The Unmade Bed Read online

  Masculinity today has become practically synonymous with degradation. Conjure up the image of a young man, and you automatically picture a loser. He lives in his parents’ basement, alternating video games and porn, presumably underemployed from either inclination or bad luck. Naturally he never reads; that’s for pussies. He eats burgers wrapped in pizzas or donut egg sandwiches or anything covered in bacon. He hangs out with his childhood friends doing childish things unless absolutely forced to do otherwise. This man-boy, basically the stock male character of all contemporary comedies, converts somewhere in his thirties into the reluctant dad, the guy who really wants to be drinking beer rather than talking with his wife or driving his kids around. Why women would fall in love with these boys or the men they half-turn-into is a mystery: lack of other options, or the attractions of condescension?

  The contemporary American male retreats whenever possible. The “man cave” is a perfect articulation of the situation men find themselves in; they can recover their manliness only in hiding, in a physical retreat that is simultaneously a retreat in time. The contemporary man cave is for the contemporary caveman. The figure of the man who is proud of his masculinity, who revels in it, is almost inevitably the douchebag. He struts through the world, daring it to despise his crudity. The douchebag has no taste and no values and no discipline. He calls himself a jackass. He’s proud to be in an entourage, a professional hanger-on. He possesses all the iconography of traditional male power and wants to own stupidly expensive markers of that power. The expense is primarily what matters. The douchebag does not drive a Jaguar E-type. He drives a Hummer. Or, even better, an ironically polluting diesel-spewing tractor-trailer.

  * * *

  The despicable shibboleth of the new hypermasculinity is the word bro. After The Fast and the Furious and How I Met Your Mother and Breaking Bad, if a show contains more than one male character under the age of fifty, they will, at some point, call each other by that name. Online, where cliché is rechristened as meme, bro is a natural epithet: “Come at me, bro,” or “Don’t tase me, bro.” Among writers who are trying to be funny the word has morphed into a series of fused words, comic portmanteaus (portmanbros, if you insist), which have coagulated into a full-on brocabulary: brogrammers, for young male computer programmers; brostep, for a white male version of dubstep; curlbros, for bros who spend too much time on their biceps. Anything that men do in groups, any activity whatsoever, they do as bros.

  Subject to intense semantic distortion and fluctuation, the word bro is slippery, but one feature of its use and abuse remains constant: the underlying contempt for male friendship it implies. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary has traced the history of the word only to be flummoxed by the range of its contemporary usage. In the 1970s the word shifted from being a short form of brother to being an epithet used among African Americans. At the same time, among surfers the word brah drifted across from Hawaii. Bro has since become almost exclusively a term of usage among white men. The OED identifies one of its stranger properties: “a certain element of metonymy: by being the sort of person who says ‘bro,’ a person becomes a bro.” The word is fluid, almost untranslatable into its own language, and much like the word hipster it has become embroiled in its own opposition, at least among people who care about what bro might or might not mean. The word has “a level of nuance that a conventional dictionary entry is ill-suited to describe: the semantic boundaries are subjective and in constant flux.”

  One major function of the word is to give women with an Ivy League education a chance to mock lower-class men. Jezebel posted a “Field Guide to Bros” in 2014. The critique encompassed dress as varied as “salmon colored shorts,” “plaid shirts,” and “ill-fitting business casual” and activities as distinct as “reading the New Yorker on the train” and “attending church services.” The Jezebel bro would include professors of semiotics and construction workers, black men and white men, the intelligent and the lunkheaded, the fey and the macho. Bro, in their reading, is indistinguishable from young middle-class American male, and their use of the term is a signifier of their cool comic-edged misandry, sort of the verbal equivalent of wearing a T-shirt that says “I bathe in male tears.”

