Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

A PubSub feed for "Lakshmi Chaudhry" leads to Feministing pointing to AlterNet reprints of a March 2006 article by Chaudhry [reprint] and Susie Bright [reprint] writing about the same topic, that is, men's portrayal as sexless consumers in recent advertising campaigns. Chaudhry points to a study which suggest that “women may still bear the greater burden of domestic work, but American males today do more at home than their fathers, and are happy doing it”. As somoene who regularly irons his clothes, I bristled at Tina's assertion that men aren't going to anytime soon take up half the housework. It's probably true that men will never make up half of the housework, but the point Chaudhry makes is that increasingly men take up some duties. Granted, I currently live alone, but let the record reflect that I will happily iron my sweetheart's clothes while we listen to music or a lecture. Taking a look around on any nice Vancouver day, you'll probably see quite a few men taking their bouncing baby out for a walk. Not half of parents with babies out for a stroll are men, but more than, say, 10 years ago.

Chaudhry cites Mark Simpson, evidently inventor of the term 'metrosexual': “Consumerism wants to make us as atomized as possible -- because the more individualized we are the better consumers we are. This is why masculinity is so fragmented today and incoherent -- and irresponsible. It used to be the tradition. Literally passed down from father to son. But we live in a society where tradition stands in the way of profit. So bye-bye daddy.” This sounds sympathetic to Post-Modern Conservative's idea of The Smithereens (an idea I readily admit to not understanding fully).

Both articles argue that North American advertising and popular culture express correctly North American masculinity, that is, neither how men desire to express it not how they actually do express it. Big surprise. But two feminists, both "sex-positive", point this out, showing an awareness outside of male writer circles that masculinity are not uniform and that those that come to use from the television screen are much further off from reality than we're led to believe.

Ian Brown, discussing What I Meant to Say: the Private Lives of Men, a book essays written by men for a female audience which he edited: “Women now initiate sex, and they don't want the ordinary, they want the fancy stuff. Now, young men are so concerned about performing for women that they take Viagra. These are big changes for men who used to run the world. At the same time, all these age-old problems and dilemmas that have never changed are still there; the physical danger of being a man, of going to war, of going to work - seldom acknowledged but a real problem; the trenchant loneliness of being a man. The sense of physical pointlessness if you're not having a baby and there's no war on, what the hell do you do, exactly; the unbelievable guilt that all the men in this book seem to notice and feel; the sometimes unstoppably physical nature of male desire, which is, believe me, a problem.”

Cherie Thiessen reviewed the book for January Magazine. No word, at least not in the above article, on what Brown thinks about Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd.

Charlie Gillis writes about waning masculinity in North America. (In the same issue of Macleans, John Intini writes about a series of Canadian commercials featuring a handyman that he finds irritating.) Maureen Dowd writes about men still preferring unequals in their women and introduces me to the term 'girl money', that is, her money not being good enough when it comes to paying for things, such as dinner.