Gentleman 2.0

Shut up for a second and answer me this: what exactly is a “gentleman”?

Just think on that for a bit now. What comes to mind? What do you see? If you’re anything at all like one hundred percent of every author and blogger I’ve read on the subject in the past six months, you’re either imagining a clean cut and fit scholar and family man of the 1940’s complete with stylish jacket and tie or else a medieval knight of the court. If you’ve thought up something else, please let me know what it is because you fascinate me. If your image is something even remotely modern, all the better.

Why? Because I am frustrated.

Sexual politics is a difficult subject to broach in any forum, but the state of the Male identity has been bothering me for some time for reasons I can only slightly put my finger on. The men I know, including myself, have grown up with the dialogue of feminism always in our ears, and it’s had a peculiar effect on us. I don’t mean this as a barb at feminism. I’ve found that the institution and its proponents have grown smartly into feminism’s maturity, particularly in the past year or so by becoming increasingly cognizant of the need for the positive involvement of men as a replacement for the endless lambasting of guys’ inherent evil. But we young men, having heard this our entire lives even without, in many cases, ever harbouring a misogynistic thought, have been left with a warped sense of who we are and how we ought to conduct ourselves.

I’ve been reading tripe like The Art of Manliness and The Modern Gentleman on and off over the past few months, and it’s not sat well with me. Worse, I’m beginning to see the glut of such writing for what it is: a deeply misguided and unfortunate response to our identity crisis, appealing to archetypes established before the war of the sexes got so complicated. The love that these publications have for the forties/fifties man is almost nauseating, and it’s an obsession that lurks in far too many familiar places. It’s all very cookie cutter, very repetitive, and I’m finding it intolerable at this point. I don’t particularly want to be like Teddy Roosevelt and apparently that makes me a sissy.

Take a look at the Art of Manliness, I dare you. Notice anything about all of the goddamn pictures? They’re all pre-1969 by a mile. It’s eerie.

Reading this article over at Newsweek helped me piece this idea together, with it elaborating on some of the hard facts about how men under thirty are generally behaving aimless and resentful, with tremendously depressing results. It’s bad, it’s really quite bad.

So we’ve got this fetish for the turn of the century model man, which just seems too painfully, transparently like yearning for simpler days when we Y-chromosomers had monolithic and unquestioned power in relationships, education and money. It’s immature and it’s reductive, and I can understand what provokes it but it has got to stop. Regression of this kind isn’t admirable at any level, and the better part of a generation resorting to it will and is causing problems. Young men are making less money, pursuing less education, living on their own less, marrying later and later, shirking responsibilities of any sort, and generally and statistically being pathetic. It’s not alright.

Men wanting to be modern seem to run headlong into the new age of sexual politics, get upset that they don’t get to be patriarch, and say “fine!”, arguing sulkily that if women get to take over so much of their playground then they get to be stay at home dads, underachievers, layabouts, and childish. There’s this horrible quantum thinking going on where if we can’t have it all and be that 1940’s man then we’re going to do an about face and make those uppity wimmins do everything. We’ve got no readily available idea of the modern man because we’re not letting such an idea develop, and both sexes and a lot of young people are losing out because of this.

I treat the term “gentleman” as indicative of an ideal, something to work for and something worthy of respect.

So what should Gentleman 2.0 be? What should we young men aspire to be in this day and age? Is the very notion that we can have any kind of singular model of style and behaviour itself worthy of rejection? Or will leaving young men without any sort of clear identity or role model enable and worsen this demographic’s slump?

It’s time we had some new ideas in this arena, because the old stand by of a man being a totem of roughshod values which all essentially boil down to either a pugilist’s mitts or a gigolo’s charm. We can have a clear role and a strong identity without resorting to stereotypes or insisting that things like public speaking and leadership aren’t also relevant to women.

It’s worth thinking about, we’re better than this.