Many homeowners compete at Christmas time to put up the brightest and most complicated displays.  Still, with Christmas, there’s only so much you can do.  There’s Santa Claus, lights, and maybe the reindeer on the roof. With Halloween, your options are limited only by your imagination.  Any kind of monster or creature will work.  You can even make a multi-holiday display where Santa fights Frankenstein while a Werewolf chases the reindeer.   Plus, it’s the only time of the year you can put a fiery devil in the front yard without offending the neighbors. Costumes

If you took a poll (and I haven’t) many people would probably list Valentine’s Day as the sexiest holiday.  These people are wrong.  Halloween is the sexiest holiday, and nothing else comes close. Halloween is a time to let your dark side come out and play, and for many people, especially women, this means the opportunity to express desires and play out fantasies that might normally be frowned upon.  How many times (not enough) have you gone to a Halloween party and seen the quiet girl who wears sweaters all year round marching through the party in a French maid outfit? For one night of the year, business attire is out, and sexy is in.  Scantily clad nurses, cheerleaders, policewomen, devils, angels and pirates rule the night. For men, you have 1000 years of monsters, heros and legends to draw from.  You can be scary, ironic (lots of Bernie Madoff costumes this year) or funny.  Either way, it’s another chance to embrace this distinctive holiday. And if that doesn’t work, you can always buy a big tub of candy, sit at home, and watch old horror movies.  There’s more than one way to enjoy Halloween.

President Obama and golf partners, including the White House assistant chef Sam Kass, right, during his vacation in August. Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

At first blush, Mark Liebowitz‘ NYT essay “Man’s World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say” reads like a serious piece about feminists are genuinely concerned about a male-dominated culture in the West Wing. After awhile, however, one begins to suspect it’s a PR exercise to make President Obama seem more manly.

Does the White House feel like a frat house?

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.

The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

He presides over a White House rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other “dude” and testosterone-brimming personalities like Rahm Emanuel, the often-profane chief of staff; Lawrence Summers, the brash economic adviser; and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, who habitually speaks in sports metaphors.

The technical foul over the all-male game has become a nagging concern for a White House that has battled an impression dating to the presidential campaign that Mr. Obama’s closest advisers form a boys’ club and that he is too frequently in the company of only men — not just when playing sports, but also when making big decisions.

Uh huh.

“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration whose sister, Betsy, served as the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer. Ms. Myers said women have high expectations of the president. “Obama has a personal style that appeals to women,” she said. “He is seen as a consensus builder; he is not a towel snapper and does not tell crude jokes.”

Ooh, so he’s not only a Guy’s Guy, but he’s mature and sensitive, too? Oh, my!

Mr. Obama, in an interview with NBC on Wednesday, called the beef over basketball “bunk,” saying that the players were largely picked from a regular Congressional game and that the list of invitees was reviewed by women on his staff. “I don’t think it sends any kind of message or signal whatsoever,” said the president, who often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home (where he is the only non-canine male). He added, in the interview, that he had hired women into “some of the most important decision-making positions in this White House.”

OK. He loses a couple of Man Points here for 1) blaming the selection of his basketball team on female staffers and 2) having female staffers pick his basketball team.

Mr. Obama is hardly the first commander in chief whose penchant for sports and other guyish stuff (comic books, “Star Trek”) has become part of his presidential persona. The first President George Bush presented himself as a horseshoe-playing, pork-rind-eating Texan. He was followed by the Big Mac-gobbling, cigar-chomping Bill Clinton and the brush-clearing, bike-busting George W. Bush. It worked to good effect, said Mark McKinnon, a media adviser and mountain bike companion of the latter Mr. Bush.

Aside from perhaps the brush-clearing, is there any reason to believe any of this is affect? There’s every reason to believe Bush 41 likes horseshoes and pork rinds and Clinton liked hamburgers and cigars. And all these men were demonstrably avid sportsmen in their day.

