He-man Woo!

[onager]

Meet Frank Miniter, author of The Ultimate Man's Survival Guide.

Classic false dichotomy, anyone?: Women quite rightly realize they're better off with Crocodile Dundee than with Ryan Seacrest.

But he really shines at historical analysis:

It's revealing to note that every culture successful enough to support an upper class produced sissies.

For example French kings, such as King Louis XIV, once wore high-heeled shoes, silk stockings, and long, curly wigs made from women's hair.

In Victorian England, men...wore frock coats with fitted waists and matching vests, silk top hats and stockings, and cravats, and practiced strutting with walking sticks with polished brass knobs.

Yet those were both two of the most patriarchal societies this world has ever seen.

So then, what dandified those men? Just like urban America today, a complete lack of connection with their roots in the natural world is what is shrank their gonads.

I admit, the connection between fashion and masculinity puzzles me. But...

That sissy Louis XIV fought a series of major wars that nearly bankrupted France. And he helped the bankruptcy process by ruthlessly persecuting/exiling one of his most productive minorities, the Huguenots.

As for those "sissies" in Victorian England, some wore snappy red uniforms trimmed in white lace, and fought bitter colonial wars from India to the Sudan to Afghanistan.

Fortunately, there IS a solution. Just buy Miniter's book, which will teach you how to fight mountain lions. For the practical part of the training, as opposed to the book-learning part, I guess you can hire Miniter as your guide.

Or you could do this:

Just travel to any Third World country where men still have to till the earth with their hands and hunt to fill the pot, and look around to see if you can find a "girly-man" wishing he had a fuller-bodied shampoo.

Fortunately, I just spent nearly 4 years in a Third World country--Egypt. "Till the earth?" Try planting rice, which means standing knee-deep for hours in filthy water from the local irrigation canal.

You can also experience some real he-man stuff that has mostly disappeared in the decadent First World--cholera, typhoid, river blindness and rabies, among many others.

Here's his interview, in the National (Socialist) Review Online:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTA0Y2EyMzIzOThlMGZmNGIzMGNjMGM2OGM3NjRiNDc=&w=MA==

On edit - one last pearl of wisdom from Frank Miniter: Men need to stand up to today's moral relativism and belch.

Thanks, but I would rather fart in your general direction...

[charlie]

1. National Review, color me surprised.

Whatta toon. Miniter is the guy with the furtive eyes in the shower, terrified his peeking will be mistaken for homosexual lust, but desperately needing assurance he isn't the low man on the Totem of Poles.

Third World earth tillers may not have use for scented shampoos, but plenty of them kiss faces and hold hands with men. Y'know, unremarkable gestures of greeting and affection. Surely ol' Frank's seen them do it. It must be in a chapter called, Overcoming Your Fear of Being a Homo: Real Men Kiss Real Men and I've Got the Field Studies to Prove It.

There are scenes in American Psycho where Christian Bale goes through his ablutions naked, while a voiceover drones a litany of gels, depilatories, moisturizers, etc. He emerges crisply dressed, perfectly coiffed, unblemished, and radiant. IOW, a metrosexual poofter-doofter man. I've seen women go wobbly from lack of oxygen after seeing that. I've had to snap my fingers to break my wife's trance.

Sorry Frank, you lose. BTW, doesn't your certainty about what lubricates a woman's libido scare you a little bit?

Call your high school biology teacher. Ask him why a peacock drags around a flouncy riot that makes him a sitting duck for predators (hint: major babe-age). Learn something and I'll look forward to your book's revised edition.

[realisticphish]

2. do women actually go for these guys?

the "ultra he-man" guys? And by that I don't just mean traditionally tough guys, but rather the pseudo intellectual idiots who write guides to manipulating women, etc (like our idiot in the OP)

[onager]

3. These women sure don't...

And this is where I stole the story:

http://jezebel.com/5280305/being-a-man-a-rough-life-or-not-rough-enough?skyline=true&s=x

The comments are hilarious, as always at this site. I waste way too much time lurking over there.

