I Am a Man

I am a man.

I saw an interview with Daniel Radcliffe the other day, and that’s what he had to say to all those people who still think he’s a cute little wizard.

I too am a man, and apparently it means a number of things.

For some, it means to be one of the last remaining hairy, muscled warrior kings without need for emotions or pity clenching a battle axe in your calloused hands at the ends of your scarred and bleeding forearms barking orders to your brethren as they join in conquest of the enemy in hopes of one day returning to your womenfolk and ravishing them so one day their 15 sons can go on to inherit your glory.

For others, it means being someone who works hard for a living, coming home sweaty on Friday and washing up with Lava before dressing in denim and driving your pickup to the local bar where you’ll spend an evening tossing back beer, making fun of midgets, and discussing just what it is you like more – custom-built V10 racing lawnmowers, or women’s Jello wrestling.

Still, for many it means high-fiving at a college football game and tanking up on cheap brew while slipping nips of Jagermeister between field goals before stumbling back to the frat house turning your visor sideways to better shoot a cell-phone video of some dumb brunette playing truth or dare in her underwear as Chumbawumba jostles the organs in your chest cavity.

Recently, a number of people think it means pausing your game of  ”Gears of War 2″ to set the Tivo to record “The Science of Star Trek” and checking the progress of your torrent download of 10,000 photos of Jenna Jameson in action before you head out to the mailbox to collect the shipment from the seller on Ebay who promised you a mint “Sin City” Marv Bobble Head action figure with the rare misspelling on the packaging.

Guess what ladies? You think being a man is sad, depressing and gross.

We know, that’s why we changed and/or hid our manliness for nearly two decades. But then, suddenly it seems, something happened.

Perhaps you’ve noticed it. The backlash against sensitivity and feminine aesthetics over the last few years.

Men, it seems, are tired of being emasculated and are seeking some form of release.

The first modern exploration of this was probably 1996′s “Fight Club,” and later the movie.

Chuck Pahluniuk wrote a book out of a desire to create some sort of place where men could be men. Other novels like “The Joy Luck Club,” “How to Make an American Quilt,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “The Ya-Ya Sisterhood” and so on had created these tiny exclusionary groups where women could indulge in their womanhood, yet men had nothing other than video games and sports.

He saw a modern life where many of the attributes men bring to the table in an evolutionary sense were no longer valued. Aggression, physical strength, competitive drive and ribald sexual appetites are all frowned upon. Likewise, the things society suggested we were to aspire to – rock gods, astronauts, tycoons, quarterbacks – were largely unattainable goals.

“Fight Club” is about two generations of men who are living in the shadows of the manliest men who ever lived; The Greatest Generation laughs in their faces. Ghosts of fathers and grandfathers munch on cigars right behind you as your short, overweight douche of a boss tells you how it is.

He suggested deep within all men there is a yearning to return to a place where the things that make us male are important again, and the things that keep us in cubicles and hair salons are once again meaningless.

Of course, in the book and the movie, the result was a fascist dictatorship of sorts causing mayhem through terrorist acts and violence. The duality of man is a harsh and ugly truth.

“Fight Club” often ends up in user-voted top ten lists for best movies of all time. The book is passed around and read by men who barely skim sports pages. Men dig it because just about every one of us would end up in a fight club if we had the chance, or at least we like to believe we would. Why, you might ask?

If you are a woman, I highly recommend you go and get a shot of testosterone (yes, you can actually do this) and get a taste of what it’s like being a man. Some women who do this report unfathomable horniness, uncontrollable aggression and a sudden and deep desire to eat the raw flesh of the noble elk.

Ladies, imagine the horniest you have ever been, multiply that by 17, and that’s us every second of the day until we die. Add to this a hair-trigger temper that demands blood for transgressions on our honor, pride and possessions along with a need to defeat anyone who challenges us in anything – be it nuclear war or table hockey – and that’s us every second of the day.

