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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 21st 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?