A man like the one that married dear old mom: nostalgia and masculinity crisis in late 20th century American culture

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A MAN LIKE THE ONE THAT MARRIED DEAR OLD MOM:

NOSTALGIA AND MASCULINITY CRISIS IN LATE 20
TH
CENTURY AMERICAN

CULTURE

by

John Marshall Kephart III

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2008

Copyright 2008 John Marshall Kephart III

ii
Dedication

To my grandparents: James Carlton, Mabel Carlton, Elaine Kephart, and John M.

Kephart Sr. Their encouragement, intelligence, love, and care made me who I am today.

iii
Acknowledgements

Over the course of the time it took to write this dissertation, I imagined what the
acknowledgements would sound like many times; and it never came out the same way
twice. Such a monumental undertaking would have been approximately 0% possible
without tremendous encouragement, advice, and support over the course of graduate
career. My greatest fear, of course, is that I will leave someone out and regret it for a
substantial period of time. So, if I have left anyone out, let me begin with an apology:
I’m sorry. There are, however, a few people that I am positive I must thank. First, I must
thank my advisor Sarah Banet-Weiser. Her steadfast support, insight, advice, and
friendship have made me not only a better writer and teacher, but a better person. This
dissertation would not be what it is without her; I thank her for her advice, but assume all
responsibility for errors in content or poor humor. G. Thomas Goodnight was a valued
mentor in my academic writing and my professional development, and to him I owe a
monumental debt of gratitude. Michael Messner challenged me to think in new ways
about masculinity studies, a challenge that was instrumental in the current project. The
members of my qualifying exams committee helped challenged my thinking in a variety
of productive ways and laid the foundation for my dissertation scholarship. Larry Gross’
insistence that I add rigor and empiricism to my work while always challenging the
claims I took to be self-evident helped me grow as a writer. Marita Sturken’s constant
demands for context and specificity helped me to better understand how to situate my
work as part of a broader conversation. And Steve Ross’ challenge to complicate my
understanding of class politics and popular culture helped shaped my academic trajectory.

iv
I was also fortunate enough to work with a dedicated faculty at the Annenberg
School of Communication, including Abigail Kaun, Gordon Stables, Thomas Hollihan,
Randy Lake, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, and Allison Trope, all whom provided substantial
help and guidance at one point or another in my graduate career. Anne Marie Campian,
Donna McHugh, and Christine Lloreda made sure that I didn’t accidentally drop myself
out of grad school, and were always there to answer any questions, of which there were
many. And for which I owe a great debt of gratitude. I would also like to recognize the
support of the faculty in the Communication Studies Department at California State
University Northridge whose encouragement at the end of the dissertation process was an
enormous help in the final stretch: Ben Attias, Kathryn Sorrells, Daisy Lemus, Sakile
Camara, Peter Marston, Jim Hasenauer, Don Brownlee, Jeanine Minge, Rebecca Litke,
Christie Logan, and Randi Picarelli.
Additionally, I must express my profound gratitude to the members of my Ph.D.
cohort at the Annenberg School. The trials and tribulations of grad school were made not
only bearable but enjoyable through the camaraderie, wit, charm, and support of Yan
Chang, Arul Chib, Paulina Chow-White, Melissa Franke, Richard Hodkinson, Seung-A
Jin, Vikki Katz, Araba Sey, Aram Sinnreich, and Matt Matsaganis. I was also lucky to be
surrounded by fantastic doctoral students whose support and friendship was invaluable,
including Amelia Arsenault, Daniela Baroffio-Bota, Omri Ceren, Craig Hayden, Zoltan
Majdik, Shawn Powers, Carrie Anne-Platt, Steven Rafferty, and Cynthia Willis.
Finally, my close friends and family helped shape me over the course of my life
and continued to provide me with the support and encouragement I needed to keep going

v
at the end: Bryan Pratt, Christopher MacFarlane, Eric Overholt, Marcus Ricardo, Erin
Dunbar Barry, Nick Schneider, Corey Turoff, Erik Holland, Christina Schneider, Kate
Lyman, Aaron Walker, and Matt Akana. And last, but most certainly not least, my
family, who inspire me to make them proud in all I do and motivated me when I needed it
most. To my parents John Kephart Jr. and Nancy Kephart for always believing in me; to
my sister Beth for encouragement from afar; to my brother and best friend Chad who
helped me remember life outside of grad school. And my grandparents who instilled in
me a love of reading and a wonder in knowledge. This dissertation is dedicated to them.