[Warpy]

4. I suppose a certain type does

just like there are groupies for all the he man poseur stuff from rock bands to NASCAR. Even bantam roosters find willing hens, after all.

The swaggering always meant shortcomings in, er, other areas to me, though.

What do you want to bet Miniter had only one physically demanding job in his life and that he was fired from it for not being able to manage it?

He'd be no different from any other man who asked his buddies what women really wanted but would never consider asking any women except that Miniter thinks he also has all the answers.

The comments are hilarious!

[Odin2005]

9. IMO most swaggering swashbuckler types are, erm, "compensating" for something.

[Odin2005]

8. I got in a flame-war on another message board because a couple posters claimed...

...that "deep down" all women liked "bad boys" and similar misogynist crap and that "sensitive guys" like myself only get attention from women out of pity. What a load of BS.

[Evoman]

18. Lol...are you sure you weren't arguing against me?

I gotta be honest...I was a pretty "sensitive" type guy in high school. I got jerked around quite a bit by women. And then I just fucking lost it. I stopped giving a shit, started hitting the gym, and turned into something akin to a "bad boy". Ha..it was like night and day....picking up women was freakin' easy. And not screwed up women or headcases....nice girl, smart girls, great girls.

Oh, I'm not like that anymore. I got over myself. And I was never homophobic like the author of the bullshit in the OP. And I realized I could still be a sort of nice guy, as long as I didn't let anyone walk all over me. I treat women well, but I also don't take any shit.

So I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you...I think your fucking awesome the way you are. And if your sensitive and caring, then fuck that bad boy bullshit. But some advice....don't ever underestimate the power in having an edge.

[moggie]

14. Perhaps you could ask: do men go for these guys?

In college, I knew a gay man who played rugby. It's a very physical, aggressive sport, and the common perception of players (at least the amateurs) is that they see themselves as "ultra he-man" guys. But, according to my friend, playing rugby is a great way to pick up closeted guys from among your fellow players...

I've always wondered how many of the most assertively masculine men are over-compensating for teh gay.

[salvorhardin]

5. The wacko right has been fixated on the so-called feminization of society for decades

It's the same old sapping-our-precious-bodily-fluids thing that Kubrick pilloried. What's bizarre is their ridiculous cartoon imagining of masculinity. Where does that come from? Honestly? I know it's rooted in images of the Old West, and probably some Alice In Wonderland version of Social Darwinism (not that they'll admit to believing in any sort of Darwinism) but seriously, does anyone know where this hyper-masculine mystique originated?

[realisticphish]

6. I think it's a product of female empowerment

to be blunt, women are pickier. Men have to actually, you know, TALK to women, and be empathetic to an extent. Basically, they resent the fact that women don't just swoon over them because they lift weights and grunt, and blame it on them there faggy homo boys with the nice hair and the nice personality and the not being total jerks (not that that the former type doesn't get dates).


but even more than physical image, I think they are just uncomfortable with women being more aggressive and (to use a term I'm not fond of) "liberated." So, they attack men who are perfectly fine with that by calling them feminized.

[salvorhardin]

7. But when did the, for want of a better word, meme first appear?

Was the Hollywood Old West and WWII imagery co-opted and intensified by the far right? If so, then we're probably talking about the 1950s which fits because that's when far right groups like the John Birch Society first appeared (1958).

Actually, I'm reminded of the "He-Man Woman Haters Club" from The Little Rascals which Wiki tells me is 1937, so the meme goes back at least that far, although it probably hadn't been co-opted by the far right yet.

[realisticphish]

10. true

that period is also the beginning of "the sixties," which may be a driving force here. The arms race with the Soviet Union may also have created an atmosphere where masculinity was a valued trait for soldiers and defenders of the nation (going with your example of WWII imagery), whereas communists and leftists were perceived as "effeminate"

[onager]

11. The Sixties were a mini-Armageddon for the Nut Right

People like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter still rail against the Sixties as the time when America went into the toilet.

