Maxim magazine makes me manly
I am happy to report that since beginning to cover the somewhat feminine collection of reading material in the men's restroom at my office, a virtual cornucopia of quasi-fresh Maxim magazines have appeared as if from heaven. (Or as the address labels indicate, from our division president's personal stash.)
As I pointed out when the first Maxim materialized, I have unfortunately already leafed though these issues on the can at Jake's house, forcing me to actually read the articles simply for the sake of novelty.
Well, as luck would have it, I came across an absolutely brilliant piece by a writer named Nick Tosches. So brilliant, in fact, I tore it out for safe-keeping since this particular copy (featuring the most famous former reader of this blog on the cover) had become water damaged in a process I can only imagine involved falling into the toilet bowl.
Anyway, this article is about the state of manhood in modern America. It's actually pretty long and if you ever get the chance to check it out in full, I recommend it. But to give you a glimpse of its genius, know that it starts like this:
To look at the current state of manhood, we must first find the rock under which it is hidden ... our rock is to be found somewhere between courage and cock, valor and virility. More confoundingly, it is to be found somewhere among these and many other things: braggadocio and bullshit, fraud and folly, gullibility and self-absorption, strength and weakness, honesty and lies, posturing and pussy-whippings, truth and delusion, pseudo-cool and pseudo-hip, bench-pressing and panty-sniffing, malice and innocence, tough talk and toiletries, nobility and nothingness, reality and make-believe.
... and ends like this:
When I turned 50, I saw that there were three things left that I wanted to do in life. One was to master the tango. Another was to kill a leopard. I forget the third.
Does my failure to have yet accomplished these things mean that I am a failure as a man? Probably. Then again, maybe I unknowingly accomplished the third one before or after forgetting what it was.
That said, fuck it.
4 Comments so far
Leave a comment
What is it to be "manly"? I had a long conversation with Art about this and he claimed that manliness is more "spiritual" than womanliness. At first, I objected on a couple of grounds - first, the implication that women have less psychological depth; second, the fact that women are more religious than men.
But to be religious is not the same as to be spiritual - religiosity is communal, normative, moralistic. It has struck me continually throughout my adulthood how conservative the women I know are compared to the men (not necessarily politically, but when it comes to social sensibilities, sexuality, and so forth). Spirituality is about individual autonomy and development. Art argued that men are inherently "adrift," they are cast into the world with a great deal of freedom to dream and strive but are doomed to perpetual dislocation. I think that the issues surrounding paternity (is that my child? do I have children I don't even know about? + the ability to start new families well into old age) are good support for this. So, perhaps it is more accurate to say that men are (or can afford to be) more "romantic" - not in a candy and flowers sort of way, but in a Lord Byron sort of way.
This may be true, to the extent that women are forced to be "realistic" by the fact of having to care for others (the very young, the sick, the very old), being tied to the world of actuality, to "real" responsibility, etc. Of course (and thank God!) feminism and the pill are changing all of that. As for me, I am totally romantic and spiritual in the senses described above - does that make me "manly"? Or is it misleading to talk about this in terms of a sexual divide, rather than in terms of what social structures and movements (capitalism, feminism, etc.) can offer people in general, as individuals??
Still, it is interesting that the author of this Maxim article elides manliness with personal achievement and ends his article with a rather juvenile denunciation - "fuck it." Which brings me to another point we touched on in our conversation, which is the perpetual boyhood of men...
What does everybody think?
If you want to talk about perpetual boyhood, you've come to the right place!
First of all, let me say that I agree with you 100% that religion is normative and moralistic whereas spirituality is about individual autonomy. (And don't get me started on how Jesus was pro-spirituality and anti-religion!)
Art's equally lucid point that men are adrift speaks to the fact that the "masculine problem" is essentially a spiritual lack. (A book I just returned to its owner phrases the drifting male's spiritual question as "Do I have what it takes?")
What I like about the first excerpt from the Maxim article is that the author is not afraid to identify wimpy or shameful concepts as cornerstones of the masculine experience. It's easy to think that "what it takes" to be a man is to be rock-hard at all times (both physically and emotionally) so it's nice to see a more realistic model of masculinity.
As for his "fuck it" closer ... I actually read this as a mark of spiritual maturity rather than juvenility. Fuck caring if you do or do not meet the requirements society/ego sets for you -- just be yourself. The requirements are not real. I mean, they're real ... you really experience them ... but they can't alter the truth that you simply are -- full stop.
Individuality is inherent. It's only when you make the leap from "I am" to "I am a man" or "I am a woman" (or any other label for that matter -- "I am a husband", "I am a wife", "I am a lover," "I am a failure" etc.) that you open the door to existential crisis.
I have no opinion as to whether women have as much anxiety as men about how well they fit society's mold for their gender but I do agree with Art that women have less psychological depth.
Well, to be fair to my darling, the idea that women have less psychological depth is not what he said (but seemed to me to be an implication of what he said).
Incidentally, the "do I have what it takes" take on masculinity sound a lot like Freud's theory of the construction of sexual difference. For boys *and* girls, he says, sexual identity is rooted in castration anxiety. Both boys and girls want to have a phallus that they can please their mother with. Boys have it, and spend their lives trying to live up to the fact; girls don't, and so they identify with their mothers and suffer perpetually from penis envy.
Thanks for your clarification about the vision of masculinity in the Maxim article. Is the magazine online? I'd be curious to read the whole thing. Does the author's realism mean that he has been able to take up a more "androgynous" (masculine idealism + feminine realism) view of masculinity??
I guess my ultimate question about all this is: what will it mean for me at midlife when I look back and ask if I've accomplished what I've wanted to as a woman. Will my fundamentally individualistic accomplishments (writing books, learning to dance, killing leopards) have anything to do with how I evaluate my success as a woman, or simply as a person? Does success AS A WOMAN necessarily involve some kind of nurturing function, whether as wife, daughter, mother, nurse, or whatever???
Yo, that Freud dude is seriously messed-up! I know that's cliche to say ... but castration anxiety? I'm not sure that many people would go, "Yeah! That's it! I'd been searching for the right words!" Know what I mean?
Alas, I don't believe the Maxium article is online anywhere. But if you email me your street addy I will mail you the hard copy.
My instinct is that your individualistic accomplishments won't impact on how you evaluate your success. Humans just don't seem to work that way. If you write a book, you will lament that it was not the best book ever. If you kill a leopard, you will go to the grave wondering what it would be like to kill a lion. Or a yeti.
I don't know. Is it possible to grow past evaluations and just live life? I'm not sure ... this strikes me as part of being human.
I'm not comfortable saying that your success as a woman involves a nurturing function or not because I don't believe there's any kind of objective success as a woman or as a man ... or as anything.