What do real men do?

Brandon McGinley ’10’s recent “Tory” article inspired by the subject

Since more than one person on this campus has confused me with McGinley (there were once three ‘Prince’ columnists variously named “Brandon” or “Brendan”), I thought I would set the record straight: I am appalled by the Dockers “Man-ifesto” and by McGinley’s article on the subject.

The Man-ifesto is available through Google: I don’t have space to reprint it here. The lead slogan itself is not particularly sexist — “Wear the Pants” could be a tongue-in-cheek, ironic, post-modernist wink — but Dockers does not leave this interpretation open: They assume that anybody lacking the all-crucial Y-chromosome is incapable of being a “hero” or a “grown-up.” In other words, girls need boys to look after them, because, left on their own, the “bad guys” will just “tie [girls] to the railroad tracks.” So, men need to take charge of the world and “wear the pants.”

And you thought “Mad Men” was a period drama.

The campaign is wrong when it tells girls, “You can never be the hero,” but it also presupposes that feminism was somehow about emasculating men rather than empowering women. “Feminism” has taken on a wide variety of meanings in the 21st century, many of them contradictory — as a word, it’s about as useless as “conservative” or “liberal” — but if feminism means “Women should have equal rights with men,” then there is nothing in that definition to suggest misandry.

McGinley calls the ad a “gem,” and we can only pray he was being ironic. He uses it as a launching pad to explore “manliness” in the 21st century. He claims that because the aforementioned vision of male chauvinism has been overthrown, boys today must grow up androgynous or animalistic: Either they sip “foamy non-fat lattes” and eat salad or they keep notches on the bedpost. A lot of McGinley’s comparisons fly by me — largely because I’ve never bothered to observe whether my friends’ hips “sway” as they walk or “remain staunchly stationary” — but he finally gets past his fixation on fruit (“field greens with raspberry vinaigrette”) to focus on homosexuality.

McGinley claims that our culture’s acceptance of homosexuality has panicked boys who fear that they might be perceived as gay, so they seize on the one thing a gay man would never do and have sex with lots of girls, and talk about it as much as possible.

I thought it was obvious that most boys who behave like rakes do so because they really enjoy sex, not because they’re scared that someone will call them gay. Secondly, I have to observe that after Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Jim McGreevey, etc., most Americans are now aware that it is not unheard of for gay men to “cover” themselves with a “beard.” Married men have been having gay sex scandals with surprising frequency since the ’90s, and having “done it” with a girl is no guarantee of heterosexuality.

But the real thrust of McGinley’s article is that men — including gay men — will not feel safe again until homosexual activity is deemed “so ignominious, so disgraceful, so shameful that ‘nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it.’ ” He immediately recovers from this to point out that he is not urging “censure of those who experience same-sex attractions” (a point that was lost on several of McGinley’s critics) but it is nevertheless illogical of him to claim that “even [gay] people are benefitted by this” because they are supported in their “valiant” struggle over their own sexual attractions.

To start with, McGinley assumes — flying in the face of empirical fact — that all or most gay people want to remain celibate for life. Gay people are no more keen on celibacy than straight ones. Moreover, even McGinley should be able to see a major problem with his proposed system. By his logic, homosexuality is like pedophilia: Some people might have the urge, and the urge is itself morally neutral, but to act on the urge would be ethically disgusting. We should love pedophiles and support them. Yet observe the precipitous decline in real estate values when a convicted child rapist moves into the neighborhood. How does McGinley think America could successfully maintain this delicate balancing act with homosexuality? Saints may be capable of this sort of hair-splitting, but it does not work large-scale.

So shaming homosexual relations is supposed to decrease the quantity of straight sex. This will lead us back to the David-and-Jonathan land of steamy male friendships, because once gay sex is unimaginable, the boys will stop screwing the girls and start casting loving glances at each other in crowded parties. I throw up my hands in confusion. This is the ultimate aim of the president of the Anscombe Society? Really? Who knew!

By the way: McGinley’s article suggests that we need to stigmatize homosexual relations for the benefit of straight guys. He says nothing about the girls. Does this mean the lesbians can stay?