vi
Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract viii

Introduction: A Man Like the One that Married Dear Old Mom 1
Method and Sample 8
The Context of Crisis:
Hegemonic Masculinity, Nostalgia, and Crisis in an Era of Postfeminism. 15
Why These Guys? The Importance of Studying the Promise Keepers
And Masculine Popular Culture 26
Chapter Breakdown 57

Chapter 1: The More Things Change
Crisis, and the Institutional Context of Nostalgic Masculinity 62
Masculinity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The More things Change 69
Homosocial Spaces: Fraternal Orders, Sports, and the
Intersection of Gender and Faith. 77
The New Man: Mass Market Periodicals and the Evolution of the Men’s
Market 90
...The More We Pretend They Stay the Same: The Emergence of
Promise Keepers and Masculine Popular Culture 105
Promise Keepers 105
Masculine Popular Culture 110
The Cultural Work of Crisis 120

Chapter 2: Narratives of the Self in Time
The Uses of Nostalgia 130
Tracing Nostalgia 138
Nostalgia as Escapist Fantasy 144
Nostalgia as Progressive Tactic 149
Nostalgia as Strategy and Tactic 153
Nostalgic Masculinity as Conservative Retrieval for the Future 158
Fitting Response: Why Nostalgic Masculinity Resonates 169

Chapter 3: Where Have All the Good Men Gone?
Nostalgic Masculinity as Framing Strategy 172
The Promise Keepers 182
Masculine Popular Culture 215
Conclusion 231

vii

Chapter 4: Act Like a Real Man!
Nostalgic Masculinity as Rhetorical Strategy 239
Promise Keepers 245
Reframing Masculinity 255
Nostalgia as Rhetorical Strategy 263
Masculine Popular Culture 275
Reaffirming and Reframing Masculinity 278
Nostalgia and Irony as Rhetorical Strategies 287
Nostalgic Longing, Masculinity, and a Rhetoric of Victimhood 301
Conclusion 308

Chapter 5: The Masculinity Marketplace
Nostalgic Masculinity as Commercial Strategy 310
Promise Keepers 321
Masculine Popular Culture 338
Conclusion 362

Conclusion:
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will 373

Bibliography 386

viii
Abstract
Over the course of the history of the United States, masculinity has been continually
situated as in peril; from the 18
th
century to the present, cultural discourses of masculinity
crisis arise every few years to proclaim that men have lost their way, and that something
needs to be done to bring back “real” American men. This dissertation examines the
cultural narratives of masculinity in crisis that arose in late 20
th
century America, from
1990-2005. In particular, it uses a dramatistic and feminist cultural studies approach to
trace two seemingly opposite phenomena: The Christian evangelical men’s movement
the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture, specifically Maxim Magazine and
The Man Show. While initially appearing to be widely divergent, both cultural artifacts
make recourse to a discourse of nostalgic masculinity to explain, resolve, and commodify
masculinity crisis. Though changing economic, social and cultural conditions are said to
put all men “in crisis”, this discourse of nostalgic masculinity is actually about white,
straight, middle-class men. The use of crisis functions as a rhetorical strategy that works
to erase the structural privilege enjoyed by those at the social center. In particular,
through appropriating feminine forms of knowledge and strategies mobilized against
heteronormative patriarchy, nostalgic masculinity works to contain feminism and identity
politics through identifying an aggressive feminine culture as the cause of male anguish,
and reframing masculinity to render such unruly Otherness as unnecessary to the
successful performance of masculinity. In this way, nostalgic masculinity and discourses
of masculinity crisis adopt a rhetoric of victimhood and position those at the social center
as under attack and in need of redemption. Further, the anxiety produced by changing

ix
cultural conditions is commodified in the service of market expansion. Using nostalgia
as a representational trope, masculinity is turned into a product to be sold back to the men
said to be in crisis. This process is not imposed on the men in the target audience; rather,
it is a process which is “good for thinking” as men work to make sense of their masculine
identity in a postmodern media context characterized by uncertain and shifting gender
roles.
.

