Among the Intellectualoids/The About Men Men
Ferguson, Andrew
AMONG THE...
...I can scarcely believe that when the Times editors launched the column—presumably as a companion to the equally horrific "Hers" column that appears each Monday—they realized they were opening Pandora's trunk...
...the writer is the dolt, and his wife/ex-wife/daughter/homosexual son has to drag him down the bumpy road to wisdom...
...Reading "About Men," you can imagine the manuscripts as they arrive at the Times office, adorned with loopy I's and i's dotted with enormous circles, a cute caricature of a snuggly bunny rabbit crouched in the corner of the page, a smiley face below the signature at the bottom...
...Professor McGill himself has Sharon...
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...he lumbered into the bedroom and cried...
...He was a brute...
...only...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS...
...These journeys are the stuff "About Men" is made of...
...Without the weight of tradition and the reflex of retrograde machismo, a chest full of medals is nothing more than a resume in 3-D and Technicolor...
...More specifically, I'm referring to the Times Sunday magazine, and its "About Men" column...
...In the silence that followed the host ran his fingers around his collar, squirmed a bit in his chair, and cleared his throat, ready to try again—ready to say whatever was necessary...
...Limit 1 per address...
...Of course, there are exceptions to this profile of the self-possessed chatterbox...
...The result is a series of amazing documents, a gushy diary produced by many different hands...
...he is divorced, with kids who teach him more about life than he ever dreamed possible...
...An avalanche of confession has poured in over the transom...
...When we send your socks, we'll also send our "ESCAPE from the ordinary"° catalog...filled with classic fashions for men and women, and the most unique gift items you'll find anywhere...
...He has gone to "About Men" to ask forgiveness from himself...
...They'll work at a new Playboy club in New York City...
...The occasional World War II vet, reflecting on the disappearance of civility, or the former Golden Gloves champ, remembering his blue-collar father's pride, can turn out columns that are witty and even affecting...
...these are tough times for the old-fashioned American male...
...He has hit on a solution...
...He blamed what had heretofore been his personal troubles on the fact that "I didn't love myself well enough...
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...So what's the catch...
...It is, then, a central contention of most "About Men" pieces that men aren't what they used to be—they are softer and gentler, more contemplative and refined...
...About Men" writers are always seeing ominous signs, even when it is clear that the battle is won—even when, pace Eastwood and Stallone, most men have already defected to their side...
...Left a bit foggier is the question of whether this is a good thing...
...Night-mares of a sort...
...In-stead of "being noble enough to have respected my wife's right to determine the direction of her life," Mr...
...That innocence comes as a great relief, he tells us, to his wife Janet, although from time to time she still suspects that Professor McGill plans, in fact, some-day to jump Sharon's bones...
...The good news is that I'm not at the point so many people get to at the beginning of one of these things when they say it isn't even worth doing...
...Alan Aida may have gone into semi-retirement, but the flowers he planted in the 1970s continue to bloom...
...Mar-tin Luther King and the Kennedys are among them, he says, for the rather simple reason that "they made me feel good about myself...
...Youman's part...
...The host, a mild, extremely solicitous man, was interviewing a woman theologian...
...After ending a "relationship" with a former secretary, Dave Durenberger, a Republican senator from Minnesota, recently left his wife and moved into an all-male retreat—actually a large colonial mansion—in Arlington, Virginia...
...Unfortunately, as Professor Michael McGill, author of the indispensable McGill Report on Male Intimacy, makes clear in his contribution to "About Men," this is no longer possible...
...he is successful in his work...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 25...
...Images of a world not right...
...David L. Dworkin, the president of Neiman-Marcus, recollects a littoral stroll with his daughter, whom he likes because she has given "tremendous validity to my life...
...as an ethical matter, "About Men" writers strive to be nonjudgmental...
...But this is just fretfulness on Mr...
...He had not long ago enrolled in a seminar on "the female component of the divine," he recalled, and he was the only man there...
...They make me ask, in the face of a life dedicated to achievement, `Is this all there is?' " Like most "About Men" columns when they hit their confes.24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 sional stride, what Mr...
...L Ii A 2-layer construction cushions feet & wicks away perspiration...
...Kalyn tells us how his wife left him (she needed "time and space...
...today they are written by wealthy men and published in magazines...
...It is granted...
...We'd be the first to admit there are no free lunches and that socks aren't given away for the price of a postage stamp...
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...he then tells us how he went to his wife's apartment to surprise her with flowers and was himself surprised to discover her with another man...
...135-04, P.O...
...Since then every freelancer in the country has lunged forward, eager to spill his guts...
...Then there is Wayne Kalyn, the managing editor of World Tennis magazine...
...Many of the pieces have a tendentious, even exhortatory, flavor...
...John Dunne, for in-stance, says his daughter Nicole allowed him "to return to my child-hood, to see things through her eyes, to giggle and be as silly as I wanted to be...
...This morning I saw a religious talk show on television...
...Talk about process and getting in touch with your own prejudices...
...he said, but the woman theologian merely forced a thin smile and said nothing...
...Eight hundred words later, he's telling us that "there are nights—many nights—when I am awakened by disturbing thoughts that do not seem to retire with the rest of my mind/body functions...
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...Dworkin's lacks in originality it makes up in obviousness...
...The girl is only twelve and shouldn't be blamed for not knowing any better, but she makes the huge mistake of asking Dad whether he's happy...
