By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 24, 2015
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It's not that I think we're doing anything consciously sexist. Friends who were there that day remind me that we were actively making light of cookout customs even as we were participating in them. I suspect that everyone in the photograph identifies as a feminist. Yet the three of us look suspiciously like characters in a commercial, one where masculinity itself seems to be for sale.
I'm thinking -- maybe you are too -- of Hillshire Farm's obnoxious "Go Meat" television spot. As it opens (watch it if you must), a man works a grill alone. Without warning, a man in another yard begins a call-and-response chant about the meat he's cooking, and after a brief moment of confusion, our hero and two other solitary grillmasters join in. The camera cuts for a moment to a crane shot, showing us the men isolated in their adjacent but fenced-off yards. In the final scene, all four have gathered around a single grill, united in celebration.
Men, this commercial suggests, come together as men when they do a manly thing. Their grills become symbolic meeting points. They enable what scholars call homosocial contact, a kind of same-sex intimacy that deflects the supposed dangers of sexual contact between men but allows them to confirm their masculinity by excluding women. Grilling, in other words, allows these characters to cozy up to one another while still maintaining their understanding of themselves as truly manly men.
Significantly, the notion that grilling is a manly thing for very, very manly men is far from universal. In an article for Forbes, Meghan Casserly proposes that men like to grill because it's dangerous and because they don't have to clean up afterward. Yet "women preside over the grill" in much of the world. Though many claim that men grill because they're somehow drawn to fire, presumably by some atavistic impulse carried in our chromosomes, the masculine connotations of grilling are culturally specific, and hence culturally constructed.Come on. He's laying it on way too thick to be serious, isn't he? Then again, if you check his Facebook profile, he doesn't sound like the type of guy who would perpetrate a hilarious hoax at the expensive of the hypersensitive cultural elites. He sort of sounds like he fits right in. One of the worst things about cultural liberalism is that it produces stuff like this. Far from being nonjudgmental as they claim, they encourage people to constantly self-examine every little aspect of their personality for hidden, nefarious meanings. If I live in a suburb, I must be a racist! If I like to grill, I must not be a good feminist! They claim that Christians cling to a legalism filled with rules. That's not actually true, but even if it were, what they do is far worse. To the extent God has laid out commands for us to live by, they're clear and unmistakable. They're not designed to trap you but to guide you. The secular, cultural left just makes it up as it goes along, to the point where everyone starts freaking out about anything and everything they think or feel or like. That gets an emasculated guy like this throwing himself at the mercy of the culture's overlords because he has realized, to his horror, he has one last masculine inclination desperately hanging on. And because of it, he just has to be a jerk. I'll ponder this as I'm grilling chicken tonight for my famous Friday night Chicken Fettucine Alfredo. And I think tomorrow I will grill steaks. Maybe Jacob can feel better about himself by splitting the difference and grilling some tofu. I imagine the air in my mouth tastes better than that, but it's all about how you feel, bro. It's all about how you feel.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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