Act Like a Man

An excessive endowment; rippling muscles; rugged attire and uniforms; a bearish coat of body hair; loving the ladies. This culturally synthesized checklist of masculine qualities does not apply in a new millennium that has seen the creation of the metrosexual straight man and squelched the gay man’s need to assimilate using ‘butch drag.’ With the modern man relying less on his physical appearance to define his machismo, how does he tap into his masculinity? Heterosexuality has lost its potency as the main criteria for being a manly-man, replaced by a trait that can be found in both straight and gay men. It seems that confidence might be the boost needed to go from boy to man.

My personal life experience has made it obvious to me that to ‘act like a man’ is a learned behavior versus biologically being a man, regardless of sexual orientation. Despite being one of four brothers who was very aware of his status as one of the boys from a young age, I was drawn to Barbie and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. I began to comprehend that my tastes were less than boyish as adolescent hormones kicked in, and I became quite fond of GI-Joe and Rambo…in part because they were males. I was simultaneously finding my way as both a man and a man who loves manly men. Yet girls my age were attracted to Andy Gibb and Shaun Cassidy, the types of tender teen angels that generations of boys have publicly denounced as being ‘gay,’ stripping away the masculine identity to (hopefully) make the pin-up boys less appealing to the girls. But to this day, it is still the non-threatening asexuality of youthful icons like Clay Aiken and Zac Efron that attracts fragile young girls, who are not ready to take on the brutishness of full-fledged adult machismo like a fashion conscious pretty boy on the verge of manhood.

Does this mean that tween girls and the grooming sensibilities of gay men are defining the new masculinity? Classic signs of machismo such as excessive body hair have become more a fetish than the standard. The modern male escapes puberty only to immediately shave chest hair, morph scruffy beards into painstakingly sculpted goatees, and pluck unibrows into two individual eyebrows! Designer haircuts, designer jeans, designer earrings—how does an internally heterosexual young man who is externally as beautiful as an Out magazine cover model prove his masculinity and distance himself from the gay label? Current trends dictate that he grabs his crotch a lot, hits the steroids to join pro-wrestling, or if desperate measures call for it, posts a home video all over the internet of him giving an unsuspecting female a Dirty Sanchez. On the downside, frequent crotch grabbing could signify a man insecurely reassuring himself that something is down there, while the wrestling arena celebrates pretty men in speedos groping each other as thousands of cheering heterosexual men watch. And I can’t quite put my finger on the Dirty Sanchez approach, but let’s consider that the act was brought to the forefront of pop culture’s awareness by the Saved by the Bell character Screech, who has spent the remainder of his career trying to obliterate his typecast reputation as an insecure geek by proving his manhood in sex videos.

Remember in high school when geeks, dweebs, and nerds like Screech were bullied, taunted, and nailed hardest with the dodge ball because they were considered to be weak, wimpy ‘faggots’? Low self-esteem made them the targets of boys who built their own confidence by being aggressive towards the passive boys. And to the straight eye, that passivity is equated with the socially ingrained notion that gay men always assume the position (which begs the question: who does the straight man think is on top???). Even a gay man can play into this assumption, as I did upon first seeing the virginal geeks competing on the VH-1 reality show The Pick-Up Artist. I was convinced most of them were gay, but with good reason. Very often a young gay man’s ‘secret’ leaves him walking a not so straight line between gay and geek, appearing outwardly as awkward as contestants on The Pick-Up Artist. I myself was told by a female friend soon after coming out that the bold move made me somehow much less ‘gay’ and much more ‘masculine’ and attractive.