Viewing Knocked Up as a fairy tale about a male damsel saved by a brave princess answers (even if it doesn’t excuse it from) its most frequent critique: that the female characters are humourless scolds, and not very well realized ones at that. Dana Stevens put that complaint forward at Slate way back when the movie was fresh, and Bridget brings it up in the comments on my earlier post:

The only problem I did have with Knocked Up was the utterly one-dimensional portrayal of the female characters. Sure, I know women like that, but then there are women like me, who are, you know … normal and stuff, and probably have more in common with the guys in that movie (I’m thinking of the poor beleaguered husband who plays fantasy baseball to escape the dull reality of his suburban life) than the women.

The thing is that it isn’t really a movie about gender relations, or about pregnancy. It’s a movie about one guy’s struggle to become (more of) a man. (more…)

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I don’t very often tell the story of how I proposed to my wife Rebecca. That’s her on the right in the photo above (my son Colum is on the left, the fetus(es) that will become our next child (or two) are slightly to the lower-rightish).

There are people who go to elaborate lengths in their proposals and a mini-industry dedicated to celebrating their romanticism. Famously, there are the much-derided guys who get their “Julie, will you marry me?” message flashed momentarily onscreen at baseball games and whatnot, a high-risk idea that could possibly backfire (even if the backfiring is often planned, as demonstrated by a rash of declined-proposal hoaxes recently). My cousin Adam’s then-girlfriend Loretta, who lived a six-hour drive away, sent him on a wild chase involving custom-made crossword puzzles hidden in lockers and multiple gifts in various places that finally led him to a Niagra Falls hotel room. The night he arrived, she popped the question onstage during a dinner theatre performance. Public shenanigans aren’t everyone’s thing, obviously, but the stories are memorable. (more…)

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Just wanted to draw your attention to Nick Paumgarten’s Talk piece from the New Yorker on Sean Avery, “The Most Hated Man in Hockey.”:

(The promised further pondering of Knocked Up, Man-Children and fairy-tale dudes in distress still coming this weekend.) The profile of the New York Ranger comes after the incident above, in which:

Avery made agitator history, in the third game of the Rangers’ best-of-seven first-round playoff series against the New Jersey Devils, by inventing a new idiot technique. During a Rangers power play, he positioned himself in front of the Devils’ goalie, Martin Brodeur, to block his view of the puck—a standard tactic known as a screen. (more…)

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I apologize for the light posting schedule this week. I’ve been working to make some progress on various projects (some related to this blog, some not), and I may remain preoccupied for the rest of the week. I hope to post some more elaborate thoughts on the whole Princess Charming question and respond directly to some of the comments there before the end of the week. But otherwise I expect to focus on doing some research and legwork to start shaking things up around here beginning early next week. In the meantime, a few random things related to the area of study from the information superhighway internetwork (as the good people at Taddle Creek call it. You really should check Taddle Creek out. Go ahead, I’ll wait…. Welcome back–on with the show!):

Tyson: brainiac In case anyone missed it, The Bironist put together an interesting response to my response to his and Jan Dutkiewicz’s piece on MMA fighting in this month’s issue. I wanted to clarify that my selection of quotations from Tom Callaghan’s essay on Mike Tyson may have undersold the degree of nuance in his portrait of the flesh-eating rape convict to be. (That never gets old, does it). (more…)

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Those paying close attention to the footnotes over here will have noticed my link to Kay S. Hymowitz’s piece “Man-Child in the Promised Land” in the City Journal, a quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute. She and I are thinking about similar things, and in similar terms, and she gives a good overview of the evolving situation I’ve called “guyliness.”

It’s really worth reading in its entirety if you’re interested in this stuff, but I thought her dissection of Knocked Up really gets to the point of the celebration/critique the movie offers of guys:

What sets Knocked Up apart from, say, Old School, is that it invites the audience to enjoy the [Single Young Male]’s immaturity—his T-and-A obsessions, his slobby indolence—even while insisting on its feebleness. The potheaded 23-year-old Ben Stone accidentally impregnates Alison, a gorgeous stranger he was lucky enough to score at a bar. He is clueless about what to do when she decides to have the baby, not because he’s a “badass”—actually, he has a big heart—but because he dwells among social retards.

And then offers what I think is a key observation: (more…)

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This will be another post about fighting, after a quick digression

[COMMENCE DIGRESSION] Having once again been noticed by one of the big kids on the internet playground, I’m tempted to self-indulgently post a response to the response to haggle over small differences of opinion and perceived slights. And if I read the blogosphere correctly, that’s the smart thing to do—go out of your way to pick a snark fight with someone more popular than you in an effort to get them to respond to you so you continue to enjoy the warm glow of their reflected traffic. But Tracy Clark-Flory is both mostly complimentary and mostly right, so I’m just happy to welcome any new readers she sent my way. Welcome.[1][END DIGRESSION]

At the risk of making you think I own only one book about sports, let me refer again to The Picador Book of Sports Writing[2], in which you can find Tom Callaghan’s wicked-great essay “Iron Mike and the Allure of the ‘Manly Art’.” There, less than a week before Mike Tyson’s first-round destruction of Michael Spinks in 1988, Callaghan expresses the dawning discomfort among boxing fans at the realization that the then-twenty-three-year-old heavyweight champion was intent on exposing the truth of what many gussied up as “the sweet science”: this was an ugly business.

