If you haven’t noticed, modern man’s image has been taking a beating lately. We’ve turned into a bunch of lazy bums, apparently, and people are chiming in from all corners explaining how we got here. Some are blaming movie directors like Jud Apatow and Todd Phillips for their depictions of men in moves like Old School and Knocked Up. Others point to marketers for displaying men as oafs in advertisements.
The Los Angeles Times even has a name for this new breed of man: “He’s a lout, from the English word for ‘an ill-mannered fellow,’ which was itself derived from a verb ‘to stoop,’ and his emergence says something important about men today.”
You know you’re in trouble when people associate you with old English words.
The lout is not exactly a reversion to the old macho stereotype. He isn’t tough, muscular, steely, monosyllabic, able to build a car engine or a house singlehandedly or sail around the world solo. He’s not a sophisticate either, a Dos Equis most-interesting-man-the-world type. He doesn’t dress to the nines or know his wines or drive a Porsche, and he isn’t able to make witty cocktail party repartee. A lout is someone who is proudly stuck in a kind of adolescent parody of manhood that conflates insensitivity and machismo.
Louts luxuriate in their lack of sophistication. Louts travel in packs or just hang out with one another. Louts dress in T-shirts and jeans and eschew fashion. Louts guzzle beer rather than sip wine, and they are most likely to be spotted in bars or lounging on living room couches watching football. Louts don’t talk feelings; they talk sports and beer. Louts have few needs and no shackles. Above all, louts may ogle women and snicker about them, but women are pointedly never their top priority. At most, women are objects, just like in the old days. That’s the revenge part. Louts don’t have to make any concessions to women. Louts barely need women. Just give a lout a Bud and his buds and he’s happy.
That definitely sounds like a few guys I know, but certainly not all of them. The Wall Street Journal grabs the mike:
What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
We’re even worse for the environment now too, according to a study covered in Time recently:
Put simply, men are worse for the planet than women. While the study found French women emit 32.3 kgs of carbon per day, men compare at a whopping 39.3kg-mainly thanks to a carbon intensive diet and their inefficient use of transport.
To recap: we’ve become unfashionable, shallow, immature weaklings. And we eat too much meat.
Is this simply an image problem, a case of a few ruining it for the rest of us, or did we really screw ourselves up somewhere along the way from Steve Mcqueen to Bradley Cooper’s character in The Hangover (don’t get me wrong, I love that movie)?
Adam Carolla might have the answer. In Saturday’s New York Post, Carolla lamented the “Man Disappearance Crisis”:
The real problem lies in the fact that women aren’t asking men to be men, and men aren’t asking women to be women. My wife doesn’t sew. She barely cooks. She’s a slob. When did women become slobs? I thought the whole joke growing up was that I was going to be walking around with a trail of socks and underpants and my wife would be saying, “It’s called a hamper.” What happened to that?
There’s a profound dishonesty in all the talk of gender equality. It began when the first women-libbers said they wanted to be more like men. They wanted us to stop being hunter-gatherers and start being huggers. They fired the first shot. This whole movement started in the ’60s when we had to start changing the way we talk. Someone would say, “Well, if this guy’s an airline pilot, and he tells me…” and people would interrupt, saying, “… or she!” “Or she!” By the way, shut up to all those people already.
As a society we have turned a blind eye to this genitalia genocide. Women said, “Let’s get out there! We want to be the boss! We want six-pack abs!” And the dudes started saying, understandably: “Oh, if that’s what you’re doing, then I’m going to hang out at home.” For every woman getting her six-pack abs, there’s a guy who’s cracking a wine cooler and watching his “stories.”
Of course, not every man has gone soft around the edges. Plenty of guys still have the qualities that make you a man’s man – knowing how to change a flat, keep burgers from becoming hockey pucks, etc. – but also know when to help out with the laundry. And if you’ve ever watched an episode of Mad Men, maybe we’ve had this coming for a while.
Still, Carolla has a point. If nature doesn’t require certain traits anymore, evolution kicks in and we lose them.
Women said that they wanted men to be more nurturing and sensitive. And we lost our eye of the tiger. It’s a case of “Be careful what you wish for,” really. Because now you have a bunch of super-sensitive, lazy dudes who don’t go out and make any money.