1
Introduction:
A Man Like the One Who Married Dear Old Mom
1

I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation
pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle
children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great
Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've
all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie
gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.
- Tyler Durden, “Fight Club”

He had a hole he was trying to fill – first with women, now with religion.
- Neil Strauss, “The Game”

American masculinity was in crisis.
2
In the early to mid 1990s a variety of tomes,
academic and popular, proclaimed masculinity as under assault in the United States.
Headlines of major newspapers and wide-circulation magazines screamed of impending
doom: men were on “trial” (Taylor, 1991), there was a “crisis of manliness” (Newell,
1998), and “trouble with boys” (D’Antonio, 1994), while some even wondered if men
were necessary at all (Wright, 1992). Columnists and pundits claimed that men were
becoming too feminized, or at the very least were abandoning their traditional masculine
roles, to the determent of themselves and society at large. Books such as Warren

1
The title of the introduction, and by extension the dissertation, is a reconfiguring of the title for Robert Westbrook’s
1990 article “I want a girl just like the one that married Henry James: American women and the problem of political
obligation in World War II.” Westbrook’s primary argument is about the ways American women, symbolized in pin-
up posters of movie stars, were mobilized as a form of private obligation to fight for the United States in World War II,
and, reciprocally, American women were to discipline themselves to live up to this image of being fought for. While
Westbrook is referring to the immediate context of Betty Grable – the girl who married Henry James – and her role as
standing in for the “ordinary” American woman, I use the formulation to indicate a sense of historical longing for the
period immediately following the war, a nostalgia for a time of gender certainty and available masculinity like the
fathers of the men who are addressed by the culture I study.

2
As will be clarified, the use of crisis in this dissertation is not used to identify a state of legitimate or definitive crisis
for any group of men or women, but rather to identify a discursive strategy that works to situate some groups as in
crisis and others not in the interests of market dynamics and patriarchal power.

2
Farrell’s (1993) The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex, bemoaned
the media’s bashing of men while chronicling the variety of ways men were socially
disadvantaged. Seemingly opposite in intent, Steven Goldberg’s (1993) Why Men Rule:
A Theory of Male Dominance (a slight revision of his earlier The Inevitability of
Patriarchy) attempted to chronicle the genetic and cross-cultural superiority of male
dominance and rebuff the desires of “environmentalists” (read: feminists) to search for
kinder gentler men. Though discussing the natural “superiority” of masculinity, as
opposed to Farrell’s discussion of the vulnerability of men, Goldberg’s text reflects just
as much anxiety as Farrell’s in its rebuttal of the increasing power of feminists and
feminism to contest the “naturalness” of masculine rule.
Men seemed to be out of their “natural” place in broader popular culture as well.
The end of the decade saw two different movies dramatizing the “masculinity crisis”
achieve wide popular success and critical acclaim. Fight Club, a 1999 film about men
who start a secret underground club devoted to fighting as a form of male bonding, tells
the story of a consumer-culture obsessed narcoleptic who initially finds redemption in the
expression of primal violence, only to realize his attempts to live up to the demands of
American society to be both macho and commodity-oriented have left him in a state of
schizophrenia. That same year, American Beauty told the story of a man whose hard
work and dedication to his job are underappreciated by a wife and daughter who don’t
respect him and a corporation who downsizes him. He rebels by blackmailing his office,
attempting to seduce his daughter’s friends, and rebuking his wife through retreating to
his youth of smoking pot, working at a burger franchise and pumping iron to 1960s

