On Masculinity: The Ladies’ Man vs. The Guy’s Guy
Kevin Arnold
If we were to paint an image of the proverbial Ultimate Guy, what would he look like?
It’s safe to say that some might describe him as a playboy, the guy who is never without two or three (or four or five) beautiful women by his side. You know this asshole. No matter how drop-dead gorgeous his girlfriend is, he still can’t resist cheating on her anytime the opportunity presents itself. Whether it’s because of his money, his looks, or both, the dude is just constantly reeling them in.
Sure it’s a stereotype, but we’re talking about fantasy ideals of masculinity.
Or, maybe this Ultimate Guy is that dude you know who can bench 315 cold, who eats raw ostrich eggs for breakfast, and who spends his weekend shark diving in Costa Rica. Unlike the Casanova, this guy is too busy with his manly pursuits to be bothered chasing tail like a horny adolescent. Women flock to him, even when he doesn’t appear to show the slightest bit of interest in them.
In short, 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. The Ladies’ Man and the Guy’s Guy are often intimately linked in American culture, since many women seem to gravitate towards rough and tumble Guy’s Guys, the macho types who command the respect of other men around them. Conversely, men tend to admire the Ladies’ Man for his ability to attract a lot of female attention.
But if we are dissecting masculinity and defining strict types, the Ladies’ Man and the Guy’s Guy can also, in their extreme forms, present a kind of tension with each other.
Think, for example, about the quintessential Ladies’ Man, Leon Phelps, played by Tim Meadows on SNL . The Ladies’ Man skits are funny, in part, precisely because Leon is anything but a Guy’s Guy. He manages to bang an incomprehensible number of women, all the while wearing silk shirts, listening to smooth jazz, and sipping his “CourvoiTHier.”
The Ladies’ Man is, to put it lightly, more than a little effeminate. The ironic contrast between this characteristic and his exaggerated proficiency with the opposite sex gets laughs, but it also reveals a cultural truth about masculinity. The Ladies’ Man is so successful with women because he thinks like them, talks like them, and, well, sort of IS like them.
In its hyperbolic form, the myth of the Ladies’ Man reaches a limit in defining masculinity. Demonstrating interest in women might be a sign of virility, but ironically, if a guy shows too much interest, he can become associated or affiliated with women in a way that is, then, decidedly unmanly. Is listening so intently to her gossip a part of your game, or do you genuinely want to hear it? It’s a fine line between scheduling that manicure because you want to get girls and because you want to look like one.
Enter the Guy’s Guy at the opposite end of the spectrum, an obvious antidote to the Ladies’ Man’s maybe, kind of, sort of feminine ways. The Guy’s Guy remains staunchly untainted by any feminizing influence whatsoever, since he embraces and surrounds himself only with the manliest of cultural elements. In sports, the military, and fraternities, men tend to act like five-year-old boys camped out in a password-protected tree house. Some of us, it seems, still aren’t entirely sure that girls don’t actually have cooties.
The persistent popularity of these macho stereotypes attests to their continued success in attracting the opposite sex, despite (or perhaps because) of their appearance to the contrary. The Guy’s Guy knows this, because his survival depends on the fact that he will still be able to attract women even when he is not actively trying to do so. This reverse psychological strategy therefore also has its own limit: at what point does a guy’s interest in all things male start to become, well, a bit too much? Like the Ladies’ Man’s excess of interest in femininity, the Guy’s Guy’s correlative lack of interest in it opens the possibility that masculinity can become about something other than getting the girl.
We might not be able to arrive at any facile conclusions as to whether the Ladies’ Man or the Guy’s Guy is the manlier of the two, but I don’t think the true answer lies in a happy medium either. Masculinity is often about extremes rather than compromise, and the tension between these two figures articulates an on-going question in how we define masculinity. Masculinity remains vital, compelling, and intriguing precisely because we cannot answer it, because its contradictions, such as this one, remain irresolvable and continue to play themselves out over and over again.
In a way that is strange, when heterosexual masculinity is exaggerated and taken to its limits, it starts to look neither very heterosexual nor even very manly for that matter.
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