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Joel Stein is a pussy. I know this because he openly admits as much, right at the beginning of his new book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. (I also know this because, full disclosure, I have played poker with him several times.)
Stein becomes gripped with panic when he learns that he and his wife are going to have a son—not because of the financial, emotional or circadian devastation his offspring is sure to wreak, but because Stein himself is singularly unmanly, and thus feels unprepared to raise a boy-child.
"Almost all of my friends in elementary school were girls," Stein writes in Man Made, published Tuesday. "I owned no Matchbox cars, no dirt bikes, no nunchucks. I never climbed a tree, built a fort, or broke a bone. I had an Easy-Bake Oven, a glass animal collection, sticker albums, a stack of LPs of nothing but show tunes, and a love for making stained-glass window ornaments. I'm not equipped to raise a boy. I'm equipped to raise a disappointed contestant on Antiques Roadshow."
And so Stein goes on a mission to discover his recessive Y chromosome—hanging out with firemen, fixing houses, camping with Boy Scouts, going through basic training, day trading and fighting one-time UFC heavyweight champion Randy Couture. He never really becomes that manly—"I have transformed into the kind of guy who will merely run in a circle to get away from a guy who wants to punch me in the face," he writes in conclusion, "instead of running in a circle while screaming and crying and begging for him to go away." But even if he never learns how to repair a roof, he does learn how to provide a secure, masculine, fatherly presence for his son.
Things started going wrong for Stein back in the '70s, when he was raised on a steady diet of Free To Be ... You and Me. The landmark album was dedicated to rewriting gender roles, and was filled with songs encouraging boys to cry and purchase dolls. The problem, Stein says in a phone interview with Wired, is that it was based on a faulty premise. Boys and girls really do act differently, and it's useless to pretend otherwise.
"Remember 'Ladies First'?" he asks. "The whole idea was that if you let ladies go first, they'd be eaten by lions. No. Ladies do go first, or they get mad at you! Even women who work at law firms!"
Stein's experience with his son, Laszlo, only confirmed his belief in the immutability of gender differences. "Boys and girls act differently, on the playground and at home," he says. "If you choose to ignore that, you're doing some weird social experiment and not being fair to your kids."
Over the years, Stein says, masculinity has been diluted.
"If you watch Mad Men, Don Draper is a man," he says. "Somebody says, 'You want to go for drinks, Don?' And he just says, 'NO.' I'd go, 'Oh, I'd love to, but I have these plans I can't get out of.' But then they showed Don Draper's dad, and he'd been working in the mines all day, and his face was all dirty, and he was silent, and he'd hit his wife and kid. That man was much manlier than Don Draper! And then if you read the Bible, all we used to do is go to the town next door, kill as many people as we could, enslave the rest, and grab their wives."
But Man Made isn't a celebration of neanderthalism. As Stein points out, our species doesn't really need aggressive masculinity anymore. We don't have to run from predators, or forage for food, or bludgeon rivals for our mates. Technology and philosophical progress have made manliness less relevant.
By and large, Stein says, that's a good thing. "Technology is awesome and enlightenment is awesome, but I think we've lost a couple good things," he says. "I think it'd be worth keeping some of the confidence, self-reliance and physicality—but still having our iPhones."
