Manliness Unbound

Blessed as I am to live in a world technologically advanced to produce the miracle of DVR, I can fast forward through all the commercials on TV. So I rarely get to see commercials anymore except on  Super Bowl Sunday...and even then I only get to see the ones good enough to stop the intermittent socializing going on and really command attention. But yet another unpleasant by-product of the Trump Era is that so much looniness is happening in real time in rapid order that one is compelled to watch more as it unfolds rather than record and save for later when whatever was news at noon has been totally eclipsed by whatever is news at 1 or 2. As a consequence I find myself being exposed to more commercials lately, like the two in the clip below:


I must confess, at first I found those ads so freaking weird that I do believe that if they were run on Super Sunday they would stop any conversation dead. Whether they would start an immediate stampede to buy catheters and turd tenderizers I can't really say. But I'd make a Las Vegas bet that if you took them out of the weekday afternoon cable news ghetto and stuck them sometime between the first and second quarters of a Super Bowl game they would give Go-Daddy girls and Budweiser clydesdales a real run for their attention-seeking money. A crusty cowboy selling catheters and a bruising biker guy selling poop pellets would absolutely dominate the post-game analysis of in-game advertising. And maybe that focus would lead to a wider, deeper conversation about the state of masculinity in America.

Surely manhood seems to be in a state of acute crisis. How else to explain the overt, omnipresent declarations of toughness? Just today an SUV barreled by me on the road with a bumper sticker that read Make Hockey Violent Again. It was immediately followed by a pick-up bearing the ubiquitous warning: Don't Tread on Me . Sixty-two million Americans voted to make a con artist their leader largely because he played a tough guy on TV, famous for telling people "You're fired!". All indications are that we are suffering through the zeitgeist of the Macho Man. 

But what if there is nothing really unique about this seeming epidemic of unhinged masculinity? What if it is nothing more than a retelling of an ancient myth as old as humankind? By now most readers must know how much The Nob loves mythology. To further explain, here is one of the great authorities on mythology, Bronislaw Malinowski, on why myth is so essential to understanding ourselves:

Myth is...an indispensable ingredient of all culture. It is constantly regenerated; every historical change creates its mythology, which is, however, but indirectly related to historical fact. 

What if this rampant display of machismo in our present day is only indirectly related to red states and blue states, racism, misogyny and the rise of #MeToo? What if it follows a direct line back to a more primal fear of physical decline? Malinowski conducted most of his groundbreaking study of primitive mythology for Magic, Science and Religion among the Trobriand islanders off New Guinea. He writes of them:

...Human beings, one and all, had to submit to the process of decay and debility brought on by old age. This, however, did not involve the full incidence of the inexorable fate which is present in the lot of man; for old age, bodily decay, and debility do not spell death to the natives. In order to understand the full cycle of their beliefs it is necessary to understand the factors of illness, decay, and death. The native of the Trobriands is definitely an optimist in his attitude to health and illness. Strength, vigor, and bodily perfection are to him a natural status which can only be affected by an accident or by a supernatural cause.

So in the broader scheme of things, these excessive, over-the-top self proclamations of manhood and toughness can be seen as less poetic expressions of Dylan Thomas's famous poem, Do Not go Gentle into the that Good Night: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The current, near hysterical outbreak of ostentatious manliness arises out of an innate fear that Macho Man is on his death bed. In the narrower sense of the two ads cited above for catheters and stool softeners, dressing the two pitchmen up respectively as a cowboy and a biker is nothing less than an attempt to keep the myth alive of "strength, vigor, and bodily perfection". 

Now does that mean that the ad makers consciously went about creating these ads to "regenerate" an ancient myth? Not at all. That's what makes myth so magical and mysterious. It worms its way into a culture and manifests itself in ways often just comprehensible at a subconscious level. And we go along our merry way believing we are so far above such primitive voodoo-hoodoo. Yet we make real, consequential choices in our public and private lives according to such mythology every day...like what medical remedy to buy and what candidate to lead us.