REAL MEN:
Rejecting Consumerism's Twisted Answers

I read a NY Times article syndicated in the Houston Chronicle yesterday that kind of made me cringe:

Straight, hip and moisturized, metrosexuals making a mark

By his own admission, 30-year-old Karru Martinson is not what you'd call a manly man. He uses a $40 face cream, wears Bruno Magli shoes and custom-tailored shirts. His hair is always just so, thanks to three brands of shampoo and the precise application of three hair grooming products: Textureline Smoothing Serum, got2b styling glue and Suave Rave hairspray. Martinson likes wine bars and enjoys shopping with his gal pals, who have come to trust his eye for color, his knack for seeing when a bag clashes with an outfit, and his understanding of why some women have 47 pairs of black shoes. ("Because they can!" he said.) He said his guy friends have long thought his consumer and grooming habits a little ... different. But Martinson, who lives in Manhattan and works in finance, said he's not that different.

"From a personal perspective, there was never any doubt what my sexual orientation was," he said. "I'm straight as an arrow."

So it was with a mixture of relief and mild embarrassment that Martinson was recently asked by a friend in marketing to be part of a focus group of "metrosexuals" -- straight urban men willing, even eager, to embrace their feminine sides. Convinced that these open-minded young men hold the secrets of tomorrow's consumer trends, the advertising giant Euro RSCG, with 233 offices worldwide, wanted to better understand their buying habits.

For more Madison Avenue vomit, click here.

My first gut response to this blatant piece of fashion industry info-tainment disguised as news was something like, "I prefer it the way it was back in the day, when gay was gay, straight was straight, and everybody with a good sense about such things was pretty sure who was who." Of course, I don't really care one way or the other--there have always been hyper-masculine men and there have always been effeminate men: humanity is all the more interesting for including both kinds, along with all the different nuances between the two extremes. No, I kind of like the concept of the dandy. After all, I'm an actor, and what actor doesn't appreciate a sense of style?

What actually disturbs me about this article is that it reminds me of a depressing trend that has been gradually worming its way into American culture for some years now: feminist writer Susan Faludi has demonstrated in her book Stiffed that masculinity in America, traditionally defined in terms of social utility, is slowly being replaced by what she calls "ornamental masuclinity," irrelevant gender characteristics for irrelevant people. Faludi doesn't observe this trend only in terms of mall-hopping dandies: the macho yang causing suffering in tandem with the effeminate yin is seen in the endless Hollywood parade of pointless bad boy role models such as Howard Stern, Eminem, and Vin Diesel--to Faludi, it doesn't matter if it's refined style or badass attitude; masculinity is becoming, quite literally, a simple put-on.

Probably the best way to understand how this redefining of masculinity functions is to consider the central premise of Betty Friedan's classic work of feminist literature, The Feminine Mystique. In short, Friedan shows how middle class women in the 50s and 60s lived rather pointless lives, without jobs or a sense of participation in society--women of that era were seen by men as mothers and sex objects: gotta look good for my man, gotta go shopping, gotta go to the salon, gotta get dinner ready, gotta change the diapers. This drab existence as housemaids and objects of beauty is what gives the book its ironic title. There was no "mystique" for women in those days. For women, life sucked, and was without meaning. The passtimes and pursuits in which the mass media encouraged women to engage were hollow, shallow, and ultimately sad. Depression is the only logical outcome for any rational human being in such a situation. Fortunately, the women's liberation movement soon arose and offered meaning and a satisfying way of life to millions, many of whom had no idea beforehand how miserable they were.

Is this situation starting to sound a bit familiar?

Neo-liberal economics, which have been used for over twenty years as the justification for both enriching the already wealthy and squeezeing the middle class and the poor, has been pushing vast numbers of American men into irrelevancy. "Downsizing" has become such a common occurance in the US by now that most people don't even seem to think about the long-term psychological effects of forced uselessness on a couple of generations of American men. "The Feminine Mystique" is now the masculine mystique. Corporate America sees financial opportunity: fill the void with the same kind of phony images and consumer fixes that were successfully thrust upon American women decades ago.

Here's how Faludi puts it:

In a culture of ornament, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and props, by the curled lip and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy and by the market-bartered individuality that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity--the objectification and mirror-gazing that women have denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony. At the close of the century, men find themselves in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture and awarded by lady luck.

The more I consider what men have lost--a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent living, respectful treatment in the culture-- the more it seems that men are falling into a status oddly similar to that of women at midcentury. The '50s housewife, stripped of her connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with shopping and the ornamental display of her ultrafemininity, could be said to have morphed into the '90s man, stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultramasculinity. The empty compensations of a feminine mystique are transforming into the empty compensations of a masculine mystique, with a gentlemen's cigar club no more satisfying than a ladies' bake-off.

Be a real man; kick some ass. Look good; the ladies just love a stylin' guy. See me in my EXTREME gas-guzzling off-road vehicle? Aren't I cool? Aren't I a real man? Look at my gym-sculpted abs; aren't I hot? Look! I wear the same underwear as Michael Jordan--I'm as manly as him!

It's so pathetic. I'm disgusted by it all.

Sadly, Faludi points out how most American men have absolutely no understanding of what is happening to them (in fact, it seems to me that many men, subconsciously feeling a need to prove their manhood, have been attracted to the more manly, badass Republican Party, which, ironically, is the key facilitator of the American man's slide into irrelevancy)--confusion complicates the misery. The only way out of this gender hell is a nationwide uprising against the neo-liberal reforms that have turned American labor, and, therefore, American men into so much waste. Alas, I don't see that happening any time soon.

That's why it is so very important that the relatively few Americans who are able to see this stealthy rise of the new masculine mystique scream like freaks about it whenever they get the chance: "metrosexuals" are not the latest hip, urban trend; the concept is simply a consumerist ploy designed to make a lot of cash off of the suffering of American men.

For that matter, Eminem sucks, too.

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