3
psychedelic rock in his garage. The film (spoiler alert!), which was nominated for eight
Academy Awards and won five including Best Actor and Best Picture, ends with the lead
realizing he is trying to hard to live up to expectations, immediately before being
murdered. What both films have in common is a criticism of the tendency of modern
men to invest themselves in a corporate consumer culture and neglect their “inherent”
masculinity rooted either in natural primacy or nostalgia for their teenage years; a neglect
which can be resolved through returning to an “authentic” masculinity. And both
dramatize the position of men in the 1990s as figures who attempt to live up to the
contradictory demands for men – to be tough, aggressive and macho while also being
hard workers, sensitive, and good consumers – and who suffer mentally and physically as
a result of that stress (Messner, 1997).
3

While some discourses of masculinity counseled a more nurturing, understanding
man for the 1990s, others bemoaned this new man as being emasculated and abandoning
his rightful duties (Faludi, 1999a). Beginning in the mid to late 1980s and accelerating in
the 1990s, men were targeted as consumers like never before. While previously limited
to pitches for electronics and hardware, men began being hailed in advertisements for
clothing, accessories, and other “ornamental” products previously marketed almost
exclusively to women (Edwards, 1997; Faludi, 1999a; Gauntlett, 2002). Self proclaimed
bastions of contemporary masculinity ranging from the upstarts Maxim Magazine and
The Man Show, to religious groups such as the Promise Keepers, and even political
leaders claimed that the feminizing influences of feminism and political correctness had

3
Susan Faludi, (1999b) who earlier in the decade had written Backlash about the conservative cultural response to
feminism in the United States, goes so far as to call Fight Club a quasi-feminist tale that is Thelma and Louise for men,
and a deeper, more nuanced, and more violent reprisal of American Beauty.

4
robbed men of their masculinity. At the same time, however, these cultural institutions
further encouraged men to consume and behave in particular ways to enact masculinity:
lifestyle magazines informed men of the proper styles of manner and dress while spiritual
organizations encouraged men to consume popular culture and consumer goods in ways
in line with both their religion and their gender. In politics, consumer culture, popular
representation, and religious doctrine, the last decade of the 20
th
century witnessed a slew
of discourses aimed at bringing American men back from the brink of crisis.
The supposed “assault” on American masculinity was varied, ranging from
complaints about absent fathers and deadbeat dads to men “under attack” for their
masculinity and complaints about an overly feminized culture (Faludi, 1999a). While
feminism and identity politics were able to secure limited but significant gains for
women, people of color, the disabled, and sexual minorities over the course of the 1970s
and 1980s, resulting in increased sensitivity towards issues of institutional access as well
as various forms of discrimination, and sexual harassment policies more commonplace in
universities and workplaces, not everyone was enthused. The complaints of an assault on
masculinity seemed to mirror accusations of an overly liberal culture, one which focused
on political correctness and multiculturalism at the expense of treasured Enlightenment
rationality and the Western canon. In particular, the “PC” (political correctness) debate
of the early 1990s evinced a variety of responses from popular critics, academics, and
politicians left, right, and center. With culture proclaimed as “under attack” from leftists
intent on destroying everything good about Western philosophy and history, vigorous
debates emerged in the press and across American universities over the conflict between

5
a need for greater tolerance and resistance to censorship and the trampling of academic
freedom in the name of that tolerance (Berman, 1992). Academics such as Dinesh
D’Souza (1991) called attempts at political correctness “campus thought control” and
declared it a politics of intimidation. President George H. W. Bush spoke at the
University of Michigan decrying academic censorship in the name of multiculturalism.
Media pundits on both sides of the political aisle, from Rush Limbaugh to Bill Maher
appropriated the term to use against those who they perceived as taking this new attention
to difference too far in their desire for sensitivity. And, not to be left out, popular culture
chimed in with the release of the 1994 PCU, a campus comedy that parodies political
correctness on universities (the title being a play on words, with the fictional college
being named “Port Chester University” though it could also be “Politically Correct
University”) and its potentially negative consequences if taken too far. The period also
saw the rise of shock jocks such as Howard Stern and Tom Lykas who became
syndicated broadcasting a message of chauvinism and sexism that encouraged men to
treat women as objects and reclaim their natural superiority, a not too distant echo of
Limbaugh’s attacks on the “femi-nazis” ruining American culture. Lest this been seen as
a boys club, it should also be noted that conservative talk show host Dr. Laura (who has a
Ph.D., not an M.D.), who often espouses a rigidly essentialist gender politics, also rose in
popularity in the 1990s. The publication of Katie Roiphe’s (1993) The Morning After
discussed the need for women to stop adhering to a feminism that overemphasized
occurrences such as sexual violence and left women in the position of victims under the
assault of patriarchy, and to take control of their lives, including accepting their own role