You could say the backlash against the Sixties started in the middle of that decade. I'd say specifically 1966--the year California elected Ronald Reagan as governor. That came after years of electing governors who were liberal Repuplicans (Earl Warren) and liberal Democrats (Pat Brown). And only 2 years after Reagan's far-right base suffered a crushing defeat in the 1964 Presidential elections.

But I'd really rather rant about the epitome of tough Old West manhood, John Wayne...who absolutely hated horses and always tried to avoid riding them in his movies.

Like G.W. Bush, Wayne was basically a draft dodger. Except he dodged the draft in the Big One, WWII. Wayne got deferment after Cheney-like deferment because he was married and had kids. But many Hollywood stars who voluntarily enlisted in the armed forces also had kids:

People who knew Wayne say he felt bad about not having served. (During the war he'd gotten into a few fights with servicemen who wondered why he wasn't in uniform.) Some think his guilty conscience was one reason he became such a superpatriot later. The fact remains that the man who came to symbolize American patriotism and pride had a chance to do more than just act the part, and he let it pass.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1055/was-john-wayne-a-draft-dodger

[salvorhardin]

12. Do you think Frederick Jackson Turner is to blame?

Do you think Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" basically romanticized the image of the rugged, tough-as-nails, frontiersman making this stereotypically masculine image synonymous with what it means to be a true American? Can we blame later cartoonish hyper-masculine imagery and its subsequent far right idolatry on him?

As with Wayne, this would be ironic because FJT didn't exactly exude cowboy essence.

[onager]

13. Not blame him, exactly...

...but I'm sure the Frontier Thesis contributed a lot to the idea of "cowboy culture."

Heck, I'll even contribute my own idea, the Dime Novel Helped Us Win WWII Thesis. Adolf Hitler never visted the U.S. (or hardly anywhere else). But Hitler was greatly influenced by the simplistic cowboys-n-Indians stories of Karl May--also a German. May visited the US once, in 1908, long after he wrote his Western novels. He did see a buffalo. Buffalo, NY, that is, which was the westernmost point he reached on his trip.

Albert Speer said that even near the end of WWII, Hitler was re-reading the May books. According to Speer, their simple Good-Guy/Bad-Guy plots comforted him the way other people were comforted by the Bible.

As with Wayne, this would be ironic because FJT didn't exactly exude cowboy essence.

Also true of another guy who sort of expanded on Turner and said the U.S. needed to keep expanding--Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783.

Mahan tried to avoid actual sea duty whenever he could. Probably for good reason, as his Wikipedia entry notes:

...his skills in actual command of a ship were not exemplary, and a number of vessels under his command were involved in collisions, with both moving and stationary objects.

:rofl:

[moggie]

15. Changing patterns of labour probably play a part

My father had manual jobs all his life. He never had a need to prove his masculinity, because he was out there every day working with his muscles and bringing home the money to his housewife, the way tradition demanded. I sit on my arse all day in an office, alongside women doing the same work, and have no upper-body strength. I don't worry about whether this makes me not a "real man", but I can see how some would.

[realisticphish]

16. that's a good point

think of how many mbas are obsessed with cars and other material possessions. Substitutes to physical achievement

[onager]

17. Same here.

My father did construction work, mostly of the pouring-concrete-nature. In summers I worked for him just enough to know I NEVER wanted to make a living doing that.

My mother's father was an interesting case. He really came up the hard way, quitting school at age 9 to help support his mother and working his way up to a management position in a textile mill. He could just look at a machine, and figure out how to take it apart and put it back together. (I only inherited the first part of that skill set.)

But he also had a houseful of books and was always reading. Almost as though trying to make up for his missed education.

Like you, I work in an office today and don't worry at all about my Real Man Cred.

[Evoman]

19. That's the funny thing....old school men from those days would look at bullshit like the guy in the

OP and turn away in disgust.

I know my grandpa had strength and character, and nobody could ever take his "man cred". But he didn't need to disparage "girly men" or impress other people with what he could bench.