The XX Factor: What women really think.

What Makes a Man

Esquire is running a series of pieces that revolve around the idea of what it means to be a man. While others here took issue with another feature in the magazine, the cover story, "What Is a Man?," a rather ham-fisted take on what supposedly makes the 21st century man that comes across as more cartoonish than reality-based, I'm of the camp that while there's plenty of talk these days about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man remains one of the great under-discussed subjects of our time. Tom Chiarella may come across as Norman Mailer redux, but, heck, at least he's trying to sort it all out, right?

For what it's worth, another piece in this issue, "Interviews with Regular Guys," is a worth a look. The magazine asked a dozen so-called "regular guys" what they've learned thus far in life. My favorite comes from Gil Duran, a 32-year-old, D.C.-based communication director for Senator Dianne Feinstein.

My mother was the most important man in my life. I remember her being six months pregnant with my sister, crawling around under trucks with a rivet gun in a Grumman Olson factory in Tulare, California. With a mother like that, you don't need a father.

It bears keeping in mind that what makes being a 21st century male so complicated has a hell of a lot to do with women.

The New Masculinity

A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:

Sam, the blurred boundary you describe between boyhood and adulthood rang true for me, as I expect it will for any member of the "educated, twentysomething, urban set" you mention. It certainly doesn't help that that the 20s are—perhaps now more than ever—an age of wildly divergent professional and lifestyle identities. Some of my old friends now wear suits daily and live in luxury buildings; those of us in the fuzzier professions wear jeans to work and spend the summer hauling secondhand air conditioners home on the subway. Others, still, have already scrimped and saved to buy property and start families.

As much as I agree with your description of the quandary, though, I wonder whether it's as unique to "our generation" as you suggest. This discussion made me think of an interview with Jonathan Franzen I heard years ago and just tracked down. Franzen teases out the cultural rift between his parents' postwar generation and his own post-'60s generation to describe exactly this kind of confusion:

I seem to have grown into a time and a place where adults didn't really want to be adults in the same way I understood them to be, which was well-mannered people who dressed differently than children and ... put their children's interests before their own, and all around, just were of a different class. They liked being adults. They got a satisfaction from that.

Ever since the boomer generation faced the problem of adulthood, with kind of dubious results, and since so much of commercial culture has come to focus on the 18 to 34 demographic, its seems as if adulthood itself is to some a threatened commodity.

I'm not sure I endorse Franzen's definition of adults as "well-mannered people" fixed in domestic life, but his observation does seem to suggest that this question has been floating for a while.

And, Dayo, on the swaggering, creepy tone of the Esquire piece: I found myself wondering whether this wasn't an effort to invoke, imitate, and channel the pithy declaratives of David Newman and Robert Benton's famous "New Sentimentality" Esquire cover story of 1964. If so, it's a bizarre allusion, since the New Sentimentality, as described, was pretty much a reaction against the ball-busting, domestic-providing sensibility of "What Is a Man?"

The Confusing Road to Manhood

Dayo, I totally agree with your assessment of Esquire's "How To Be A Man" cover story:

This reads like some kind of grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns-jerky, reductive, and obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze, breadwinning). Who talks like that?

Who talks like that? Mad Men's Don Draper and his compatriots, that's who, but definitely none of the guys I know. In the office, Jessica and I have been discussing whether males of our generation lack a sense of how to become men. The ones we know among the educated, 20-something, urban set (not broadly representative, we realize) aren't for the most part off at war or fathering babies or even bringing in the big bucks. Without those traditional cues, how are they to know when they've crossed over from boyhood to manhood?

Thanks to the feminists who came before us (and in many cases, birthed us), females my age have been raised with the constant reassurance that there are many acceptable ways to be a woman. "You can wear pants and still be a woman!" we've been told. "You can play sports and still be feminine! You can choose to be a housewife or choose not to have kids—both are fine paths for a modern woman!" But are guys getting similar encouragement? I'm not saying that the Esquire cover package is the perfect guide to manhood in the 21^st century—it's more a send-up to the male ideal of the Don Draper era. Still, do you think its existence highlights the need among the XYs of this generation for some such guidance? If so, what's the right way to answer that need?

Ain’t Nothin But a He Thing

A man carries cash. A man looks out for those around him—woman, friend, stranger. A man can cook eggs. A man can always find something good to watch on television. A man makes things—a rock wall, a table, the tuition money. Or he rebuilds—engines, watches, fortunes. He passes along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives him. This is immortality. A man can speak to dogs. A man fantasizes that kung fu lives deep inside him somewhere. A man knows how to sneak a look at cleavage and doesn't care if he gets busted once in a while. A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job. It doesn't matter what his job is, because if a man doesn't like his job, he gets a new one…

A man loves the human body, the revelation of nakedness. He loves the sight of the pale breast, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh. He is thrilled by the snatch, by the wrist, the sight of a bare shoulder. He likes the crease of a bent knee. When his woman bends to pick up her underwear, he feels that thrum that only a man can feel.

A man doesn't point out that he did the dishes.

Oooookay. I had been keeping a tally of things that I, woman, could also do—cash, check; eggs, hell yeah; hungover Bravo TV, yup—but pretty much stopped at “pale breast” (assumed that had gone out of vogue when they finally started making band-aids for black people). Wait, no! At “snatch.”

I generally enjoy Tom Chiarella’s work, but this reads like some kind of grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns—jerky, reductive, and obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze, breadwinning). Who talks like that? The emphasis on earning potential seems especially tone-deaf; in 2009, women are working in record numbers, and it’s men bearing the brunt of the layoffs in this recession. As for rebuilding “engines, watches, fortunes”: Just about every man I know is so divorced from any vestigial handyman tendencies that, if faced with an engine in need of assembly, he would simply Google “mechanic” on his iPhone and let the ripoff begin. And what’s wrong with that? At least it’s honest—and equal opportunity (I could do that, too!).

Finally, when Esquire insists that a man

doesn't see himself lost in some great maw of humanity, some grand sweep. That's the liberal thread; it's why men won't line up as liberals

I just think of all the men who do identify as liberals, and never imagined doing so magically betrays their gender. Why peddle that political point?

And what would a women’s list look like? One longs for Salt ‘N’ Pepa at this point. Cool cover, though.

Not Flipping for Esquire Flip Book

A few thoughts came to mind when I saw the video demonstration of Esquire's May "Mix 'N' Match" cover, which, according to AdAge, is "perforated to split into a flip book that will let readers play mix and match with the facial features of President Barack Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake." First of all, a video demonstration? I thought the point of Esquire was to teach men how not to look desperate. More importantly, is Esquire demeaning the president by making his facial features interchangeable with those of an actor and a pop musician? (Not that you aren't Obama-dreamy, George and Justin.) Or is this a claim that we need to focus on the man behind the image, which can be so easily sliced and reassembled to please or amuse the beholder?

And what's with the physical format of the flip book? This is the magazine whose October 2008 issue featured a digital cover. Those build-a-man flaps on the new cover seem decidedly analog to me. The gimmick is, of course, aimed at boosting newstand sales, which every magazine needs right now, but the editors of Esquire know that even October's über-gimmick didn't sell as many copies as Angelina Jolie did on the July 2007 cover or Johnny Depp did this January. Do the folks at Esquire think our attention spans have decreased to the point that we need our magazines to "do something" besides provide a good read? Are they afraid their stories alone are no longer enough to engage us? If so, is that about the quality of the stories, the quality of the readers, or just the fact that to sell anything in this economy you have to throw in some bells and whistles? The video demonstration is pasted below—does it make you want to buy the fancy flip book and play along?