6
in phenomena such as date rape, intoning that it was often an expression of regret and not
assault. As will be discussed in greater detail later in this introduction, Roiphe’s text was
part of the emergent discourse of postfeminism, which challenged the contemporary
necessity of feminism, often challenging the position in which it had left men. In the
popular imagination and on the political spectrum left, right, and center, it seemed as if a
“domestic apocalypse was under way” (Faludi, 1999a, p. 6).
The attempted resolution of this widely identified yet repeatedly un(der)defined
crisis in masculinity took a variety of forms. This dissertation examines two of those
responses. The first is the evangelical Christian men’s movement The Promise Keepers
(PK), a group which works to “ignite and unite men to become passionate followers of
Jesus Christ through the effective communication of seven promises to God, their fellow
men, family, church and the world” (“Overview,” n.d.), taking as their central premise
that men have abandoned their roles in the family and wider society, and need to become
servant leaders, and better husbands and fathers. The Promise Keepers burst upon the
national scene seemingly unexpectedly in the mid 1990s, culminating in 1997 as
hundreds of thousands of men appeared at the National Mall in Washington D.C. for
“Stand in the Gap,” a large meeting organized by the group as a day of “personal
repentance and prayer,” (“97 Stand in the Gap,” n.d.).
4
Beginning as a gathering of 72
men in 1990, the Promise Keepers saw attendance at their events reach 1.1 million in
1996. The second response treated here is what I have termed masculine popular culture
(MPC). Masculine popular culture is a short-hand term to refer to popular culture that

4
While the group had been around since 1990, it was the coverage of Stand in the Gap (SITG) that seemed to catapult
them into academic and popular imagination, with the vast majority of news reports and academic writing beginning
after the 1996 announcement of SITG.

7
explicitly targets men as its explicit primary audience. As will be discussed in greater
detail later in this introduction and in Chapter 1, these forms of popular culture are
distinct from earlier artifacts that may have imagined a male demographic as its primary
audience. While other titles are certainly aimed at men, such as Guns ‘N Ammo or Men’s
Health and Fitness, masculine popular culture takes as their central concern men’s lives
as men.
5
For the purpose of this dissertation I focus on Maxim Magazine, the first men’s
general lifestyle periodical in the United States which not only says that it is a magazine
for men, but bills itself as “The Best Thing to Happen to Men Since Women,” and The
Man Show, a television program on the cable network Comedy Central, which proclaims
itself as “an unapologetic look at the mind, body, and soul of the modern man” as well as
“a joyous celebration of chauvinism” (Stone Stanley Distribution Inc., 2003). Both
Maxim and The Man Show were exceedingly popular upon their release, with Maxim
breaking and then rebreaking several publishing records and The Man Show achieving the
highest initial ratings of any program on Comedy Central.
6

A common thread running through both of these cultural phenomena is the notion
of a “return” to a more authentic, desirable, or accurate masculinity, a nostalgia for a
period of stability. It is true that discourses of masculinity present themselves as
authentic, the way that “real” men act, or else they would function poorly as organized
discourses of gender. However, in the current context, there is a pronounced emphasis on

5
This phenomenon has also been referred to as “laddishness” in its British manifestation, and elsewhere, in advertising
parlance in particular, as “guyness” or “guy humor,” exemplified by the mantra of a series of Brut cologne ads: “Inside
Every Man is a Guy” (PR Newswire, 1999)

6
Other examples would include The X Show, Men Behaving Badly, SpikeTV (which declares that it is the first
television network for men), and other magazine titles such as For Him Magazine and Stuff. As will be detailed later, I
chose these artifacts not only for their phenomenal success, but also because they were the first items of their kind to be
commercially successful in the US. Numbers detailing their success are provided in Chapter 1.

