CARNAL NATION

“Have you seen the Dockers ads?” someone asked me recently at a conference, after I told them I write about masculinity. "A friend told me he liked those ads, because he is so unsure of what it means to 'be a man' right now. Everything has changed. There are no icons pointing men where to go, what to be like."

I hear this frequently, and I have asked myself this often, too, in my own personal identity development process of coming to a female masculinity as butch. Where are the feminist men? Where are the radical depictions of masculinity? Where are the examples of health and strength and skill and honor that I can admire and emulate? Who can I look to? Who will be a mirror showing me my reflection so that I can push myself in the direction that best fits me? I speak to this when I talk about depictions of healthy relationships in the media, too—where are they? What does that look like? Where are the heterosexual couples with men treating women with respect, value, care? Where is the equality? Where are the conscientious, thoughtful dads?

Things are changing. That is my entire premise of this series of articles on Radical Masculinity: that we are at a precarious time, in transition, finally studying what it means to "be a man" in this culture, much like feminists and gender scholars have been studying femininity and women in the past forty years. Underneath the question of what it means to "be a man," as queers and butches and trans and genderqueer folks are also asking, is what it means to be masculine. The concepts of masculinity have changed, and is still changing, and while there is no singular meaning (like perhaps the fictional version of the nuclear family and breadwinner in the 1950s), I'm finding that there is no shortage of masculine icons.

I've always been a sucker for archetypes, which the most vivid icons do become. John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Elvis Presley. Even more so than icons, the archetypes of masculinity tell us so much about what the culture deems valuable, as archetypes are the "original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all." So who becomes an archetype, and why? Who are the archetypes of masculinity?

I began gathering names of icons of masculinity from friends, acquaintances, community members, readers. I posed the question on Sugarbutch Chronicles, I asked about it on Twitter (also known as "the hive mind," it is tremendously interesting to poll there), I posted photographs and quotes on Tumblr, and kept a document of the results. Most of the mentioned icons, many of whom became archetypes, were cisgender (meaning not transgender) men. Personally, coming to my own in queer communities, many of my icons were my peers, as it is rare to see female masculinity, transgender, or genderqueer depictions reflected in the larger culture. But perhaps icons who have permeated the collective unconscious to the point of being an archetype are by necessity older than one's own peer group, and need to be not only icons to us but also to our parents or caretakers so that they become embedded in our childhood learnings of what represented adult roles and mature gender.

And since the concept of gender and biological sex being separate is a relatively young one, beginning to show up in discourse  in the 1950s, before the social change movements of the 1960s, the icons most  frequently cited were predominantly white cisgender American men. If, as I would argue, icons come up and out of not just the collective subconscious but also a reflection of the ideologies of the times, it makes sense to idealize and iconize those who also fit the cultural restrictions of what  In my limited, personal observation on these subjects, I believe it has been shifting in the recent forty or so years, and more men of color, genderqueer, and transgender folks are becoming iconic role models. It's still a problem that many of the "traditional" icons of masculinity are white cisgender American men, yes.  That's a problem. So let's change that, as we go forward—let's please have more icons of masculinity who are men of color—positive icons, not the "bad guy" icons. Let's have more genderqueer and butch dyke role models. Here's hoping currently influential folks like Jay-Z and Rachel Maddow will continue to evolve into icons.