Masculinity

There is a young marketing consultant and branding guru hereabouts whom I have met once or twice; I'll be vague. Although we both have a liking for dressing well and carrying ourselves with a certain executive authority, we didn't really hit it off, and I wasn't sure why -- until, I think, now. Said marketer has a blog with an extensive selection of photographs inviting the reader to get to know him better. I looked at all of them out of curiosity, and it is hard for me not to see them as an act of self-branding, given how completely they embody a certain Men's Journal-type take on masculinity. In the photographs we see the young marketer (who is ex-military, although I forget which branch):

Attending a Packers game in a Packers jersey
Attending March Madness
Attending the Kentucky Derby
Saluting the flag
Visiting Las Vegas
Traveling throughout Europe
Hanging out with luscious babes
Smoking cigars
Posing with a tractor
Shooting at a range
Taking a private helicopter ride
Sky-diving
Scuba diving
Geocaching
Checking out a Ferrari
Fishing
Speed-boating
Engaging in martial arts
Mountain biking
Motorcycling
Playing electric guitar
Playing pool

Golf, poker, and hunting somehow got inexplicably left out of this mix, but otherwise it's pretty thorough, wouldn't you say?

It got me thinking how "unmasculine" I must seem by contemporary and especially by Wisconsin standards (despite a 6'2" frame, muscular build, manly baritone, that stuff). I don't go gaga over the Packers; I don't hunt or fish; I've never owned or even shopped for a pick-up; my pet is a cat, for goodness sake.

Something I never would have anticipated in the wake of the Sixties and the Sexual Revolution and Free to Be You and Me is the intense rigidifying of modern gender roles -- chick lit, "It's a guy thing," Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, etc. But there you have it. Mr. Marketer (whose first name, amusingly, is sexually ambiguous, so he always does use "Mr.") is a sign of the times.

UPDATE (5/4/2009): And double. Especially since I'm out of the business world, the doings in which provided a small piece of common ground, I find I have almost nothing to talk to most Wisconsin men about. And I was always, during my commercial real estate years, forcing my interest in business a bit, quite understandably. I'm not uninterested in business (I've got plenty of sociologist in me), but I was never the "businessman" I tried to be -- I have no real instinct for making money in business, or for corporate politics. Since I've largely lost my interest in spectator sports, never had any interest in hunting or fishing or the various forms of recreation vehicles (all Wisconsin passions), and am not a "family man," I might as well be trying to relate to these guys across the Grand Canyon. Almost none of what I write about here would interest or appeal to them, either.