As to the merits of the culture clash issue, these passages put it in perspective:

In interviews, five women who work in the White House or advised officials there described the culture with more of a collective eye-roll than any real sense of grievance or discomfort. One junior aide, who like the other women spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about appearing publicly critical, said that the “sports-fan thing at the White House” could become “annoying” and that her relative indifference to athletics could be mildly alienating. And while this is not uncommon in any workplace, sports bonding can afford a point of entree with the boss.

[...]

Recreation is only one source of affinity within a White House culture, people there say. Obama veterans describe a camaraderie forged over a grueling campaign and a merciless nine months at the White House. It is not about gender, they say, but shared experience. “Many of us have known each other for a long time, and we have brother-and-sister kind of relationships,” said Jen Psaki, the deputy press secretary, who works in an office with seven other spokesmen under 35, all “brothers” from the campaign.

[...]

Ms. Dunn said that she recently hosted a baby shower for an administration official and that no men from the office were invited. She is comfortable with that — just as she is fine with never playing basketball with the president. “That is just part of the culture here that I am excluded from,” she said. “And I don’t care.”

Quite right. Women are in very powerful roles in this administration, as they have been in the last several administrations. That’s the direction our culture has taken over the last three decades or so. But it doesn’t mean that men and women aren’t going to still tend to have different interests.

Just once, I’d like to see Obama break out of campaign mode and give an honest answer to silly questions like this. He’s a very good basketball player, especially for a middle aged Harvard Law graduate with a busy schedule. Unless he’s going to invite elite level women’s players (i.e., people good enough for the Olympics or the WNBA) they’re not going to be very good competition. For that matter, aside from pre-pubescent children, who ever heard of co-ed basketball teams?

No worries, though, Obama invited Melody Barnes, his chief domestic policy advisor, to play golf with him Sunday. Which, naturally, was widely reported.

Seriously, this kerfuffle — and Obama’s reaction to it — are silly.  Obama is a man.  He likes to spend some quality time with other men doing things men do.  There’s no need to apologize for that.

Will Wilkinson makes an excellent point about manliness in the modern age that’s worth reading in full. Here’s a snippet:

I think Hymowitz’s story gives too small a part to resentment at the loss of male privilege. Many men aren’t angry and confused because they don’t know what women want. They’re angry because they want what their fathers or grandfathers had, and they can’t get it. They’re confused because they can’t quite grasp why not. I think part of the fascination for many white guys with the show Mad Men is that it is a window into an attractive (to them) world of white male dominance and privilege that has largely disappeared. It is still possible to create a traditional patriarchal household, but it’s harder than ever for men to find women who will happily play along. And, in any case, there is little assurance of the stability of this sort of arrangement, since the social esteem that was once accorded to it — which helped reinforce men’s and women’s confidence in their traditional roles within it — has largely dissipated.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with. Most Americans these days seem happy enough to see women succeed as high-achieving go-getters. And who doesn’t love Tim Gunn? But most of us have not yet given up on oppressively restrictive, strongly normative conceptions of hetero masculinity. That, I submit, is what stands in the way of a real, um … renaissance for men.

I think that this is exactly right. I’ve also had little patience for the pathetic machismo that passes for “manliness.” And I’ve never understood why so many of my male peers have so much trouble with what it means to be a man. Growing up, I had no problem with the idea that a man is someone who is strong and brave and intelligent, as well as fully capable of accepting a woman as a partner and equal. Hell, when I was 6 years old, my hero was He-Man, who had no problem fighting alongside Teela as an equal partner. (Without, I might add, any hint of romance.) As I got older, my model for manliness was sculpted by a number of sources, but in the end it’s always been the intelligent, ethical, wily, jacks-of-all trades that continue to serve as my inspirations: Sherlock Holmes, Odysseus, Emmett “Doc” Brown, Benjamin Franklin, Mathurin Kerbouchard, and others.

