On 15/05/2006, at 9:39 AM, Colin Brace wrote:
> Men Growing Up to be Boys
> Madison Avenue cultivates a Peter Pan version of masculinity
> By Lakshmi Chaudhry ...
> The benevolent patriarch of
> the '50s has been replaced by an adult teenager who spends his time
> sneaking off to hang out with the boys, eyeing the hot chick over his
> wife's shoulder, or buying cool new toys. Like a fourteen-year-old,
> this guy can't be trusted with the simplest of domestic tasks, be it
> cooking dinner for the kids or shopping for groceries.
Little surprise here, I reckon. Triumphalist patriarchy gives
pop-culture the man-god and our transitory phase gives us the
man-demon. Over-compensation after an enduring inequity is all. And
marketers may be responding to new fantasies (which I am dogmatically
economistic enough to root in the political economy of our day) but
that's because the old fantasy seems less, well, convincing these days.
>
> Yet popular culture continues to fetishize the traditional, '50s model
> of masculinity, but in a distilled form—kick-ass machismo stripped of
> the accompanying values of honor, duty and loyalty. We seem to have
> carried with us the unreconstructed sexism of the past—the
> objectification of women, inability to connect or communicate—but
> discarded its redeeming virtues. Where traditional masculinity
> embraced marriage, children and work as rites of passage into manhood,
> the 21st century version shuns them as emasculating, with the wife
> cast in the role of the castrating mother. The result resembles a
> childlike fantasy of manhood that is endowed with the perks of
> adulthood—money, sex, freedom—but none of its responsibilities.
Surely there's nothing new in the wife-as-castrating-mother thingy? In a West where all must labour to consume to make up for all that labour - where to be middle class is to be subject to changes of address at short notice - and where two careers can mean two distant new addresses at that - well, it's more realistic and systemically functional to push the money, sex and freedom line than the nuclear-family-secure-in-the-family-home schtick. And aren't they pushing this line at both sexes these days? It ain't really the wife that's the tyrant, it's marriage itself. Too unwieldy to accommodate the flexibility/dynamism requirements of the modern market-place. It surprises me that the nuke family home fantasy has endured two generations past its political economic use-by date, actually. 'Residual cultural form', I think Ray Williams would've called it ...
>
> At least part of this image is rooted in a real cultural trend,
> according to State University of New York at Stony Brook sociology
> professor Michael Kimmel. His upcoming book Guyland argues that men
> "are resisting becoming men longer and longer," doing their best to
> postpone all the decisions that mark the passage into
> adulthood—getting a job, moving out of their parents' home, getting
> married, and having kids—in order to enjoy the lad lifestyle of
> "online porn, drinking, and poker."
Again, non-monetised kith'n'kin relationships giving way to the commodity form. Tonnies was on about that a century ago, no? I suspect they're resisting the transformation because there's no coherent, functional, tenable and affirming 'there' there. I'm sure we'll still be using the word 'masculinity' a century down the track, but gawd knows what it'll be trying to represent. Marriage and venerable ol' masculinity just don't fit any more. Kiddies weigh in at about quarter of a million bucks a pop, houses three times that and security three times that. That's a lot of faith in a future we suddenly can't begin to describe.
>
> More significantly, however, this resistance to adulthood is closely
> associated with a market-driven consumerist culture that feeds and
> sustains a Peter Pan version of masculinity. "To be grown up is to be
> settled, comfortable, stable, responsible, and secure," Kimmel says.
> "Those are bad conditions for advertising, which depends on our sense
> of insecurity, anxiety, and incompleteness."
And an unpersuasive description of modern experience, too, and the young 'uns know it. To a degree the marketers are merely responding to the world they helped make and discarding the one they helped unmake.
>
> The market also has little time for the old-fashioned male virtue of
> self-denial, the imperative to do the "right thing" at the expense of
> pleasure.
Well, he may be popular again soon - just a credit crunch away, really ...
> The internal qualities once said to embody
> manhood—sure-footedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose—are
> merchandised to men to enhance their manliness. What passes for the
> essence of masculinity is being extracted and bottled and sold back to
> men. Literally, in the case of Viagra."
