Cru Jones Society

Man-date. Man-bag. Man-cation. Man-crush. Bromance. Etc, etc, etc.

What the fuck has happened to men in our society where we have to bluntly classify everything we do, everything we own, and every relationship we have with a masculine prefix? My brain reached critical mass of aggravation with this recent trend while watching I Love You, Man, the funny, if oddly paced and a touch predictable, recent movie where Paul Rudd is a pussy-whipped goober who needs to find a best man before his wedding and happens upon Jason Segel, an impetuous, free-wheeling man-child who serves as the counterpoint to Rudd’s boring, beholden-to-women doofus. This movie is the logical endpoint for the use of the of “Man-” as a prefix in describing all male-only activities because, really, there’s nowhere else to go from here.

Esquire writer John H. Richardson does a decent job of scratching the surface of “the awkward hunger of men for male approval,” but the use of “man” as a prefix indicates a deeper cultural insecurity that is not only unwarranted, but annoying as hell. Men (at least straight men, I have no idea how gay men interact) definitely need the approval of other men, but the rapid de-masculinizing (pretty sure I made that word up) of the male experience by both women (unknowing in their culpability) and the media at large has turned this once natural and largely unconscious process of making a new dude friend into a weirdly awkward, self-conscious exercise in courtship that unnecessarily complicates something that ain’t need to be complicated.

While there exist a multitude of factors in the proliferation of the “man” prefix, there are two crucial ones that need to be explored more fully to get to the root of the issue.

1) Sex Toy Parties. This is the first place maybe in the history of time that men are explicitly not allowed into and not in any way in control of. You could argue that beauty parlors, Tupperware parties, and a bevy of other women-only gatherings kept men out, but places like that are filled with subtle innuendo, gentle feminine playfulness, and are ultimately harmless. When your girl goes to a sex toy party, if it’s not already explicit, the implicit message is, “Hi, me and all your friends’ girlfriends are getting together to talk about sex and buy things we plan to insert into ourselves or into, on, or around you. Have fun worrying about how much we’re going to tell other women about the shape of your cock and how you like to be spanked. Oh, and you’re not invited and never will be. Love you!”

And once women figured out they can get together with other women where there’s not even a hint of a sliver of a shell of a chance that a guy will show up, the craze of these parties spread like wildfire. When your very own mother tells you she’s attended one, you know these events have reached complete and utter ubiquity. And for the first time men everywhere were completely powerless and desperately without a roadmap for how to handle things.

Thus, since women had carved out a truly unique space in a historically patriarchal culture, men everywhere felt the need to reclaim some cultural territory for themselves failing to realize they’ve held the keys to the stadium wherein all the cultural games are played for the last million or so years. Hence, the last decade has seen the exponential rise of online gaming, an explosion in poker-playing, and a re-affirmation of some of the men-only activities from times past. But with the success of women in cultivating a highly effective no-men-allowed sphere, these re-affirmations of maleness have largely fallen flat, or at least been incomplete. Which brings me to point #2, probably even more important in understanding this phenomenon.

2) Metrosexuality. I’ve hated this term since it came into vogue in the cultural lexicon, and I hate it even more now. At its core, metrosexuality is really nothing more than a synonym for narcissism and self-indulgence. Taking pride in your appearance and and tending to small details of personal grooming: Good. Excessive preening due to unhealthy levels of self-absorption: Bad. Metrosexuality is merely an increased availability of tools that facilitate this excessive behavior. The by-product of this increased self-awareness is that historically as a society, we haven’t necessarily given a collective shit what men looked like. Sure, someone like Dean Martin always had that loungy, “can I offer you dames a cigarette?” cool look about him, but no one gave a crap about his complexion. For Christ’s sake, Telly Savalas was considered a sex symbol 30 years ago and he looked like a guy who sold wholesale plumbing supplies in suburban Baltimore. So why have I unwittingly sampled five different face washes made by gayer-than-8-guys-blowing-9-guys (credit Patton Oswalt) Kiehl’s?

