There is something self-deconstructing about this post by David Neiwert. Can you spot it?
People who talk about masculinity  especially conservatives, who seem to obsess about it, but in a peculiarly juvenile way  have always seemed a little weird to me. It’s like the cliche retort the wealthy like to use: “If you have to ask how much it is, you can’t afford it.†Masculinity is one of those things where if you have to talk about it, you’re never going to get it. And the harder you try, the less a man you become.
David: Can you possibly have suffered the same quantity of mockery for your laudable decision to be a stay-at-home dad as Jeff has, or does he have it coming because he’s, you know . . . conservative?
And even though a lot of women thought it was neat that a man was being the primary caregiver, there was still a certain amount of resentment directed my way, from a lot of women, over my invasion of what for them was their territory. Some of this was perfectly understandable; when Fiona was a toddler, the topics of conversation among the gathered mothers often veered into various complaints with such bodily functions as breastfeeding and yeast infections and that sort of thing, and I of course was not just utterly incapable of conversing on these matters but felt like I was invading their privacy as well, so I made it a habit to wander off at such moments.
And there were moments  whispered comments, offhand remarks  where I was reminded that a lot of people, both men and women, privately viewed stay-at-home daddies as wimps or out-of-work losers. Sort of like Dr. Helen.
Dr. Helen’s point, as I understand it, is that some women unfairly judge the way that men choose to spend their time at home just because it doesn’t appear supportive to them in any direct way, just as, to crib Lady Oracle, women can expect men to be exciting, aggressive and masterful, while also expecting them to be docile, domestic and safe.
The upshot is, if people have these contradictory expectations and they are directed against conservatives, that’s fair criticism, whereas if they express them towards liberals, that’s narrow-mindedness.
UPDATE: more weenie outing at firedoglake here, regarding Michael O’Hanlon, and here, regarding Hillary Clinton’s “emasculation” of McCain-Feingold.
RE-UPDATE: Debra tells Andrew Anthony to “grow a pair,” because his description of liberals fails to encompass her.
And Let’s Not Forget Karl Rove’s gay adoptive father’s solid gold cock ring.
He’s trying hard, isn’t he?
Oh, and it’s not just the rich that say “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” Just about everyone uses it. How class-conscious do you have to be to believe that’s a statement particularly tied to the rich?
OMG!! BECAUSE OF TEH WEENIE!!!!
Deep down, Niewert wishes his name were Chuck Norris.
We really can’t expect Socialists to understand masculinity you know.
They have no role-models.
I must be missing the point here. It’s a practical arrangement, why all the fuss?
Why? indeed.
TW: so-called alluding
I wish my name was Chuck Norris. Heck, I just wish the 67 year old man couldn’t kick my butt but that’s a failed hope.
Huh. Who knew? It’s a Swedish thing you stick your infant in so you can still strike a pose that says “Hey you” when you’re hanging in icy backstreet Swedish alleys. MANLY. To REALLY get your man on you can get one that comes pre-attached to an actual Swedish girl. You get to have your infant along AND not obscure your tasteful v-neck tee with that jaunty American sports-themed sweater draped in a way that suggests you have actual shoulders and those coy euro-jeans with the stitching that draws attention away from your pesky infant to right where you want it to be.
With the Swedish girl model, you get side-impact airbags.
Part of masculinity, Dave, is not giving a shit what these people think.
Now I’m confused over who is obsessing over masculinity. It’s David and the likes of Herr Doktor Perfessor Karaoke and that little poser TRex over at RacistDogFakes, who obsess over conservatives discussing what the collective progressive hive mind considers to be “manly” subjects or the use of “manly” words. Are the words displacement or compensation the correct ones here. I would have to check Dr. Sanity’s site.
That fem-blog post regarding O’Hanlon is a little overdone considering he is not in a policy making position. I guess the fact that he has gotten some ink causes confusion among their ranks.
So, ‘feet, that’s the non-Muslim Swedish couple that had the rugrat last year?
Masculinity is somewhat like pornography. It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Therein lies most of David’s problem.
He wouldn’t know it if it ran over him in a Ford 1-ton with dual rear wheels and a king cab while clutching a double patty cheeseburger and listening to CW music on the way to a NASCAR race and Promise Keeper’s retreat. Gee I hope that’s not too hetro-normative for him.
Ah, but Niewert’s ashamed of his wish.
