The XX Factor: What women really think.

Danny La Rue, a Woman’s Man and a Man’s Woman

Reading the obituaries column of the newspaper is so much cheaper than therapy, yet it's often just as effective at driving a trip down memory lane. This morning's tributes to British female impersonator Danny La Rue, who died at the age of 81, sent me back three decades to my grandma's house where the family would gather around the telly to watch his performances. (Scroll down for a video of one.)

La Rue disliked being called a "drag artist." His act was all about convincing the audience that the person on stage or screen was the most glamorous, dazzling dame in the world. Being a working-class lad himself, he knew how to tap into the ultimate British fantasy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Into the Man Cave

Greg Beato, my go-to source for weird insights into mass culture, has a very funny analysis of the DIY show Man Caves over at the Smart Set. The show is premised on the idea that men need man-friendly rooms in which to be manly, and the hosts help regular guys turn ordinary rooms into testosterone-rich dens featuring, say, stripper poles and motorcycles. But Beato thinks the masculine showboating is just the price of entry to an aesthetic realm typically reserved for women and gay men:

if today’s men don’t seem quite as grown-up as their grandfathers did, they show a much greater flair for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Real Men Don't Take Dictation

When the focus of an economy changes from making stuff to helping people—that is, manufacturing to services—low-skilled men drop out of the labor market in droves. A new study of unemployed men in Manchester, England, suggests that "idealized embodied masculinity" is partly to blame. Manual labor, claims Sociologist Darren Nixon, imbues working class men with a sense of pride that helps compensate for the very fact of being working class. They may not be financially dominant, but they feel relatively masculine compared to their white, middle class counterparts.

The Secret of a Good Life

The New Masculinity

A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:

Sam, the blurred boundary you describe between boyhood and adulthood rang true for me, as I expect it will for any member of the "educated, twentysomething, urban set" you mention. It certainly doesn't help that that the 20s are—perhaps now more than ever—an age of wildly divergent professional and lifestyle identities. Some of my old friends now wear suits daily and live in luxury buildings; those of us in the fuzzier professions wear jeans to work and spend the summer hauling secondhand air conditioners home on the subway. Others, still, have already scrimped and saved to buy property and start families.

As much as I agree with your description of the quandary, though, I wonder whether it's as unique to "our generation" as you suggest. This discussion made me think of an interview with Jonathan Franzen I heard years ago and just tracked down. Franzen teases out the cultural rift between his parents' postwar generation and his own post-'60s generation to describe exactly this kind of confusion:

I seem to have grown into a time and a place where adults didn't really want to be adults in the same way I understood them to be, which was well-mannered people who dressed differently than children and ... put their children's interests before their own, and all around, just were of a different class. They liked being adults. They got a satisfaction from that.

Ever since the boomer generation faced the problem of adulthood, with kind of dubious results, and since so much of commercial culture has come to focus on the 18 to 34 demographic, its seems as if adulthood itself is to some a threatened commodity.

I'm not sure I endorse Franzen's definition of adults as "well-mannered people" fixed in domestic life, but his observation does seem to suggest that this question has been floating for a while.

And, Dayo, on the swaggering, creepy tone of the Esquire piece: I found myself wondering whether this wasn't an effort to invoke, imitate, and channel the pithy declaratives of David Newman and Robert Benton's famous "New Sentimentality" Esquire cover story of 1964. If so, it's a bizarre allusion, since the New Sentimentality, as described, was pretty much a reaction against the ball-busting, domestic-providing sensibility of "What Is a Man?"

The Confusing Road to Manhood

Dayo, I totally agree with your assessment of Esquire's "How To Be A Man" cover story:

This reads like some kind of grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns-jerky, reductive, and obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze, breadwinning). Who talks like that?

Who talks like that? Mad Men's Don Draper and his compatriots, that's who, but definitely none of the guys I know. In the office, Jessica and I have been discussing whether males of our generation lack a sense of how to become men. The ones we know among the educated, 20-something, urban set (not broadly representative, we realize) aren't for the most part off at war or fathering babies or even bringing in the big bucks. Without those traditional cues, how are they to know when they've crossed over from boyhood to manhood?

Thanks to the feminists who came before us (and in many cases, birthed us), females my age have been raised with the constant reassurance that there are many acceptable ways to be a woman. "You can wear pants and still be a woman!" we've been told. "You can play sports and still be feminine! You can choose to be a housewife or choose not to have kids—both are fine paths for a modern woman!" But are guys getting similar encouragement? I'm not saying that the Esquire cover package is the perfect guide to manhood in the 21^st century—it's more a send-up to the male ideal of the Don Draper era. Still, do you think its existence highlights the need among the XYs of this generation for some such guidance? If so, what's the right way to answer that need?