Thursday, July 27, 2006

It's time to be MEN again!

Sometimes even the Brits can see the truth!

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1816168,00.html

The Menaissance

The American male is learning to flex his muscles again

Paul Harris in New York
Sunday July 9, 2006
The Observer

The man stands up in disgust at the tiny portion of haute cuisine on his plate. He storms out of the swanky restaurant as his gorgeous date looks on aghast. To swelling chords, he bursts into song: 'I am man, hear me roar!' - to the tune of the feminist hit 'I am woman'.

Soon the man has what he really wants: a Texas Double Whopper. Sandwich in hand, he strides down the street as legions of other men join him, all singing the new 'Manthem'. They burn their tight white underwear, bear placards declaring their manhood and set on a girlish-looking minivan. They toss the vehicle off a bridge into an enormous skip, which is being hauled by a muscle-bound chap in hot pursuit of a gigantic burger held before him on a spade.

This may just be a hit television advert, but its naked celebration of old-fashioned manliness - burgers, cars, feats of strength, an aversion to salad - is just the tip of a chisel-jawed iceberg ploughing through American popular culture. Advertisers know what appeals to millions of consumers, and what appeals now is not caring and sharing metrosexuality, but raw old-fashioned manhood.

Manliness is everywhere. Superman is again flying across American cinema screens, all man and out to save the world. One of the hottest indie rock bands is called Man Man. Tom Hanks recently graced the cover of Esquire, posed by a grill, holding a can of beer.

In literature the hot new trend is Fratire, a male alternative to chick lit that celebrates drinking and sex. At the other end of the scale a Harvard academic, Professor Harvey Mansfield, has produced Manliness, an intellectual call to arms for men to reassert their power and identity. As the Boston Globe said recently: 'We're in the middle of a Menaissance.'

What is going on? As American men start to celebrate the things they have been told for decades need to be discouraged, it could leave women in shock - or under threat. The idea of half the nation descending back into caveman attitudes is not an attractive one.

Others say there is no need to panic, however. A new idea of masculinity is emerging and it is not the one from the patrician, sexist past.

It may be 100 per cent man but it is still 100 per cent modern. Either way, the sparks are starting to fly in America's latest sex war.

Tucker Max is one of the most controversial parts of the fight. He has become an internet and publishing phenomenon solely on the back of drinking and having sex a lot and then writing about it. His website has had more than 200 million page hits and his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell has become a bestseller.

Max is one of the main proponents of Fratire, a form of literature that has emerged this summer as tongue-in-cheek male counterweight to chick lit. It celebrates bad behaviour and, despite being shunned by many publishing heavyweights, has been a hit. Max's recent book tour - his drinking and sexual exploits with fans were exhaustively detailed on his website - drew huge crowds across America.

Another Fratire author is George Ouzounian, who has written a book called The Alphabet of Manliness. Its publicity handouts happily list the people who hate him as 'vegetarians, environmentalists, feminists, hippies and New Agers'. It too has been a bestseller.

While much of this - like the Burger King ad - is overhyped, there has been an undeniable return to the male virtues that feminism was supposed to have suppressed. Qualities such as stoicism, promiscuity and brute strength are now openly celebrated across the cultural landscape.

Actor Jim Belushi recently brought out a book called Real Men Don't Apologise. That certainly echoes Max's philosophy; his website boasts: 'I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers and sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable.' The New York Times called his book 'highly entertaining and thoroughly reprehensible'.

Nowhere is this un-PC world more obvious than trends in American advertising. Last year the advertising agency Leo Burnett researched male attitudes and found that 70 per cent of American men felt ads were out of touch with them. The messages did not portray their everyday reality or attitudes.

Since then advertising firms have been racing to catch up with their audience. 'They are reinventing the definition of what it takes to be a man. It is men taking back some control of their identity,' said Rose Cameron, an executive vice-president at Leo Burnett.

Ads have thrown out images of success and sophistication and replaced them with the bawdy, the bold and the just plain sexist. The biggest recent advertising hit is a beer ad called 'Man Laws' where a group of macho men, led by Burt Reynolds, dictate the rules that govern male life. These Man Laws - such as how long you have to wait before having sex with a pal's ex-girlfriend - are then written down by a scribe and passed to the public (you wait six months, apparently, but only if she is a stunner).

It's not just beer. One soap advert boasts that its bottle even 'looks like an oil can' to encourage men to use it. Axe deodorant claims that merely spraying on its product will see women mug you for sex. If it was a woman's product what happens when you spray it on would be called rape, but the men in the ads apparently love being physically assaulted by a series of statuesque beauties.

This is a long way from the metrosexual ideal that dominated debate five years ago. Indeed the metrosexual bible, the male shopping magazine Cargo, has now folded. The new trend has even been dubbed retrosexual. Though feminists would have another word: cavemen. It has been taken to bizarre extremes. The New York Observer, which exhaustively chronicles the styles of the Manhattan elite, ran a piece claiming beer bellies have come into vogue. 'Man Flab, it's fab,' the paper declared to the likely surprise of New York gym rats of both sexes.

