“We live in more of a pussy generation now,” Clint Eastwood told Esquire magazine last year. “[E]verybody’s become used to saying, ‘Well, how do we handle it psychologically?’”
Eastwood tells truths. America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.
This all occurred to me at 1:47 a.m. on November 8, 2008. I was on the phone in a hotel hallway, listening to this guy moan about this girl that didn’t want to get it get it, if you will. Out of some cruel, dazzling dark corner of my metal heart, a single thought formulated: Man up.
Intellectual elite girls know this secret. Vanderbilt University stands near the light end of a two-decade tunnel from Southern Playground of the Rich to generic Duke stepsister, but the tunnel produced a foil to the unmanned masses: the 2000s Vandy Girl. Embodied most in a handful of elite sororities, the concept of Vandy Girl requires one shot of the Old Spirit (pearls and champagne and knowing what to say and when to say it), and two shots of this confidence that’s a tic-tac-toe board of goals and timelines.
So, the calculus goes, the girls isolate aspects of masculinity—the drive, the confidence—in lightning rounds of Natural Selection Yahtzee. The men, likewise, drift to the center. They soften. They become Euro basketball players who never played high school ball, falling down like they’ve been shot after every hand check, and telling you they don’t feel respected. Don’t feel respected? Feel? I wouldn’t trust that person in a crisis. Why can’t we all shift in one direction, instead of stumbling into an androgynous mass of feelings-first zombie groupthink?
But perhaps you don’t believe me. Maybe you live in some neo-noir situation where the men smoke on dark corners or in open plains and don’t wear scarves unless it’s cold enough to cut a hole in some ice and pull a fish out, and even then are a little hesitant about the whole thing. I don’t know your life.
They’re not bad guys, not necessarily, this First Team All-Sister Mary Margaret. They’re generally polite, they love their parents, they get good grades at excellent schools. But underneath this sheen of the Good Kid, the Good Kind, thought overcomes action, and emotion overcomes thought.
“It’s selfishness,” my high school principal explained to me. He grew up in Western Pennsylvania and commands respect, whether at my privileged high school, or at his new, post-retirement post at a far rougher school. “It comes down to two questions: ‘What have you done for me lately?’ and ‘How will this look?’”
Vanity over pride, selfishness over self-restraint—serious problems that can be traced from one to the next, streaks of light in the dark forming one big circuit.
The Sports Enthusiast can recite Yankee batting averages like the alphabet, but can’t explain the infield fly rule. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but he was recently hired by a top-tier consulting firm. Fratastic can thrill a girl with Lost Generation levels of raging and fluent French, but in between tequila shots, he’ll judge anyone with a harshness that stings. The Moderate refuses to subscribe to a political ideology, so he meticulously eschews conservative bigotry and liberal recklessness by calling himself a Joe Lieberman Guy. He knows his politics, but he doesn’t want to take a stand.
Then we have the cavalry, aggregated into a single figure: Backstreet Boy X, who earns his title with all the violent action of a sleeping kitten. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Tom, in (500) Days of Summer captures Backstreet Boy X perfectly: smitten, ironic, and emotional. Backstreet Boy No. 3 lit candles, placed rose petals just so, and waited in a dark room on Valentine’s Day for a girl who’d already said no—and then refused to talk to her the rest of the year. Backstreet Boy No. 16 informed his girlfriend of three months when he would propose. Backstreet Boy No. 28 refused to talk to his girlfriend for an entire day after she forgot to reply to his “have a good day” text.
A 2008 New York Observer piece categorized a special serial version of the Backstreet Boys as the Homme Fatale.
“He was sensitive, funny, supersmart, not athletic at all and not physically imposing,” one actress explained. “But there was something that was so charismatic—a gentleness and gracefulness and a confidence.”
Backstreet’s back, all right? Boom. The article goes on to document the trail of unconsummated, unsatisfying, undefined faux-relationships all these sensitive, creative men left behind. Maybe we reap the product of socialist grade-school Valentines in Backstreet Boy X: everyone was supposed to feel special, and so everyone does. Rather than confront the more complex cultural issue, though, the article casts the Homme Fatale as a state of emotional mental illness; one man interviewed even calls the Homme Fatale an emotional sociopath. Addiction, anxiety, and depression always trump a well-placed, old-school “Man Up.”
Feelings matter first, now. My principal coached the Little League team his son, Scott, played on when he was twelve. Scott was catching and a kid got hit by a pitch, fell to the ground, and rolled around crying. Scott looks at him and says something like “You’re embarrassing yourself. Get up, pussy.” The umpire immediately calls time, and tells my principal he needs to talk to him.
