The question makes me sound like I've just returned from Lilith Fair and it is 1996. But over the past five years, I've lived in Louisiana, Tennessee, Oregon and now Idaho, and in my travels I've collected some observations, in breadth and depth, of how 20- to 30-something males in our country present themselves publicly, dress, act, socialize, behave towards women...
Just a few observances that beg the question...
Grown men strutting around in spandex, tight spandex, at the gym. Lots of guys spend more time styling their hair than I do in the morning. Men getting manicures. Guys wearing skinny jeans (Fonzi had nothing on these dudes). Driving wee little cars. Keeping their hands soft and their suits pressed.
But it's more than just those materialistic things. It's a shift it values. It's men opting to live like partying frat boys long into their 30s - shunning relationships with women so they can party with their 'boys' forever. It's men who try NOT to act masculine, as if they're fearful they'll turn into George W. Bush and start talking Texan if they act like they have some balls.
Correct me if I'm off-base, but there's been this palpable cultural shift away from anything masculine. A male isn't supposed to "act like a man," anymore. Try to define masculinity from a traditional sense, and then apply that definition to some of the young men in your own life. How's that work for you?
To me, Paul Newman was the epic modern man. When he passed at 83, dying from lung cancer, Men's Journal wrote an article in memorium of Newman. This excerpt from the article may shed some light on my questions:
"Newman’s generation was different. Where John Wayne was big, hard, stubborn, self-assured, and self-righteous, boldly lumbering into action, Newman and his confederates were small, soft, malleable, self-doubting, and ironic (about the last word one would use to describe Wayne), sliding their way edgewise into a scene. This attitude was identified as cool, and it was. Where the previous generation of actors always seemed to be on a mission, these young actors were disdainful toward everything — everything, that is, except themselves. They certainly didn’t believe in missions, and their contempt was a large part of their appeal to other alienated young men in the 1950s and early 1960s. What they had was a sense of superiority, as if they had understood something that the John Waynes hadn’t; namely, that nothing was worth the kind of energy Wayne and the others expended, nothing was worth the sacrifice or the risk or the faith. Not anymore."
So what is the result of that disillusion with traditional values?
Just as men like Newman shifted away from the precedent set by the likes of John Wayne and Clark Gable, are modern men going to shift further away from Newman's essence of masculinity? Sure, Newman didn't give a shit. But at the end of the day, he oozed testosterone. He was very much a man and he didn't have to do anything to achieve that very distinct existence.
So what of men these days?
Perceivably natural things like men whistling at women in public are squelched in our uber-PC society. (Ask the men in Spain, it IS natural for a man to need to whistle at a woman. And, as a woman, I quite enjoyed that freedom of expression as it existed in that fabulous country). We've declared men who like big things, be them trucks or power tools, and relish in simple things like hunting trips and piddling in a well-organized and well-stocked tool shed "ignorant" or "redneck."
I wager a lot of women would rather date such a "redneck" as opposed to a man who trotted around in spandex at the gym.
See, while I believe our fabulous country is certainly large enough for the truck-driving rednecks and a spandex-wearing intellectuals to co-exist, it doesn't seem that's how the trend has developed. The herd has, for the most part, seemingly donned the skinny jeans and the spandex.
Perhaps more loners remain than I really know. It is a huge world - perhaps we can still be a country for real men.
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