I’ve been fortunate in life that all of my male friends have been cut from the same cloth. Respecters of intelligence, respecters of women, able to admire success without being envious–is it really that hard to be a man? Actually, yes, it is. It’s a lot easier to whine about how women don’t like you and act like an entitled jackass than it is to actually live up to a personal code of conduct and abide by it.

But that’s what you’re supposed to do.

It was 10 years ago that I decided to write a piece on “Mainstreaming Pornography.” I had recently gotten out of a relationship with a woman who liked porn, was turned on by porn, and was turned on even more when we watched it together. Believing this was something of an oddity, I researched the subject and discovered to my surprise that there were millions of women who were porn consumers, and that many more actually found certain types of pornography sexually stimulating in the lab.

Unfortunately, I never sold the piece. Perhaps I was ahead of my time because today, the fastest growing segment of porn consumers are females – single, married, involved – and the younger the woman, the more likely they are to have their own porn collection stashed away at home.

There is still a stigma attached to porn viewing by women (“nice girls don’t do it”) but mores in America are changing fast and if you haven’t noticed, porn sellers are making it a point to market all kinds of adult products to women. Several chain stores like Starship and Good Vibrations report almost half their walk in business comes from women.

But what of the porn industry itself? Industry analysts say that more than 70% of all adult films made still cater to the tastes of men. And while those “tastes” may not have changed much since the first guy figured out that a woman has three orifices, and that it feels good sampling all of them, there has been a decided shift in what is considered “mainstream” today as opposed to 30 years ago.

Yes, real men like anal sex according to today’s standards. This survey from 2006 revealed changes in attitude toward the act that, according to my unscientific observations, mirror the rise in popularity of anal sex porn in the 1990′s:

The survey, released last year, showed that 38.2 percent of men between 20 and 39 and 32.6 percent of women ages 18 to 44 engage in heterosexual anal sex. Compare that with the CDC’s 1992 National Health and Social Life survey, which found that only 25.6 percent of men 18 to 59 and 20.4 percent of women 18 to 59 indulged in it.

Here we have a classic case study of media influence; did the rise in interest in anal sex drive the porn industry to make more films in that genre or did the explosion of films portraying anal sex in the 1980′s and 90′s drive the curiosity seekers to try it in their own lives? This leads to a further question; what influence does pornography have on sexual practices in America?

Modern pornography – dating to the Victorian era where the camera was first employed to take risque pictures – has never been much of a mystery for men. If you’ve viewed any classic porn, you know that much if it is rather vanilla in nature. Classic woman alone, one or two women with one or two (or more) men, two women — all catering to common males fantasies and are still staples of the porn industry today. Of course, there were examples of homosexual porn as well as rare fetish porn, but by and large, the market catered to men with “ordinary” tastes in sex.

This held true through the 1970′s after the breakthrough films Deep Throat, and Behind the Green Door made it hip to take your date to the local “art house.” But the invention of the VCR changed the porn industry forever. Now, because porn consumerism exploded, even fetish and gay videos could find a niche in the market and make big money.

Today on the internet, I challenge you to invent a fetish and not already find dozens of porn titles that cater to it. Everything from head to toe, hair to ankle worship, and all the bodily functions in between now has its own sub-genre on streaming porn sites. I suppose this is progress but since I’m pretty much of a vanilla sort of fellow myself, I have refrained from investigating.

Most of these fetish films cater to men. But interestingly, women seem to get aroused watching just about any kind of pornography:

Even more compelling were the results of a 2004 study at Northwestern University that also assessed the effect of porn on genital arousal. Mind you, a copy of “Buffy the Vampire Layer” and a lubed-up feedback device isn’t most girls’ idea of a hot night in. But when the researchers showed gay, lesbian, and straight porn to heterosexual and homosexual women and men, they found that while the men responded more intensely to porn that mirrored their particular gender orientation, the women tended to like it all. Or at least their bodies did.