8
not just being a real man, but instruction on returning to the ideal masculine state. In
various ways, both the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture situate their
audience as in crisis, representing the state of the “modern man” as one fraught with
peril, uncertainty, and a variety of cultural influences which impede men from living up
to historical standards of masculinity. This sense of anxiety identified as crisis is not a
new experience in American culture or discourses of gender. Historically, masculinity is
always already in crisis. While periodically presented as a dramatic shift from previous
notions of what it meant to be a man, masculinity is constantly in crisis as gender identity
changes in response to changes in politics, new social and economic relations,
technological innovations, and evolving cultural norms. Far from being a stable roadmap
that one only needs to open and follow, gender identity is constantly reworked as
conceptions of what it means to be properly masculine or properly feminine change over
time. Crises explode when men are no longer “acting” like men, and the felt experience
of anxiety over sweeping cultural and economic changes is vocalized in the public
domain, and identified as incongruent with previous models of masculinity. While what
it means to be “in crisis” is often not clearly identified in doomsday scenarios of absent
masculinity, the state of crisis is frequently deployed as a strategy to name and
understand shifting social relations.

Method and Sample

My research adopts a feminist cultural studies perspective, which informs both
methodology and analytic approach in a number of important ways. From a feminist

9
perspective, attention will be paid not only to how these practices and representations of
nostalgic masculinity affect the men targeted/engaged in such cultural expressions, but
also the implications for women of this particular ideology of masculinity. In examining
how this masculinity makes sense of feminism, as well as other movements for social
justice, the dissertation will necessarily view these cultural phenomena through a feminist
lens. Additionally, a cultural studies approach guides both the structure and the focus of
the chapters. Proceeding from a tradition of relentless contextualization demands that
each chapter (in addition to the work as a whole) begin with a history to not only
understand how we arrived at a particular historical moment, but also what ideologies are
responding to in their contemporary manifestation. Further, a cultural studies perspective
considers issue of power to be foremost: how is power deployed? Who benefits from
power? Who is harmed? How? Together, a feminist cultural studies approach
intervenes into contemporary discussions of masculinity and gender studies to see how
we have come to a period of nostalgic masculinity, and engage the implications for men
and women alike.
The dissertation will be guided by a series of research questions to frame and
direct the analysis. Broadly, the big question seeks to uncover what ways nostalgia plays
a role in representations of masculinity in the late 20
th
and early 21
st
centuries: What
characteristics define contemporary masculinity, and how are they similar to and different
from historical notions of masculinity? In particular: What about the cultural context
renders nostalgia as a fit response to the latest “crisis in masculinity”? How are men
positioned by a discourse of nostalgic masculinity? How does such a masculinity take

10
into account/respond to feminism and identity politics, and what are the implications for a
feminist informed politics? How is masculinity (re)presented in religious contexts? How
does the popular culture of this period encourage particular types of consumption? How
is consumption used as a resolution to the masculinity crisis?
These discourses circulate through a wide body of texts, including but not limited
to journalistic and academic articles in popular press, entertainment, public statements,
interviews, press conferences, mailings, and conventions. In tracing masculinity through
these various texts, I used textual and rhetorical analyses, in addition to participant
observation, to provide a nuanced reading of the contemporary crisis in masculinity. In
terms of rhetorical analysis, I rely most on Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic theory. For
Burke (1966), the primary distinctions between humans and animals is our capacity for
language, as Burke saw humanity as the “symbol-using animal,” and viewed language as
not just a method for describing our world, but as symbolic action, a way of defining,
understanding, participating in, being influenced by, and changing the world around us.
Through examining the use of language in various texts, Burke argues that we can “chart
human motives,” and understand not only the conscious attempts at persuasion, but also
the frames through which individuals view the world and make sense of it, frames they
might not even be aware of themselves. In particular, Burke (1950) saw rhetoric not as
mere persuasion, but an act of identification, as the effective rhetorician does not merely
goad their audience into action, but becomes “consubstantial” with them, inviting them to
see the world in the same way – a more profound strategy of symbolic action than mere
persuasion. At various points I identify concepts and aspects of Burke to use in analysis,

