Guys own the companies, run the governments, make the money and rule the world.
Pity poor guys.
Seriously.
The dramatic gains women have made in the workplace and elsewhere in U.S. society during the past 30 years have transformed the ground under the feet of men.
This and more has turned the first decade of the 21st century into a uniquely confusing time for American men, experts say.
Protectors? How old-fashioned. Sole providers? Not so much. Even the male stake in making babies is corroding, thanks to advances in reproductive science.
Now it’s acceptable, even cool, to ridicule men and masculinity, says marketing guru Marian Salzman, the author of “The Future of Men.”
The drive for gender equality was and remains necessary, Salzman says. But now it’s women who define masculinity, and one casualty has been the straight, white man, who “can be the butt of any joke.”
“We’ve been very black-and-white about what is male: large dogs and armpit [noises],” she says. “I think we need to wake up and say male can be a lot of things.”
What does it mean to be a man? Who are contemporary iconic males?
It’s been a long time since answers to questions like these were automatic. Even John Wayne had to share the pantheon of male heroes in the ’50s with guys like James Dean, Marlon Brando and Cary Grant.
But coming up with shorthand for masculinity is even tougher in the age of TomKat, Brangelina and Bennifer II.
Sensitive and emotional, or stoic and stern? Maybe all four? Windsurfing (see: John Kerry) or hunting (see: Dick Cheney)?
Gay? Straight? Metrosexual? Does it really matter?
If a guy searches for his masculine foundation, what will he find?
“I’m just this guy”
“The women take care of the kids, and she earns the bread,” says former New York Times writer Charlie Leduff, the author of the new book “US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man.” “Any physical jobs have been exported. So what is there?”
Leduff, a reporter whose area of coverage – roughly, men doing male things – helped paint him as an especially swashbuckling journalist, recently left the newspaper to take care of his infant daughter. During a phone interview, the baby shrieked several times in the background, and Leduff picked her up and cradled her.
“People think I’m this macho guy,” he says. “But I’m just this guy.”
The crux of the dilemma, says Paul Nathanson, co-author of “Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture,” rests on a cluster of things men have lost the past few decades, and not yet replaced.
“To have a healthy identity as such, they must be able to make at least one distinctive, necessary, and publicly valued contribution to society,” he says. And for now, at least, Western men are flailing.
Before the launch of the pity party, it must be stipulated that men still make more money than women; that men rise higher, in terms of responsibility and management, in American business; that the keys to the castle still jangle in the pockets of guys.
Also worthy of consideration: Boys are falling behind girls in secondary school. Between 1980 and 2001, the percentage of boys who said they did not like school rose 71 percent, according to a University of Michigan study. Males constitute about 44 percent of university students.
A wide range of social indicators like this point toward troubling times for boys and men.
Sharing the domain
What’s changed? One thing is for certain: What not long ago was the male domain – in short, most of the commercial, intellectual and bureaucratic stuff of America – now is shared with women. And with every passing year, women come closer to grabbing the keys to the kingdom.
To Salzman, a male pop-culture icon who illustrates a contemporary masculine ideal worth emulating is George Clooney. She calls him an “ubersexual.”
The ubersexual, she says, is a response to the metrosexual, a category of guy who gropes for identity based on the judgments of women. The emerging ubersexuals, on the other hand, “defined themselves, their goals and their needs, with very little reference to women” she wrote.
“Rather than responding to feminism, they are making choices based on what opportunities are available to them today without all of the analysis and second-guessing that can prove so paralyzing.”
The ubersexual, however, also champions women and sees them as his equal in many ways. Equal, yet still different.
The metrosexual, the ubersexual, the retrosexual. The categories of “guy” are proliferating, and while many are adjusting to the times, others still subscribe to ideas of masculinity prevalent 30 years ago, even though the real lives of men and women have changed enormously, says Michael Kimmel, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York who writes about masculinity.
“What I’m worried about is what happens to them when they have inherited these ideas about masculinity and they can’t reconcile them with the world they are actually living in,” he says. “So they are torn between two worlds, the world of the present and that of the past. And their peers are trying to pull them back into this past world of masculinity.”
New men do dance
Kimmel said his son’s recent 8-year- old birthday party illustrated the divide. His son held a dance party, and he invited 12 boys and 12 girls. The girls immediately fluttered onto the dance floor, along with some of the guys. Other guys, however, just leaned against a wall. Yet another group of four boys pinballed back and forth between dancing, then joining the guys on the wall, then dancing again.
The back-and-forth boys, Kimmel says, “want to participate in this new world, they want great relations with women who are their equals, but they are also pulled by the guys lining up against the wall who say, ‘I don’t dance, I don’t do that.’ And it’s agonizing. I could see it on the faces of these four 8-year-old boys. They were in such pain.”
One problem, says psychologist and author William Pollack, is that men feel compelled to demonstrate their masculinity.
Women can be mothers, CEOs and auto mechanics – all at the same time – without threatening their female identity. But some men are so wedded to notions of masculinity that they feel emasculated by changing diapers, or even considering the idea of “stay-at-home dad.”
“Men have to endlessly prove they are men,” he says. “It pushes men toward a direction that is negative.”
For now, at least, Leduff has stepped away from the performance. He’s cradling a mewling baby instead of hanging out with guys in a fight club.
His wife? She’s working.
“It is her turn,” he says.
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at djbrown@denverpost.com or 303-954-1395.
