Cliché Watch

Are We Manly Enough?

Heather Horn 631 Views Oct 14, 2010
Are America's talented young men too feminine? Apparently, conservatives are worried about this. John Miller at National Review posts the "nut graf" from Katherine Miller's piece Man Up, part of the book Proud to Be Right.
America's elite has a problem. It's skinny jeans and scarves, it's Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it's Michael Cera, it's guys who compliment a girl's dress by brand, it's guys who don't know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men--and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.
That they may, but if conservatives are right about this one, they've probably gotten used to it by now. Why? The effeminization epidemic has been an issue of longstanding concern on the right: Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, for one, has been harping on this theme for years.

An amused Jason Kuznicki notices this at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. "I see that it’s time once again for conservatives to worry that the American male is insufficiently masculine," he writes. "Someone should tell them," he continues, "that the very first sign of insufficient masculinity is worrying about insufficient masculinity. A real man can wear a dress, and it ain't no big thing."

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