On Masculinity: 10 observations about top ten lists
Kevin Arnold
Open any magazine or visit any Web site aimed at a predominantly male audience and there you will find them, a seemingly endless stream of “Top Ten” lists. The Top Ten Steakhouses in Philadelphia. The Top Ten Must-Have Tools for Your Garage. The Top Ten Guitar Players From 1976 Whose Last Names Start with “C.”
The proliferation and sheer volume of Top Ten lists has made them somewhat tedious, but it also seems they’re here to stay, if for no other reason than the fact that they are so fast and easy to produce. Lists can generate a lot of buzz with minimal effort from the writer.
Hey, I can’t fault the writers for this. Not when I’m writing my own list the night before my deadline.
Still, I think there is something more compelling about the Top Ten list that has contributed to its staying power, especially with men. Top Ten lists can be described as particularly masculine, not only in their typical content (“Top Ten Blondes in Hollywood”; “Top Ten American Muscle Cars”) but also in their structure. 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.
In honor of this storied tradition, I humbly submit my Top Ten observations about the Top Ten list.
10) The Top Ten list should be understood as a significant, contemporary genre of writing. I’m not sure about the history of Top Ten list, when it was “invented” or what changes it has gone through since then, but we seem to have become fixated on it recently.
Language is changing rapidly. Today, we head to slate.com instead of picking up a newspaper. We text, tweet, or post on our buddy’s Facebook wall instead of writing him a letter. It’s not so much that we read and write less than we used to, but that we do these things differently.
We might add to these changes the devaluation of the article and our love affair with the list.
9) The Top Ten List challenges our conventional understanding of reading as a feminine activity. The “gender” of writing varies widely in time and place, alternately imagined as the most avowedly masculine of pursuits (from Plato to Hemingway) and then as l’écriture feminine. By contrast, the act of reading has rarely, if ever, to my knowledge, been understood as especially masculine, at least within Western culture.
Reading a list is a qualitatively different experience from reading, say, Wuthering Heights, but it is still reading nonetheless. Rather than passively giving oneself over to the flow of sentences, the list informs the reader point by point, engaging him in the composition of the list in perhaps a more “active,” masculine way.
Why else is it that,
8) Top Ten lists seem especially to be written by men and for men? Women have been making out grocery lists for quite some time, but there is something about a particular kind of list, the Top Ten list, that is proper to men and masculinity.
Just pick up any women’s magazine. You’ll find a lot of lists here as well, but they tend to be unordered and non-hierarchical (“5 Easy Tips that Will Drive Him Wild in Bed”) or excessively lengthy (“492 ‘New’ Ways to Alleviate Menstrual Cramps”) to the point that they begin to exceed the parameters of a strict list and look more like conventional, if punchy, prose.
By contrast, like masculinity, Top Ten lists are:
7) Competitive and Hierarchical. Men tend to rate and rank things, sometimes ruthlessly, with clear winners and losers. The Top Ten list reflects our competitive nature.
6) Quantitative. The Top Ten list assigns each entry with a numeric value so that it can be compared, mathematically, with all other entries. #4 is better than #7, but not as good as #3, which is not as good as #1, etc.
Sometimes it seems that Top Ten lists are not really even “about” what it is they are ranking, but the pleasure and enjoyment that comes simply from counting things.
This empirical, pseudo-scientific quality of the Top Ten list is distinct from the relativizing and egalitarian nature of more feminine kinds of lists, where each entry is on par and indistinguishable with every other. Indeed, a Top Ten enables even the most subjective of sets to become,
5) Objective and Concrete. A Top Ten list removes the guesswork. It takes an abstract quality like “Best Mexican Food” and affixes it to a hard, absolute value.
Somewhat ironically, however, Top Ten lists are also always,
4) Debatable. It is in this way that the Top Ten list actively engages the reader, by soliciting his response to it. Is #4 really better than #8? Why? Is there something that doesn’t belong or that has been left out? Men love to debate these kinds of things, especially when they are presented as “objectively” true. We might then describe contemporary masculinity as a form of,
3) Connoisseurship. I’d like to think more about this. If an expert knowledge of various refined topics has been attached to masculinity at other moments in history, it seems that this idea has experienced a resurgence recently, which the preponderance of Top Ten lists attests to.
More and more, masculinity seems to be about having the best working knowledge of particular subjects, whether it’s to impress a date or to argue effectively with one’s friends.
2) Men concern themselves only with what is considered “the best.” Everything else is irrelevant, since it is necessarily excluded from the list. “8 Designer Coats for Fall” in Cosmo, let’s say, does not preclude the possibility of considering others in the way that a “Top” list does.
If the Top Ten list suggests a form of discerning refinement, it is also,
1) Formulaic and Repetitive. This contrast describes the state of contemporary masculinity quite well, caught between creative variation and strict adherence to traditional form. On the one hand, a joyful exuberance in devising a new ordering of things and on the other hand — Oh God, not another Top Ten list.
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