I know 6 couples where the Dad is a stay-at-home Dad. 2 Dads work from home, one as an IT consultant/tech, the other the National Sales Director for a major food corp, who works from a home office and has to travel twice a month overnight and they get Grandma to come on those days. His wife is a Corporate VP pulling high six figures. He is low six figures. The other three are loser step-dads who were looking for a meal ticket and think they are God’s gift to women and why wouldn’t they want to support him. I wouldn’t call the IT guy manly, he is rather a geek and calls himself a “sensitive” man. His kids are horribly neurotic and everything that comes into their space is checked and double checked for every imaginable flaw or ill. The VP/Sales Director couple are cool. The Dad looks like a young version of Tom Selleck. He was a long-hair guitar playing hippie when I first met him and then about age 30 he got serious and now many years later, you will find copies of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly books on their coffee table. He smokes cigars and goes surfing whenever he can, helps coach his son’s youth football team and his daughter’s softball team. He is hot. The loser Dads are overweight, sloppy, tend to be foul-mouthed. They order the kids and the wives around and are generally disgusting. One of the loser’s wife works two jobs to pay rent and utilities and says she is grateful she doesn’t have to shell out a $100 a week or more for babysitting services. These are the guys who always tell you they can “take” anyone, so come on, ya got somethin’ to say types. I never think of the last one as a stay-at-home Dad, probably because he stays home because he is disabled. He lost his leg in a construction accident. He is an inventor and holds all kinds of patents for things to do with the tool and die industry and the production of micro-surgery equipment. He is a manly man even from a wheelchair and one of the smartest and nicest guys I know.
I do agree that if a man has to constantly tell you how manly and/or tough he is, he isn’t. But, manly men come in all shapes and sizes, all ages, races, and ethnicities, but rarely have time for stupid stuff or anything politically correct. They are self-assured, comfortable in their own skin, they are take charge types without being the least controlling, and the best sign of a truly manly man is how much respect he has for the women in his life including wife, mother, and daughters.
I don’t know for sure, but an educated guess is – 2 Conservatives, 1 Progressive and 3 How much beer ya goin’ to buy me if I vote for your side.
The “fuss” is in watching the contortions.
The Leftists are again attacking the Rightists, and the result is somewhere between ironic and knee-slappingly hilarious, because as usual they aren’t attacking us at all — they’re expending untold quantities of ammunition against the stereotype they’ve built in their heads, and the puzzlement they express when we chuckle as their bolts go wide is a wonder to behold. This particular attack is a variant of the “chickenhawk” argument, and most Leftists are still scratching their heads over that one. How could it possibly go wrong? What are those idiots laughing at?
So: “weenie boys”. Neiwart expresses the stereotype pretty clearly:
In other words the assumption upon which his whole argument is built is that conservatives are poseurs who are unsure of their masculinity and adopt cliché-masculine symbols as self-reinforcement. By attacking and deriding those symbols, he hopes to disgrace and embarrass the “masculinists” by forcing them to either discard the pose or attempt to defend it in ways that reveal it as a pose.
The problem is that it actually works the other way. People who are in fact masculine (or feminine!) don’t maintain a checklist: Well, I need to demonstrate that I’m masculine, therefore I shall buy a gun/cheer a sports team/ogle nubile teenagers/ride a motorcycle. Instead they do those things and others automatically, without thinking or any specific intent, because they are expressions of the underlying characteristic. Neiwart and Prof. Caric hope to turn that process on its head, discrediting their opponents and gaining for themselves the epithet “masculine”.
The ambition discredits itself, almost by definition. It is they who are longing — demanding! — to be called masculine, and trying to define a new set of symbols as the flags of that state. They are thus the poseurs in the case, and watching them perform is sometimes hilarious.
Consider Prof. Caric. George Bush isn’t a big fellow; in college he recognized that fact, and was secure enough in his masculine identity to not only avoid letting the jocks challenge it, but to take on a (stereotypically feminine) role as a cheerleader (and, not incidentally, provide himself a remarkable number of opportunities to feel up hot chicks in the line of duty, so to speak). This, according to the Professor, identifies GWB as a “weenie boy”. What it actually does, of course, is to reveal Prof. Caric himself as something approaching an existential definition of what he claims to deplore, a futile jock-wannabee who couldn’t make the grade and prefers to utter his insults in pseudo-profound academese rather than argot — while keeping the content the same.
