There's a recent issue of Esquire on my coffee table that claims to tell me “How To Be a Man” and, inside, lists qualities I should possess because “just being male doesn't make you a man.”
I've skimmed it and I have to say it annoys me, since I know very little about saws and I sometimes like to drink sauvignon blanc on a hot day. I threw the mag across the room out of anger, a gesture which I suppose is man-like enough to make me a man, right?
As I was brooding over this (also manly, Esquire tells me), I started to notice posters on the street showing the Brampton, Ont.-bred actor Michael Cera running hand in hand with a girl, promoting the film he's currently starring in called Paper Heart . It's the latest in a string of films in which Mr. Cera plays a variation on the same insecure, shy, sensitive guy, who, in Judd Apatow's Superbad , tells a half-naked girl that he doesn't think sex is a good idea because she's too drunk.
And here's the thing: The current zeitgeist – by which I mean the Twitter search I did on Mr. Cera – confirms he's becoming something of a sex symbol to young women. “Michael Cera is a sex god” appeared, along with “i dreamt i had sex with michael cera. why did i have to wake up!?”
What does this mean for 21st-century man?
Michael Kimmel, the editor of the book Men and Masculinities , points out that Mr. Cera is not the first of his kind. “At any one moment, there's always these alternative, more sensitive types who are extremely attractive – like for example Tobey Maguire or John Cusack,” he said. “What that elicits from girls is their rescue fantasy: ‘He's a lost kitten. I can help him.'”
Dr. Kimmel, a sociologist, did agree that Mr. Cera in particular is part of a more recent paradigm of manhood – call it third wave masculinism. “The eighties into the nineties was this mytho-poetic drumming, chanting thing,” he said. “Then, after 9/11, we liked firefighters and carpenters and guys with sweat on their forearms. But after the complete discrediting of the Bush era, now there's Obama, who seems like a really nice guy.”
Robb Willer, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, posited that the changes we are seeing in the ideal man are more related to the political changes for that other gender. “The increase of status for women in society might have led to an increased respect for feminine traits,” he said.
Although I understand logically that “feminine traits” do not appear “female” if done by a man – a person drinking sauvignon blanc could also happen to have a penis, for instance – it does sometimes make me cringe to hear it put this way, a result, I suppose, of being part of the transition generation, raised to fear looking or acting like a girl in any way.
Some of Dr. Willer's research explains this reaction, showing that when some dudes feel their behaviour is being viewed as feminine, it can lead them to be more supportive of war or to prefer buying an SUV over other cars. He calls it “masculine overcompensation.” When I asked him whether viewing Paper Heart would lead men to become angry or enlist in the army, he laughed. “I would never say that Michael Cera might have such an effect on a larger population,” he said, but agreed it could lead to some overcompensation in guys who are heavily invested in more traditional norms of masculinity.
Alanna Thain, a film and cultural studies professor at McGill University, described Mr. Cera in a way that made me wonder whether he represents a model of a man who is a balance of feminine and masculine qualities.