Today’s internet porn recognizes the surging female audience in a variety of ways. The two biggest pay-per-minute sites — HotMovies.com and AEBN.com — feature a “For Women” genre that streams movies with more of a storyline, as well as films that realize specific female fantasies. HotMovies has a genre with movies directed by women, another fast growing facet of the adult film business.

No stats are available from the two streaming video sites regarding female viewership, but Hustler’s Theresa Flynt reports that 56% of their DVD sales are made to women.

The cultural earthquake being caused by the widespread acceptance of pornography by both sexes has yet to be measured. How does it affect our attitudes toward partner sex? Toward women? Men?

Seeing that porn is an estimated $57 billion dollar industry world wide ($10-14 billion in the US), the social scientists will probably have enough data to keep them busy for years.

Nathan Hodge:

Today’s soldiers are weighed down with a ton of gear, and the Army wanted a new parachute that could carry a paratrooper with a total jump weight of 400 lb. Last year, the service approved low-rate initial production for the new parachute, called the T-11 Advanced Tactical Parachute System; the 75th Ranger Regiment is supposed to be the first unit equipped this year. Fred Coppola, the army’s deputy product manager for clothing and individual equipment, told me last year that the new chute would slow the rate of descent for a jumper weighing 385 lb to around 19 feet per second, versus the 22 feet per second of the old T-10. It’s the equivalent of jumping from a five-foot-high platform instead of an eight-foot jump — a difference that should save a lot of knees. The new chute also has a lower oscillation rate (the jumper swings less from side to side on the way down), and the T-11 also has a lower “opening shock” rate: the canopy opens more slowly, so the jumper does not experience a heavy jerk when the thing finally opens.

Sixty-year-old advice on shopping with the wife still rings true today

Photo credit: Bettmann/Corbis

“A word to the wives is sufficient. And the word is NO. When you have serious shopping to do, leave the pretty things at home. They can call in a few harpies from the neighborhood, set up a Kaffee-klatsch, tear a few reputations to ribbons, and be as happy as birds.” — Esquire, February 1949

Food in America has been cheap for a long time, and consumers have become accustomed to taking that fact for granted. When there are price hikes on things like steak and beer, it’s bound to be noticed, especially if a nice night out at a restaurant costs considerably more than in the past. It may give already jittery consumers yet another reason to pull back on their spending, and provide more fuel for the argument that any recovery will be about as robust as a flat glass of suds.

Well he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.

Those classic words, penned by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard months before I was born, are at least as true today. Despite what the advertisements may tell you, manhood has little to do with what kind of cigarettes you smoke, what car you drive, or how white your shirts could be.

The post’s title started as a placeholder; a prototype of the sort of posts we would write at MANzine.  But there seems to be serious question on this issue.

I happen to drive a Nissan 350Z Roadster, a two-seater, convertible sports car.  It’s easily the coolest, most fun car I’ve ever owned. Unless it’s raining, under 30 degrees, or above 100 degrees, I’ve got the top down.

A few weeks back, we learned that the practicalities of road trips with our infant daughter made it worthwhile to trade my wife’s small SUV for a minivan much like the one pictured atop this page.   I occasionally drive it.  While it’s neither as cool nor as much fun as the Z, my manhood doesn’t mysteriously vanish when I’m behind the wheel.

Sadly, manhood can’t be purchased for a few thousand dollars.

I get why men fear the minivan.  It is a pretty tangible symbol of giving up our youthful ideal in exchange for domestic life.   If we drive a sports car or motorcycle or pickup truck — or even an SUV — we can at least pretend the we haven’t changed.  But get a minivan, and it’s over.  You’re a daddy now.

This classic Peyton Manning commercial on the subject is pretty funny:

Because I married and became a dad later in life and I’m thus more financially secure than I would have been if I’d done those things in my 20s — and because our child care situation allows for it — I’ve managed to keep my sports car and drive the minivan only occasionally.  We’ll probably get a third car before I give it up entirely.

