Published in the February 2014 issue

A few years ago, a team of researchers led by a professor from UC Berkeley set out to test what they called the masculine overcompensation thesis, the theory that when men sense threats to their manhood, they respond by exaggerating their gender traits. The researchers used several approaches, from laboratory experiments to large-scale cross-sectional surveys, but they all confirmed that when men faced the implication that they were somehow not men, they tended to increase their support of war, homophobia, male dominance, "purchasing an SUV," and other stereotypical male bullshit. Women do not respond this way. If you tell women they're more masculine, they don't suddenly rush out to buy pink Priuses. The conclusion of the study is, to me, indisputable, but it leaves men in an impossible position: The more manly you act, the less manly you probably are.

Illustration by Kyle Hilton ON RON SWANSON No one has embodied and developed the idea of straight camp more thoroughly than Nick Offerman, both as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation and as the version of himself he plays on late-night television occasionally, when he reads the tweets of young female celebrities. Ron Swanson began as a straight-up parody of the manly man—with his pyramid of greatness; his love of "meat delivery systems"; his cell phone, which makes the sound of a shotgun firing; his desire to privatize every last government function; and, of course, his secret life as sexy jazz saxophonist Duke Silver. As the show has developed, Ron has also developed. He has become a figure of wisdom, dispensing tidbits like "Never half-ass two things; whole-ass one thing." He has gone through parody, but remains absolutely campy, with his buried hoards of gold, his attempt to purchase a house near the Lagavulin distillery, and his attraction to brown-haired women bearing breakfast foods. The manliest man on television is satire-within-satire.

You don't need experiments to understand how this works; everyday life is full of it. In his Treatise on Elegant Living, Honoré de Balzac wrote a series of maxims for men of style, number 40 of which states: "Clothing is how society expresses itself." Men's clothing of the moment reveals a deep contradiction: Strength means weakness and weakness means strength. Everywhere you look, the weak look hard and the hard look weak. The man in the salmon-colored shirt fires the man in overalls. A face covered with Nazi prison tattoos is the face of a man as powerless as it is possible to be, while the face of Mark Zuckerberg, emanating gentle geekiness, projects his world-encircling billions. The amazing thing is that we live in a world filled with alpha males—most of the world's billionaires are male, about 80 percent of American political offices are held by men, and 83 percent of all board seats of Fortune 500 companies are held by men. But our culture, at this point, seemingly has no way to express male strength outside of a camouflaged jokiness.

In the welter of back and forth, in the froth of the display, what has emerged is a form of straight camp. Susan Sontag defined camp in the 1960s as a self-consciousness of performance: "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman.' To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater." Sontag is describing a gay sensibility. Today straight masculinity is the theatrical expression: The campiest shows on television are Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Duck Dynasty—all of which feature tough guys wrestling with the forces of nature for the amusement of desk-bound data analysts. They show bearded men doing ludicrously "manly" things, with the manliness firmly kept in quotation marks. And just like the gay characters of the past, who were fonts of wisdom exactly because they were caught up in identity gamesmanship, straight camp figures in comedies offer insights into the workings of the world for the more "normal" characters. Think Barney from How I Met Your Mother. Think Ron Swanson, whose job it is to provide the last-minute life lesson on Parks and Recreation, sometimes while eating steak with Lagavulin. Whenever manliness becomes inflated in serious drama—as in the upcoming sequel to 300 in which the bulging muscles seem CGI-enhanced—it ends up with a slightly comic edge. Figures who embody testosterone as a walking joke are everywhere, an international phenomenon: Charlie Sheen in America, Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia. They're hilariously terrifying or terrifyingly hilarious, depending on what angle you take.

Illustration by Kyle Hilton

Quotation marks can be liberating; they are at least an escape from the overcompensation that has gripped men for the past fifty years. Postfeminist machismo—of the Norman Mailer variety or the Tucker Max variety, too—has essentially dissolved in the absurdity of its own premises. It was never entirely credible, because it was so obviously on the losing side. Today the big tough-guy guys are the Rob Fords and Chris Browns of this world, monsters of masculinity. Who would want to be like them? They're self-evidently losers.

It's just becoming too obvious that overcompensation is a sign of failure. The old bullshit doesn't work anymore. And we all know it (or almost all). When Snoop Dogg changed his name to Snoop Lion, it was a sign that his gangster life—which played so weak by his acting so hard—was ending, and true self-determination was emerging. Jay Z knows that when he rapped about "Big Pimpin'," he was just expressing how powerless he was as a young black man. Now he appears on the subway talking politely to nice old ladies who don't recognize him. That's power. That's a man who knows what he's about.

The corollary of Balzac's maxim number 40 is his maxim number 41: "Negligence of clothing is moral suicide." The true alpha male of the moment is the one who can understand that masculinity is a style and who can embrace that unstable and often difficult-to-negotiate fluidity without needing to prove his manhood, without the urge to retreat or to blow up. The man who realizes, joyfully, that men are able to pick and choose how they want to be men as never before and that the first thing to do with your manliness is relish those opportunities. Men are obviously at the end of something, possibly of many things. But each one of those endings is also a beginning. Only the strong will be able to see the hope in both.

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