Masculinity and Its Discontents
Man Conjecture #1
This New York Times article, which is almost certainly behind a firewall by now, is about the ongoing series of “Man Law” commercials for Miller Lite beer. The Man Law premise is the upscale version, basically, of the Milwaukee’s Best Light...After (part 5 of 6)
(Please Note: This is a serialized follow-up essay to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show.” If you missed ’em, here’s part one and here’s part two and here’s part three and here’s part four) Spring 2005. An old...Manjecture #2: Everybody's girlfriend is a vegetarian
Manjecture #2: Everybody’s girlfriend is a vegetarian. This isn’t literally true, obviously, but I suggest that it has a general, manjectural kind of truth to it. Hugo Schwyzer, our Puritan friend, recently wrote about a recent study, done by the Newcastle...After (part 6 of 6)
(Please Note: This is a serialized follow-up essay to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show.” If you missed ’em, here’s part one and here’s part two and here’s part three and here’s part four and here’s part...Resisting the Nipple, or What to Do about the Male Gaze?
My wife, under the normal-est of circumstances, has big nipples. Under the pregnant-est of circumstances—now, for instance—she has truly very quite big nipples. Nipples which are, these gestational days, more or less erect constantly. Throw in a general...On Looking: The Female Gays, The Male Gays, The Male Straights, and their Gazes
I think it was a lesbian friend who first talked to me about the male gays, as opposed to herself, one of the female gays – a play on words, of course, referring to the male gaze, which I think it will serve us to have a definition of before we proceed with this...Dan Bites Dog
This past Sunday morning, at about 9 a.m., our neighbors’ dogs were out in their backyard barking again. And when I say “again,” I mean it with as much venom and resentment as you can cram into the word “again.” When the neighbors...Barack Obama's Gentle Sexist Condescension
I was watching a video stream of Barack Obama’s recent speech in New Hampshire, and I was struck less by his ease and eloquence than by his participation in the old “my wife is better than me” tradition of politicking—a trope that I’ve...Merry Christmas Geico Caveman!
I hate to give props to any large company, and even less so to an insurance company, and I know I’ve said it here before, but man do I love my Geico caveman. I was first hooked by the airport commercial: his sensitive (cave)male sensitivity, his disgust. The...An Ambivalent Jew on Christmas Eve
So here I am in snowy Boulder, Colorado on Christmas Eve. We (the wife, the mother-in-law, the aunt and uncle-in-law) are going to the 9 o’clock mass this evening at one of the Catholic churches in town. This will be my third Christmas Eve mass in a row. The...Gazing, Navel
In “After” I wrote about the few words of wisdom I managed to offer to a friend consumed with that good ole guilt and shame over his pornographic obsessions: I told him that once I started talking about it in therapy, once “I stopped beating myself...Oh, Stephen
Last night I dreamt that Stephen Colbert was my friend. He had read something of mine and contacted me about it and we became pals, were going to work together on some project. It was all very exciting. Then suddenly we were in a building that was collapsing. I was...13 Ways of Looking Manfully at an Omelette in Denver
The scene was the Dozens diner, a block or two away from the Denver Art Museum. Jessica and I were having lunch with Brian Terwilliger, who is Jess’s oldest friend (they grew up on the same block in South Windsor, CT).Brian had ordered a Denver omelette, no...December Wrap-up
Hugo Schyzer calls himself a feminist. We called him a puritan, among other things:I ran a serialized follow up essay to “Peep Show,” the essay that brought Dan and me together, in six parts, called “After.” We wrote about the male gaze, not...The Design Fag and the Moral Significance of the Prejudice Within
I first started using the term “design fag” after two gay men—one of them a planner of theme nights at night clubs and the other a designer of floral arrangements for rich people’s houses—condescended to me for a few hours one evening, in...The Perry Ellis Man
If I was slightly more computer savvy I would have stolen a clearer image from Perry Ellis’s fascinating comic strip-based advertising campaign. But go here to see what I’m talking about in better resolution. They have about 8 of these comic strips, each...The Democrats Man Up
There’s a clever but typically shallow article in the Times today, "The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat," written by the clever but typically shallow Ryan Lizza. I quote at length:the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday was notable for another...The REAL Deal
“Sincerity, writes Patterson, “requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.”” The Orlando Patterson...I don't think I'm an Old Spice man
I don’t know quite what to make of this new webvertising campaign from Old Spice. The gist of it, I’m pretty sure, is something along the lines of "Old Spice: It’s not just your grandfather’s line of masculine grooming liquids, lotions and...Order me a plate of machos too
Over at the eponymous MeTube, our friend and ally Patrick has the YouTube capture of the trailer of the new Quentin Tarantino/robert Rodriguez film. "I’m not an action movie kind of guy,"writes Patrick, "but this trailer makes me wants to go to a...I wanna be an alternadad too, just like Neal Pollack
Neal Pollack is interviewed over at Radar Magazine about his new book, Alternadad, which I’m hoping to read and review for someone at some point. I thought this particular Q&A was relevant to what we’re doing here.Radar: At one point the book was...The Hillary Google Index and Polemical Follow-up
As Googled, hit counts for: “Hillary Clinton” (in quotes) and “bitch”: 442,000and “dyke” 79,600 and “whore”: 313,000 and “cunt” 91,900 and “hero” 940,000 and “butch” 68,400 and...I Deserve Death by Bad Beer
The other night Anja and I went out to a friend of her’s gig at a local club wearing the new and semi-matching plaid jackets we bought the other day at our local thrift store (at the Survival Center which, too, has a blog!). It wasn’t until we walked in...Deconstructing
I don’t yet have a great deal to say about Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation, the new book by journalists Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Y. Moore ("the Natalies," as they call themselves at their blog)....I like my coffee milky and sweet, like my women
So I’m "reading" a recent issue of GQ (one doesn’t really read a magazine like GQ so much as absorb its ambience and feel badly about not being able to afford the beautiful clothes in the advertisements and not being as good looking as the...The 5 Challenges
If you have a few minutes, and would like to see a neat You-tubey kind of thing, check out this film created by one of my co-workers during his wife’s pregnancy. My colleague is a graphic designer/artist/videographer, and his wife is a modern dancer–he...I Am Adman, Hear Me, Boar!
