Catering to Cable Guys

Despite the demographics and marketing, we are still free to debate why the celebration of men as regressive louts--as opposed to the celebration of them as something else--is cropping up in the popular culture at this particular moment. The FX's Liguori argues that "only recently has it become O.K. for guys to be guys again. Men are attracted to women. Ten years ago, that was harder to articulate in an entertainment product, and in reality." Or perhaps it's that men's magazines and TV shows are simply offering up images of masculinity that stand in high relief to the ones recent pop culture has provided: the wimpy and neurotic males on Friends, the fey brothers Crane on Frasier, the emotionally broken Detective Sipowicz of NYPD Blue, the guys in the movie Swingers, whose nostalgia for Rat Pack swagger never really expresses itself in anything beyond a taste for suits and cocktails.

Of course, it also appears to be true that the new men's magazines and TV programs are preying on a class of young men who may feel disenfranchised because they do not belong to the world of 26-year-old Internet millionaires with whom the news media are so endlessly enthralled. The median income for men 25 to 34 decreased from $27,656 a year in 1989 to $25,996 in 1997, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Moreover, according to the research firm MRI, the number of 18-to-34-year-old men earning $60,000 a year or more (the market-research industry's affluence standard) is growing at a slower rate than it is for adults on the whole.

Backlash author Susan Faludi, who explores the subject of male alienation in her upcoming book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, puts it this way: "If you don't have a lot of money, you're not a player. That's what the culture has taught young men. It's hard to feel like a grownup man. Maybe there is comfort in believing that it's O.K. to be a boorish kid with a baseball cap turned backwards forever." And that it's O.K., throughout that long boyhood, to keep your room wallpapered with pinups from Baywatch.