Enter Mr. Neiwert. In order to achieve his goal, he must redefine the cultural markers he expresses as being “masculine”. He fails, of course, but it’s fun to watch him flail about in futility. I suppose it ought to engender sympathy, but he and his fellows have been nasty enough in the past to wear that right out.
Regards,
Ric
One of the commenters at bigbrassblog wrote that if we had had a different president on 9/11, it wouldn’t have happened. I think if we had had a different president in 1993, 9/11 wouldn’t have happened.
ric: this is beyond absurd. You either do or or you don’t. Don’t create a swamp, please.
That “peculiarly juvenile way” of speaking of masculinity is highly sophisticated rhetoric, a kind of hyperbolic reverse apophasis — a not-mentioning by ridiculously exaggerating — in the uniquely American comic tradition of Mark Twain, Hunter Thompson, Mark Leyner, unrecoupably transgressive avant-garde performance artist Andrew Dice Clay, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, every rapper who’s not a “conscious” pussy-mouthed date-rapist, and the funny old guy at the bar wearing a John Deere hat with axle-grease handprints on it.
A lapidary surface like Ace’s
While on a sex-spree in a Tijuana whorehouse, Dick Cheney used a live cougar as a condom.
The bodycount was fourteen Mexican whores and one cougar.
may be hard to get past if you’re terrified of any hint of female disapproval because your junk can’t fill a shot glass and you’ve projected that personal insecurity into the social realm.
Don’t do that. The harder you try, the bigger the rest of our dicks look.
cynn,
I, create the swamp? Hah. I’m sitting on a tuffet, swatting flies, drinking Pearl, and ridiculing badgers who are trying to pretend they’re alligators. They’re so cute.
Regards,
Ric
The first party I ever went to where the married couples were guests and not chaperones was a brigade formal when I was a new 2LT INF. We sat at tables of eight. I was one of two bachelors, with three married couples. The chaplain said his thing. The colonel said his thing. Then the three married ladies started talking ob/gyn. The other bachelor and I looked at each other, horrified. We did not know this was the norm. Ears turning purple, we excused ourselves to the bar. There are some things newly-minted professional killers should not be expected to endure. So I can see the man’s point, to a point.
The outward signs of masculinity can vary. My definition of masculine is a man who can say, You WHAT? and the other parties straighten out their act with no further prompting. Not to do so would be unthinkable.
Again, what are you talking about? I’ve been celibate for ten plus years; have things changed that much?
That is tor say, I think couples shold negotiate their own agreements, and the rest of us should leave them alone. Sorry to give too much information.
Masculinity is one of those things where if you have to talk about it, you’re never going to get it.
OK, now why did you bring up this subject?
[blockquote][i]Sorry to give too much information.[/i][/blockquote]
And here I thought it was precisely metered…
– I’d say hes living proof that once you turn in your ballsac, life is just one desperate fantasy after another. If you were from the sorts of communities I’m familiar with, you’d be laughing your asses off, because this winky-doodle is just “dickie wagging”, but trying to burry it in sophomoric words. All of which, probably means hes short in the junk box. Nature finds a way……
I think Ric’s response to Niewert and Caric (who seem to share each other’s arguments like two less obviously masculine guys might share a watermelon-flavored wine cooler) deserves a post of its own.
I think I’ll put it up tomorrow and shop it around.
So much of leftist rhetoric is an attempt to shame and to redefine terms in the vacuum created by the shaming mechanism.
Thus, Professor Caric, who redefines “color-blindness” as “primary racism,” and “race consciousness” as the new egalitarianism. Those who argue for a color-blind legal system are the legacies of Jim Crow and slavery, and they hate blacks, embrace white supremacy, and provide intellectual cover for crackers with ropes.
And here, Niewert, who, performatively, redefines masculinity as that which talks incessantly about how it would never talk incessantly about masculinity (much less engage in any of its gendered conspicuous consumption). Those who refer to masculinity without the requisite disclaimers about how it is unmasculine to refer to masculinity can lay no claim to that real masculinity — which evidently comes from recognizing that real masculinity is seldom pointed out by really masculine people, unless they are pointing it out to show how pointing it out is unmasculine.
Which, in turn, makes them masculine for the effort.
Of course, the short version of this doesn’t require such contortions: To Caric, those who disagree with him are racists; to Niewert, those who don’t share his contrived view of masculinity are are faux-masculine.
Or, even better, racism is what Ric Caric says it is; and masculinity is what David Niewert says it is.
