The last American man

by Thomas Dollar

If Super Bowl ads are any good at capturing the Zeitgeist, then our country has a problem.  Namely, our American men have become a nation of unemployed, emasculated, uxorious schlubs.  The strictures of civilization and legions of nattering wimmins have conspired to confine us to cubicles, indoor bathrooms and shopping malls, when what we really want is to grab a spear and go slaughter a kudu.  But since kudus are hard to come by in North America, and throwing projectiles probably violates the terms of our homeowners’ association, we’re forced to sublimate our primal urges into purchasing light beer, and khaki pants and hemi-powered V8 muscle cars.

Crass TV commercials aside, pop sociology tells us that the US is facing a crisis of masculinity, exacerbated by the latest economic recession (or “he-cession”).  As men make up a diminishing proportion of the workforce, this decline conflicts with social norms that still measure a man’s worth solely by his ability to be a breadwinner.  The disconnection between idealized archetypes of manhood and reality produces anxiety.

The social conservative response to this anxiety is straightforward: go back to a simpler time with a simpler set of rules.  This what Brandon McGinley called for in his now-infamous Tory article last December.  McGinley contrasted the manly men of Pittsburgh, who “wolf down meaty sandwiches and hearty soups,” with the dainty, effeminate, gayified Princeton men.  And in an essay that manages to insult straight men, gay men, all women, and the City of Pittsburgh alike, he concludes that we’d all do well to reassert rigid gender norms, in which manhood is defined exclusively by what it’s not (femininity, homosexuality, healthy eating choices, etc.).

And maybe he’s got a point.  Living in a world without rules or guidelines is scary, and having a cows-are-cows-and-bulls-are-bulls set of norms might make some people less anxious.  But there was a reason why we got rid of the old rules, and that’s because under them a lot of folks got a raw deal.  Until the 1960s, women could be fired solely because a man wanted their job.  Poor and black women often didn’t have the luxury of not working, and their lives weren’t even considered in the construction of cultural norms.  Gay men were expected to live blithely closeted, married lives—or else.  And people with non-conforming genders or sexual identities just didn’t fit into the framework at all.  It’s not that diverse people didn’t exist in the “Leave It To Beaver” era—they were just expected to stay out of the spotlight.  Our society today is far freer, more open, honest and accommodating than ever before, with more different types of role models.  But choice produces uncertainty.

This past fall I read The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert’s biography of a modern day frontiersman named Eustace Conway.  Eustace is both a back-to-the-woods primitivist and a shameless self-promoter.  He hikes the Appalachian Trail in buckskin, rides across the country on horseback and lives in a teepee, while also preaching his lifestyle to school groups and talk shows.  Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) offers a portrayal that is sympathetic but unromanticized, as she shows the paradoxes in a man who seeks to save society, while is himself tyrannical and abusive to his protégés, siblings and series of not-perfect-enough girlfriends.  She places him in the context of other paradoxical Great American Men of the Wilderness—Crockett, Boone, Teddy Roosevelt—and recognizes what he offers to the modern, “lost” young people who seek him out: rules and ritual:

“What happens to young people in a society that has lost all trace of ritual?  Because adolescence is a transitional period, it is an inherently perilous journey.  But culture and ritual are supposed to protect us through the transitions of life, holding us in safety during danger and answering confusing questions about identity and change, in order to keep us from getting separated from the community during our hardest personal journeys.

“In more primitive societies, a boy might go through an entire year of initiation rites to usher him into manhood.  He might endure ritual scarification or rigorous tests of endurance, or he might be sent away from the community for a period of meditation and solitude, after which he would return to the fold and be seen by all as a changed being.  He will have moved safely from boyhood into manhood, and he will know exactly when that happened and what is now expected of him, because his role is so clearly codified.  But how is a modern American boy supposed to know when he has reached manhood?  When he gets his driver’s license?  When he smokes pot for the first time?  When he experiences unprotected sex with a young girl who herself has no idea whether she’s a woman or not?”

Both Eustace Conway and Brandon McGinley offer answers to our crisis of rulelessness and rolelessness—but the latter is too exclusionary and the former too extreme to be useful guidelines.  What men and boys need is a new set of role models—masculine archetypes that are not based in violence, homophobia or misogyny, and that are broad enough to encompass diverse sexualities, life goals and interests.   Since the second wave of feminism, women’s life roles have been characterized by “choices” and “empowerment”—sometimes to the point of extreme self-parody.  But when men choose non-traditionally masculine roles—a career in nursing, say, or being a fulltime stay-at-home dad—they are still seen as counter-cultural or unmanly.

Sadly, many feminists treat issues of masculinity—or even the idea that men could have social identity problems at all—with mockery or outright contempt.  After all, men are still the dominant sex, so why worry about them?  But men’s issues and women’s issues shouldn’t be competing interests in a zero-sum battle of the sexes.  Men’s issues and women’s issues are two sides of the same coin, and solving our social problems—pay inequality, violence (sexual and otherwise), anxieties over body image and sexual identity—won’t happen unless everyone’s brought on board.