Bro, What's Wrong With All the Dudes?

Men of a certain age, globally, seem to be speaking the same language suddenly and while it falls just short of whining, it's damned near close. But...why?

Some guys. Before they all went crazy.

He had been a Mexico City Olympian. Or maybe just an alternate for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, an event that had been some sort of rubicon for him. He had taken whatever it was possible to take, steroids-wise, to go from alternate to contender and it hadn’t panned out for him. Leaving him with little outside of a somewhat murky history of street fights and run-ins with the law.

“Yeah, man, there’s no denying it,” he once told me over drinks, “but the past few decades have been pretty tough on men.” His marriage was failing, as evidenced by the vast amount of shit he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife would talk about each other when the other one would leave the room. Massively uncomfortable being their guest but I had to know what he was talking about, because I didn’t.

The 14-year age gap between us meant he had grown up in a different America than I had. He came from an active military family, and as an ardent athlete he had seen a raft of his friends disappear down the rathole of the Vietnam War, never to return, even if they had come back with all of their limbs. Was this what he was talking about?

[E]ndless social media fueled mewling…. [and] snowflakey dissatisfaction with what we get and what we believe we deserve. Jesus…what happened to the John Wayne prototype of strong and silent?

“Nah, women’s lib and all the rest,” he shook his head. “Really put us on the back foot.”

And I wondered about this “us” of whom he was speaking. My father had been military, an Air Force intelligence officer. I had never known my mother not to work, so whatever Cleaver (Ward and June, not Eldridge) fantasy was afoot here I wasn’t picking up on it.

More than this men were born into my family at a rate of about one every 50 years, so I grew up with four sisters, female cousins, aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. If men were there it was because they had married in. And lectures from my mother would trend toward “this is something you need to know how to do if you’re going to be a good man,” she’d say while teaching me how to sew. Or cook. Or clean. “Your father was very good at all of these things.”

What was unspoken was what was very evident: don’t let anyone tell you that this is “woman’s” work. A message that was received. So my takeaway ended up being this: as the scales of justice were seeking level it was perhaps a little uncomfortable for him to weather this transition. From the changing roles of fathers, which he was at the time and I wasn’t yet, to perhaps competition in the job market.

However, my entry into the job market more often than not had me competing in spaces where not many Black folks had been before me, so even here the competition he hinted at, was a subset of the competition I was facing so WHAT THE FUCK WAS HE TALKING ABOUT?

At this point specifically there should be no secrets remaining about what it is to be a man. Certainly not to men.

Over the years I’ve heard variations of this — first from Iron John, then Leo Buscaglia — that men were in desperate need of some kind of critical care. Sometimes with statistics to back it up. Statistics about matriculation rates of women from college outpacing men, low self-esteem issues, later the Incel movement of men who were “involuntarily celibate”, men’s right activists, early glimmers of which could have been seen in films like Kramer Vs Kramer where the subtext was men are getting screwed over.

All hardened into a spearpoint that’s brought with it what everyone seems to have agreed that they can call the “man-o-sphere”, a place where previously unheard men can be heard without guilt, recrimination or the pushback that’s had men in sitcoms and cartoons reduced to generally well-intentioned stooges. These punchlines, from Ralph Kramden to Homer Simpson, “just didn’t GET it.” Cue: laugh track.

But as a famous German director once warned about denying a group, in his case he spoke of Germans, a moral imperative on account of past crimes, there was a strong possibility that all of that energy will metastasize into something more horrible down the road.

And here it is necessary to not confuse things because the aforementioned “evidence” is nothing of the sort. What men — and for me it’s been with rare exceptions in my convoy MEN — find attractive about our present Trumpian place in space is not the man’s policies, which can be quicksilver, but their delivery. Their “manly” delivery.

Trump’s very angle of attack is what gives it a framework for understanding how we’re here because of the cartoonish, professional wrestling angle that is much more a product of how a young boy might understand what it is to be a man than anything else.

Immigrants? Not your problem and identifying it as a problem is not a solution. Same with trans folks.

“Yeah, politicians where I’m from, you can’t understand them half the time!” The speaker was a Brit ex-pat with no interest in returning to a Brexit’d England. “But Trump has a lot of good points, and he just…SAYS them!”

What good points, where?

“Well Mexico is a hellhole full of murderers. So you can’t let them in, yeah?” Mexico City, for all the world, reminded me of every other global capital. Which I said. I honestly felt my life was in greater danger in Philly than I did in Mexico City.

“So there are lots of Mexicans in Philly?”

Which is just when it dawned on me that the silent, and now seething, generation of men have felt silenced for long enough that a loudmouth blowhard who may often be loud and wrong is significant for them not because he’s right or wrong, but because he is loud. From the Mexico City Olympian to this Brit, the hunger to be heard has brought us here.

Where? To the whine-a-thon that’s an earmark of the last decade. The endless social media fueled mewling. The snowflakey dissatisfaction with what we get and what we believe we deserve. Jesus…what happened to the John Wayne prototype of strong and silent?

“Eugene, what are your secrets of machismo?”

I laughed, out loud. Right up until I spied the asker’s face. He was not joking. Not even a little bit.

I said that I didn’t know but that didn’t sound…right. So another attempt: something about being wholly yourself and shouldering your burdens without complaint. This seemed to satisfy him about as much as it suddenly didn’t seem to satisfy me.

Because having this discussion at 17 is very different from thinking about it decades later. Decades that have included marriage, divorce, fathering four daughters, putting kids through college, buying houses, paying taxes. Adult living at its most crucial.

At this point specifically there should be no secrets remaining about what it is to be a man. Certainly not to men. So now finally a swing at it that comes from a life lived in the thick of it: handle your business and stop your fucking whining.

Immigrants? Not your problem and identifying it as a problem is not a solution. Same with trans folks. And keeping women in “traditional” roles a la the “trad wife” deal? Well, it doesn’t seem to me that the best way to win a race is to hobble the competition.

So, if you’re asking me, then I’m telling you that the key to victory here remains the same and hews very definitely to the handling of business and ceasing whining. See there…just saved you hours of viewing and listening to the likes of Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Charlie Kirk, and all of the other testosterone profiteers.

Now go out and be nice to people.

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