To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with.
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/08/28/the-menaissance-and-its-dickscontents/
Intriguing. I've certainly found the process of constructing an identity greatly aided by not buying into heterosexist culture (when reading the article linked in Wilkinson's post, I thought more than once- "I'm so glad I'm not normal), but I've never heard it expressed in quite this way. Fascinating stuff.
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