...For all the dedicated trampling of Chuck Norris and Rocky, Rambo and Reagan, the brightly colored blossoms sprout thickly around our ankles, entangling ever more of our number, causing them to tumble softly into the comfy poppy field of the New Age man, where self-absorption equals sensitivity and compulsive confession is mistaken for candor...
...our interest in each other is relational, not romantic...
...Tucked neatly between four-color, bled-to-the-edge ads for Waterford crystal and clothes designed by the rugged Ralph Lauren, "About Men" has for several years nowbeen a soapbox for the sort of man who is forever given to the minute, in-finitely loving examination of his favorite subject: himself...
...The typical "About Men" contributor is not hard to define: he is between the ages of 25 and 45...
...THE ABOUT MEN MEN by Andrew Ferguson Late last year, the Playboy organization announced that it had hired its first male bunnies...
...Nevertheless, he scowls: "One can always find a father or two on the sidelines who is surreptitiously but scrupulously recording every run that scampers across the plate...
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...and he is extremely eager to talk—so long as the monologue doesn't stray too far from his favorite subject...
...The details are numerous and, for our purposes here, insignificant...
...And in a mild variation on this theme, the literary critic Benjamin DeMott records that he was taught how truly to enjoy an apple by a horse named Terence...
...I'm not at that point yet," he shyly told his millions of readers...
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...I take that as an ominous sign...
...Jeff Rector, one of the thirty-five novice bunnies chosen from nearly 1500 aspirants, said this transformation in his life process was "an awesome responsibility...
...Dworkin a question like that, you'd better sit back and get ready for the long haul...
...Nevertheless, at a time when the survival of the human race may depend on the willingness of men to walk hand in hand metaphorically, I see evidence that they are drawing apart physically...
...Senator Joseph Eiden, whom my fellow Democrats often point to as the model of the new Democratic leader, rising up and striding boldly forth from the ashes of the Mondale-Ferraro campaign, speaks often of his heroes...
...You would think that confessions such as these would be better told to a bartender in the wee hours, when most of the other customers have stumbled home...
...Women," he writes, "use interaction as a way to improve relationships...
...Every Sunday my papergirl delivers fresh evidence, in the form of the Times magazine, that this is so...
...he is vaguely uneasy...
...The future perhaps...
...He has discovered that men make crummy best friends because we "use interaction with one another to prove ourselves, following conventional rules of commerce and competition, ever aware that if we get too close, confide too much, it may be used against us...
...Perhaps it's because of the insatiable nature, the remorselessness, of the Master the "About Men" men—and, in truth, all men—struggle to serve...
...Rubin shudders at the kind of example this must set for the kids...
...We represent all of mankind, of manhood...
...In abject apology he twisted his mouth into a grotesque grin and began talking very fast...
...Ergo, get yourself a woman for a best friend...
...But sooner or later they tip their hand...
...After a couple of minutes she castigated him for using the masculine pronoun when he referred to God...
...Rector is quite close to being correct...
...Zick Rubin, a professor of social psychology at Brandeis University, worries that American men are too quantitative, and celebrates the fact that in his son's Little League games no score is kept ("The important thing . . . is the playing and the building of skills, not the winning...
...Why by then the fretfulness...
...Not everyone recognizes the value of this...
...Although "I'm a married person—I believe in the sanctity of marriage and the whole business," the Senator didn't know when he'd go back to his wife...
...The column in that sense is self-evidential...
...We make some pretty strong claims about our products...and back these promises with an unconditional guarantee that's just as strong...
...Professor McGill's situation, by the way, is an "About Men" anomaly, in that he has charged headlong into the New Age while his wife is the one who has lagged behind...
...Senator Durenberger was giving enough of himself as a person to share the news in front-page stories in the Washington Post and the Minneapolis Star and Tribune...
...I could go on, but my point should be clear: no matter what they tell you, Andrew Ferguson is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...After lamenting that fewer and fewer Italian men hold hands in public, Roger Youman sadly takes note of "the terrifying problems of a planet whose political leaders . . . seem to believe that their first priority is to prove their manhood...
...But far more often "About Men" is about newspaper column as public therapy, where the patient rises from the couch and struts and preens...
...The sad truth is that Mr...
...If you ask a guy like Mr...
...But whatever their original intention, the editors apparently decided, as an "About Men" man might put it, to feel the flow and go with that...
...Owen Edwards realizes that "medals are atavistic, mere archaic mementoes impressive to those who need to believe in a man's worth...
...My sons may be better off in a country in which `Manhood' will mean little more than, say, the name for an after-shave lotion," says Leonard Kriegel, who is moreover aware of "the price exacted" in our national life for the idea that a man should be "tough, resilient, independent, able to take it...
...I have some more explaining to do," he says...
...Sharon and I are intimate but sexually innocent...
...Gushy diaries are no longer the private preserve of insecure school girls...
...The signs are everywhere—even in America's newspaper of record, the New York Times...
...It was, he writes, "a question I have never forgotten...
...More of-ten the reverse is true...
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...Quite a problem...
...Kalyn got steamed...
...Consider these other developments: •The League of Women Voters has announced that its new executive director is one Grant Thompson, a biological male...
...Not everyone should fill out this coupon or receive our catalog...
...Or maybe given man to man—say, to a best friend...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
