Much has been made of the battles over women's gender identities; the chic lit debate and the mommy wars are just two of the most recent battlefields. But over here on the other side of the gender divide it's not all hearty toasts with Bud Light, either. Two new books on male insecurity can be roughly mapped to the chic lit/mommy war battlefields: Charlie LeDuff's US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man reproduces chic lit's cycle of preening self-regard followed by blank despair, while Neal Pollack's Alternadad has the same Bugaboo moment (horror that you actually contemplated buying a $700 stroller) as the mommy war books, except it passes more quickly and with fewer psychical aftereffects.
Charlie LeDuff wants to be the poet of that portion of the American male population that peaked in high school. Like a thousand other New York journalists, he goes west to find the "real" America, attaching himself to groups dedicated to doing things the vast majority of Midwesterners wouldn't dream of doing. LeDuff spends time with a motorcycle gang that lets off steam by beating each other up; a Arena 2 football team staffed with players who don't have a chance of making an Arena 1 team; and, in the interests of balance, a gay rodeo. What's remarkable about these groups of miserably inarticulate men is the performative quality of their activities. Not only are they trying to attract the attention of other people with the same fruitless ardency as a beauty contestant, they all engage in competitions that decide nothing--can there be any victory more hollow and deflating than beating another Arena 2 football team? No wonder they're all angry drunks.
Pollack's Alternadad grapples with actual dilemmas experienced by ordinary middle class men, so it's harder to dismiss it as just another book from a narcissistic, irritating guy urgently trying to tell you something you already know. Pollack's dilemma is the same one that a lot of new parents (and those still contemplating parenthood) grapple with: How to maintain a sense of self without being swamped by the demands of modern parenthood. Furthermore, choosing to reproduce is a weightier economic decision than it was for our parents. As Slate's Michael Agger points out, the alternadad isn't all that different from duffer dad or child seat in the pickup truck dad:
The anger surrounding alternadad and hipster parenting derives from the idea that these new parents don't want to "grow up" and act like parents. Instead, they give their kids fauxhawks and inculcate them with a precious taste in music and "film." I agree that this can be irritating, but find me the set of parents who haven't, consciously or not, indoctrinated their kids into a little family cult. And who's more annoying: the 3-year-old who knows Mandarin or the one who loves Devo? The difference between an alternadad, a banker dad, and a soccer dad is ultimately aesthetic and pointless. Sure, Pollack is psyched when Eli develops a love of the Ramones and Spider-Man, but most of his book recounts his struggle to find what America used to offer easily: a solid house, a living wage, a decent public school.
I once entertained the idea of naming my son Bix after the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, but then decided that naming my first born son after an alcoholic with a harsh and unloving father maybe wasn't the best idea. Still, I'm pleased that my son plays air trumpet. Moving to the suburbs hasn't changed me that much, although I do miss our loft. So I drive a station wagon now. So what. It's a regular car all the way to the back seat. One can fret about quality daycare and watch Hou Hsiao-hsien films without any cognitive dissonance. But once someone calls you Daddy, you're never the same.
NB: Thanks to Brendan Wolfe for his corrections on biographical details about Bix Beiderbecke.
Too late for your first-born, I suppose, but Bix was not a heroin addict or even a user. He drank. (A lot.) He didn't play trumpet, either, but I think the distinction between that instrument and cornet is subtler than between heroin and hooch. Still, the latter killed him just the same.
Posted by: Brendan Wolfe | February 17, 2007 at 05:35 PM