As homophobia recedes, the language is celebrating male friendship and intimacy
By R.L.G.
LAST week Johnson featured depressing evidence that old-fashioned gender-attitudes are still very much with us, in looking at “sexism” and “misogyny”. But there is good news, too. A host of new words from the past decade shows that straight men in the English-speaking world are enjoying a bit more flexibility in how to be a man.
Ten years ago saw the rise of people like David Beckham, straight men (even in traditionally male domains like sport) who like flashy accessories and a bit of gel in their hair. The press coined “metrosexual” to describe them. The word hasn’t aged well: the New York Times shows a sudden spike in the word’s usage in its pages in 2004, followed by a marked dropoff.
But that is perhaps because more specific words came into being to describe individual bits of the metrosexual’s life: manscaping (careful grooming of body hair); man-purse (later murse), a small bag for a mobile phone, wallet and keys so that they don’t bulk out the pockets of a stylish pair of trousers; man-icure (obvious enough); mandals (sandals for the metrosexual at play) and so on.
But a bigger change is afoot. A popular online collection of old photos shows how much American men used to casually touch each other: Victorian gentlemen posing with hands clasped; grizzled cowboys sitting with arms entwined, and a striking amount of lap-sitting. But such pictures from the middle of the 20th century and later are rare. The culprit is homophobia: as gay men became more visible, they were reviled, and men in the English-speaking world (though not only there) started avoiding any touch that might indicate they were that way inclined.
Gays have made startling progress in the past fifteen years, though, first in public visibility and soon after in legal rights: the ability to marry across America and in many other western democracies, protection from workplace discrimination and the like. When the world didn’t end, as many social conservatives predicted it must, Sodom-and-Gomorrah style, it had a freeing effect on straight men, too.
It turns out that straight men’s need for intense, intimate relationships with each other never went anywhere, as evidenced by the ebullient burst of words celebrating it. Pop culture has been a leading indicator: our Prospero blog recently reviewed two movies in the same week—“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The End of the Tour”—which our reviewers concluded were essentially “bromances”, a male friendship at the heart of each story. The word itself was boosted by 2009’s “I Love You, Man”, which Wikipedia describes without scare-quotes as a bromantic comedy—a genre with its own Wikipedia entry, created in 2014.
Around the bromance have appeared other words about its elements. “I Love You, Man” also boosted man-cave, a room in the house restricted to men only. "Entourage", a straight-male fantasy about actors and their friends chasing beautiful Hollywood starlets, is also a smart examination of male friendship. Its most memorable character, the tough-talking agent Ari Gold, popularised his way of ending a distracting conflict between two of the crew: “Hug it out, bitch!” The male hug has its own moniker: the bro-hug should be both genuinely affectionate, and vigorous enough to prove that both men could still wrestle down an enemy if needed.
A whole generation of young men feel comfortable taking man-dates out together, saying “I’m gay for” a male celebrity they like, and generally pressing man-, bro- (and dude-) into service for new words signalling that their straight-maleness is secure. The eagerness is refreshing, and telling. Everyone wins when no one is afraid to appear to be something that was never wrong in the first place.
