Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game […]
Andrew Jackson’s Love Letters
In our era of political “bromances” between leaders who value aggression and belittle sensitivity, it’s easy to forget that expectations […]
“Made in America”: O.J. Simpson, Race, and the Triumph of Toxic Masculinity
Black and white America could not have been further apart than on the morning of October 3, 1995 when a […]
Denver’s One-Lung Army: Disease, Disability, and Debility in a Frontier City
This post originally appeared on REMEDIA. In 1879 the famous showman, P.T. Barnum joked that, “Coloradoans are the most disappointed people I […]
Confessions of a Newborn Father: The Birth of the “Hands-on” Dad
By Ginny Engholm
A recent Vicks Nyquil commercial has a typical scenario for an advertisement set in a workplace. A clearly sick man — coughing, runny nose, the whole works — opens what looks like an office door a crack, pops his head in, and delivers the one line of the commercial: “Dave, I’m sorry to interrupt. I gotta take a sick day tomorrow.” While this might seem like a very traditional depiction of masculinity, a guy at the office asking his male boss for a day off, the ad subverts this narrative by revealing an adorable toddler standing up in his crib. The tagline of the ad — “Dads don’t take sick days. Dads take Nyquil” — makes the ad’s argument clear. A real man is one who is so dedicated to his real job — fatherhood — that he continues to parent through his colds and flus. While the idea of moms’ total and complete dedication to their roles as mothers has of course been part of our cultural understanding of motherhood for, well, forever, the shift in the past decade or so of depicting fathers as equal-opportunity martyrs, devoted to the care of their children, strikes many modern viewers as something new.
The Gender Trap: The Problem of Raising Boys As Warriors
By Sean Cosgrove
It strikes me as odd that having identified a crisis of masculinity in our young boys that anyone would suggest these same boys should be raised more like ‘warriors’ than they otherwise would have been. And yet, Maggie Dent, a former high school teacher and counsellor, suggested at the beginning of this year that many of the social ills facing young men today—from Sydney’s king-hit culture to lacklustre personal and academic performance—are related to a broader societal problem of strangling the masculinity out of the boy.
George Washington’s Bodies
Many Americans could tell you that George Washington was tall and that he had false teeth. Why? Although he is […]
Sunday Morning Medicine
By Jacqueline Antonovich
-Hunky history: the male nude.
-The man who forgot everything.
-The Victorian version of the GIF.
-Baseball’s forgotten experiment.
-Ancient grills: gem-studded teeth.
-Campy photos of Communist spies.
Man Up: Give Blood Like a Victorian
By Sean Cosgrove
How do we convince people of the need to donate blood? It can be scary and uncomfortable, and I’ll be the first to admit, as someone who does not regularly donate, that it all seems like a lot of work. The answer, according to one comedian writing in a Sydney commuter magazine recently (which has unfortunately been lost to me and, to the best of my knowledge, is not reproduced online), at least in part, was to provoke people (especially men) into volunteering to roll up their sleeves. Rather than the softly-softly approach, the tugging on heart strings or outright begging, it suggested that we should try a more competitive approach: tell these people to drink their cup of concrete.
The Consequences of “LAD” Culture: “Drinking, Football and F**king”*
By Helen McBride
I was initially motivated to write this piece as a response to the controversy over an anonymous post on a Facebook page, “UW Crushes,” associated with students at the University of Wyoming that read “I want to hatefuck ___ so hard. That chick runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think it’s hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and she’s going to be a good Republican bitch.” While the outcome of this storm has been problematic due to legitimacy concerns over who posted the offending comment, the story prompted me to visit the current debate over “LAD” culture in British and Northern Irish universities.