The authority to define and shame comes from presumptuousness and, I suspect, a bit of self-loathing.
Caric would do well to read Thomas Sowell. Niewert should rent every Charles Bronson movie made before, say, 1983.
By the end of the second paragraph, I was visualizing him as a drag queen caricature of a shoujo manga rich-bitch japanese schoolgirl villainess, arch-affectedly laughing into the back of his hand as he looks off to one side. Hoi-hoi-hoi-hoi-hoi!
Cynn – That was too much information, but it was informative.
1) I believe it’s Neiwert, Jeff. Yeah, I’ve done that, too.
2) Dave’s always looking for psychological dysfunction in other people’s backyard, especially those with red-state voting tendencies. As far as I can tell, that’s the only tool in his toolbox.
3) For further (or, more accurately, previous) adventures in intellectual self-buggery, I refer you to this:
4) RACIST!!!!1!!
TW: suggest binocular
I suppose the thing that creeped me out the most about the post, political preferences aside, was the complete, straight-faced, unabashed role-reversal that this guy was describing. Not only had he taken on the traditional role of the woman in raising his daughter over the past six years, but is now describing his first steps back out into the real world after being a homemaker. I thought I was reading a Woman’s Day article out of the early seventies written by a housewife who had decided that she was going to try to ‘give it a go’ in the business world.
I feel for Mr. Neiwert and I wish him well. My advice would be for him to encourage himself often by playing “I am woman, hear me roar” whenever he is feeling insignificant and overlooked. After all, he is a role model for his daughter, now. You go girl!
In the Debra smackdown of the that English pantsy-waste guy, this is was my favorite part:
“In Chinese medicine terms he [the English cupcake dude] lost a lot of Kidney qi due to fear on September 11 and no longer has enough water to rise up and cool the Heart which can lead to cloudy or irrational thinking.”
That is SO TRUE. You can’t mess around if you kidney chi. This happen to me one time when me sister made me go on Space Mountain when I did not want to go one it. (Not afraid – just not into that kind of a ride.) She was all like “I went on Mr. Taod, now you have to go on this one.) Well, to make a short story of it, my kidney chi got ALL UP IN my heart chakra, which was pretty much soaked. ANd its not just your heart that gets all water-logged with kindey chi. Some of it sloshed all over the place. I had trouble seeing out of my third eye for like a month.
So butch up, Percy von Limpwrist. Next time a 9-11, instead of all running to the rightwing reputzlican’ts to SAVE ME SAVE ME FROM THE BAD MEN, maybe you should just chill, get some acupuncture, and get your kidney chi’s out of twist. That ll were saying.
You know, I bet Alan Alda gets lots of hand.
Dammit, Witheld, and I just took a swig of coffee!! You owe me a keyboard.
I don’t know that being confronted with one’s adopted gay father’s solid gold cock ring would be all that much worse than, say, being confronted with one’s natural, heterosexual father’s solid gold cock ring.
That may just be lack of imagination on my part, though. Or lack of caring; take your pick.
I read David’s essay – overall, pretty good, too bad he had to spoil it with a misguided slap at Dr. Helen – ironic, because he got it 180 degrees wrong – if anything, she’s supportive of him. But she’s a conservative, or deemed to be one, so gratuitous slap required.
Mr. Neiwert’s post would have been more appropriately entitled, “Fiona has two mommies.”
Slart:
That’s quite the interesting article you found, so full of “Orientalism For Dummies” that Said’s corpse must be positively blushing at this very moment. Add to it that Neiwert seems to think he has stumbled across some sort of racist Illuminati and you’ve got pure comedy gold.
Much of it is reminiscent of the “you don’t understand what jihad truly means (you implicitly idiotic dhimmi). It’s not a real “armed struggle”, no! It’s an internal struggle for meritorious outward behavior.” “You can’t understand the Koran until you speak/write Arabic.” Only it’s transposed into the language of racism and racialism — “‘Black Power’ didn’t actually mean collective resistance against ‘Whitey’, it was only a metaphor for individual forthrightness!” “MEChA doesn’t literally want a reconquista — you’d know this if only you spoke/wrote Spanish, you racist gringo!”
Fortunately, we have a regular bunch of postmodern Joseph Smiths like Neiwert sitting about, only too happy to reveal the true meaning of their neo-Gnostic “faith” to we simps that are constrained by the lack of urim, thumim and big ol’ magic spectacles.
