Nostalgia For a Terrible Time

Masculinity, video games and fathers

Playing Halo in the basement

There is a crisis of masculinity afoot, or so I've been told repeatedly in the last decade. This has not affected me because I don't consider myself very manly. Mostly because I don't have the hand-eye coordination to play video games – which, if r/relationships and culture critics are to be believed, seems to be the number one thing associated with being a man these days. Even Elon Musk, world's richest man and father to 13 children with 6 women, faked playing video games so that he could placate a large swathe of the straight male population and prove to them that he was a man. 

I grew up watching movies and fantasizing about the type of life that directors like Martin Scorcese and Michael Mann had. Much like a large proportion of men, I did not want to be like my father. Some boomer director who made movies about cool guys hanging out with each other seemed the farthest away I could aspire to. As an aside, Goodfellas is not a gangster movie – it just uses the premise of the gangster movie to show guys shooting the breeze and getting up to some hijinks. But lately, I've been getting the feeling I came in too late for all that. As Connor O'Malley, comedian and artist who explores the underbelly of male culture, puts it, "You look at boomer directors, and they're obsessed with fucking in cars as teenagers. And our generation is obsessed with playing Halo with 15 men in a basement."

I watch sports and yell at the screen – but I don't gamble, which makes watching sports almost entirely pointless today. Even my most conscientious male friends spend a few hundred bucks on sports gambling every now and then. I empathize. You experience a terminal boredom when you watch a sports team you started supporting when your brain was mush and not fully formed. It needs something a little extra. Knocking back several beers does not cut it anymore. The stakes need to be higher and higher to feel something. Suddenly, everything you do has to take the form of an alternate reality game. It's not enough to just watch sports or read the news - you have to gamble on it, make theories about why your gamble is the right one, get other people in the group chat to believe you, and make rational, preferably technical, explanations for why the gamble failed. Buying stocks, prediction markets, and sports betting – these are the economic engines of alternate reality games, the in-game purchases that keep you invested, and eventually, the sunk cost that keeps you coming back. Recreating the experience of playing Halo in the basement over and over again

Michael Mann’s Letterboxd profile pic, targeted at guys like me

Going dandy mode

I smoke cigarettes occasionally, but those Zyn pouches give me dizzying headaches. The last time I tried one was at a party where a guy was handing out Zyns like he was the Great Gatsby. 20 minutes later, I found myself looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing double. I had to lay down like a frail Victorian lady for half an hour to get my bearings back.

I lift weights, but not enough to make them central to my identity. The only "male culture" I indulge in online these days is menswear, which is the unmanliest way to be a man. It involves looking at clothes and objects and saying things like "nice material" or “ID on the pants king?”A womanly affair. I don't mean that in a sexist way. It is just well known that for a consumer company to be successful, it first needs women adopters. The most manly thing about me might be that I enjoy wearing boxy square jackets that hit right at the waistline. Some weeks and months, I indulge in the delights of menswear more than I should, but then I eventually meet a guy who says things like, "Do you want to smell my hand cream?" This is how I know I've gone too far. 

Being a man’s man

I've noticed that there are two categories of people who criticize straight male culture. The first one consists of gay guys and heterosexual women. This group seems to be interested in the performance and theater of being a man - chivalry, assertiveness, doing things with your hand, etc. The number one most valuable you can make with your hand these days are microchips – most of the manufacturing of which is automated, but the part that is not automated requires dexterous, delicate hands that can handle small, fragile components - essentially making it akin to knitting rather than fixing a car or working in an oil drill. A guy who does a masculine performance of doing things with his hands is just a modern-day Don Quixote, riding on his high horse, lamenting the loss of manliness. Maybe this is why so many men are interested in fighting these days and why the chairman of the UFC is a critical part of the government – men have little to perform with their hands other than pretend to fight until death.

As for the theatrics of being a man, I would have thought that it is common knowledge by now that a lot of physical antics of men that impress other straight men are just men impersonating women – like the oft-repeated anecdote of why John Wayne's walk was attractive - because he looked like a female supermodel doing a catwalk. This clip from Birdcage explains it better than I could. 

The second category of people who criticize modern straight male culture are men past their 40s who also happen to be terrible fathers. I don't know why this is but seems to be the case exclusively - I suspect it is some deep psychological injury from narcissism that they project onto their offspring and the generation of men they belong to. The boys often grow up to be men who seek approval from father figures in their life, only to be disappointed and angry when they don't get it and turn into their fathers in their 40s. 

One time, someone I was dating asked me. "Is it hard to be a man in this world?" We had only been on a couple of dates. The question was a bone thrown to me to go on a rant about being a man, to make me feel better about myself. But I've never been quick on my feet, so I replied, "I don't know. I've never really considered being a man." I suspect this is how it is for most straight men who are not culture critics, so cut us some slack, let us gamble, and play Halo with 15 guys in the basement while looking for other ways to escape from reality. There's not much to do with our hands anyway, and the rest of the theatrics is as made up as anything else. It's miserable enough to be human, let alone be a man.