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October 18th, 2010
“What they want, in short, is Jon Hamm.”
The boy is dead again. This time it’s the New York Times which eulogises and pulls the referential threads.
Naturally, it’s the economic downturn. We long for real men with jobs, a grown up look which is parallel to a more mature style in female fashion. Editors from Maxim to V Man and Details comment and all agree that their readers no longer accept a 17 year old boy as an ideal. They want to look at someone they can identify with.
People have been trying to kill off the boy for a long time now. Tom Ford launched the new Yves Saint Laurent men’s fragrance M7 as early as 2002 with the help of a bit of hairy nudity, declaring that time was ripe for a new masculinity. Since then, there’s been recurring talk about the ideal moving in a more masculine direction, but in the end, the boy has always been victorious.
This time I’m not so sure, if only for the simple fact that there is a similar trend in the move towards more traditionally feminine bodies. There is a shift away from androgynous bodies to more distinct genders, something which might partially explain our love affair with the TV show Mad Men. There is safety in simplicity and rules.
It is tempting to stop there, to say that economically unsafe times make men (and women) want to return to male and female stereotypes. Grow a beard, have boobs, be muscly or curvy, become a stud or objectify themselves.
But that explanation seems too superficial, because there is a difference between the more mature female ideal and the grown up man. There has never been a male Lolita as an ideal for straight men (Tadzio in Death in Venice has never had that pull). The expected ideals are the mature man and the young girl and a more grown up feminine ideal is therefore a welcome change of familiar patterns, an example of how fashion can be progressive and enable women to release themselves from history’s old ‘get rid off after 40′ attitude.
What is interesting with the New York Times article is that the magazines whose editors agree on the new era of real men have very different readers. Maxim is a typical men’s magazine with semi-nude women while Details and V Man to a large extent are read by gay men. That they all move in the same direction says something.
At the same time they are talking about different male ideals. The Jon Hamm ideal is traditionally masculine, hairy, not too gym built, while mentioning Herb Ritts takes you in the direction of a more muscular, hairless and groomed Adonis ideal which we recognise from the 1980s and which mainly is a gay ideal.
Maybe this is the point. The obsession with true masculinity is something shared between straight and gay men. Read Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge and see that even when that book came out in 1968 people talked about there not being any real men anymore.
Isn’t this really just the usual fear for a masculinity without focus that we have talked about ever since Susan Faludi wrote Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man? What are men supposed to do in this new world without manual labour, where it is important to talk about your feelings, where men are expected to be equal but loses in sex appeal when they are? The financial crisis only enhances this feeling since it is mainly traditional male jobs that are disappearing.
Fashion is at it’s best in situations like this. It becomes an arena to explore and examine ideas. What is still interesting with that old wrinkly, windburned masculinity? What is the strong body about in a world where few are involved in manual labour? To what extent should the male body be objectified? Is manliness today more of an aesthetic than a lifestyle?
Perhaps manliness can’t be anything but aesthetics today? All that which kept the lifestyle going – the jobs, the spare time hobbies (which men don’t have time for now that they are expected to be more involved in family life), the separation of the genders – have been pushed away, become unmodern and obsolete.
If we want to be positive we could speculate that this is a disconnecting of the traditional masculinity from it’s bad sides like misogyny and homophobia. There is still a strong visual connection between rough manliness and murky values.
It is possible that men are tired of having to dress in a way that signals to women that they are for equality. They believe they are equal. They think they have earned the right to dress in whatever way they want. If women can’t see that they don’t care too much, because men are becoming like women: these days, they dress mostly to impress other men.
I think the free market has become the third gender. I know that sounds strange but hear me out…
Male and female roles were shaped and formed before the ideal of free market capitalism/ democracy existed. The idea of man as provider and woman as property served the feudal system, where the church was the power center and knowledge holder.
Now power and knowledge are completely decentralized and volatility is king. The combination of the internet and the one-man day trading it enables has made volatility, constant change, and exploitation of that change more important than some stabilizing central force.
In personal experience, both men and women value their careers over each other. Women treat men like status objects and men are looking for gratis prostitution services. We do not know how to treat each other like human beings. Instead we treat each other like any other outsourced customer service rep or barista: gratify me and I’ll leave you, frustrate me and I’ll hurt you.
Money, not semen and ovum, is the method by which our species can perpetuate itself. Lust follows.
Comment by HeyitsAlexP — November 6, 2010 @ 4:03 pm