Discovering Manliness in Mather

I have discovered the meaning of guyness. You're intrigued, I am sure. Lord knows I was. But before I tell you the secret, a little background would be helpful. It was Friday last, the first real day of winter, whether the calendar agreed or not. Outside, a cold combination of sleet and snow was falling with little pings to the ground. There was something beautiful about it all, but in another, more real sense, it was cold and wet--so I decided to stay inside. I wandered into the Mather House library to check out the magazines and there it was, the answer. Needless to say, I was surprised to have stumbled upon this priceless information in such a casual manner and in such an inauspicious setting. One could imagine discovering manliness in Mather, but in the library?

Nevertheless, there it was, staring me right in the face. On the cover of GQ was George Clooney. Beneath his sardonically smiling face were the words of truth: "George Clooney and the Meaning of Guyness," an article by Peter Richmond. From the look of the photograph (with a little fashion savoir faire provided by a small insert), it seems that real men wear stripes, lots of them, preferably by Emporio Armani, at a total cost of somewhere in the thousand-dollar range. Incidentally, or not so incidentally, real men are also white, but that's for another time.

The teaser for the article, as if those stripes and that headline weren't enough of a tease, informs the interested reader that George Clooney most wants to act the part of the "Guy" in a "classic leading-man kind of way." His simple request: "Just let me be the guy here." A real guy, taking the anecdotes Richmond relates as sign-posts, drives a motorcycle and/or a black car with leather interior, alternates between cursing and punching people who "disrespect" him or any of his "boys," does 180s on busy Los Angeles streets during the day. And he does it, Clooney explained, because it is "guy shit." And George can get away with it because he has this "ingratiating self-assurance."

So let's summarize, just so that everyone is on the same level of understanding: Real guys talk dirty, drive badly, are physically violent and drive cool, if slightly dangerous, vehicles. At this point, I'm beginning to get a grasp of this "guy" business.

Clooney always plays the same character, whether in his movies or in the weekly episodes of "ER." He is a macho guy, attractive, self-confident, somewhat crude, gruff on the outside, moderately warm inside. And, according to Richmond, Clooney can get away with the monotony because "there is something reassuring about George's unspectacular but classic character in an age when the screen is increasingly peopled by young guys...who haven't lived--not really lived--more than a day and a half their whole lives and are therefore about as inherently interesting as garden slugs." Which means, to take this up a level to the world of "meta," that interesting for a real guy is living rough, driving dangerously, dressing well. Manliness is beginning to come into clearer focus than I bargained for.

George is popular in this day and age, Richmond postulates, not only because the remainder of the male leads are scrawny and naive little boys, but because George knows what it is to be a man: "If there seems to be some question about the role of the male in late-millennium America, about how you're supposed to act as a man right now, there's no question in George's mind." George knows the answer: now is the time to be a guy again. Guys never let the women pay the check and always take care of their stuff, their women included.

Dean Martin, we discover, is George Clooney's hero. But Clooney does not want merely to act like Martin; he wants to be Martin, to be this 1950s manly man of the big screen. George wants to recreate the time when "men were men and women were broads but 'broad' was a compliment." Which may be the most honest section of the article. The vision of masculinity that Clooney tries to embody is a fiction of the screen and the novel, circa the 1950s, a disembodied and dangerous ideal-type of what it is to be a real man.

That George Clooney willingly, even proudly, admits that he likes some of the "I'm just a hunter, to drag the chick by the hair" mentality is not particularly noteworthy. But that his antiquated and sexist ideals should be toted as the essence of guyness, what real guys believe and what real women, by extension, should want, is wildly disturbing. Guyness is much more interesting than George Clooney, and much more varied. Thank goodness the '50s are over.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott's column appears on alternate Thursdays.