Blue collar guys, masculinity, etc.
In the "dating a nerd" thread, Squirrely said that "nerds = emotional problems, and then went on to say that she likes a different kind of guy: "Big lifted truck, hunting, fishing, works outside." The type of guy one might call "uncomplicatedly masculine." That made me think of something Camille Paglia said:
| quote: | There is a disastrous problem with sexual identity at the elite schools. I don't know whether the young women see the kind of young men who are going to these schools as very sexually aggressive or intrusive, but that is not the case. From Williams to Brown to Yale, the young men are fresh faced, genteel bourgeois boys who were raised in professional households with very active mothers. They are boys with good manners, boys who are very sensitive, boys with their masculinity hardly visible.
When I teach in Philadelphia at Art School, and then go up to Harvard, the difference is hilarious. On the streets of central Philadelphia, I see real men, African-American men, Italian-American men from South Philly, real masculine men, and that's a compliment. They have no doubt about their sexual identity....It's hilarious that the virulent anti-male rhetoric is coming out of the Ivy League schools where there is not a virile masculine man in sight. |
Looking around me at my school (not Ivy League, but a pretty similar upper-middle-class-and-higher demographic), it does seem to me that a lot of guys, maybe the majority, are basically "nerd lite" -- not very "physical," not very aggressive, and almost kind of "deferential" toward women.
And then I thought about the times I've gone to rivers in south Texas and seen a lot of "blue-collar" kind of guys with military-issue hair cuts, big tattoos on their arms, and faces red from being out in the sun and drinking cheap beer. These guys seem to be "comfortable" with a certain prototypical aggressive, physical "masculinity" in a way that most of my upper-middle-class uni peers are not.
So, a few questions to talk about :
(1) Women: Do you like "blue collar" type "manly men" over more "academic" or "white collar" men?
(2) Are blue collar guys actually more "masculine-seeming" on average than guys who come from a higher income background, or am I misperceiving the situation?
(3) Is there something about growing up in a sheltered suburban environment that "planes down" a guy's personality and ensures that he'll always look out of place at a construction site?
(4) Is modern culture tending toward a feminization of men?
Last edited by MrJiveBoJingles on Sep-06-2008 at 17:42
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