That, and Neiwert, et al, seem to be able to see the racist fnord!s that lurk around every verbal corner that “transmitters” like Jeff, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, etc. Where would we be without their keen insight and ability to detect the insidious racist plots that we all are unwittingly participating in merely by reading “righty” blogs!
TW: so-called dockets. Ain’t nothing so-called about ’em, my electronic friend. Plus, do hyphenations count as single words? ‘Cause otherwise, I just got three words for the price of two…
Bah, misplaced sentence there, should’ve read: “[…]like Jeff, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, etc. [commit to the virtual page].”
Those responsible for the omission have been sacked.
TW: martyr world Egads, I hope not! That’s where I keep all my stuff…
And remember, folks, MEChA is not a cool bunch of Otaku obsessed with 50-foot-tall mechanized battlesuits. Though the resulting confusion of several overweight Weird Al fans turning up with arms full of Gundam dolls at a MEChA rally is rather delicious to contemplate.
TW: government howl. Yup, I participate in one of those every April 15th…
Jeff, if you do decide to go with this, perhaps an addendum is in order.
The whole thing has a lot in common with computer games and the despair of Amanda Marcotte. There is hardly a pasty-faced nerd in the CS department who doesn’t wish (and think, in his own heart) that wizard-hacking in seventeen different languages and the ability to sort out conflicts in a network environment were masculine; and feminists back to the dawn of time have noted that many of the masculine attributes are also concomitants of an abusive personality, and have attempted to convince everyone that they are invalid tags. In both cases the desire and attempt are and will continue to be futile, and the nerds retreat into first person shooters as compensation while the feminists become more and more shrill and vicious out of frustration, because at the end of the day, when the roar of conversation has passed its peak and the barmaids are behind in collecting the empty glasses, there is only one valid test for masculinity: the ability to attract female sex partners. Them as does, are. Them as don’t, ain’t.
Attempts to modify that by verbalizations, however extended, are as futile as any other effort to change reality by act of will. Spending a few megawords on showing that George Bush is a “weenie boy” and John Kerry is a “war hero” doesn’t in any way change the fact that George has attached one of the best-looking, most all-round admirable women in the country and has two daughters in the same mold, while John has been swept up by a strong-willed egotist who likes the social cachet of being married to a Senator and has no offspring; thirty years of “sensitivity training” hasn’t reduced, even slightly, the number of nubile chicks clustered around the jocks, and another century won’t make any difference.
Call it a scientific experiment. Philosophers over the centuries have attempted to define “reality” and find “meaning” in existence, and discovered only circularity. Most recently they have given up, declared that no such thing exists or is possible, and asserted that such things are created in the minds of people by force of will and raw intellect — with themselves, of course, as prime examples of that. Events of the last few decades declare them mistaken. There is an underlying reality not amenable to either “construction” or “deconstruction”, and the fact that the guy getting a blow job from the prettiest girl in school plays football instead of studying mathematics (or Hegel and Kant) is an epiphenomenon of it.
It’s absolutely correct to declare masculinity a matter of attitude and self-image. What’s wrong is to try to reverse cause and effect. One of the possible combinations of masculinity and personality results in motorcycle ownership. Buying the baddest, shiniest motorcycle on the block won’t attract women, as many a nerd has discovered to his dismay — the girl isn’t attracted to the motorcycle; the motorcycle is a visible phenomenon of what does attract her. Neiwert is offering a pomo variant of a Charles Atlas course, and will achieve precisely the same result.
Regards,
Ric
Now wait a cotton-pickin’ moment, Ric. As a self-described “geek”, I must admit to bristling at your inclusion of we geeks in your analogy.
What, pray tell, is unmasculine about holding down a job and providing, fairly well (if I do say so myself) for my wife and children? Must I be a hulking beast that roams the gridiron weekly, smashing all competitors ‘neath my steely fist in order to qualify? Or is there something masculine to taking responsibility, owning up to my obligations and doing my utmost to help those around me? I think it is your definition that goes awry — there’s nothing inherently “manly” in jock-ish behavior; instead, it is mere adolescent preening and posturing, only with more fully-formed private parts and bigger bank accounts.
Please, Jeff, if you’re going to include Ric’s addendum, allow him to revise it further.
TW: re-created 1925. Weird. Second hyphenated TW I’ve gotten today. Re-create the ’20’s? Sure, I’ll take the flappers, but I could do without the whole Prohibition thing, personally…
Plus, I gotta say: I enjoy the heck out of computer games and I ain’t compensatin’ for nothin’.
