Man up. Suck it up. Be a man.

Since the globe and mail removed all the fun of chatting about this- I am posting it here!


POP ROCKS: THE POLITICS OF GENDER

Masculinity can't still be about steak and moose-skinning, guys

LYNN CROSBIE

Man up. Suck it up. Be a man.

But how? What is a real man? I read a lot of magazines (and looked at a lot of men for research, men in form-fitting uniforms and well-packed jeans) to find out.

According to The Godfather's patriarch, Vito Corleone, it is not someone like Johnny Fontane, who cries like a little girl when he is afraid (and gets slapped by Corleone for doing so). According to the kind of woman who enjoys chiselling away her mate's self-esteem and dignity, he is not a coward afraid to demand a raise forcefully or to punch a stranger for looking at his woman.


Masculinity can't still be about steak and moose-skinning, guys

And according to the new issue of Esquire, which promises to show readers "How To Be A Man," he is able to skin a moose, fell a tree, curse well, stop a running toilet and, appallingly, kill an injured animal. He is, further, someone "who makes things - a rock wall, a table, tuition money. Or he rebuilds - engines, watches, fortunes."

While Esquire's criteria seem pathetically dated and patently inauthentic - yeah, I am fairly old, but not old enough to fantasize about a dreamboat who fixes toilets well - the subject is not insignificant, as there appears to be a masculinity movement afoot. Not a Robert Bly-style "take back the cave" movement, but an informal quest to determine what exactly masculinity is today, evident in everything from bromance films, to post-Fratire books like Dick Masterson's Men Are Better Than Women, to the renaissance of guitar fuzz and metal bands like Mastodon.

I looked through the magazine section at Chapters recently, where the youngest men were reading about ultra-violent video games, the twentysomethings were looking shyly at Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts (on the cover of the new Maxim), and the cement-heads scoping the astonishing variety of fitness mags. I grabbed Muscle & Fitness and read the feature Eat Like A Man.

Between gasping audibly at men so fit that their veins look like tanned King Cobras, I took note that salt, booze and bloody steak are sentimentally favoured by these apes who also express their manliness by shredding their abs during "thermonuclear training sessions" and getting jacked on supplements to make them "evil sons of bitches."

As extreme as these Ultimate Fighting Champion wannabes seem, a mainstream trend toward explosive masculinity raises disquieting questions about what "anti-violence educator" Jackson Katz (author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help) refers to as "the crisis in masculinity," a crisis he believes stems from "being the 'real guy' " lionized by so much pop culture.

Katz, as Bitch magazine's Shira Tarrant notes in an article, is fighting against these stark facts: "More than 90 per cent of serious domestic violence is perpetrated by men and ... men are involved in more than 95 per cent of all incidents of road rage." And Tarrant doesn't even cover 'roid rage! In other words, if we lionize men for putting possums out of their misery with the heels of their boots while saying, "I fixed that toilet good, huh, babe!" we may be cultivating a generation of pinheads who equate cruelty and ignorance with genuine masculinity.

Still, this sort of manly man is beginning to feel stale: While some women still like mean men (in the words of the inked and pierced rapper Rolling Stone calls "post-human," Lil Wayne, "Shawty wanna thug,"), every girl in the world is in love with the Twilight character Edward Cullen, a fictional vampire boy who is cultivated, mannerly, avoids stimulants like cola and is, like the Jonas Brothers, a virgin! Shawty wanna nice guy - a nice, alternative guy.

In the 1970s, the days of my youth, we liked men who wore makeup and had long hair and were tough and pretty. In the new Spin, there is a picture from that era that epitomizes this desire: It is Alice Cooper, the scary singer of I Love the Dead, skinny and shirtless, with long black hair and heavy eye makeup, wearing an elaborate diamond necklace.

Now, I feel that ambiguously beautiful boys are creeping back. There is the radiant androgynous actor Zac Efron (High School Musical), whom Interview magazine refers to as "the Future"; there is our own King Khan, of the 1960s-style garage-rock band King Khan and the Shrines, who calls himself a combination of Cleopatra and Rick James; and there is the Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) crew, who spend each film exploring the limits of heterosexual male love affairs.

What is a real man?

He is an indeterminate age. He is a zombie-killing, biracial, body-modified bad-ass filled with mad love, brilliant faith and wild hope. And he is here to recruit you.

Last week's question

I wish to thank the many readers who responded to my question in last week's column (If Bruce Springsteen is, as accused, a serial cheater, is he still the Boss?), insisting that the Boss was still the Boss whether he cheated or not. (Another argued, quite eloquently, that he was a fake-populist hypocrite.) The consensus: "It ain't no sin to be glad the Boss is alive."

Next Week

Ain't I A Woman? Tell me what a real woman is.