I was reading Tracy Clark-Flory’s “In defense of casual sex” over at Salon, about which I may have more to say over the weekend depending on how sun-stroked I wind up taking my kid to the beach.

But her third-last sentence, unrelated to the general topic of the essay, is that her current boyfriend is remarkable in part because she’s “never felt the need to challenge him to an arm wrestling match.”

Which only reminds me of a piece of advice I was just recently giving to both my brother and my brother-in-law: never get into an arm wrestling match with a woman. You cannot win. I know this from experience, and I would have known it from logic if I were not so enthusiastically refreshed on the occasions when I learned it from experience.

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Here’s an observation from the annals of the obvious: everywhere you go, strangers talk about the weather. And if you live in Toronto, where I do, they always talk about how absolutely crappy the weather is or recently has been or will be in the immediate future. The winters are long and slushy, with winds that rip through your clothing and through your skin and through your bones and feel like they are carrying pieces of your soul out the other side of your body and leaving a biting dead cold behind. The summers are like a sauna in which you’re trying to commute to and from work, choking on the soupy heat, while some moron with feathered hair keeps spraying more water on the rocks and asking if it’s hot enough for you. So in winter everyone you share an elevator with brushes sleet out of their hair while they whine about the cold and make a lame joke about global warming not being all it’s cracked up to be; in the summer they just sort of slump and ask if you’re lucky enough to have an air conditioner at home.

The summer has some clear advantages, though. In winter,^{1Which has hockey, which would in other circumstances be an insurmountable advantage.} when you’re slopping down the street with wet socks trying to see if you can still feel your nose — yup, it’s still there, and it hurts like a bitch — all the members of the opposite sex, as well as members of other sexes, are wearing scarves and hats and puffy sweaters under even puffier coats and heavy pants and boots and basically unless you have some kind of wool fetish^{2Which, if you do, good for you, weirdo.} means it is the least sexy time to be around strangers.^{3All the obvious crap about fireplaces and ski chalets you’re busy getting ready to fire off a comment about notwithstanding.} In summer, on the other hand, very attractive people wear very little clothing in very many of the places you go on a given day. This is a consolation for the doggier elements of these hot days that is hard to understate.^{4I know, that’s one from the annals of the obviouser. So?} (more…)

In the August issue of Esquire (on newsstands now, but not yet online), there’s a story  by Brian Mockenhaupt called “The Tunnel,” in which inmate Joe Hoffman, encountering sand under the concrete floor of his cell while attempting to procure his freedom, pretty much sums up the quiet desperation of adult men everywhere: (more…)

I just finished reading David Giffels’s All the Way Home, which I’ll soon be reviewing for a different publication. It’s a memoir of a man who, with his pregnant wife and infant child, buys a falling-down mansion and begins trying to make it a home, with minimal help from contractors and maximal stress on his relationship with his wife and son. The house is his white whale, as he notes — to the extent that at one point it actually tries to swallow his leg — and the book is very consciously about Giffels process of trying to sort out his place in the world as a man, among other things (other things: crazy old ladies and how they may have gotten that way, the sadness and anger and confusion of miscarriages, how to fail at getting squirrels out of the attic with a Stratocaster, ghosts). He becomes obsessed with the restoration — an inherited condition for him, apparently — partly out of a desire to fulfill his obligations to his family, partly out of a need to sometimes avoid being an active participant in his family, and figures out how the former somehow leads to the latter while the latter prevents the former from happening. And it’s funny, did I mention that?

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From Jamie Allen at McSweeney’s, a campaign speech on the occasion of the narrator’s 40th birthday:

And from those words, I have sensed what you might be thinking: Should we keep this person as our son … or should we legally disown him?

I want you to know, Mom and Dad: I … Hear … You.

(Applause.)

For that reason, I believe it’s time we talked about change. This campaign is all about change. We all want change for the better. We all want me to change into an independent, responsible adult who lives outside this house. You want it, Dad. You want it, Mom. And I am here to tell you that I want change, too.

As they say: it’s funny because it’s true.

