. The night he arrived, she popped the question onstage during a dinner theatre performance. Public shenanigans aren’t everyone’s thing, obviously, but the stories are memorable. (more…)

Just wanted to draw your attention to Nick Paumgarten’s Talk piece from the New Yorker on Sean Avery, “The Most Hated Man in Hockey.”:

(The promised further pondering of Knocked Up, Man-Children and fairy-tale dudes in distress still coming this weekend.) The profile of the New York Ranger comes after the incident above, in which:

Avery made agitator history, in the third game of the Rangers’ best-of-seven first-round playoff series against the New Jersey Devils, by inventing a new idiot technique. During a Rangers power play, he positioned himself in front of the Devils’ goalie, Martin Brodeur, to block his view of the puck—a standard tactic known as a screen.

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I apologize for the light posting schedule this week. I’ve been working to make some progress on various projects (some related to this blog, some not), and I may remain preoccupied for the rest of the week. I hope to post some more elaborate thoughts on the whole Princess Charming question and respond directly to some of the comments there before the end of the week. But otherwise I expect to focus on doing some research and legwork to start shaking things up around here beginning early next week. In the meantime, a few random things related to the area of study from the information superhighway internetwork (as the good people at Taddle Creek call it. You really should check Taddle Creek out. Go ahead, I’ll wait…. Welcome back–on with the show!):

Tyson: brainiac In case anyone missed it, The Bironist put together an interesting response to my response to his and Jan Dutkiewicz’s piece on MMA fighting in this month’s issue. I wanted to clarify that my selection of quotations from Tom Callaghan’s essay on Mike Tyson may have undersold the degree of nuance in his portrait of the flesh-eating rape convict to be. (That never gets old, does it).

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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:

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This will be another post about fighting, after a quick digression

[COMMENCE DIGRESSION] Having once again been noticed by one of the big kids on the internet playground, I’m tempted to self-indulgently post a response to the response to haggle over small differences of opinion and perceived slights. And if I read the blogosphere correctly, that’s the smart thing to do—go out of your way to pick a snark fight with someone more popular than you in an effort to get them to respond to you so you continue to enjoy the warm glow of their reflected traffic. But Tracy Clark-Flory is both mostly complimentary and mostly right, so I’m just happy to welcome any new readers she sent my way. Welcome.[1][END DIGRESSION]

At the risk of making you think I own only one book about sports, let me refer again to The Picador Book of Sports Writing[2], in which you can find Tom Callaghan’s wicked-great essay “Iron Mike and the Allure of the ‘Manly Art’.” There, less than a week before Mike Tyson’s first-round destruction of Michael Spinks in 1988, Callaghan expresses the dawning discomfort among boxing fans at the realization that the then-twenty-three-year-old heavyweight champion was intent on exposing the truth of what many gussied up as “the sweet science”: this was an ugly business.

An explanation for boxing, at least an excuse, has never been harder to summon or easier to see than it is now, simmering in the eyes of Mike Tyson. Muhammed Ali’s face, when his was the face of boxing, at least had a note of humour, a hint of remorse, even the possibility of compassion […] Valour can be redeeming; so can grace, poise, bearing, even cunning. But this is a nightmare. The monster that men have worried was at the heart of their indefinable passion, of their indefensible sport, has come out in the flesh to be the champion of the world.[3]

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“I wanted to be a tall, flat-chested, muscular, bearded, hairy human being with no uterus and a penis. If that was ‘man’, great. If not, OK.” A helpful commenter on my “Mr. Mom” post suggested checking out this post written by a Female-to-Male transsexual explaining why he wanted to be a man and how the world looks different under the influence of testosterone. It’s a pretty good read, offering his personal experience (including a pretty funny, if completely earnest, list of reasons he wanted to stop being a she) and offers some refreshingly honest takes on gender politics. One of my favourite bits:

After [Testosterone], I discovered that if I could think about something heretofore not sexually interesting during approximately six masturbation-to-orgasm sessions, that item would become a turn-on in and of itself….no matter what it was. I could literally program myself in a Pavlovian manner to be aroused by whatever I wanted. I found this out by accident, after I inadvertently added a few new dishes to my arousal buffet without meaning to. When I realized this, I sort of sat in shock for a while, and then I said to myself, “Boy, you’re going to have to be very, very careful from now on.”

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