But who knows?  We’ve just got one child now, a 7-month-old.   The time may well come where I’ll be picking up a car pool and shuttling my kid off to soccer practice, making a two-seater silly rather than merely a luxury.  If so, I’ll do what tens of thousands of men before me have done and get a mini-van.

It could be worse.  Once upon a time, men had to make much bigger sacrifices.  Whether it was a long cattle drive or fighting off Indians, men often put their lives in danger to take care of their families.   Now, we’re called upon to set aside our egos and drive a less cool vehicle.

Elsewhere:

• Vanessa reminds us that women hate the idea of driving minivans, too.
• Chaz Hill contends that, “A Real Man drives whatever he goddamn well pleases, be it an old Jaguar or a New Beetle.”
• Matthew @ Billy Ockham argues “[M]asculinity has nothing to do with possessions. Manliness has to do with responsibility first and foremost.”

Certain events in a man’s life give him pause to take stock of himself and his place in the world. For me, the twin acts of getting married and purchasing my first home within days of one another were just those types of events.

These life changes have sparked a question: What does it mean to be a man in the twenty-first century?

For many men, the question might seem silly — a relic of a bygone time.   Modern men have transcended gender stereotypes and should be judged as individuals.  But that attitude is why the question is so pressing.

Simply speaking, we have learned to cease thinking of ourselves as men.

This is problematic on a couple of fronts. Firstly, as well intentioned as our efforts might be, we are the ultimate fools of naivete if we don’t see this move as fundamentally playing into the very privilege from whose yoke (and benefits) we seek to escape. The ability to turn away from and play ignorant to this most ubiquitous context  in such a self-righteously defiant fashion is, itself, a privilege that lies almost exclusively at the feet of men.

Women, for all their gains over the past decades, have no such luxury at their disposal. Whether in the workplace, in social settings, in still many homes, and in a not insignificant remaining number of cultures, women have no choice but to consistently bump up against the realities of their womanhood. No escape hatches or trap doors abound to provide our counterparts with a similarly pleasant pièce de résistance. And so, our euphemistic escapism from the difficult reconciliation of our past and future responsibilities is, when the rubber hits the road, a sublime silver spooned slap in the face.

In short, we do no one any favors by cultivating and codling this frame of mind.

The second reason that this is a pressing question is that whilst we wile our days away renouncing our manhood, it is the case that the very concept is debased on an almost hourly basis. By not electing to take it upon ourselves to wrestle with the implications and responsibilities of our manhood, we leave wide open the door through which an infanticized and, frankly, feckless impostor is allowed to assume his posture of fraud.

One need only take a quick look at the kinds of male images that litter popular culture to conclude that many young boys and men are bereft of anything even approaching a constructive role model of manhood presently. Be it Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Doug Heffernan, or Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, the implication is clear: these days, to be a man is to be fat, incompetent, and oafish. Certainly these types of comical characters have permeated popular culture in decades post, but the prevalence of their visage and the echoing absence of more constructive alternatives (a problem that, for all the challenges of previous male incarnations, has not existed in such stark contrast previously), makes these men the prime target for male cultural reference.

Consider the potential state of future men now growing up with these dullards as the constant baseline of informational bombardment about what it means to be a man. Is it any wonder that it seems like an increasing sea of boys steadily marches against the shores of our best efforts to grow up? And imagine the plight of women for whom these childish ring wraiths are meant to be partners (should those women choose men as partners, and the challenge also exists for men who come to choose men as their partners — sexual orientation is no Maginot Line against this onslaught).

The current and future problems begin to stack up relatively quickly. It is not just in our best interests, but is our obligation and responsibility to ask and steel ourselves to the task of adequately answering the question: what does it mean to be a man in the twenty-first century lest we allow the lowest common denominator to answer for us.

It is with this question and the variety of answers that I joyfully and excitedly intend to grapple over the next few weeks. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.