Commentary from Larry Solway
I should have known it when Gloria Steinem married "Mr. Right," after radical feminist avoidance of the snare and slavery of marriage for all her most physically beautiful years. (And she was achingly beautiful.)
I should have known something dramatic was in the air when Stock Day won wearing a wet suit while driving a macho personal watercraft. (replaces Personal Water Craft.)
The hair on the back of my neck should have stood up in silent warning when the Premier of Ontario abandoned good sense to his gonads by abandoning his wife and taking up with an ex CBC news person. I should have known. Where was I looking?
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Do Ontario's affluent guys all play for team Harris? Sometimes it seems that way. |
The "Guys" are back. With a vengeance. A Toronto columnist wrote that Harris' support comes from mainly affluent males. Gone are the men who know how to cry, men who have and admit they have a feminine side, men who put social conscience ahead of instant gratification.
After all the years of Kate Millet and Germaine Greer and yes - even Judy Rebick - testosterone is once more in ascendancy. How else can you justify the rise of "power" cars and the new dominance of sports-utes? And the debasement of popular media?
I'm too tired for MoJo radio. I'm too fixed in my habits to switch to Molson's because of "I Am Canadian" TV commercials. I never liked Labatt's Blue in the first place so why would I switch because it's the sure way to make the Leafs win the Stanley Cup. And who are the young actors they get to declare that they'd undergo a sex change or French kiss their dog for a Leaf Stanley Cup? Ugh.
This is the new dispensation. This is the atmosphere that has my favourite columnist, Rosie DiManno of the Star, extolling the virtues of being the only guy in girl's clothing even though she is avowedly and devoutly and energetically heterosexual.
There is a hellish blend of consumerism, politics, marketing, and me-ism in place while I stupidly sit here and try to be profound. No one wants profound. All eyes are focussed on the New Age of Guydom.
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The consumer imperatives of young men are primary. They vote with their testes. |
Sports-covering columnists and TV videographers almost outnumber the "guys" with painted faces and ice cold ones in front of them in sports bars. One reporter writes: "Thirty-seven TV screens. 400 pounds of chicken wings,174 litres of golden amber flowing out of the tap. Fans with painted faces who'd bleed blue-and-white in a dust-up." Another pit stop has fifty-two (!) TV screens going full blast Raptors and Leafs. Watching and cheering and boozing are hordes of males both affluent and potentially hoping-to-be-affluent.
Ad agencies and new format radio stations are only now catching on to what the Harris he-men have always known: the political gold is in young males. They want to and have to feel important. Their consumer imperatives are primary. They vote with their testes.
Brief aside: during my campaign in the provincial election I put a sign up in a doughnut shop. Three 20 something guys mulling over their coffee and faint hopes declare: "The NDP are just a bunch of whiners." The dawn breaks. There is strength is macho gusto and winning. There is weakness (and whining) in even remotely looking like someone who cares.
As a former participant in the art of broadcast success, I had to watch and commemorate the new rush to glandular exploitation. CHUM Radio after years of diminishing success morphs into "The Team" and takes dead aim at guys. Talk 640 becomes MoJo radio and puts on a broadcast version of the runaway success of Maxim magazine. Guys' talk. Guys' urges. Guys' flicks. Poolroom intellectuality. Mammarial excess on billboards.
You have to include in the me-Tarzan genre another sad story. In John Feinstein's clever and witty book about golf, titled (borrowed from Mark Twain) A Good Walk Spoiled, he tells of the PGA Touring pros who were picked for the elite Ryder Cup Team. Every one of them is a tour winner. Every one of them is a big money-maker. Every one of them qualifies as "affluent male." Feinstein reports that they refused, to a man, to pay the traditional Ryder Cup team call on the President. The President in this case was Bill Clinton. With all the money they make, and their urge to keep as much as possible, pro golfers are unrelenting supporters of the Republican Party.
There are two significant questions: why do people with money and a gift for earning it (not to be confused with true talent or dedication) always behave so protectively when they perceive that some tax-and-spend government wonk with a left-leaning liberal bias wants to tax some of that wealth away to help support the institutions that make their money-earning possible in the first place?
Even more profoundly sad: why does that same political imperative manifest itself in the attitudes of young males who are often at best working at entry-level jobs and have only fantasies of some day becoming affluent? And why do they think they can make themselves feel bigger (phallically that is) by calling caring people "whiners?" Why indeed!
Next week: Testosterone and the politics of diversion.
What about you?
Are you a whiner or a man? How does the Return of Guy Culture affect your life? Do you have evidence that the New Age of Guydom has come?
Tell Straight Goods and see what others are saying...
Then Take the Straight Goods poll on Guy Culture
Posted: May 14, 2001
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