Some men are able to keep all that manliness in check, pushing it down and denying it. Some can’t. Either way – bars, stadiums, strip clubs and arcades act as refuges where the monster can roam free for a while before Dr. Jekyll is forced to put on his suit and act like an evolved human being again.

Consider the Real Doll. Men will have sex with a doll if it looks enough like a beautiful woman. Who wants to live like that? No one does, but we do what must with the brain we were given. Male Australian jewel beetles will mate with discarded brown beer bottles because the shape and texture resembles a female – a gigantic, yet irresistibly hot female. The circuitry is hard-wired to respond, and it does.

Biologists call Real Dolls and brown beer bottles supernormal releasers. When a normal stimulator of behavior gets exaggerated, sometimes it overwhelms you. The beetles fuck the bottles instead of actual females, and then they die without having passed on their genes or formed a mutual, lasting relationship based on respect.

I promise you, men would love to be able to turn off our stupid, hyper sexual, hyper aggressive mind at will. Being a man means being in control. Being a man means not descending into a place where you engage in pseudonecrophilia with a lifeless automaton. For some, this is the only way they can cope. Without the doll, they might descend further still.

Advertising has caught on in a big way. Always roaming around in our collective unconscious, advertising geniuses recently discovered our emasculation and are using it to sell us all sorts of stupid shit.

Examples:

I could fill the page with ads devoted to this. You get the point I’m sure. Men want to be men again, want to celebrate that which was once scorned, and they’re willing to buy stuff in the name of being a man. Companies out to make a buck oblige by creating products designed to appeal to men. How can metal strips glued to a strip of plastic be gender specific?

But wait, there’s another way to capitalize on this feeling of emasculation, sell people a chance to reclaim their manhood. The military loves this. You’ll find Navy ads with rock and roll, Marines ads with men fighting hellspawn, and the worst, Army ads with young men playing videogames and being taunted by real soldiers. “Hey, pussies. Want to be real man? Then put down that remote and stand up straight. Wipe the Cheeto crumbs off your shirt and call a recruiter!”

Seriously? No one sits there playing “Halo” thinking, “You know, the only thing that would make this game better would to be the sensation of the actual blood of my friends being sprayed into my eyes and mouth.”

They relentlessly play these recruitment commercials during “The Daily Show,” “Adult Swim” and “Attack of The Show.” They know who they’re after. Hell, why do you think there’s a cable network devoted to men? Spike is just capitalism at work. Target demographic acquired, launch “Girls Gone Wild.”

But, far worse than the Army of One campaign and the Army Strong campaign, both designed to make you feel as if taking orders somehow makes you a stronger individual, are the Strength for Now, Strength for Later ads.

In one, a skinny, chiseled-face man wearing a uniform and a beret walks up to a group of old buddies; they all yell and slap each other welcoming him home. One asks, “So, what did you do?”

He looks into his old friend’s eyes, his steely glare piercing the very heart of his inquisitor. He’s thinking how naive and soft these guys are. He’s thinking, Jesus, was I once like them?

“Computers, mostly,” he replies.

No need to go into details. They wouldn’t understand. These sorry excuses for men should just go castrate themselves right now and look over some sultan’s harem. What pathetic dipshits. Why did I even come back?

His high-school buddy, who probably still reads comic books and plays with dolls timidly moves closer.

“But, couldn’t you have just done that here?”

The mind if the soldier who was once a boy explodes into shards of flashbacks; the smell of cordite and fear fills his nostrils. He’s back in a tent, surrounded by laptops; the sound of battle rages outside. He’s yelling, “Quick, hit control, alt and delete. No, you fool! Simultaneously! Move out of the way!”

The soldier turns his head, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth might buckle.

“Not really.”

I assume he stands up after that, does an about face, and then walks out of the room and into his cab. Later, on the base, he fires up “World of Warcraft” with his uniform still on.

The other ad, which leads me into the other side of this emasculation phenomenon, features a pudgy dad sitting at a coffeehouse in the middle of the night.

Outside, rain is sheeting down. A train in the distance moves away. His son sits beside him, dressed sharply in a uniform, his face clean and his posture correct.