Even Brokeback Mountain has not escaped the male backlash. Once seen as a gay breakthrough movie, there is now a school of thought redefining its cultural significance. Instead of gay cowboys being seen as a token of a more sensitive nation, the film may have showed that even gay men have had to become more butch. Now they are huntin', shootin' and fishin' types, just like their straight counterparts. In modern America even gay men like to chew tobacco and go to the rodeo. 'You can make an argument for it either way and each is perfectly valid,' said Professor Robert Thompson, a popular culture expert at Syracuse University, New York state.

But women need not despair just yet. The truth of the new emerging American masculinity is more complex than just the re-emergence of the sexist brute. Beneath the outrageous bluster and bawdy humour is a deeper picture of the male sex's struggle to adjust to a world of sexual equality.

Yes, Superman is saving humanity with his enormous muscles and his patrician attitudes. But this Man of Steel is a thoroughly modern hero. Bryan Singer's sensitive film Superman Returns has the hero struggling with his identity, his feelings for Lois Lane (who is now married), and his role in the world. In short, Superman, played by Brandon Routh, has issues. The same can be said of last weekend's blockbuster hero, Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Yes, Sparrow is a pirate and a swashbuckling one to boot. But isn't that eye shadow he's wearing? 'Our heroes tend to still be sensitive in one way or another. These are not the non-verbal action heroes of the Eighties and the Reagan era. They don't just shoot first. They are thinkers too,' said Professor Timothy Shary, a film expert at Clark University.

What is emerging is a new definition of masculinity, or as Mansfield prefers to term it in his book, a new idea of manliness. It is not a complete throwback to the past. Instead he sees it as a realignment after the shocks of feminism. Now both sexes are coming to terms with equality and trying to adjust to it. 'Feminism needs to come to terms with manliness. I think women are confused about what they want men to be and that leads to male confusion,' Mansfield said.

Mansfield's vision is that men need to recapture old virtues of manliness - such as decisiveness and assertiveness - and not be afraid to display them. He argues that women would on the whole prefer that too. He believes that there are stark differences between the sexes, but these should be accepted and celebrated. He chose the title Manliness for his book - which has outraged many liberals - because he felt the word spoke directly to the innate differences between men's and women's ways of thinking. 'The word masculinity is more about the body and physical differences. Manliness is more about a way of making judgments. It is a term of distinction,' he said.

Not everyone would go that far. But many experts agree that American men are starting to define themselves anew and forge a new identity. They just haven't quite settled on the final product yet. 'After feminism, women had a new role, but men's role just dissolved. Now masculinity is a Petri dish of exploration. It is a work in progress,' said Cameron.

In fact, those searching American popular culture for signs of the return of the caveman mentality have trouble finding too many serious examples. There is no Eighties-style Stallone or Schwarzenegger swaggering across the screen. Cinematic leading men, even superheroes, remain sensitive characters like Toby Maguire (Spiderman) or Orlando Bloom (Legolas). Even as America is mired in a Middle East war and the age of terrorism, its exploration of the subject through film has focused on ordinary citizens in such movies as United 93 and Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center. 'These men are heroic but they are citizens too. This celebration of the ordinary man is the opposite of what we saw during the Eighties with Rambo,' Shary said. So the new masculinity is not just about celebrating old male values that would threaten women's equal role. It is about creating new ones too.

Perhaps, despite the best efforts of advertisers and Fratire writers, American women can still rest easy. The new sex wars are not going to drag them kicking and screaming back into the kitchen. On his website, amid all the tales of womanising and drinking, Tucker Max lists the things he finds attractive about the opposite sex. 'Aggressive women, funny women, successful women,' he writes.

It seems the new sex wars are not so much about winning the battle. Women have already done that and America is a better place for it. Now it is about working out the exact terms of the peace treaty.


First of all, let me say that I love that Burger King commercial. Best commercial ever.


And to build upon it, it's good to see American men being men again. We sweat, we curse, we spit, we roar. We drive big American trucks and ride motorcycles (and I'm talking Harleys ala Marlon Brando, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, not those sissy-faggy japanese crotch rockets). We are John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris and we get the job done by shooting straight and kicking ass. Real American men throw punches and pack .45's and settle disputes with toughness instead of running to court and hiding behind effeminate lawyers. We discovered a new land, settled the east, tamed the west, and prospected the north for wealth and glory. We built railroads and canals, erected skyscrapers, bridges and dams, won wars and achieved all manner of great things. American men broke the sound barrier and went to the moon while the girly-man French were getting kicked out of colonies that had been founded by their real-man Napoleonic ancestors. It's high time that we burn Phil Donahue in effigy... Aw hell--we're MEN! Let's get him and burn him for real!

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