The point is, preening cocksuckers like David Beckham were suddenly wearing girlie headbands, and vacuous dickheads like Steven Cojocaru (I know he had two kidney transplants, I don’t give a fuck. He was at least as ruthless as Joan Rivers on the red carpet and no amount of personal adversity erases the venom he spewed at “fat” celebrities) were now criticizing male fashion as doggedly as they were women’s. The role and perception of men had irrevocably changed, and in terms of ridicule from overeager media outlets ready, willing, and able to destroy those in the public eye at the request of an insatiable Us Weekly reading public, men and women were inching closer toward equality. A fucked-up, mind-bending, god-awful equality, but an equality nevertheless.

Which leads me back to my original point. Whereas before everything was assumed as “male” unless otherwise noted feminine such as in the use of ostensibly harmless terms “chairman” or “fireman,” with at least part of the gender war deadlocked, a re-introduction of masculinity was needed (Note from E Dagger: It actually wasn’t needed at all, but go with me on this).

And we arrive at the present day where we have Andy Samberg playing a gay personal trainer explaining the concept of a “man date” to a clueless, castrated Paul Rudd seeking male friendship. I swear to Christ, if I ever describe hanging out with a new guy as a “man date” just drag my ass out into the street and shoot me, because I have lost all value to society. Dates are for courtship, and classifications are for people without a clue. Dating is a mysterious, unsettling, and wholly terrifying process, which is why there are so many rules and classifications associated with it.

Male friendship isn’t defined by rules and develops organically and unpredictably like the ivy coming in at Wrigley during the month of May. In high school I was dating a girl named Jessica and started to call her Sarah, the name of my most recent ex-girlfriend and her most recent ex-friend, when she turned and looked at me pissed the fuck off. I had gotten out “Sar-” when she asked angrily, “Were you going to call me Sarah?” The dude we were with who I’d only known for a couple weeks jumps in and says, “No. He wasn’t even talking to you. He was calling me ‘sir.’ It’s a joke from English class. Chill out.” She actually bought that line of crap, which it totally was. He saved my ass and I got a handjob that night. Why am I telling you this? Because from that point on, I knew he had my back, and since I damn sure owed him one, he knew I had his. We didn’t need a contrived series of “dates” to become friends, it just happened. He could have been a prick and watched me go down in flames while standing idly by chuckling to himself, but he didn’t, and I immediately wanted to hang out with him more because of it.

A lot of people make their friends in high school and college, but I’ve made plenty in the adult world as well, which strikes me as the general thrust of the crisis outlined in movies like I Love You, Man. As I described in “The Hardest Part of Living with a Girl,” I bonded with a dude in San Diego making gay jokes about Mark Hamill. I’ve made a couple of friends making “Brett Favre is a crying baby” jokes and my all-time favorite new friend whom I’ll never see again was that German guy I met in Las Vegas whom I chatted with piss drunk for an hour at the Excalibur bar at 5:30 in the morning about something I can’t even remember. Also, we may have been speaking different languages, it doesn’t matter. The conversation was engaging and funny as hell. We decided to be friends that night, and that was that. We didn’t have a “bromance,” it wasn’t a “man date,” and we certainly weren’t on “man-cation” together (even though the trip was only with my friends Conor and Shrek). We just became pals.

These terms only serve to identify that which requires no further identification. The only gender-related terms that merit continuation in the public sphere are “sausagefest” indicating a party where your odds of getting laid are 50-1 at best due to the high percentage of dudes, and “bitch rich” the compensatory female term for a place lacking in cock coined by CJS Regular Dollar. But again, those terms pertain to inter-gender relations and not to general expressions of friendship or accessory like “man date” or “man bag.”

We’re fully saturated as a society with man terms and the end of I Love You, Man exhausts them all with the guys exchanging expressions of affection like “I love you, Bro Montana ” and “I love you, Bro Namath.” That scene should (but probably won’t) act as the crescendo and coda for the “man/bro” prefix. I’m officially retiring it from my active vocabulary, and I urge all of you to do the same. Because our lives are complicated enough – we don’t need rules for making new friends too.

edagger@crujonessociety.com