If geeks are seeking to compensate for perceived lack of masculinity, then how do you account for 35 year old men rolling as female Dark Elves in World of Warcraft?
Doug,
As another self-described geek, I think you’re missing Ric’s point. Competence, responsibility, sacrifice — these things are part of masculinity. Spending your nights in the basement computer lab proving yourself a l33t h4xx0r is not, no matter how hard the l33t h4xx0rz wish it were.
And in those years, my own experience was that the cute girls were spending ‘quality time’ with the jocks and the frat boys and the Chipsters a lot more than with the geeks in the basement, if only because the cute girls hadn’t yet graduated to a point where the recognized responsibility and sacrifice as being equally desirable as say, really good hair, designer clothes, the ability to do multiple keg stands, and of course, a nice fat credit line from the Bank of Daddy.
There is truth in Ric’s argument, just as there is in your rebuttal.
What would libs know about masculinity, except as a punchline to their vegan, hemp wearing, pallid, girl-muscle screeds against right wingers, members of the Military and other “warmongers”?
There goes my self-image.
TW: therefore Kentucky suggests, however, there may be some logical issues to be resolved before we give weight to Ric’s observations in this regard.
Doug, as a fellow-geek, I understand your objections, but remember that President Bush was a cheerleader and avoided injury as a result, but still outscored wierdo war-hero John Kerry (“I have my magic hat”) in all ways estimable. Part of masculinity is an indifference to the criticisms of others regarding one’s own; you either are or aren’t, and that self-confidence is impossible in many academic and progressive minds. Self-hatred of the kind necessary to make oneself worthy of forgiveness for personally-uncommitted heinous sins (the sins of one’s ancestors) does not admit self-confidence as a personality trait except as part of the effort to slander any who disagree with you.
So perfectly descriptive of the “progressive” relativistic dilemma, this made me smile. When will contemporary and popular intelligentsia recognize the existence of an unchangeable reality that even the finest Hegelian contortions and psychological manipulations cannot change?
From their academic aerie the elite look with horror down upon the reality on the ground and realize too late their perches are imaginary. They fall! Upon life’s thorns they bleed!
A real man protects his family. And it really is that simple.
No. Clearly I am expressing myself poorly.
“Masculine behavior” is whatever behavior masculine people express. I had a shipmate, long ago, who was an almost embarrassing caricature of the “girl in every port” sailor. He was five foot nothing, weighed maybe 130 in wet clothes, and had a face like a frog — but give him ten minutes, and the prettiest girl in the bar would be hanging over his every word, and the rest of the women would be stealing glances his way and touching their tongues to their upper lips. I have no count of the number of six-two hulks with broad shoulders and finely chiseled features I’ve met who couldn’t attach a woman if the nunnery closed down, and even plumbing isn’t absolutely determinative: one of the most masculine people I’ve ever encountered was distinctly concave about the pudenda and wore about a B cup. (One night, when the pickings were slim to nonexistent and conversation was the preferable form of intercourse, one of the other guys asked Lin if she’d ever considered a sex change. Response: “::snort:: Those losers. It wouldn’t give me the upper body strength, and if I want a dick I’ll just use yours for a while.” Masculine.)
We all learn, at an early age, the socially constructed expressions of masculinity appropriate for our society, and as we mature we pick and choose from that menu to form our own personas. Those social constructs are, in turn, constructed from what might be termed the congenital forms, the inherent qualities bequeathed to us by our genes; some of the constructs are intended to enhance positive qualities as defined by the specific society, others to suppress destructive ones. The list of available “natural” expressions plus social constructs is long, complex, and sometimes contradictory; there are plenty of ways to express masculinity in ways that differ from others’ expressions. That much is normal and indeed inevitable.
What cannot be done is to reverse the process. Masculine people exhibit behaviors taken from the menu, which they choose (generally unconsciously) according to their particular personality. Deliberately choosing a behavior which is stereotypically “masculine” and attempting to consciously exhibit it inevitably fails to achieve the goal of attracting feminine companionship, as whole legions of customers of Charles Atlas and Harley-Davidson have discovered. Sympathetic magic doesn’t work. The arrow of causality only has one point.
