It’s hard out here for a man…

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for my campus paper about a ridiculous new survey- the 50 manliest cities in America. Yup, you read that right. You see, not content with shoving sexist bullshit down the throats of men around this country, we’ve taken to classifying cities based on how manly they are. And how exactly does one come up with such a ranking? Observe the categories-

Sports

Manly lifestyle (whatever that means)

Concentration of manly retail stores

Manly Magazine Subscriptions

Salty Snack Sales (um…..)

Anything strike you as particularly odd as you read this? Maybe the fact that last time I checked, women also watch sports, visit Home Depot and eat salty snacks? It’s things like these that reinforce how sexism isn’t just a women’s issue. Indeed, it never has been but yet, feminism hasn’t really done much to address artificial constructions of masculinity. In my column, I wrote-

While a number of gender studies classes focus on the effect that sexism has on women, little time is devoted to studying its effects on men. This despite the fact that men are victims of a culture that infantilizes them and reduces them to one of two caricatures: the beer guzzling and intellectually deficient Homer Simpson or the slacker with grade-school humor, as depicted in every (awful) Seth Rogen film.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject lately thanks to the popularity of this new reference in pop culture- bromance, or as Urban Dictionary puts it, “the complicated love and affection shared by two straight males.” There are several problematic things about this term. For one, it attempts to contextualize and rationalize a close relationship between two straight men, as if there is something wrong with maintaining such a bond. Of course, it also reveals a deeper issue- the fear that any relationship between two men will be construed as homosexual in nature. By slapping on a cutesy label like bromance, we are effectively silencing such fears. It seems then that straight men sharing close relationships with other straight men chips away at what we traditionally perceive of as masculinity- stoicism and a lack of emotions. This makes us deeply uncomfortable so we take to gender policing. And, in case you were wondering, the manliest city in America is Nashville. 

-Indira