Crisis of Modern American Masculinity :: Essays Papers

Crisis of Modern American Masculinity I think every man between 20 and 40 needs to read Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Last American Man". Without going into details (like I said, you should read the book), this is a biography/profile of Eustace Conway - a man who is, among other things, capable of and prefers to (or would prefer to) live the kind of frontier lifestyle we have read about: hunting and gathering his food, living in a house he built using his own hands, making his own clothes from the skins of animals he captured, etc. I suspect that for many people the story, at least initially, will arouse the sort of Romantic feelings that tend to come with fantasies of a "simple life" of rugged self-sufficiency. However, even for those who are quite certain that they prefer their modern urban lifestyle (air conditioning, direct deposit, grocery stores, ebay, cable TV, &c.), I think this book raises fundamental questions about what it means to be a man at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The problem, as I see it, is that we have not re-defined masculinity for the modern age. In the old days, masculinity was measured by (1) physical abilities, particularly strength, but also skill, (2) power/success/wealth, and (3) sexual prowess. The first can be developed through education and hard work, the second could be acquired through the application of the first, and the third, well, either you got it or you don't, but locker-room bragging can always make up for any lacks, especially if you got the first two. Boys growing up in such a society work to develop their physical abilities and learn how to apply them most efficaciously, thus becoming a "man". This makes sense when a man might be faced with the challenge of building shelter on the prairie or raising crops, but us modern urban men are unlikely to face such challenges. Of course, we are not unprepared for the challenges of a modern urban lifestyle. Our education generally provides such life-sustaining skills as linear algebra, the performing arts, and information systems management. The educational system is successful enough to allow most of us to get jobs that pay us enough to afford all the requirements of a modern urban lifestyle: housing, food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, etc. The trouble is that while education has more or less kept pace with the advance of civilization, our notions of masculinity have not.