James Bond, shaken and stirring, from “Crying Men,” by photographer Sam Taylor-Wood. The whole series is really beautiful. From The Arab Acquarius:

Taylor-Wood explains, “Some of the men cried before I even finished loading the camera, but others found it really difficult. People can decide for themselves which they think are the authentic tears and which they think are fake. It’s about the idea of taking these big, masculine men and showing a different side.”

The whole subject of men and crying is complicated and interesting and, I think, one of the most frequently misinterpreted elements of the discussion of traditional masculinity.

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The late, lamented Canadian men’s mag Toro is back, sort of. As my good friend Marc Weisblott of Eye Weekly’s Scrolling Eye puts it:

[Of the relaunched, internet-only Toro] “It’s an example of how a men’s magazine looks and acts when taking advantage of state-of-the-art 21st century digital technology — as opposed to 18th-century printing press technology,” goes Morassutti’s YouTube-posted pitch. “Carrying forward just enough of the branding, categories and contributors for continuity — but also creating, from scratch, an exciting new men’s lifestyle platform that plays to the strengths of the online medium.”

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CBC Radio Ideas producer Richard Handler summarizes Dr. Leonard Sax’s book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men:

But then he bucks up and gives us five reasons for this epidemic. Many are familiar but Sax puts them all together like a brick thrown through your window:

• Video games. These addictive activities disengage boys from the world. Some young men even seem to prefer online porno to the prospect of sex with another human being.
• Teaching methods. Girls develop intellectually up to two years ahead of boys. Boys in grade school are naturally rambunctious. They need ways to express their native energy. They are being taught to read and write too early. Their mostly female teachers prefer compliant, dutiful girls.
• Prescription drugs. Hyperactive, frustrated boys are increasingly being medicated. This we all know. What Sax claims is that these drugs shrink the motivational centres of the brain and that the effect of this lasts years, well after these kids stop taking their meds. I hadn’t heard this before but if it’s true, it is truly frightening.
• Endocrine disruptors. Chemicals from plastic bottles, canned food linings and some shampoos mimic natural estrogen, the female hormone. Boys’ testosterone levels are half of what they were in their grandfathers’ day. Also, their bones are significantly more brittle.
• The devaluation of masculinity. Boys don’t know how to become men. They no longer have appropriate rights of passage. Once Father Knows Best was the paternalistic model but now he has been replaced (and mocked) by a dopey Homer Simpson. Sax likes the old virtues of courage and temperance, with a good measure of intelligence.

Sounds familiar. Not sure whether I agree with all the elements of his diagnosis. Another book to add to the pile.

Picture this: it’s 2012 and a new Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings masterpiece hits the (by then entirely virtual) record store shelves. The album art features, in arty black and white, a solitary figure, perhaps hunched slightly, but with his chin held defiantly high, sitting at a grand piano in the Nevada desert under a vast grey sky, the panorama of the landscape that surrounds him somehow enlarging him rather than shrinking him. When you press play, you’ll hear the sound of a lone artist in an empty room, the absence heavy in the air as the tentative, almost muted simplicity of a few eerily melodic piano keys provides the solemn backdrop for the voice, once a belting baritone, now roughened up by the sandpaper of hard-earned wisdom and tamed by a reluctant familiarity with mortality. Men and women of America, I give you an artist chewed up and forgotten but not defeated. With the great beyond in sight, he’s perched at an elevation to survey the great before that was One Man’s Life — the showgirls and the bubbly drinks, the whole world as a chorus, the highlights and the bright lights alongside all the derision and disrespect — and to whisper in the only voice with which age can address youth; cracking, failing, but insistent: no regrets, no excuses; it’s sad, and lonely, and scary at the end, and though memories of a life lived on your own terms are a poor substitute for a life ahead of you, they become all that remains. Ladies and gentleman, in the tradition of Johnny Cash, the singer-songwriter as American Icon:

Barry Manilow? Nah, right? But if Rick Rubin can work his man-for-the-ages magic on Neil Diamond, you gotta figure it could be anyone. Manilow? Why not. Elton John? Step right up. Phil Collins? Of course, this came to my attention thanks to Diamond’s song “Act Like A Man,” which is frustratingly unavailable online in a form I can link to available for a free listen right here. (more…)

OK, I can kind of understand the general thrust of Canadian Club’s new ad campaign, with the tagline “Damn right your Dad drank it.”

