Harley.
No more need be said.
Posted on 02/23/2014 4:01:25 PM PST by 50sDad
In my youth, vampires were EVIL INCARNATE. They used you and left you dead or worse. Somehow, in the past fifty years, vampires have become teenaged heartthrobs, misunderstood and full of angst. But do you realize, from a societal and sociological point of view...vampires are the perfect man for modern women?
In my youth, in the movies, men were men. You were either John Wayne…strong, silent, but caring underneath, or you were Cary Grant…quirky, but strong, witty on the surface, but a manly good guy underneath. They were GOOD INCARNATE.
We have gelded the modern male. Once they were supposed to be strong, honest providers, because how would your family survive if you didn’t work hard? (This was before the Government stripped away the shame of not working, and replaced it with “Be happy you don’t have a job! You have more time to be with your family!) Men used to know how to be men. It was simple. Now, doing ANYTHING is nearly impossible… because you are pretty sure you are going to be wrong, no matter how you act. You are no longer a strong cabin, hewn by your manly efforts out of the wilderness…you are a poorly constructed shack that is going to require a woman to tear down and remodel, just to get you up to Society’s Construction Code.
And look at TV…men as fathers are no longer wise and strong, like Beaver’s dad, or Lucas McCain. Men are universally stumbling idiots who can’t cook, can’t do laundry properly, don’t pay attention to the kids, break things, and do not, as TV dads once did, command ANY kind of respect. Hollywood’s men are a joke. Today, society requires that you have to be strong, but not arrogant; empathic, but not wimpy; watching out for your spouse without EVER implying she can’t do everything herself, because if you open a door, you might be an arrogant fool for thinking she can’t, and if you don’t you will probably be lambasted for failing to be considerate.
To be a man in the Gelded Age is to be required to be dozens of diametrically opposed things at once. And women are little better…they are supposed to be both career women at the top of their field, Super Moms, and Man Architects all at once. And still, the biological imperative at our core, the call of the Meat Machines that we are and always has been cries out like a wolf into the night that at a primitive level, we are NOT all things, we are NOT all wired the same…we are men and women. And we need look no further than our popular fiction to see what we yearn for.
So, back on point…modern vampires…they have endless strength and can protect you (from werewolves and worse) but are so in touch with their feelings, they tear their shirts and belabor their fears, spilling complete backhistory and SHARING everything. They are at once strong and weak, bold and introspective...the vampire is the complete superman that modern women want, because they are EVERYTHING AT ONCE in a way that men in reality cannot hope to be.
Think about it…then think about their bibiological descendent Christian Gray, and why “Fifty Shades of Gray” is so hot that the books only hover over the shelves before they fly out the door. Gray is fabulously rich and so can protect you and provide for you like men once were supposed to do, but is so in touch with his feelings he is nearly immobilized between being an overpowering aggressor and a wounded little boy. He has a complicated backhistory, and needs a woman to fix him. He is once strong and weak, bold and introspective... that overpowering, sexy, vaguely threatening and yet needy Dom is in fact the perfect man. No wonder it sells so well…he is the perfect man that Hollywood has said women need.
Strong men like Wayne and Grant, men who have been culled out of society by a media and a social system that says it is somehow EVIL to be sure of yourself, and protective of those you care about, are apparently exactly what they seek inside their heads. It is like the Jungian concept of “archtypes”…there are some things so deeply engrained in our collective human history that they cannot be escaped.
It is a shame that we have let that reality of manhood be so diluted and maligned that there are few of Wayne and Grant’s breed still around, and that simple chaste femininity that once was so delightful has been scrubbed away in favor of the modern vulgarity of Mily Cyrus. Once, men knew how to be men. But the software has been so hacked, and corrupted, and re-coded, and modified, and revised that men and women are left we a vague sensation of longing for what was, with no idea of why they feel the loss.
” The call of the Meat Machines” would be either a good book name, or a good band name.
Actually, the men on Supernatural are pretty strong. Klaus on “The Originals” is pretty strong, he’s a vampire/werewolf hybrid, and pretty much an anti-hero, Marcel and Elijah I’m on the fence about. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, there were many strong male characters.
Have you ever heard of “Game of Thrones”? The only “sensitive” type of guy on that show is the gay guy.
Justified has noting like what you are talking about. And “Sons of Anarchy” isn’t exactly a bastion of wussiness either. Jax does have his moments occasionally, but Clay, Tig, Chibs, and Happy more than make up for it. Juice does cry a lot, but he’s been through a lot lately.
Leverage was pretty good too. Suits, White Collar, Burn Notice, Dollhouse, justified, The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Logan and Dick on Veronica Mars, Firefly, Castle.
And that was just what I could pull out of thin air on the shows that I enjoy.
Threse with a Malkavian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42k2vgY_t4
Heather Poe with a Malkavian: http://youtu.be/U5Q98oCaYPc?t=3m44s
You watch way too much TV.
Harley.
No more need be said.
This is a topic I’m always echoing. It’s one of the reasons I tend to find so much of modern entertainment to be so unpalatable... the lack of manliness in the male characters. I just can neither identify with nor even stomach most representations I see nowadays. I have to go back to vintage fare, just to find the solid, admirable kind of manly comportment in a protagonist (stoic confidence, moral backbone, etc.).
It often seemed that some time in the past two-to-three decades that old-fashioned masculinity disappeared, replaced by either cartoonishly ludicrous ‘macho’ action-heroes on one side, and wimpy, effeminate man-children on the other side. Nor did it seem to help when Jay Leno in the 1990s seemed to perpetuate the joke that the ‘average’ male is some fat, lazy dude who sits around a couch, drinking booze and reading porno all day.
I’ll be sticking with the old archetypes I always valued and respected. The Randolph Scott, Rod Cameron vein. While American culture itself seems to continue swirling down into some kind of depraved, faggoty toilet.
Nothing like the old male role models. John Wayne's characters were by and large rugged without being uncouth, rough without being trashy, and in perfect command of their emotions. Male characters who aren't sex-crazed have seriously gone out of fashion.
As a man myself, it ticks me off that males are portrayed in the manner they are these days.
I’m getting a sci fi vibe from “call of the meat machines”.
In the future, we are considered monsters of legend by the machine intelligences.
Somehow Sam Elliot and his Harley fit into this.
I want John Wayne and Lee Marvin back.
Bump.
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