The dad’s gravel crunching voice comes up slow and steady like a moan from the bottom of a well, “You’re a changed man.”

The son, unflinching, returns, “How’s that?”

“Back there, when you got off the train, “the father looks away,” you did two things you’ve never done before at the same time.”

The father pauses. Is he really going to admit this?

“You shook my hand, and you looked me square in the eye.”

The dad looks into the face of his son who meets the glare like a matador waiting to strike. His body is a statue, his neck filled with tightened cords of steel. He smirks.

I assume the very next second the son stands up, looks down on the man he once feared, the man who used to beat him as slobber tinged with the tang of bourbon dribbled out of his yellowed teeth onto the carpet right before he stumbled off to enjoy violent maritals with his sobbing mother; he looks at that same man, now so small and hollow, and tells him, “I have a ride. I just wanted to meet you here and say one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Fuck you.”

You see, advertising is a the canary in the coal mine of American culture. People with something to sell or something to gain who have the money to spend do everything they can to keep up with the rapidly shifting psyche of their targets. When you start to see a trend, there’s always a good reason for it. The Army knows what they are selling, and they only need to sell it once per customer.

The Devry and ITT-Tech commercials, aimed at the same people and aired with the same programs, show people who were in dead-end jobs and had no girlfriends who, after going to Devry Technical Institute, not only get a decent job but also get to have sex with real women. Every Devry student graduates with a degree and his father’s respect.

So, it isn’t just “The Man Show” and Maxim magazine profiting from this need to be hairy. Stuff, FHM, “300″, “Jackass” – all of it is the result of people profiting on the woe that is modern man’s realization. We are no longer needed.

Don’t get me wrong here. I understand the problem.

Men don’t have wombs, and wombs can seriously get in the way of acting a fool until you’re 50. Men can be boys forever if they play their cards right. Most of us act like 16-year-olds as soon as no one is looking.

Before the birth-control pill, we had free reign of the Earth. All the institutions and governments, all the science and technology – men kept women out of the loop. Women entered the workforce, academia and politics without looking back, and it has taken a lot of struggle to get to where women are today – still short of the prize.

I think somewhere in the late ’80s, and early ’90s, there was a push to embrace femininity, to get in touch, to wear sweaters. There was a cascading wave of guilt crashing into us for being such assholes for so long, even if you weren’t one.

It was doomed from the beginning. Men may be subject to devolution, but it isn’t going to just fizzle out. That’s too bad in many ways. Holocausts and wars are certainly the domain of men, not women.

Charlie LeDuff, an inspiration and among my favorite journalists and authors, recently tapped into all of this in a new book, “Us Guys.”

LeDuff is in search of the American male. He finds a lot of men in the Heartland wandering aimlessly through life, boozing it up, drifting into old age with nothing but regret. All the dragons are dead, it seems.

His revelation? The only real men left are gay rodeo stars and their fans.

A final note. Thanks to Match.com and other online dating sites, a great deal of information has been gathered about what it takes to persuade a woman to look at a man’s profile, dig deeper, decide to share information with him and eventually meet.

If you love evolutionary psychology like myself, then you already know certain things would be revealed by the data.

According to the boo, “Freakonomics,” women are far less concerned about looks and far more concerned about income than are men. But, what’s interesting for the sake of this blog entry, is how women tend to gravitate toward a very specific group of men who don’t earn big money.

Soldiers, firemen and police officers get a lot more action in the world of online dating than do men who make a comparable amount of money. In fact, those men in uniform do just as well as wealthy businessmen and other professionals. Women tend to avoid students, actors and waiters. Also, you can be overweight, but not short.

What does that say? It says women want men to be men as much as men do. Meanwhile, men still find blond hair more attractive than college degrees.

To be a man means rising above your animal instincts and embracing humanity. It means having integrity, courage, honesty and accountability. But it seems, at least for next few hundred years, a balance must be achieved. Because as much as I love poetry and dandelions, I still wouldn’t mind being allowed once in a while to run at full speed through the highlands with a battle axe in hand.