  The first portmanbro the OED could find was from a surfing magazine. Bromance is the ideal as well as the original portmanbro. Men who love each other are either clandestine homosexuals or homophobes or probably both. The polyvalence of the term allows for its audience to pick which insult it prefers. All forms of male community are connected with one another: fraternities with anime fan gatherings, soldiers with men who hang around in cafés talking about their creative writing courses, corporate board members and skateboarders. All are men in groups. All are bros. The actual content of the contempt is irrelevant, so long as it is there.

  In popular culture the friendships between women are the source and the choicest fruit of their maturity. In the final scene of Noah Baumbach’s 2012 film Frances Ha, Frances glimpses her oldest friend across a crowded room. “Who are you making eyes at?” somebody asks. “That’s Sophie. She’s my best friend.” And we know that theirs was the film’s true love story all along. Insofar as any given television show is about women, it’s about friendship—Sex and the City, Girls, Broad City, and so on. Male friendship on any given sitcom, or in any Judd Apatow movie, is a retreat into thoughtlessness, crudity. The Big Lebowski hilariously painted male friendship as an extended and colossal fuckup. The Hangover movies turned it into a series of epic degradations—involving Mike Tyson and a tiger in Las Vegas, ladyboys in Bangkok, and waking up in a bathroom with breast implants. But the standard buddy movie of the moment, a movie like 22 Jump Street, is defined by a single word: dumb. That’s why the greatest buddy movie of them all is Dumb and Dumber. Men get together onscreen to be idiots with one another. To mature as a female person is to mature into female friendships. To mature as a male person is to mature out of male friendships.

  It should come as no surprise, then, that the culture that has given rise to the word bro is a culture in which male friendship is in crisis. The transition from boyhood to manhood is a journey into isolation. Becoming a man means leaving behind your family and your friends, striking out on your own. And therefore growing up means shedding connections. Male suicide rates correlate precisely to the loss of their friendships. At age nine suicide rates are the same for girls and boys. Between ten and fourteen, boys are twice as likely to kill themselves. Between fifteen and nineteen, they are four times as likely. From twenty to twenty-four, five times.

  Masculine maturity is inherently a lonely thing to possess. That’s why maturity and despair go together for men. The splendid isolation of masculinity has emerged from so much iconography—the cowboy, the astronaut, the gangster—that almost every hero in the past fifty years has been a figure of loneliness. Current pop culture is even more extreme: it doesn’t merely celebrate the lonely man; it despises men in groups. That contempt runs counter to male biology. Men, every iota as much as women, are social creatures who live in a permanent state of interdependence and require connection for basic happiness. In periods of vulnerability the male suicide rate spikes. Unemployed men kill themselves twice as often as employed men. (There’s no difference in the rates for employed and unemployed women.) After divorce a man is ten times as likely to commit suicide as a woman. Men over eighty-five kill themselves thirteen times more often than women over eighty-five.

  Suicide has become the leading cause of death by injury in America, surpassing car accidents. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 38,364 suicides and 33,687 deaths by car accident. And the major reason for that change is a cohort shift. The group that has shown the highest increase in suicide rates is middle-aged men, for whom the number of suicides has risen by a horrifying 28.4 percent in a mere decade; among that group the rate for men in their fifties has risen nearly 50 percent since 1999.
/>
  The reasons for this rise are speculative. The increased availability of prescription drugs may play some role, since poisoning has become a common method of suicide. There have never been more guns in America, and gun ownership correlates to an increase in suicide. There has also been the brutality of the recession and the new reality of people in middle age taking care of elderly parents while they’re also taking care of young children. Economic pressures are the most compelling reason; for example, after the 2008 crash the number of suicides increased globally by 3.3 percent. The more substantial, and more complicated and disturbing answer is cultural. Suicide is not connected to religious values or traditional family structure. It is directly related to loneliness, to social isolation. And not only are American men more likely to be lonely, but they are also more likely to deny their loneliness.

  Who needs research to understand the difference? Look at the women around you—your mother, your sister, your wife, or your girlfriend. How many people can they call when they have a bad day? And the men?