Hard to internalise sure-footedness and confidence of purpose within turbo-charged modernity, I submit. Ergo, hard to be an old-fashioned chap. As the fantasy persists (not least in the minds of the female) the substance must needs give way to the appearance.
>
> Before it was hijacked by marketing gurus to peddle body lotions and
> pedicures, British author Mark Simpson coined the word "metrosexual"
> in 1994 to connote an "epochal shift" to a narcissistic form of
> mediated masculinity; a man who "has clearly taken himself as his own
> love object and pleasure as his sexual preference."
If the world hasn't got a convincing niche for you, you make yourself
according to what gets you jobs, status and laid. The metrosexual
copped a decade of gratification (maybe three if you've been required
to watch Saturday Night Fever lately) and now, as men and women alike
seek refuge from the winds of change in fondly imagined old identities,
the retrosexual is back. For now.
>
> Contrary to popular understanding—fueled by conservatives who are fond
> of caricaturing liberals as well-coiffed and manicured wimps—Simpson
> does not define the metrosexual as particularly feminine or even gay,
> but as "a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by the
> media."
Yeah, but we don't live in an absolute second-order media-created universe. Those real relations ever drive us from behind our backs, and the good marketer responds more than s/he creates.
> "Today, consumerism tells all males that … they never need
> abandon their narcissism. That they never need grow up. Just so long
> as they buy the right products."
Narcissism is a rational response to the suspicion that you may be the only person you know today still to be in your life a decade down the line. Investing is all about perceived probabilities, eh? So invest in your 'self' ...
> And if adult responsibilities are defined as
> emasculating, then it's no wonder that popular culture now defines
> "commitment" solely as a woman's goal.
I'm not so sure commitment is as decisively vaunted a woman's goal as it was. The Sunday supplements are full of new models for womanhood, muchly to do with fast-moving careers and predatory sex - familiar stuff, empty stuff and, unlike the old tropes, realistic in light of modern experience.
> While progressives and feminists have
> rightly championed a woman's right to reject marriage and motherhood,
> they rarely address the consequences of living in a culture where
> pair-bonding and parenting—the basic processes that form the
> foundation of all societies—are constructed as the antithesis of
> masculinity.
And, I begin to suspect, that of femininity, too ...
> "Certainly, most men struggle to fulfill the ideals they set for
> themselves in this area. But they recognize that being a 'real man'
> requires that they are honest and respectful and willing to sacrifice.
> I saw this among men who worked at jobs they didn't love, who took
> care of an ill spouse or child, who helped in their communities
> without recognition or compensation. There are millions of such men."
And thank gawd for 'em - poor fossilised fools that they (we) are ...
>
> American men may be doing their best to figure out what it means to be
> a man in the 21st century, but it's no accident that these men—and
> more importantly, their sons—aren't getting much help from the larger
> culture. "Consumerism wants to make us as atomized as possible—because
> the more individualized we are the better consumers we are," says
> Simpson. "This is why masculinity is so fragmented today and
> incoherent—and irresponsible. It used to be the tradition. Literally
> passed down from father to son. But we live in a society where
> tradition stands in the way of profit. So bye-bye daddy."
Daddy is melting into air ... the family's sentimental veil torn away and the family relation reduced to a mere money relation. A development some discerned about 158 years ago ...
>
> Discussions of masculinity on both the left and right inevitably
> circle around women's equality, either as a curse or boon to men.
> Where some argue that the women's movement has freed men from the
> straightjacket of traditional machismo, others have blamed it for
> depriving them of their identity. Yet the greatest threat to modern
> manhood may lie elsewhere—in the flickering images on our television
> screen, bought and paid for by corporate America. Feminism may have
> sparked the battle over gender roles, but its outcome may well be
> determined by market forces determined to make voracious consumers of
> us all.
Always we're exhorted to focus on consumption ... as if the way we're doing the producing ain't the independent variable. Capitalism needed feminism half a century ago, now it needs mobile acquisitive individuals who perform their gender (and fill the holes where their humanity had dwelled) through consumption. If we blame feminism for the consequences, that's just fine. Retrosexuals and frilly chicks will make their return on the racks, circulation proceeds apace, and we'll all be wearing our fantasies on our backs ... none of which will quite fit.
Now, was that a lefty rant or a conservative bleat? I honestly don't know.
Cheers, Rob.