An explanation for boxing, at least an excuse, has never been harder to summon or easier to see than it is now, simmering in the eyes of Mike Tyson. Muhammed Ali’s face, when his was the face of boxing, at least had a note of humour, a hint of remorse, even the possibility of compassion [...] Valour can be redeeming; so can grace, poise, bearing, even cunning. But this is a nightmare. The monster that men have worried was at the heart of their indefinable passion, of their indefensible sport, has come out in the flesh to be the champion of the world.[3] (more…)

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“I wanted to be a tall, flat-chested, muscular, bearded, hairy human being with no uterus and a penis. If that was ‘man’, great. If not, OK.” A helpful commenter on my “Mr. Mom” post suggested checking out this post written by a Female-to-Male transsexual explaining why he wanted to be a man and how the world looks different under the influence of testosterone. It’s a pretty good read, offering his personal experience (including a pretty funny, if completely earnest, list of reasons he wanted to stop being a she) and offers some refreshingly honest takes on gender politics. One of my favourite bits:

After [Testosterone], I discovered that if I could think about something heretofore not sexually interesting during approximately six masturbation-to-orgasm sessions, that item would become a turn-on in and of itself….no matter what it was. I could literally program myself in a Pavlovian manner to be aroused by whatever I wanted. I found this out by accident, after I inadvertently added a few new dishes to my arousal buffet without meaning to. When I realized this, I sort of sat in shock for a while, and then I said to myself, “Boy, you’re going to have to be very, very careful from now on.” (more…)

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I was talking to my friend Kathryn the other week about this project, and she was sure a conversation about being a man was much needed, especially if I addressed the fact that when it comes to dating, “there’s no code anymore.”

Then I encountered the time-worn phrase “bros before hoes” about twenty times in two or three days in wildly varying contexts (including this one, which caused small bits of my brain to splatter all over my monitor and the wall). And I thought, maybe it’s not that there’s no code, it’s just that the code is written by absolute morons. (more…)

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If you’ll allow me to repeat myself: acting like a man has little or nothing to do with feminism. How could it? If what we’re talking about is having the cojones to stand up and take responsibility for yourself, to make something of yourself in the world, to be accountable for your actions and for the course of your life, to be strong and honourable and courageous and all that other stuff, then how the hell could women’s liberation be to blame for anything?

But, you know, it needs pointing out explicitly, at least partly because of yahoos like Dimitri the Lover, who was profiled on the cover of Eye Weekly this week (by a writer working for me in my day job as city editor there). He’s a former doctor, who lost his medical license for sexually harassing patients, who now runs a group called “Toronto Real Men,” providing unintentionally self-parodying lectures with titles like “Worship the Cock.” He calls the staff at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore “bitter, moustached, man-hating, femi-nazi cunts from socially regressive, evolutionarily non-sequitur organizations.” And in case it was ambiguous from that description, he doesn’t like them, since he figures he’s running a “rebellion against society, and what they’ve turned men into … a rebellion against feminism….” There’s all kinds of other idiotic nonsense on his website (which I won’t link to because I don’t want his ego to have the traffic), like animations of him impregnating the Blessed Virgin and his theories on why men need to embrace their inner rapists. (more…)

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I once saw a short documentary at a festival of film students’ projects—the name of the movie and its makers is lost in the fog of memory, unfortunately—that was about a teenage genderqueer. She was biologically female but dressed like a male all the time. She and her boi friends dressed like greasers and walked and talked like slim-built James Deans. (more…)

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Advice from a fictional character for a real party leader.

DEAR ANGRY MAN: I’m the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in a mid-sized, soft-power country in North America. Since winning the leadership of my party, I’ve had a bit of a bumpy ride: there’s constant rumbling in my own party that I’m the wrong man for the job, and the jock who sits opposite me seems to enjoy openly mocking me.

The problem is that the polls never seem to turn in my favour. I’m sure my party could form a great government if only the voters would give us a chance. Our party has played it pretty cagey this last year—we constantly have the opportunity to defeat the government and force an election, but instead we’ve outsmarted those bastards by refusing to vote on confidence motions. We just get up and leave the House to refuse their bullying (heh, heh!). But the people of my mid-sized soft-power North American country, however, aren’t getting the message; the polls are still indefinite. Or worse. Now, apparently I’m running fourth in my own riding. What should I do, Angry man? What should I do?

Lilly-livered Liberal

P.S. I have publicly acknowledged that I am not a particularly eloquent English-language speaker. (English is one of the two official languages in my country.) Yet people still make fun of me about it. How do I get them to stop?

Ah, Lilly. Come here so I can smack you hard enough that your testicles descend. You’re making me physically ill over here, you freaking infant. You pantywaist. You quivering puddle of pablum. I understand English ain’t your strong suit so let me and Google translator make it easy for you: Actez-vous comme un homme! Un homme! Comprendez, mon ami? (more…)

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Canadian newspapers (and American sportscasts) last week were full of news about legendary Montreal Canadiens hockey goalie Patrick Roy and his son Jonathan being suspended for their part in a brawl. Here’s video of the incident so we know what we’re talking about:

Roy Sr., “St. Patrick,” is the coach of the Quebec Remparts of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey league. Roy fils, a chip off the old block, is the goaltender. By my viewing of the clip above (and from a bunch of other angles), here’s what happened: (more…)

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