The State of Man
From the everyman to the iconic, male figures are — for better or worse — evolving. Who’s going to pick up the fragments of their history?
We live at an interesting time — at the intersection of technology and society, a time haunted by scandals, deceptions, and the potential to define relevancy at a national, and even global, level. In the age of social media, it seems that a scandal arises as soon as a man is handed the gilded star of “icon.”
The men who survive this era unscathed are the men who create a context for themselves to live in, and then place themselves between their context’s two extremes by either creating an illusion of normalcy, or by making themselves unreachable.
Just as quickly as “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli was catapulted into public awareness for hiking the price of the AIDS drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 — making a name for himself as a sort of social anomaly that everyone talked about but no one could quite understand — Donald Trump was beginning a largely-dismissed trek across America’s heartland to “Make America Great Again!” Trump’s 2016 presidential win has been attributed by some to the fact that he made himself an everyman for the largely marginalized.
Anne Champion is a poet and professor at Wheelock College in Boston, and the author of “The Good Girl is Always a Ghost,” a forthcoming collection of persona poems that give voices to many famous — and many historically overlooked — iconic women. When I spoke to her via email, she considered her research of the iconic female in relation to the notion of the iconic male.
“Men require very little to be granted humanity and admiration: even the most repulsive and mediocre of men can be catapulted to great heights in our culture,” Champion notes. Society has “wildly different expectations of men: we see a lack of emotion as a means of strength, when in fact, it’s a symptom of our cultural psychosis that causes many problems in the world.”
Masculinity wasn’t supposed to be as complex a notion as it became. The earliest art and philosophy documented and encouraged constructs they now oppose — Homer’s epics and Voltaire’s satires, in their own rites, asserted gender roles.
A quick search through a thesaurus suggests a problem with masculinity’s synonyms: virility, machismo, vigor, ruggedness, robustness. Luca Maurer, Director of the LGBT Education, Outreach, and Services Program at Ithaca College, thinks perception of masculinity “is largely a Western notion.”
An icon is a pictorial representation. Iconic men have historically embraced these stereotypes. In this decade, the standards seem to have changed.
“Society deems historically iconic male images reflective of society,” said Maurer. “But this view does a disservice to everyone. … It places men in a sort of straightjacket. … To be male suggests that one is violent, aggressive, combative, dirty. Though there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, when they are the only things held up in society, it creates a very narrow view in which anything that doesn’t conform to that standard makes you suspect.”
More and more, the everyman is becoming a sort of anomaly, traded instead for the dimensions and dramas of complexity. The iconic man, the Don Draper type, was suave and imperfect, yet his misdeeds — and there were many — were easily forgivable, thanks to his privilege and status. There was a time, however, when the iconic man and the everyman appeared to be analogous, the goal being to make the everyman feel iconic.
Everymen were easy to empathize with, easy to root for, and always found themselves in extraordinary circumstances — they negated the foul deeds of the iconic. The everyman’s missteps could be blamed on traumatic childhoods, abandonment issues, suppressed insecurities, and the fact that they were men. But the everyman himself is a sort of paradox. Jay Gatsby was an “Oxford man,” hardly your average Joe, who possessed the anachronistic quality of mysterious intrigue. Yet he was also a convoluted fabrication of himself, a public fraud.
The everyman never stated that he thrived off of his virtues. Instead, he was loved for his relatability. What was enticing about the everyman was the potential for every person to become him. The everyman cultivated an ordinary sense of an ideal; for all intents and purposes, he was the face of The American Dream. He overcame obstacles and made sacrifices. Still, Maurer notes, when analyzing any masculine symbol, “it’s remarkably hard to find images that wholly represent people’s lives.”
On a heightened level, the everyman seemed like every American citizen (until he didn’t).
Perhaps it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that brought an awareness to the public of the different stratum in which icons exist — helped them come to the realization that they were mortal, that they could not play God. There was a time when the everyman was something to be applauded; John F. Kennedy was the sort of man you could have a TV dinner with, and despite rumors of infidelity, he seemed to encapsulate the virtues of his office. He had the pleasure of being a man in a period when man’s sins were blamed on the stresses of their powerful positions and the unstated emotional contradictions associated with their sex. Lately, the everyman seems to be a product of our nostalgia.
Tides seem to be turning, although very slowly, and every era continues to see barriers for women in male-dominated fields challenged. In 1970, Nora Ephron, along with 45 other women, filed a class-action lawsuit against Newsweek for not allowing women to work as writers. Last year, Gretchen Carlson, along with several other women, came forward with sexual harassment allegations against Roger Ailes, then Chairman and CEO of Fox News, eventually leading to his ouster. What remains unsettling about these stories is not only that there is a cycle of women having to expose the facades of many iconic men and/or male-driven industries, but a pattern in which women must present the injustices committed against them in numbers in order to be believed.
Ithaca College freshman Carolina Jeronimo thinks the iconic male is formed in a way the iconic female isn’t.
“The iconic man is someone with wealth and power,” Jeronimo said. “Without both, they can’t be iconic — because they have to use it. Iconic women are more interested in using their wealth and power to help other women because they recognize and remember the struggles they faced.”
The making of iconic men is often paired with the erasure of powerful women. This is because women’s flaws are frequently deemed unforgettable or damaging. That is not to say that women from history are not easily remembered. Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland are iconic women — and stereotypes — of the 20th century. But, as Champion notes, “their iconic status comes to them because they are flawed and beautiful. While men’s flaws get ignored, women’s are put under a microscope in hopes that they will self-destruct.”
As Champion notes, despite being a “philanderer,” Kennedy is considered an icon “because he was a young, smart, handsome, fairly progressive president.” Looking at the iconic women of the time illuminates a stark double standard.
“In contrast, we have Rosa Parks — a virtual saint,” Champion said. “The history that many people don’t know is that Rosa Parks wasn’t the first to [refuse] give up her bus seat. In fact, an unmarried teenage pregnant girl named Claudette Colvin did it nine months prior, and it was her case that eventually went to the Supreme Court, declaring segregation unconstitutional. Her story wasn’t publicized because she would have been seen as morally corrupt for being unmarried and pregnant. In order to grant women iconic status, they have to almost be superhuman, without any human flaws.” To a certain extent, the flaws (or, better put, pasts) of iconic women have historically become scapegoats in order to strengthen the ethos of men.
The everyman is a myth of a capitalist society as much as the iconic man is a breed of it. At a young age, men are taught that the stimulating is more rewarding than the satisfying. A societal indicator of happiness in 2017 is affluence — designer clothing, designer cars, credit cards with large balances, the burning pockets of new money (just peruse some of the most notable music of this year).
Time can only tell which men we will perceive as the icons of 2017; however, 50 years from now it is likely that they will not be the same ones we perceive at the time of this article’s publication. Perhaps the world will end, as we are so often reminded, or maybe our apathy will reach its apex and we will be impressed by no one. George Orwell may even have been correct in his assertion that the man “wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it,” but it’s not necessarily one’s choice to take on various personas. Most of our perceptions of people become very fragmented over time. We remember incomplete instances which make deciphering the truth increasingly difficult.
Champion agrees — though she remains ambivalent about the strictures which beget icons. “The biggest thing we can lose in propping icons up on pedestals is the total erasure of many worthy, complex, and interesting icons,” she said. Pedestals are meant to be broken — or perhaps, because their standards are impossible to live up to, they are meant to be invisible.
“The minute we put someone on a pedestal, they become a myth,” Champion said.
