-Caveat Lector-
A Britlander's ramblings from an unknown, unspecified vantage point on and off
the No American continent
>From TheNewStatesman (UK)
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Andrew Stephen - America - Hail to the all-American wimp
Andrew Stephen - America
Monday 4th October 1999
Re: 4 October 1999
Now that I've passed two milestones this year - it's been 30 years since I
first set foot on US soil as a teenager, and I've now been living here for a
decade - I feel qualified to make another of my periodic pronouncements. No
species in the history of the world, I hereby proclaim, has ever been so
pampered and cosseted as the average American male at the end of the 20th
century.
The evidence is everywhere you look. They have their hair primped and permed;
they lather themselves with deodorants and men's perfumes; they go nowhere
without their mobiles; they help themselves to fully a quarter of the world's
energy resources to stay cool in summer and cosy in winter; and they rush off
to their doctor for a prescription at the merest hint of a sore throat.
The paradox of all this, though, is that they think they're the toughest, most
macho people in the world.
I've seen two unpleasant examples of this in the last week, one a public event
and the other a personal experience.
Last Monday the New York Times ran a picture on its front page of an American
male revelling in what he doubtless believed was his tough manliness: one
Justin Leonard, the golfer who sank the decisive putt in the Ryder Cup.
This man's arms were outstretched, his fists clenched, his face snarled into a
grimace that oozed aggressive triumphalism. "The Ryder Cup is once again
American property," the NYT smugly declared, glossing over the grotesquely
unsporting American stampede on to the green that ruined the chances of
Leonard's European opponent sinking his putt and thus squaring the tournament.
Another newspaper, USA Today, was even more overt in its reporting of this
triumph of American manhood: "Take that, Europe" were the first three words of
its report.
Well, I'm afraid some of us don't particularly care either way whether the US
or Europe wins the Ryder Cup. What is increasingly disturbing, though, is the
way American males are now compensating for the pampered and cosseted reality
of their lives by adopting more and more aggressive, macho posturing: spurious
though it all is, more are toppling over the edge as a result.
As I wrote last week, "senseless" shooting sprees are dramatically increasing:
what is becoming clear is that the no-hopers who commit them (and usually die
in the process) are acting out an illusory fantasy of manhood. They may be
failures in real life but, boy, they can whip out their .38 Magnums and show
'em - they're real men, after all.
I recently saw this process for myself, in a much less dramatic way - how small
boys here acquire this peculiarly self-deluding aggression from their fathers.
I was invited to a school father-and-son fishing trip, accompanying several ten-
year-old boys and their fathers on a chartered fishing boat; the overnight trip
involved a meal that effectively did not end until 10.30pm on Friday evening.
In order to have breakfast and be at the dock in time, most of us had to be up
at 4am on Saturday. I was hard-put to be cheerful and it was ludicrous to
expect the little boys to be chipper, but the dads - invariably with names like
"Todd" or "Biff" - were all gung-ho as our boat chugged off into choppy
Atlantic waters before sunrise.
Then two interesting things happened. I've been seasick only three times in my
life, but that was enough to ensure I'd brought with me a packet of Dramamine,
an over-the-counter anti-seasickness pill. Inevitably, one boy started to vomit
over the side of the boat. The others, one by one, began to drop like flies.
Dramamine is effective only if you take it before you embark but it is safe for
children; I told the boys that if their dads agreed they could take a pill and
would all immediately start to feel better.
My bluff worked like magic: within minutes all the boys were chattering and
laughing away.
But then, one by one, the fathers sidled up to me. "Er, do you, er, have any of
those to spare?" they each asked, but none daring to do so within the hearing
or vision of their own sons or the other fathers; they would lose something of
their perceived masculinity, it was clear, if they were seen not to be toughing-
out what in reality was fast becoming a pretty nightmarish trip.
Only one father - a man from India rather than America - admitted he had been
sick, though others took themselves off to the boat's toilet and carefully
pulled makeshift shutters so their suffering could not be seen.
The sons and dads, meanwhile, were being taken by a professional captain to a
patch of sea where sonar detectors showed exactly where shoals of fish were
waiting to be plucked out; this was hardly the man-and-beast struggle of nature
they fondly believed, but a thoroughly choreographed, hi-tech charade in which
the acquisition of supposed tough, manly virtues had been purchased for cash.
"Die, fish, die!" one ten-year-old boy yelled as he vainly tried to pull in a
large bass, finally helped (of course) by the hired hand yanking up the fish
with a large hook before spilling its blood and guts on to the deck. "We got it
through the eyeball!" another boy shouted excitedly.
The fathers, meanwhile, looked on approvingly: yep, their boys were becoming
men before their eyes!
What, in fact, was happening was that the boys were acquiring from their
fathers lessons on how to pretend to be a man. In 1999 America, a production-
line, counterfeit machismo is frantically trying to disguise that unpalatable
but inescapable fact: just how primped and pampered the American male has, in
reality, become.
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