I don’t know where I’ve been for the past eight months or so, but I somehow only saw Burger King’s “Manthem” commercial for the first time the other day. In case you’re the other person who hasn’t seen it, it goes like this:...Lord help me, I think I'm becoming a (football) man
I have a manfession to make. After a lifetime of being a huge NBA and sometime baseball fan who has (at least since the retirement of Fran Tarkenton, Lynn Swann, and Terry Bradshaw, which came after a period of huge O.J. Simson adoration) long reviled the gridiron as...Demetri Martin, Sarah Silverman, and the humanity of it all – oh, and ME, of course
Sometimes, the more I think and write about these masculinity issues, the more I think they’re just personulinity issues. To wit: So the other night I’m sitting watching Demetri Martin’s Comedy Central special, “Demetri Martin: Person,”...San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and “Man Code”
In 2003, a college- and then San Francisco friend of mine, Matt Gonzalez, ran for mayor in SF and, as a Green, nearly defeated a Democrat in a practically one-party Democratic city. It was a very heady time, and working on the campaign, and hanging out with the...OT stands for Off Topic
This just in, Gavin Newsom is going in for . . . REHAB!!!!!!!!Why am I surprized and indignant, that’s the question.How long do you think politicians will keep milking the booze excuse? Can’t be too much longer, seeing as NO ONE IN AMERICA CAN POSSIBLY BE...Notes on my father
I’ve had this notion, over the past few years, of convincing a glossy, extremely well-paying magazine to run a Father’s Day feature of mine. The concept is simple. I’d get a lot of different people to tell me good stories about their father. The...Wearing Manup
It appears that I might be wearing makeup today. Or, to be more specific, I am most certainly wearing a daub or two from my wife’s Neutrogena “On-the-Spot Blemish Wand.” I have some weird rashy type thing that’s spread from the bridge of my...This is a fantastic article from a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It’s about the cultural signficance of Playboy, but more generally it’s a meditation on how the evolution of men’s magazines — from the pre-Playboy days, to when Playboy...
Lads will be lads?
I am eager to respond to Dan’s last post, and to the article to which he refers, but I’m waiting until I can get my hands on a copy of Maxim, which is being surprizingly impossible (perhaps because Eva Mendes is on the cover this month?) this weekend in...There was once a gay man in the NBA — cover your privates!
I haven’t written anything about the coming out of former NBA player John Amaechi, in part because I haven’t read anything from his book yet and in part because he’s not a big enough name, I don’t think, to really change the dynamic in the NBA....Amaechi, etc.
I’m glad Dan posted on hoopster John Amaechi. I’d been wanting to but almost felt like I just had too much to say about his coming out to stuff into a post. As a big NBA fan, I was thrilled at his self-outing. I just wish that Amaechi, who had a lot of...I wanna be like John
While reading up on the curious case of John Amaechi, the gay ex-professional basketball player who’s just written a book about his gay basketballing, I came across this interesting comment from a gay conservative blogger. His argument is that it’s not too...My brush with blog-lebrity
Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has a short review of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, by Stephen Ducat. She writes:Ducat’s basic thesis is that boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive...The Sissy and the Tomboy
In the day before yesterday’s post, after a great deal of throat-clearing, I wrote the following, fairly succinct summary of how I believed my interest in gay male culture is in fact a kind of sublimation of my repressed interest in women.What’s compelling...The Apotheosis of the Baby Bjorn
I had been planning, for today’s post, to feature a picture of me in our brand new Baby Bjorn, which arrived in the mail yesterday. Unfortunately, I’m both very vain and terribly unphotogenic, so after an unsatisfying photo shoot I decided to abdicate in...Craig Ferguson enters the Mantheon
I think Jamie’s going to be chiming in later today with an attack on the article about Playboy that I found so invigorating, but in the meantime I thought I’d direct your attention to this Youtube clip of a recent monologue by Late Late Show host Craig...Hate the Playboy, Not the Gamer
One thing bugged me about all the refreshing feedback from NBA players in response to the John Amaechi-Tim Hardaway brouhaha: the response by many black athletes that, based on what they and their forbears have gone through, they have learned not to hate....Dan Goes Self-Promotional, but at least it has something to do, he's pretty sure, with the topic of this blog
Just up at dadlabs.com is a book review by my very own bad self. The book under review is Alternadad, a memoir of dad-dom by Neal Pollack. I wrote about Pollack a few weeks ago, when my book review was merely a potentiality, but now I can, and in fact do, speak with...Manuary and Mebruary's Mansized Mots from the Mascublog!!