I imagine that if you are in the business of trying to sell rye whiskey (No, not scotch, the other whiskey. No, that’s bourbon, we mean the other other whiskey.) you hear a lot in focus groups about how it’s an old fogey drink. And so one sympathizes with the effort to turn a positive into a negative — trying to cash in the general “mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again” nostalgia sometimes experienced by dudes entering what another beverage marketing firm would like us all to refer to as our “Carlsberg Years.”

I mean, didn’t our forefathers know how to use tools and fire guns and fistfight bears and all that other badass shit? That’s cool, right? And hell, the kind of guy likely to go in for the wood-panelled rec room vibe in the photos might find himself — fresh home from having his chest waxed and in the midst of plucking stray eyebrow hairs — looking in the mirror and sympathizing with the whole “Dad was not a meterosexual” message. I see the thinking. (You know I’m not immune to that crap.)

But how to understand the fact that not one but two of these ads evoke the image of “your dad” getting laid?

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…is you don’t talk about acting like a man. The second rule of acting like a man is, well, you know.

Forgive me if this post descends into an exercise in free association but this is a truth of traditional masculinity so self-evident that it’s hard to understate, or to quickly get a big-picture handle on. You’ve got your strong silent type. Your actions speak louder than words. Your walk softly and carry a big stick. It permeates the archetypes of Hollywood heroes: the gunslinger may be wounded inside—he almost certainly is—but he ain’t talking about it, and while he can certainly draw down on you if you force his hand, he isn’t going to waste a lot of breath telling you about it. (more…)

Last Friday, just as I became preoccupied with planning and hosting a two-year-old’s birthday party and then launching into a nightmarish hell of day-job research, The Shelf cried out to me for my opinion about Tree of Smoke and its particular appeal to male-type people and further, the relationship of men to literary fiction that plays with genre conventions.

To which I say, um, well gee, it would appear you have a point, since, um — ahem — well, it’s a spy novel with, um hey, look over there at that shiny object!

Still there? Oh, alright. The thing is I haven’t read Tree of Smoke. But I’ve now added it to the pile — and I’ve now read Jared’s post and the NY Times review, which makes me an expert on the subject by Internet standards. So as for Jared’s core question to me (why would this kind of great book appeal more to dudes, and why is that the case for genre-exploring lit fiction in general?), I feel qualified to put forward a fairly straightforward theory (more…)

Consider this the start of a blogroll with benefits — I’ll update it periodically and your own additions, objections and suggestions in the comments section give it a whole Web 2.0 interactivity thing that’s been missing from so many inaccessible blog sidebars. Cause as you can see, this blog ain’t got no sidebar. (more…)

Just to tie up some loose ends after my post about Kay Hymowitz’s “Man Child in the Promised Land.” (Earlier knotting took place here and here.)

Dave M declares his allegiance to the bong and says he hopes I really didn’t mean to give my agreement or approval to Hymowitz’s piece:

it assumes pretty much the worst of men under 30. for a start, Maxim culture — vile as it can be — is in some ways a welcome corrective to the outrageously classist idea that having the time and inclination to pursue Hef’s “jazz, Picasso, Nietzsche and sex” formulation is the best and only way to be a man.

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Driving a cab (or just “driving cab,” as the drivers themselves call it) is one of those jobs that remains overwhelmingly dominated by men. There are women in the business, but they’re rare — I got a ride from one a few weeks ago and interviewed her on the spot about her job, as I do almost every driver I meet, and she claimed to be the only female cab driver she personally knew.

It’s also one of those unglamourous positions, like, say, front-line combat soldiers, men’s room attendants and restaurant dishwashers, about which almost no one discusses the patriarchal glass floor that women are having trouble descending below. It’s a shitty job, and a dangerous one, and I get the impression very few women are interested in taking it up. (more…)