Be afraid, sensitive guys. The new, post-sensitive male has arrived, and he will kick sand in your face. You can see him on television, in this season’s deliberately boorish sitcoms, “Men Behaving Badly” and “Ned and Stacey.” You can read about him in “The Code,” a handbook for cads published this month in parody of “The Rules”–the best-selling guide to husband-hunting. You can subscribe to his loutish lifestyle in Loaded magazine (a British import “for men who should know better”) and Hollywood Highball–a ’60s-style girlie rag with tributes to “real men” like Howard Cosell.
This is not dangerous misogyny. These popcult testosterone patches are harmless fantasies designed for a generation of guys in search of an identity. The post-sensitive man is rediscovering his hard-wired masculinity. He felt marginalized by the feminization this year of formerly male bastions: the Olympics, the presidential election (all that pandering to soccer moms). But he’s recovered from the hangover of political correctness. He’s over “men are from Mars” psychobabble and the touchy-feely teachings of Robert Bly. And he’s sick of playing the nice guy who cries on the first date.
A recent issue of Esquire proclaimed the return of the Alpha Male. But he’s really the Retro Guy, a throwback who attacks life armed with props from his father’s generation: cigars, Scotch, golf clubs. Forget Man at His Best. This is about celebrating Man at His Worst. A survey in the December Mademoiselle found that 100 percent of male respondents said they’d have sex with a woman even if they weren’t interested in a relationship. Five years ago, some of them might have had the decency to lie.
“There’s kind of a balance coming around,” says Mademoiselle Editor in Chief Elizabeth Crow. “No woman wants a guy who’s in tears all the time.” Nate Penn, a coauthor of “The Code,” believes that “somehow essential masculine tenets have been swallowed up or papered over, and we felt like we had to apologize for them.” Code Guys are the antidote to Rules Girls. Penn and partner Lawrence LaRose serve up “time-tested secrets for getting what you want from women–without marrying them.” Chapter headings include “Be a “Beast’” and “No Tampons in the Medicine Cabinet: Protecting Our Borders.“The movie rights have already been sold.
Amazingly, NBC’s “Men Behaving Badly” operates on an even cruder level. Based on a popular Britcom of the same name, the show wallows in the Neanderthal mentality of Jamie (Rob Schneider) and his roommate, Kevin (Ron Eldard). Jamie is the less evolved of the two, the kind of guy who uses soiled jockey shorts as a coffee filter and feigns the death of his mother just to get a woman to go out with him. “We wanted to zero in on male behavior in an unabashed and unapologetic way,” says executive producer Harvey Myman. Which is why women watch: it confirms their worst suspicions. “It’s about looking at men when they don’t think anyone else is looking,” says Myman. “There’s a little Kevin and Jamie in all of us.”
A little “Beavis and Butt-head,” too. The ongoing quest of MTV’s animated bad boys to lose their virginity will be further chronicled in “Beavis and Butt-head Do America,” their big-screen debut, due Dec. 20. The cartoon’s creator, Mike Judge, thinks the appeal of his clueless youths is that they “go to the most primitive part of your being. They just do whatever is at the core of their male minds.” Sample targets of B&B’s lust: flight attendants, nuns, Chelsea Clinton.
Core bad behavior is always on display at Pravda, a Manhattan nightspot frequented by models and the men who crave them. “I don’t approach women,” says Tim Nadeau, an Internet executive perusing the clientele. “They come to me.” It’s a pose, of course. Dropping his self-consciously suave front for a moment, Nadeau, 30, admits, “Men are the schmucks of society.” Another Pravda pickup artist, Thomas Maslin, reaches for a suitably manly analogy: “It’s basically like fly-fishing. You test the water, and if there’s a nibble, you move in for the kill.” No crying. “To get laid,” Maslin, 30, says, “I try to shy away from the sensitive-guy thing.”
Fly-fishing comes easier to some men than others. When Mike Errico, a 30-year-old New York singer-songwriter, was smitten with a lifeguard in his building, he wrote her songs and called way too much. Nothing worked. Finally, friends felt compelled to perform an intervention. Don’t fawn over her like a puppy dog, they lectured. Tell her, “I’m going to this club. Wanna come? If you don’t, I’m going anyway.” Be a man. Recalls Tad Low, a TV producer and one of the interventionists: “We had to reattach his libido–it was a very delicate operation.” And successful. Errico wooed his current girlfriend with the direct “I want you now” approach. “It’s just so goddam exhausting to be sensitive,” he says. Still, he hastens to add, “I don’t chew cigars, and I don’t sit around watching football or bragging about “chicks’.”
A key distinction. The line between “masculine” and “jerk” is thinner than a cocktail napkin. John Favreau, the 30-year-old writer and star of “Swingers,” doesn’t want to take the blame for a new breed of creeps. “It’s not about dominating women and putting notches on the bedpost,” he says of his character, Mike. “But he’s got to come to his power and meet the girl he needs to meet.” Being post-sensitive doesn’t mean being insensitive. Guys like Favreau don’t really want to kill the bunny. They just want to pat one.
