masculinity | The Smart Set

The Successful Gesture

Matt Hanson — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed […]

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My Father Through Mann’s Eyes

Greg Gerke — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 22:56:13 +0000

I can’t ask my father if he has seen Anthony Mann’s Man of the West because my father is dead. A mild aficionado of the “western,” he might have come upon it, maybe on some meandering 70s’ or 80s’ Saturday afternoon in a pan-and-scan version on television. Or, maybe he watched a remastered copy on TCM in the last 20 years of his life, as cable television packages anchored him in those […]

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My Trouble With Men

Mike Ingram — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:30:55 +0000

In graduate school, a female classmate told me I read like a girl. We were at a house party. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep had recently been released in paperback, and I mentioned that I’d read it over the summer and enjoyed it. “Really?” my classmate said. Her face began at surprise and then traveled toward […]

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In Plain Sight

Byshera Williams — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 11:30:04 +0000

Rafael Casal is a poet, rapper, producer, writer, and actor. Over the last ten years, he and his longtime friend and collaborator, Daveed Diggs, wrote, produced, and starred in their first film, Blindspotting. The story revolves around best friends Collin (Diggs) and Miles (Casal) during the last three days of Collin’s probation. As the days […]

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What Hallie Knew

D.B. Jones — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 11:30:11 +0000

Several great or powerful American films have yielded signature lines of dialogue to remember them by: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn;” “We’ll always have Paris;” “I coulda been a contender;” “Go ahead, make my day.” Of all John Ford Westerns, several of them truly great, only one of them produced a signature […]

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The Project Mayhem Age

Daniel Vollaro — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 12:19:02 +0000

For some of us, Fight Club is like a dirty bomb going off in the culture. I walk out of David Fincher’s iconic film sometime in the summer of 1999 feeling like I’ve just been touched by mad genius. The film is a hot, filthy, stylish channeling of rage against consumer culture and manufactured masculinity […]

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The Beard

Paula Marantz Cohen — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:12:43 +0000

I have never known my husband without his beard, a fact that disturbed me in the early years of our relationship. What was he hiding: a weak chin, a saber scar, a slothful nature, a psychological need for a barrier between himself and the world? But as time passed, I no longer felt the need […]

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The Culture of Sex

Jessa Crispin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:12:43 +0000

In the early ’90s, amid high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits and rape awareness campaigns such as Take Back the Night marches, two students accused a master at an Australian university of assaulting them at a school party. Hotly denied by the master himself, the charges consisted of a drunken grope while dancing, and a come-on later […]

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Girl Talk

Kristen Hoggatt — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:12:43 +0000

I think of poetry as a boys’ club. Do female poets have to learn to write in a “masculine” style to gain any praise for their poems? — Sarah, Malden, Massachusetts P.S. Do you know of any good poems about female relationships? You’re right, to some extent: Poetry is a boys’ club, as are many […]

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The Lifestyle Beat

Jason Wilson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:12:43 +0000

Not too long ago, I was at a party with a number of people who have successful careers in lifestyle journalism. I was chatting with a beautiful, sexy friend who writes for a magazine that covers luxury spa vacations. She got that job, in part, because she wrote a wonderful travel book about bathing culture […]

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