This month in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a number of billboards went up in town, featuring homely looking men and reading simply, “Husbands Need Wives.”  It got the whole town buzzing. 

A pro-family message?  An anti-divorce message?  Something to do with peace among the sexes?  A traditionalist message?  Or something progressive?  Everyone was stirred up by them.  Within a couple of weeks even the gay rights activists had contacted the newspaper, anticipating some manner of discrimination afoot. 

The punchline came out later this month.  “Husbands Need Wives… to Get an Annual Mammogram.”  It is breast cancer awareness month, after all.  The billboards were funded by Avera McKennan Hospital, and their spokesman assured everyone that there were no subliminal messages intended in the billboards (there was, he reminded everyone, a billboard reading, “Boys Need Mothers.”  Men simply need to get invested in the health of their wives, especially when it comes to breast cancer.

Kudos to Avera McKennan on this one.  Aside from staging the most successful publicity ad campaign in Sioux Falls years, they also managed to get men invested in women’s health.  More specifically, they opened up the door for men to talk with women about breast health.  Admittedly, it’s difficult for us men to dialogue about this.  Mentioning this intimate body part seems to be socially inappropriate.  Talking about breasts this was also seems to demystify them; men can admire them or even giggle about them, but discussing metastasis of cancer cells in them seems unholy in every way.

But the truth is that breast cancer is an unholy reality.  My aunt’s early death is just one example of this most unwelcomed fact.  Men need their these women in their lives.  And women need their men to be committed and aware.

Vince Vaughn, one of America’s most outstanding bachelors, announced this month that is tying the knot with Canadian real estate agent Kyla Webber.  It seems that Vaughn’s movie, Couples Retreat, may have been therapeutic.  What happened to the lovable party animal from Swingers?  What will become of the Frat Pack? 

Interestingly, he told Oprah.com that he decided to get married not in order to find greater fulfillment, but to have kids.  He is actually sprinting towards responsibility.  He isn’t letting out many details about his relationship, but seems excited mostly excited about the new possibilities of a responsible life. 

On the other side, he has expressed ambivalence about whether the relationship is going to change him.  Good luck on that. 

The anthropological observation of importance here is that many men in America today are experiencing a mid-life crisis.  In contradistinction from a generation ago, however, these men are making moves towards resposibility, not irresponsibility.  Men today get married and have a child, where the boomer escapees were running from their wives and kids.  The midlife crisis today is not a new adolescence.  It is the late departure from it.

The political right – as in Kay S. Hymowitz’s recent article - continues the drumbeat for earlier marriages.  Certainly a wife and child and mortgage will force men to grow up.  Maybe.  But in a world where marriages are dissolvable as aspirin tablets, will this really do this trick?  Besides, men like Vaughn are going into marriage these days with the caveat that they don’t have to change their immature ways.  The a-woman-will-whip-me-into-shape days are over.  Which is why bearing children has become the real test of maturity.  Offspring are so, well, concrete.

In the end, maybe the only weapon the cause of maturity can wield is the promise of a better life.  Being a man is better than being a boy.  Attending a city council meeting is better than watching Southpark.  Wooing a woman is far superior to beating off to Maxim magazine.  Raising a child is more satisfying than being one.  If Vince Vaughn can come to that realization, why not others?

A conversation from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, between Lord Henry Wotton and Lord George Fermor: 

“It is rather fashionable to marry Americans just now, Uncle George.”

“I’ll back English women against the world, Harry,” said Lord Fermor, striking the table with his fist.

“The betting is on the Americans.”

“They don’t last, I am told,” muttered his uncle.

“A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a steeplechase.  They take things flying.  I don’t think Dartmoor has a chance.”

“Who are her people?” grumbled the old gentleman.  “Has she got any?”

Lord Henry shook his head.  “American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past,” he said, rising to go.

“They are pork-packers, I suppose?”

“I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor’s sake.  I am told that pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after politics.” 

“Is she pretty?”

“She behaves as is she was beautiful.  Most American women do.  It is the secret of their charm.”

“Why can’t these American women stay in their own country?  They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women?”

“It is.  That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it,” said Lord Henry.

The most disturbing religious song I have ever heard comes from the despondent singer-songwriter David Bazan, a.k.a. Pedro the Lion.  Entitled “Rapture,” it describes an adulterous sex scene of the album’s tragic character, a man plummeting into a whirling pool of self-destruction.

     This is how we multiply
     Pity that it’s not my wife
     The friction and skin
     The trembling sigh
     This is how bodies move
     With everything we could lose
     Pushing us deeper still
     The sheets and the sweat
     The seed and the spill
     The bitter pill yet undiscovered

The raunchiness of the scene can’t be stopped, however.  The dissonant chords drive on, paving over any possible voice of conscience along the way.

     Gideon is in the drawer
     Clothes scattered on the floor
     She’s arching her back
     She screams for more

The Bible left by the Gideons remains untouched.  In its place is the illicit affair, raised to the level of religion.  The throes of orgasmic passion are not unlike that of an ancient sex cult:

     Oh, my sweet rapture
     I hear Jesus
     Calling me home

Even after the song rises into a climax and collapses, the whole thing begins again, as if to emphasize the wallowing in depravity. 

A digression: I remember hearing a presenter at the Men & Masculinity Conference from over a decade ago, claiming that men, having been told to restrain emotional expression in so many areas of their lives, turn to sex as the sole outlet for their passion.  Making love – nay, fucking – for men has been baptized as the emotional activity par excellence.  Sigmund Freud came a similar conclusion a century before, that the anxiety of men built up by self-suppression needs a release, and in that release one experiences the (feminine) religious sensation of oneness with the universe.  I wonder if there isn’t an analogue to the male experience in Christianity, that with a subtle prohibition against forms of religious intimacy with God or anyone else, Christian men go looking for release elsewhere.  Whole new bastard religions get born.  Remember how Bishop J.A.T. Robinson testified at the “Lady Chatterley trial” in 1960, claiming that Christians should be able to appreciate the sacredness of sex, even if that erotic awareness is found outside marriage? 

For Pedro the Lion’s adulterer, the voice of Christ is lost in the demonic act.  The thrill of Christian marital fidelity has been supplanted by the idolatrous drama.  Or has it?  Bazan concludes the song with a final, surging refrain:

     Oh, my sweet rapture
     I hear Jesus and the angels singing
     Hallelujah
     Calling me to enter the promised land