Neiwart and others like him not only try to do it backward, they attempt to take it one step further. They fully trust in sympathetic magic; they believe implicitly that if they express the proper behaviors the Universe will shift to accommodate their desires; but (for whatever reason) they find the available menu of “masculine behaviors” unpalatable. Therefore they attempt to define a new set of behaviors as “masculine”, and insist upon being judged manly on the basis of the new definition; by an odd coincidence, the behaviors they insist are “masculine” are the ones they themselves express. The effectiveness of that effort can be easily determined by an objective metric — divide his girl friend’s bra size by her waist measurement. (Curb your objections, sir. It’s a flawed metric, but it’ll do as a first approximation. I personally come out pretty piss-poor by it.)
The self-deconstruction Dan mentions flows from that. Neiwart is properly scornful of people who attempt to simulate masculinity by picking stereotypically masculine behaviors and expressing them artificially; he fails to acknowledge that he’s doing exactly the same (futile) thing, and simultaneously attempting to compel Universe to bend to his will. Me, I just laugh.
Regards,
Ric
Zelda. That was elegant in its simplicity. 6 words that express the underlying sentiment quite gracefully.
Well, once you strip away affectations (machoness, etc.) you are what you are. In that sense, as a pianist, I don’t have to play all ‘manly’ music; if I drop affectations I play in my own particular style and idiom. It will reveal who I really am to the perceptive. In fact, both the man and the woman musician will have a particular touch with which they play in turn very delicate and very aggressive music.
What to me speaks of ‘falseness’ is affectation. Affectation being, I would suppose, habits which are ancillary and non-ironic; fabrications of personality designed to create an image, to obscure rather than reveal.
So over-machoness that is not done in jest (since every man ought to know that machismo is by definition just for show) is a sign of affectation and therefore of falseness.
But if your world consists of one where there is no difference between shadow and substance, it may be difficult to discern the difference between an action of the heart and one born of guile. I suppose said world is the one where you think you can change reality by thinking particular things about it. If what is ‘real’ is no more than a subject of your whim, then what difference is there between substance and imagining? You would lose your discretion.
As for geekiness, some women eventually realize how honest it is (if it is.) Many of them regard it as attractive (or ‘cute’ I’ve heard…) partly because it represents an aspect of the real person; rare in this age and time of image and illusion. But it takes a particular kind of woman to appreciate a particular kind of man. Some virtues are more universal; courage, fame, sincerity, loyalty, consistency, mastery. If geeks are lacking in any way it is usually that they miss the mark in the image department. Both the substance and the image are important, which is hopefully something we all learn in time.
Most of the ‘Girly man’ smears are simply self-justifying narratives. “I want manhood to be this way, so I will attack anything that represents it as something else.” So personal, so effing personal.
As an asnide, I recall Reagan using the ‘thumbs up’ gesture. He did it consciously, so it might be considered an affectation, but it came across as genuine. This suggests that he knew himself well enough to know his own style. Its a great blessing to not have to invent a stage personality, but to really be larger than life. That’s what it is to be a great man.
TW: extensive clutch – or a great car, too.
Ric, I agree. What is ‘socially constructed’ is the means by which we communicate the eternal virtues (if I may) and some societies disallow certain ones from being expressed. Genes play a part too, I would suppose, as you can’t really be a man of great strength with a frail frame. But courage is universal; how it is communicated is socially constructed. Layers.
RiverC, Ric:
Your comments brought to mind the scenes in the American version of The Birdcage in which Robin Williams was desperately trying to teach Nathan Lane how to act “masculine”. Lane’s character, being what he was, was utterly incapable of affecting a genuinely masculine persona — he just didn’t have “How ’bout them Dolphins!” in him and no amount of acting could change that.
I end up finding the Neiwerts of the world far funnier when I imagine them as Lane, taken with a case of The Vapors, whining about how goldurn hard it is to pretend to care about the NFL, stock cars, “CCs”, power tools, etc.
[…] Lieberman, epitomizing the anti-masculine qualities of an arch conservative : […]Now the Damascus airport is the point of entry into […]
Ah…The Vapors:
I obsess about my masculinity, but I do it in a mature, self-confident way.
I wish I’d known. I would’ve demanded pie.
[…] did a fine job yesterday pointing up the almost surreal blinkeredness of David Neiwert’s bizarre and strained attempt to play Dr […]
Ok,wait a sec… I’m a stay at home dad,but there IS no mom,so does that make me masculine? feminine? Transexual? Now I’m confused.
MUST. LET. LEFTIST MASTERS. GUIDE.
I also wish that David Niewert was named Chuck Noris.
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