Barbershops Offer Space for Men

The day of the fraternal club has gone the way of the dinosaur.  Seen as elitist, sexist and generally suspicious, most men’s groups have either dissipated or become co-ed.  Athletics sometimes seem to be the only center for male interaction.  I admit, this makes me sad.   Men’s isolation is greatest around other men.

So it is with some hope that I’ve noticed the re-emergence of the barbershop.  For instance, according to the Saddleback Valley News [CA] (19 June 2009), V’s, an Arizona-based franchise, has recently opened shops in Foothill Ranch and San Clemente.  Featuring vintage Koken barber chairs, flatscreen TVs and straight razor shaves, it has brought men into a space more comfortable and interactive for them.  “You walk into a hair salon and there’s women getting perms and it smells,” said Blake Feaser, the 24 year-old manager of the Foothill Ranch shop.  “This is centered more around the guy.”

In my own hometown of Sioux Falls I’ve seen a related thing emerge in the form of the Chop Shoppe.  For around $25 a guy can plop down on a leather couch, order a beer (!) and watch ESPN until he feels like having his hair cut.   From there he is moved to the cutting area, which looks like some crazy hybrid of a motorcycle detailing shop and Paul Bunyan-gone-Japanese-minimalism.  While the staff is mostly women, and while they offer massages and manicures and the like, the place is very cool, set up from head to toe with men in mind.  

Barbershops don’t guarantee male comaraderie.  But they do at least offer a space in which men can relax and perhaps develop some relationships in a non-athletic environment.

A Real Man… Doesn’t Mooch off His Woman

On the 20 November edition of the talk show “The View,” I noted with interest the comments being made about the recent divorce between pop queen Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie.  The two, having avoided a prenuptial agreement when they married, sped through the divorce process, Ritchie (ostensibly) giving up far more than half of their joint estate.  Madonna’s earnings are estimated at perhaps ten times that of Ritchie, and while he could have been entitled to around half of the sum of their accounts, he voluntarily forfeited hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Whoopi Goldberg’s response to Ritchie was one of great admiration, going so far as to say that his actions showed he was “a real man.”  What she intimated by that, she explained, was that he wasn’t willing to act as a financial parasite upon his (ex-)wife, and was willing to respect her by not being dependent on her.

Granted, the whole settlement hardly represents anything of ethical significance; Ritchie could wind up a millionaire fifty times over or more, even with a most inequitable settlement. 

What strikes me as significant is that this case would be used as an opportunity to equate manliness with independence.  This, of course, is no new claim.  Independence lay at the heart of colonial and republican conceptions of manhood in America, and was defined in financial tones after the Industrial Revolution.  But since the emergence of feminism in the 1960s and 70s society has tried to counterbalance this expectation with talk of the need for male “collaboration,” “equality,” “cooperation” and dependence on others, even financially.  The breadwinning male too often came home from the office suffused with a sense of entitlement and unlimited power over his non-breadwinning family members.  The last few decades have been a trimming of that model, making room for women in the work force and reinventing modes of (non-business) male sociality.

What Goldberg espouses represents a gentle swing (and wobble) of the pendulum.   In some sense she probably means only a kind of boundary-setting.  Dependence must not mean economic childishness.  Boys must be men, they must not place a burden on their women.  Women rightly refuse to empower this pedantic neediness.  But the context of Goldberg’s comments suggests a double power play: the use of gender-norming language to shame men into a kind of provider role, combining it with legal claim: “See, what’s mine is mine.  Now be a man and support yourself.”

Open Forum: Why Is Jim Halpert the New Male?

I hereby crown Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) the New Male.   As the superprotagonist of NBC’s “The Office,” Jim is liked by the guys and loved by the women.  A lot.  And I haven’t run into one exception so far.

How?  How did an unassuming, skinny, paper-pushing dude in middle management become the next über-male?  You tell me. 

AMSA 2009 Conference: “Beyond Borders: Masculinities and Margins”

The American Men’s Studies Association has announced their theme for their 3-5 April 2009 conference: “Beyond Borders: Masculinities and Margins.” 

From their site: ”Presentations should reflect on the construction, reconstruction, and effects of borders of all types as well as the men and the practices of masculinities that fashion, feel, respond to, and seek to cross from the margins over these divides. Other academic papers on masculinities are also welcome. Submissions are due by November 21, 2008. Events will be held at McGill and Concordia Universities.”

Dressing the Part in Zwinky World

If I might stay in the fashion and gender vein . . . 

 

One of the more popular activities for online youth involves the creation of avatars, that is, animated icons representing oneself.  Zwinky, a software program designed for the very thing, helps people generate anime-inspired personae.  It seems to be especially popular with girls, who can try out all sorts of outfits on their cyberselves, though Zwinky offers a range of male templates. 

Their standard ad features a cartoonish girl with long legs, hourglass waist, big breasts, doe-like eyes.  No surprise there.  But she also sports short hair and skullbones on her bra and shorts. Follow the ad to their site to find most of the other female avatars sharing these core qualities: C-cup-plus chests, skinny girl legs, and eyes as big as plates.  Yet this is no traditional Barbie.  Most have actual hips (thank goodness.  How did hips go out of style?).   A surprising number of the female personalities have an ass-kicking quality to them, a weird hybrid of “Hello Kitty” and punk-goth bitch.

