Kevin Arnold
Kevin Arnold is a Ph.D. candidate in English at SUNY Buffalo with an interest in contemporary masculinity. Presently held captive in the ivory tower of academia, he is looking to bring his work to a wider audience. Kevin also writes the blog str8bro.net, an irreverent take on masculinity and male bonding.
Articles by Kevin Arnold
Advice
A Gentleman’s Agreement: How to be a good gym partner
The ideal gym partner isn’t just someone you want to hang out with for a couple hours a few times a week, but someone you can form a very particular kind of connection with.
Advice
A Gentleman’s Agreement: Going to a restaurant
It’s no surprise that the idea of sitting down to a plate of panko-breaded calamari with another dude might seem a bit too much like, well, a date. But it doesn’t have to.
Advice
On Masculinity: The Ladies’ Man vs. The Guy’s Guy
Is the Ultimate Guy a ladies’ man or is he more of a guy’s guy? When we think about ideal masculinity, we probably imagine a little bit of both at the same time.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: Why men need to ‘hang out’
It doesn’t actually matter whether men are getting together to watch football on Sunday or to sacrifice a goat to the god Zeus. What matters is simply that they are getting together.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: 10 observations about top ten lists
Regardless of what it is they are ranking, the very form of these lists, as well as the impulse to create them, expresses several points about men today, with whom they remain most popular.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: What is a fetish?
I started out this column with the idea that fetishism is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon, and I wanted to think about why.
First, of course, I needed to verify that this is even true.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: The spectacle of the human body
If the spectacular display of the male body is indeed a very “old,” primal concept in masculinity, one of the best examples of this in the modern world is sports. Strange as it might sound, it seems that men can’t get enough of looking at other men’s bodies.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: The manliness of freedom
When we pare the question of freedom down to our everyday, cultural understanding of what it means to us or what it “looks like,” we associate freedom with qualities like independence, autonomy, and self-determination, qualities that, in turn, are indelibly associated with masculinity.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: Bros before hoes
Isn’t being a “bro” first and foremost about getting with as many girls as possible? If so, is the bros before hoes philosophy coextensive with this aim, or is it speaking something else about what it means to be a man today?
Advice
On Masculinity: Male violence and aggression
If you surveyed one hundred people and asked them the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the word, “violence,” I’d bet my last cent that women would not figure in even a single one of the responses. From video games to MMA, from action movies to war, men and violence go hand-in-hand.
Lifestyle
On Masculinity: In defense of the phrase “No Homo”
As the phrase “no homo” has moved from comedic novelty to quotidian vernacular, it has come under fire from the gay rights movement, which denounces it as an essentially homophobic statement. And yet, to my knowledge, no one has attempted to analyze, linguistically, what this phrase actually means or how it works.