11
and explain them in-depth there. In using Dramatism as a rhetorical method, this
dissertation examines how the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture construct
particular visions of the world, situate their audience within that world, and encourage
them to engage that world through various linguistic and representational practices.
Additionally, I engage in a representational analysis of both the images and texts
of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture to uncover ideologies that circulate
within, through, and between these texts. This includes looking at themes which were
promoted consistently across issues, episodes, skits, videos, speakers, and written texts to
interrogate how they represented both men and women through description of practice,
behavior, dress, speech, and visual images. Such analysis seeks to examine the strategies
and codes around which messages get constructed through both the narrative and visual
conventions of images and text. Not only were the ways that readers/viewers/attendees
were addressed examined, but also how the various audiences were imagined and situated
by the discourse of the chosen texts. The involvement of the viewers is crucial, as
meanings compete in popular and political discourses, and representation is a key site for
the struggle over which meaning will become the dominant, preferred meaning. To
illustrate broader themes I will make use of multiple examples while at times providing a
deep analysis of particular representative articles, pictures, skits, examples, or scenes.
Specifically, the period analyzed is from 1990-2005. 1990 was the year that Bill
McCartney, at the time the head coach for the University of Colorado football program,
started the Promise Keepers with his friend Dave Wardell, the athletic director at the
university. It continues through the rise of the Promise Keepers in popularity and public

12
attention, and culminates in 2005, the year I was able to attend the PK conference in
Anaheim, California, titled The Awakening. This period also sees the launch of Maxim
magazine in the United States in 1997, and the debut of The Man Show on Comedy
Central in 1999. The method of sampling to determine artifacts for inclusion was both
random and convenient, though every effort was made to ensure representativeness and
relevance without cherry picking only those examples and texts that support my
argument.
For the Promise Keepers, I chose four texts in particular for an in-depth textual
analysis: What Makes a Man: 12 Promises that Will Change Your Life (McCartney,
1992a), The Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper (McCartney, Laurie, & Hayford, 1999),
Wild at heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul (Eldredge, 2001), and The
Awakening Experience: Calling Men to an Unpredictable Adventure (Velasquez, Rasor,
Hinkle, & Richardson, 2005). These texts were chosen based on their relevance to the
Promise Keepers, as determined by the Promise Keepers themselves. What Makes a Man
was the first PK text published by the group, and contains 81 essays by various authors
on the makings of a “godly masculinity,” and is often referred to as McCartney’s
manifesto for the organization. The Seven Promises is a central text to the Promise
Keepers, and outlines ways for men to live in the PK model. I analyzed the revised
edition because it offered a later development of PK ideology, being published nine years
into the life of the organization, and after racial reconciliation become a more significant
focus of the organization. 7 Promises contains 39 essays and three organizational
statements (the Promise Keepers purpose statement, their Statement of Faith, and the