“I asked, ‘Which one? The one embarrassing himself or the catcher?’ “He admitted he and a few other parents of boys on the baseball team were probably too tough on their boys. “The kid who got hit with the pitch is a produce manager at a grocery store. Not that a produce manager is a bad job, but the three boys we were so tough on—one’s a CPA, one’s an attorney, and one’s a captain in the Marines.”
A couple months after the Great Hotel Epiphany of Man Up, I was killing time in the newspaper office, and the opinion editor needed a pinch-hitter for a column. So, what the hell, why not “Man Up, Vanderbilt”? A few hundred words later—on the prayer of the American college girl that the real world whittles down the anthropomorphized box of Easter peeps with whom we’ve gone to college—and I had forty e-mails, half a dozen comments, one response column, and a slew of passing thoughts from people I only sort of knew. Man Up is a cherry bomb met with evangelical fervor.
The column itself was a thrown-together list of superficial attributes. Don’t have bangs, don’t wear driving shoes (for fifteen dollars more, you can get the whole shoe!), and so on. And, of course, I did a few stupid things too in that column, choosing sort of arbitrary positives: I announced that fighting is hot, and I stipulated that real guys hunt and fish. Both obscure the spirit of the problem at hand; shooting a six-point buck requires no more masculinity than choosing Busch beer at 7-Eleven.
Nevertheless, the sentiment resonated. A Vandy grad and army captain stationed in Iraq (“218th Sand Dune on the Left”) told me how glad he was to leave the pastels behind. One girl I’d taken a class with told me they’d put the column on the Theta house refrigerator during rush week. Another girl, a grad, killed the dreams of many: “Even post-college I can assure you they still love their pretty pastel shirts and diet sodas.” Frat author Tucker Max bookmarked the link with the charm-heavy comment, “I am going to Vandy and fucking three hundred girls in a week.”
Casually, quite a few people will commit to the Eastwood paradigm. You can play a round of Real Men Do Not faster than a round of dirty Scrabble. With the e-mail and Twitter entries I received while writing this, we can play one right now.
Real men do not: drink daiquiris; encroach on personal space or the splash zone; cry during While You Were Sleeping; cry at all, unless a wife, family member, or favorite dog has passed away; wear tight pants; do yoga; do theater or especially theatre; shop for themselves (moms, girlfriends, wives, and daughters do that); write poetry; wear eyeliner unless they’re in an 80s rock band (a good one); highlight their hair; drive smart cars; use smiley faces in texts unless they’re trying to get some ass; use the elliptical; or bring yogurt and a diet soda to work in a packed lunch.
Meanwhile, dark, tall, square-jawed actor Jon Hamm became a cultural icon as Mad Men’s Don Draper. More than two hundred thousand people added the Tebow Crying page on Facebook in a month. Dockers ran a fall 2009 campaign predicated on the perceived lack of masculinity: “Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that’s what they did. But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men.” Dodge worked up the same angle in their Super Bowl XLIV ad for the Charger, calling it Man’s Last Stand. Suddenly, at the end of the first decade of this evolved twenty-first century, maybe a girl needs a little more than a fedora and an Animal Collective song to keep her warm at night.
Or maybe she doesn’t. Not everyone loved this Man Up idea. You tell guys to stop wearing the man scarves in temperate Nashville, some woman will chime in with requests about how all women everywhere must now descend from the Twelve Oaks staircase, kitten out a three-syllable “Hi,” and throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres in dresses stolen from Betty Draper.
One comment questioned my sacred femininity:
“I wonder how charitable you would be if a man suggested that your femininity was predicated on your ability to gracefully defer whatever education and dreams you have for your ‘truly female’ role as a home-bound domestic manager and child-bearer who knows how to whip up a mean rack of lamb when the hubby brings the boss home for dinner?”
Marvel at fragile social framework in peril. If Bobby cuts his bangs, Jane must hood-slide into a Ford Pinto to escape college’s reach and dream only of racks of lamb and hollandaise sauce. Shackled in some political correctness armistice, we back handspring straight into Meg March’s kitchen if we consider damming the river.
“You may have to choose between a well-educated guy with a good job and warm personality,” another comment chastised, “and a guy who can gut a fish and talk about sports after working on an oil rig. Just don’t be surprised when this ‘manly man’ you craved expects you to conform to your own gender stereotypes (better be home with dinner ready in pearls and makeup with hair set up. And don’t forget to smile and keep your mouth shut).”
