The College Fix

The following is an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “Proud to Be Right,” a collection of essays by 22 young conservative writers.

“We live in more of a pussy generation now,” Clint Eastwood told Esquire magazine last year. “[E]verybody’s become used to saying, ‘Well, how do we handle it psychologically?’”

Eastwood tells truths. America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.

This all occurred to me at 1:47 a.m. on November 8, 2008. I was on the phone in a hotel hallway, listening to this guy moan about this girl that didn’t want to get it get it, if you will. Out of some cruel, dazzling dark corner of my metal heart, a single thought formulated: Man up.

Intellectual elite girls know this secret. Vanderbilt University stands near the light end of a two-decade tunnel from Southern Playground of the Rich to generic Duke stepsister, but the tunnel produced a foil to the unmanned masses: the 2000s Vandy Girl. Embodied most in a handful of elite sororities, the concept of Vandy Girl requires one shot of the Old Spirit (pearls and champagne and knowing what to say and when to say it), and two shots of this confidence that’s a tic-tac-toe board of goals and timelines.

So, the calculus goes, the girls isolate aspects of masculinity—the drive, the confidence—in lightning rounds of Natural Selection Yahtzee. The men, likewise, drift to the center. They soften. They become Euro basketball players who never played high school ball, falling down like they’ve been shot after every hand check, and telling you they don’t feel respected. Don’t feel respected? Feel? I wouldn’t trust that person in a crisis. Why can’t we all shift in one direction, instead of stumbling into an androgynous mass of feelings-first zombie groupthink?

But perhaps you don’t believe me. Maybe you live in some neo-noir situation where the men smoke on dark corners or in open plains and don’t wear scarves unless it’s cold enough to cut a hole in some ice and pull a fish out, and even then are a little hesitant about the whole thing. I don’t know your life.

They’re not bad guys, not necessarily, this First Team All-Sister Mary Margaret. They’re generally polite, they love their parents, they get good grades at excellent schools. But underneath this sheen of the Good Kid, the Good Kind, thought overcomes action, and emotion overcomes thought.

“It’s selfishness,” my high school principal explained to me. He grew up in Western Pennsylvania and commands respect, whether at my privileged high school, or at his new, post-retirement post at a far rougher school. “It comes down to two questions: ‘What have you done for me lately?’ and ‘How will this look?’ ”

Vanity over pride, selfishness over self-restraint—serious problems that can be traced from one to the next, streaks of light in the dark forming one big circuit.

The Sports Enthusiast can recite Yankee batting averages like the alphabet, but can’t explain the infield fly rule. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but he was recently hired by a top-tier consulting firm. Fratastic can thrill a girl with Lost Generation levels of raging and fluent French, but in between tequila shots, he’ll judge anyone with a harshness that stings. The Moderate refuses to subscribe to a political ideology, so he meticulously eschews conservative bigotry and liberal recklessness by calling himself a Joe Lieberman Guy. He knows his politics, but he doesn’t want to take a stand.

Then we have the cavalry, aggregated into a single figure: Backstreet Boy X, who earns his title with all the violent action of a sleeping kitten. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Tom, in (500) Days of Summer captures Backstreet Boy X perfectly: smitten, ironic, and emotional. Backstreet Boy No. 3 lit candles, placed rose petals just so, and waited in a dark room on Valentine’s Day for a girl who’d already said no—and then refused to talk to her the rest of the year. Backstreet Boy No. 16 informed his girlfriend of three months when he would propose. Backstreet Boy No. 28 refused to talk to his girlfriend for an entire day after she forgot to reply to his “have a good day” text.

A 2008 New York Observer piece categorized a special serial version of the Backstreet Boys as the Homme Fatale.

“He was sensitive, funny, supersmart, not athletic at all and not physically imposing,” one actress explained. “But there was something that was so charismatic—a gentleness and gracefulness and a confidence.”

Backstreet’s back, all right? Boom. The article goes on to document the trail of unconsummated, unsatisfying, undefined faux-relationships all these sensitive, creative men left behind. Maybe we reap the product of socialist grade-school Valentines in Backstreet Boy X: everyone was supposed to feel special, and so everyone does. Rather than confront the more complex cultural issue, though, the article casts the Homme Fatale as a state of emotional mental illness; one man interviewed even calls the Homme Fatale an emotional sociopath. Addiction, anxiety, and depression always trump a well-placed, old-school “Man up.”

Check out the response from Cameron Parker, the UNC Daily Tar Heel opinion editor.

The rest of the essay (there’s plenty more words out there, like 2000 more) can be found in Jonah Goldberg’s Proud to Be Right. Katherine Miller is the editor of the Student Free Press Association website; her blog is Awkward Awesome.

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