Well, dear and gentle readers, because we’ve been deemed unworthy of an RSS feed or index of tags or any other sensible way of searching M.A.I.D., I present to you, once again, the bi-monthly (or is it semi? the every-other-monthly) rehash of M.A.I.D. hits for...The Proliferation of Cool (White) Dad Writing: A Guest Post
[Today’s guest post, the first in what will be an entirely unsystematic, unpredictable, possibly nonexistent series of guest posts from friends of Masculinity and its Discontents (FO-MAIDs, for short), comes to us from Hayley Wood, a Program Officer at the...Once More Unto the Undiscovered Country, From Whose Bourne Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender be
The end of Neal Pollack’s Alternadad ends on a note that says something, I think, about why the whole alterna/grup/hipster parenting thing– which we’ve been dissecting at MAID this past week — bothers some people so much.By this point Pollack...The unbearable lightness of porn
There’s a website that I frequent occasionally — for research purposes — that publishes pornographic stories. It’s kind of the wikipedia of literary erotica, or maybe the eBay of literary etorica. Or maybe it’s like neither of those...Let the Sun Shine In, A Guest Post
[Today’s guest post, the second in what will be an entirely unsystematic, unpredictable, possibly nonexistent series of guest posts from friends of Masculinity and its Discontents (FO-MAIDs, for short), comes to us from Tom Devine, the founder/editor/sole author...A Word from Alterna Non-dad
“ . . . he advertises the refusal (or has ended up standing in for the people who do; more on that in a minute). It’s that his life — with its cool T-shirts, cool jobs, cool kids, cool art, hip music — is a walking implication to the rest of us...Macho Men Heal Faster
A new study in "Psychology of Men and Masculinity," which is an academic journal that I assume has something to do with the psychology of men and masculinity, has made the astonishing discovery that there’s a correlation between being an old school...A Culling of the Mantheon
I’ve been musing about the recent Mantheon wars ("wars" is perhaps an exaggeration; it’s been more of a rhetorical slap fight, and the slaps aren’t even that hard).They started because Jamie has a MAID-crush on David Sedaris, and so he...The Mantheon — so easy a Geico caveman can get into it
So the Geico people are in talks with ABC about creating a sitcom around the caveman concept that’s been at the center of their most popular advertising campaign. As the article in Slate.com explains:A few weeks ago, word arrived that the Geico...Dateline London: Amaechi Spot-on: British Definitely Gay-er
In several interviews, former NBA player John Amaechi who recently came out as gay has said that teammates sometimes found him a bit light in the Reeboks, but that they usually laughed it off as a factor of his Britishness. Well, friends, I return from England with...The Return of the Murse
[Ignore the YouTube video above — or don’t ignore it, since it’s pretty funny, but know that it has nothing to do with the post below. I was just making sure we could post YouTube videos.]Manjecture #86: You can wear a man purse, or just a purse for...Susan Sontag (R.I.P.) on Feminism and its Discontents
I’m interested in this passage from Susan Sontag’s posthumous collection of essays, because I think it touches on the difficulty — partially but not primarily self-inflicted — that feminists often have winning people over to the cause of...Eggers on their McFaceys (just a tad off-topic)
[NOTE: Early in its existence, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Dave Eggers & Co.’s always visually inventive and oft-outstanding humor/literary magazine, made the astounding offer, especially in retrospect, of a lifetime subscription for a meager one...Gross Trumps Rome! / Dog Book Gets Press!
Something wonderful has happened in Western Massachusetts AM radio. With no warning (as you may have noticed is the way this usually happens), the local sports talk radio station, this past Monday, magically turned into . . . an NPR station! How often have you ever...I am man, hear me whine
[turns out the boys can use YouTube — uh-oh]I’ve had this itch recently to pick a fight with feminism, or with particular feminists, or with some aspect of feminism, or something. I’ve also been skeptical of the itch. I consider myself a feminist,...E-Edition
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