Again, I think men can act like men and still be smart. I cannot believe this is such a novel concept to so many. It feels simple but this game of gender politics can stun you with its complexity. Our concept of masculinity functions as an inextricable product of our femininity; we live in this binary environment where only one well exists, and we can draw only so much water from it. If Bobby taps into his masculinity, Jane essentially sells herself to him. Rather than get all up in a hot-air balloon of pearl-clutching feelings, engaged in some Cold War of gender neutrality, can’t we consider this question again: Why can’t we all shift in one direction?
Vandy Girls know the secret, so we don’t have to explain for them, but Man Up’s kissing cousin—Sack Up, Ho—dictates a similar but distinctly ladylike set of ideals: Don’t cry in public. Don’t dance on a table (and, for Christ’s sake, don’t fall off of it). Don’t be a tease. Don’t ever proclaim that you “hate drama,” because we all know exactly who starts the drama: it is you. Don’t ever devolve to the point that sorority benefit or a bridal shower becomes both Waterloo and Thunderdome in your life. Contain your dignity and your shambles, and keep them to yourself. Sack up, ho.
TJ Miller would never say that, but he’s comfortable with the idea. My father comes in at about five foot six, and has a habit of reading during Redskins games. He’s a Silver Star, flew for the CIA, sold F-16s, and once got out of a mugging in the grocery store parking lot by hitting one of the muggers with a wine bottle. He’s watched, basically, every Atlanta Braves game played in the last two decades, curses with vigor and finesse, and rotates through about five flannel shirts in the winter. He stands in our driveway smoking and went to Harvard Business School. He tells badass stories about FBI agents and professional baseball players, and all of my brother’s friends are at least a little scared of him.
TJ Miller thinks we could all be tougher—he’s just egalitarian that way. But he doesn’t get to squint at Backstreet Boy X and spit “what the hell are you doing” or “don’t tell people that” very frequently, so we have President Obama to mentor the androgynous flock instead. Comforting!
Now that I’ve dragged you to hell, out on some access road in a broken-down Range Rover with a boy sobbing because AAA won’t pick up and his nerves are bad tonight, it’s time for a game of chess. Or Monopoly Junior, whichever. Line up the First Team All-Sister Mary Margaret, choose your favorite, and let’s predict the future.
A relationship can’t just be a relationship. It has to be special. You need to feel good about it. “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things, like a social status,” Animal Collective tells us, because, you know, God forbid.
A job can’t just be a job. It has to be special. You need to feel good about it. The concept of the Global Citizen carries that allure for the Sister Mary Margarets: citizenship begets duty, which begets opportunity, which begets action, which begets some overarching, uncontrollable force of Purpose. This is how Teach for America, mission work, and grad school win out over the unknown reality of banking, sales, or the military. Teach for America received 35,000 applications last year for 4,100 spots, because actually pursuing teaching certification would require a life decision. Even the top banking and consulting firms now brag about their rotations through the nonprofit sector, so Sister Mary Margaret can atone for selling out to the corporate overlords who tie all the free trade organic coffee bean farmers to railroad tracks.
But what if Man Up strikes back? The dominoes might be aligned. These Economic Times could kill the special, the Greatest Depression could pour Spic and Span all over these spilled feelings. More than half of workers aged eighteen to twenty-seven have been laid off since the financial crisis struck. Research by Microsoft, Fidelity, and Retail Financial Intelligence conducted over the past year indicates those in their late teens and early twenties may be the most financially conservative generation since those who lived through the Depression. A recent Harvard poll illustrated how Obama’s devoted zombies might be turning into broken toy soldiers: “More young Americans now believe that the government’s efforts will hurt (30 percent) rather than help (26 percent) their financial situation. The majority, 41 percent, say these efforts will have no impact.” Slaying the feelings monster one open-handed sober Puritan slap of reality at a time! You need a Carter to get a Reagan!
I have hope in that embittered cynicism. For every Backstreet Boy X, for each Ironically Fratastic, I know a David, Dan, Matt, or Mike who’s smart and still acts like a man. They do stupid things like stay up all night playing video games or wear duct-taped flip-flops instead of buying new ones. They also do things like call their grandfathers to check in or earn their tuition as work-study managers; they don’t talk about the girls they’ve dated; they know their baseball; and they crack jokes about themselves. They have self-restraint and self-respect, and to them, I say, you’da you’da best.
To the rest, I say, man up. And yes, I realize this is all wildly bitchy, and one has to avoid sounding sour or angry about such things, because that is what an ugly woman would sound like. But then there’s still a guy quoting Gossip Girl in his Facebook statuses, one telling a girl he can’t date her because she might hate him if they break up, and one blowing bubbles at a picnic. Sometimes the truth has to be delivered. I’m just the mailman, delivering the mail.