  * * *

  Without friendships life simply isn’t worth much. Friendship is essential not just to a personal sense of well-being but to society. In The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle prizes it more than justice: “When men are friends, they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.” Note that Aristotle says “friendship,” not “bromance.”

  Bro is a light word encumbered by shadow. It is a joke aglow in an aura of suffering. Both the men who use it as a password for a community of idiots and the outsiders who use it as a cipher for contempt mean to imply the darkness and the suffering as much as the lightness and the joking. They respect fundamentally only the lonely man, the man who is by himself. They betray, by that respect, the deep traditionalism of their vision of masculinity, the man who needs no other. That traditional masculinity must wither and die unless we insist that men themselves wither and die. The sophistication of adult male friendship is essential to being a fully formed person. Men need friendships the way they need oxygen, in blood and bone. The current contempt cannot last because the lesson for men is obvious: Keep your bros. Just don’t call them that.

  * * *

  How did manhood become synonymous with crudity? The Beauty Myth blamed a vague patriarchy for the state of femininity in mass culture. It would be stupid to repeat that mistake when it comes to the decrepitude of masculinity. Men have themselves constructed the palace of shit they inhabit.

  A recent series of studies from UC Berkeley tested what sociologists call “the masculine overcompensation thesis,” the theory that when men feel their masculinity is threatened, they respond by exaggerating their masculine traits. The researchers found that when men were given feedback that they were feminine, they tended to increase their support for war, homophobia, male dominance, and “purchasing an SUV.” Women do not respond this way. If you give women feedback that they are masculine, they don’t suddenly want to buy a pink Prius. Overcompensation always tends to devolve into its crudest traits. Globally we are living in the midst of macho taken to the point of a joke—most obviously in the glistening prick who was Silvio Berlusconi. But maybe most chillingly in the case of Vladimir Putin, he who wrestles with tigers, who dives for amphorae in the Black Sea, the expressionless judo master who brings a dog on state visits with Angela Merkel because he knows she hates them, the frightened tyrant overseeing a failed state shellacked in virility. Donald Trump, as a political phenomenon, is the purest possible expression of masculine overcompensation in the history of the Republic.

  But in America you can see the history of masculine overcompensation, with its willful, intentional drive to crudity, most clearly in the novelists. The iconic American male writers of the postwar period—especially the great ones—responded to the rise of women with fear and puff-chested emptiness. When Norman Mailer wrote “The sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maqueillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn,” he was reacting to the fact that there had emerged dozens of female writers better than he: Germaine Greer, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison. Only a threatened man would utter such nonsense.

  Philip Roth, the greatest male novelist of his generation, turned himself into a well-established brand of forgiven misogyny. When Portnoy timidly offers to buy a shiksa a drink, she sneers. When he violently claims he wants to eat her pussy, she approves: “We went to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and said, ‘Go ahead.’ ” This is an amazingly common fantasy: that by being an asshole, you score. The strategy might even work, but here’s the thing: even when it does, you’re still an asshole.

  Roth is a great writer, but all his books are an angry reaction. Like all inherently angry men, what he craves is pity. He longs desperately to fit himself into the new status of victimology that emerged out of the 1960s. All of Roth’s great late novels contain that inversion. Established men, of the most dominant sort in the most traditional positions of power, turn out to be victims. So American Pastoral works this way: the Swede is a successful factory owner—rich, white, privileged—but the real story is he’s the one being fucked over. In the most welcoming country and period in the history of the Jewish people, Roth wrote The Plot Against America, an imagined counterhistory in which America is a great anti-Semitic power. In The Human Stain Coleman Silk is a white classics professor—and so not entitled to pity—but then it turns out, magically, that he’s black, and so entitled to pity. Roth has proven to be a devoted, clandestine apprentice of the identity politics he claims to revile.