 The male figures appear more normal.  Normal, that is, if one means lean and muscular with smaller heads and piercing eyes.  The men are also encouraged to dress themselves up in various fashions, though I noticed that their wardrobes tend to be limited compared to the women.  With the exception of pimp-wear (gaudy necklaces, pink suits, etc.), the men had relatively standard, casual fare from which to choose, stuff you’d expect to find at a skate park or frat party.  I did find, however, certain male users who had gone towards a bobblehead look.

It is a little surprising that Zwinky, with its be-who-you-want-to-be philosophy, doesn’t challenge social conventions so much as supply their exaggerations. 

 

 

 

What Is It about a Man in Uniform?

Especially in bygone days, but even now, it has been common to hear women say, “I love a man in uniform.”  They mean it romantically/sexually, but their attraction clearly stems in large part from the kinds of associations they gather from a uniform.  What women ostensibly mean when they refer to “uniform” are not refrigerator repairmen and Arby’s employees; they mean police officers, military, doctors, firemen.  Notice how each of these uniforms indicate key traits:

• Economic viability
• Physical strength and vigor
• Mental acuity
• Social status

That is, women can “safe-sexualize” a man in a uniform because he is a known entity.  Other types of uniforms may provide a stereotype for more daring sexual fantasies, such as the shirtless Harlequin romance beefcakes or Diet Coke’s “Lucky” commercials.  But for the most part women fall back on men whose occupations are indicated in safer, more professional garb, making transparent a whole other host of socio-economic qualities.  Uniforms signify a kind of homogeneity useful for identification of one’s rung on the social ladder.  Think about it: it’s indicated in the name itself, uni-formity. 

How interesting that men tend to like women in outfits, not uniforms.  Barring the nursing profession, occupational garb isn’t as important for men, who generally look for women who are able to accentuate their lives, not women who provide a financial or class-status cornerstone.  Thus men like changing appearances, whether that be the changing fashions from day to day or the erotic role-playing in the bedroom.  But these trends may be reversing in some part as women play a greater role in business outside the home and men identify less with their roles as breadwinners and defenders. 

Any further thoughts or observations?

Van Damme’s Universal Language

Jean-Claude Van Damme told Metro magazine (3 July 2008) that he wasn’t surprised that he had become an international movie star.  “My movies are international,” he said, explaining, “Everybody understands a slap in the face.  In Japan, Belgium or America, a punch is a punch.” 

This, of course, is exactly what dictators and schoolyard bullies and movie directors have known all along, that physical violence communicates in any culture.  Otherwise indifferent audiences have to pay attention.  The attitude Van Damme displays goes a long way in explaining why men in so many societies tend to default to violence as a mark of true masculinity.  It identifies a man as powerful, forceful, and important.  On the other hand, I find it interesting that Van Damme’s statement is patently false in the sense that not all cultures interpret violence to mean the same thing.  It may be a sign of power, but that power may be interpreted as more or less appropriate, more or less fitting as an expression of manliness.  Most cultures tend to find American movies’ bloodshed gratuitous at best. 

I might add that, from what Van Damme movies I’ve been exposed to, the universal language seems to be that of vengeance.  Most every culture seems to relate to a sense of personal justice.  Van Damme plays off this the inherent weakness we have, not for violence per se, but for vigilantism.

Gatorade and Androgyny

A Gatorade ad being run this year in the UK features a topless man, a swimmer, bronzed and gleaming.  He has been digitally connected, however, to a woman in a lab coat, clearly a scientist of sorts.  The advertisement, of course, seeks to assure athletes that they are getting the maximum amount of technological research with every swig of their sugarwater.  Why not do so with an eye-grabbing way androgynization that may even express a kind of equalitarian sentiment?

 

The ad is unsettling, however.  The man and a woman are set up as comple a kind of hieros gamos, a kind of yin-yang which works together as non-competitive complementarity.  Yet the man-half makes up 60% or more of the human hybrid in the picture.  Moreover, I find it striking that the man is presented as the archetypal athlete while the woman plays the technical – but supportive - role.  Or, in a kind of post-Victorian expression of modern college enrollment patterns, is the binary oriented around the male-brawn and female-intellect?  Or is it actually reversing the pattern of the sexualization of the female body and the authoritative garbing of the male in a uniform?  I’m not sure if there are other ads in circulation reversing the roles. 

 

Perhaps the bigger question regards the social function of such product images.  Slavoj Žižek notes how the multiplication of “couples” in the West may be, after all, an attempt to gloss over the unspoken dualism at the core of our society.  The he-she unity of the Gatorade ad may simply help “introduce a balanced duality into the minor spheres of consumption,” just like restaurants pair blue and pink packets of artificial sugar, displaying “an attempt to supplement the lack of the founding binary signifying couple that would stand directly for sexual difference” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, pp.25-26).  Have we really dealt with identity and difference by smashing the two together, or is this precisely the avoidance of such questions?