  Postfeminist machismo has essentially dissolved in the absurdity of its own premises. It was never entirely credible because it was so obviously on the losing side. Roth is, deservedly, one of the most widely admired writers in America, but no one wants to write like him. He has no imitators; he influences no one. The sad young literary men adore him, rally to his defense whenever he’s attacked, but don’t kid yourself: at their desks they’re all trying to be Alice Munro. He wrote books that sting. They write books that soothe.IV

  Mailer and Roth, and John Updike too, tried on the recognizable self-loathing braggadocio of teenage boys well into their seventies, terrified of the fact of their body and of the seemingly oceanic negotiations required for intimacy. The septuagenarians and the teenage boys aren’t wrong to be afraid; equality is terrifying. You put your soul at risk. And so it’s much easier to pose as if you’d cheerfully trade your soul for a little anal. But this crude masculinity won’t do for too much longer. It pretends to be “men as they really are,” but it’s obviously as much a mask as anything else. And only the desperate would wear such a stupid, self-loathing mask for long.

  Men are obviously at the end of something, possibly of many things, but each ending is also a beginning. You won’t find the hope in books or even on screen, but there’s a glimmer in the clothes men wear on the street. In his Treatise on Elegant Living, Balzac wrote a series of maxims for men of style. Number 40 is “Clothing is how society expresses itself.” Men’s clothing of the moment is an expression of a deep contradiction: the weak act hard and the hard act weak. At a rib festival in a poor suburb of my city, where mostly working-class families consumed big slabs of slow-cooked meat on plastic benches with the music of a Neil Diamond cover band drifting overhead, the vast majority of men, particularly the young men, looked “hard,” with bicep-baring shirts, chunky jewelry, and extensive arrays of tattoos. Because they had no money, they wore their money. Because they had no power, they displayed power. The following week I happened to be at a bris in the very choicest neighborhood of the city. A bris with valet parking. There the softness of the clothes was reminiscent of a weekend at the cottage, the shirts hanging out, the shorts frayed, everyone in sandals, the vague hint of antique English soap and sand from exclusive beaches. There were p
eople worth hundreds of millions of dollars in that room. Wearing rags showed how invulnerable they were.

  Strength means weakness and weakness means strength. The man in the salmon-colored shirt fires the man in overalls. A face covered with Nazi tattoos is the face of a man as powerless as it is possible to be. Mark Zuckerberg, emanating gentle geekiness, projects his billions. Snoop Dogg changed his name to Snoop Lion; it was a sign that his gangster life—which played so weak by acting so hard—was ending, and true self-determination was emerging. When Jay Z rapped about “Big Pimpin’ ” he was expressing how powerless he was as a young black man. Now he appears on the subway talking politely to nice Jewish ladies who don’t recognize him. That’s power. That’s a man who knows what he’s about.

  Masculine sensibility has turned into a game of leveling. Strength can mean weakness, which can again mean strength. Michael Cera plays an asshole to prove that he’s a nice guy who was raised in a secure middle-class family. Kanye West insults other singers, which proves he’s vulnerable, which demonstrates that he has overcome hardships. The choice that emerged for women, the screen drawn between the self and its objectification, is beginning, just beginning, to intrude into the lives of men.

  * * *

  Masculinity and femininity, in terms of their cultural expressions, dwell in an infinitely varying, endlessly expanding series of citations, for men and women both. For women, these citations are a means of escape and retrenchment. For men citations are a way of negotiating the end of patriarchal norms. In both cases, straight sexuality is becoming theatrical, and the farther we go the more extreme that theatricality grows. The most popular of popular culture exemplifies gender performativity: For women, the Kardashians, the “real” housewives, Martha Stewart, and a hundred domestic goddesses perform elaborate parodies of feminine traits, taken seriously and comically at once. For men, The Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Warriors, and Duck Dynasty show tough guys wrestling with the forces of nature for the amusement of deskbound data analysts. They show bearded men doing ludicrously “manly” things, with the manliness firmly kept in quotation marks. Donald Trump, as a pop culture figure, is basically walking “manliness.” In the welter of back and forth, in the froth of the display, straight camp is emerging. Straight camp defines the current cultural reality of masculinity and femininity.