13
Eight Principles for Reconciliation and Unity), and is also made up of a variety of
authors. John Eldredge’s book Wild at Heart was selected not only because Eldredge is a
top selling evangelical author, but because it is the only text recommended as additional
reading on living a Christ-like masculinity by the Promise Keepers in their field guide to
the conference I attended, and so it was chosen to examine a text recently recommended
by the Promise Keepers to provide a perspective on how PK gender ideology has evolved
since its inception. Finally, The Awakening Experience was the companion book to the
conference I attended, and is part workbook, part movement text, with both essays (10 in
total) and exercises for living a Christ-like masculine life. In total the sample included
130 essays, 1 manuscript, and 73 different authors.
7
Additionally, I also attended The
Awakening Conference as a participant-observer, employing thick description to record
the various speakers, videos, and musical acts that performed. As part of this, I examined
a variety of texts that were distributed at the conference, from both the Promise Keepers,
and other groups such as Gospel for Asia and the Media Leader’s Prayer Group who had
booths set up at the conference, as well as the comedy DVD of Brad Stine, an evangelical
stand-up comedian who performed at the conference. I signed up for the PK mailing list,
and included materials they sent me in my analysis to get a sense of direct marketing
strategies used by the group, as well as the Promise Keepers website, and the group’s
press releases.

7
I also incorporated Stu Weber’s Tender Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man (1993), and Edwin Cole’s Maximized
Manhood: A Guide to Family Survival (1982), though I did not do as in-depth an analysis. They were included because
of their frequent mention in other work on the Promise Keepers, though none of the texts I analyzed made reference to
them, and Cole’s was outside of the time period analyzed. I use them primarily for examples of the variety of gender
discourse in PK, and not as primary texts for analysis.

14
For masculine popular culture I obtained representative samples as a baseline to
analyze, and supplemented those texts with others I was able to access. I selected eight
issues of Maxim for an in-depth textual analysis, one from each year of publication from
the time period identified, including the initial issue.
8
These issues were selected to
account for seasonal variety (of which there is little in Maxim) as there is at least one
issue from each of the four seasons. The identified magazines were examined in-depth
and read cover to cover; I supplemented this analysis with other issues as well as the
Maxim webpage.
9
I conducted a content and ideological analysis of the covers, features,
regular columns, advertisements, and letters to and from the editors. For The Man Show,
I did an in-depth analysis of the odd numbered episodes for the first four seasons (1999-
2003), as well as other even numbered episodes. Odd numbers were chosen so that the
pilot would be included in the sample.
10
Finally, for both Maxim and The Man Show I
examined press releases in addition to the texts themselves. The remainder of this
introduction will lay out some of the key themes that will reappear throughout the
dissertation, as well as to situate this most recent of masculinity crises within a historical
context. It will conclude with a chapter breakdown for the rest of the dissertation.

8
The issues included were March 1997 (the first issue), October 1998, September 1999, October 2000, December
2001, February 2002, April 2003, June 2004, and August 2005.

9
By the time I began my research, The Man Show website was no longer active, and so was not included.
10
Discussing every one of these episodes would have been impossible, so I did a sustained analysis of the odd-
numbered episodes to ensure a random and representative sample, and made use of “deep analysis,” taking particular
representative moments and examining them for ideological content from other episodes. The program is based on a
fairly repetitive formula, so there was little to no variation between the episodes; as such, I chose moments that made
the gendered discourses particularly salient. The same is true of the issues examined for Maxim; I made sure to include
enough of a variety of issues to ensure a broad sample, and utilized as many other issues as possible to round out the
sample. After reading enough Maxim or watching enough The Man Show, it became clear that there was not nearly the
variety that one sees in PK writing in terms of gender ideology. Indeed, as I describe in Chapters 3 and 4, masculine
popular culture was remarkably consistent over the period in terms of discourses of masculinity.

15
The Context of Crisis:
Hegemonic Masculinity, Nostalgia, and Crisis in an Era of Postfeminism.

To claim that men have had “lost” their essential masculinity, or that such a
masculinity can be in crisis, assumes that a masculinity was evident to begin with,
something men have always had, or at the very least presumes the existence of a stable
gender identity to which all men had access. But a quick jaunt through history reveals
much more instability than current commentators are willing to give credit. What follows
is a brief introduction to the instability of masculinity, an introduction significantly
expanded in Chapter 1. Here, however, it is used to illustrate the cyclical, recurring
nature of popular discourses of crisis. Stepanie Coontz (2002) argues that changing
gender relationships within families has left masculinity and femininity in continually
shifting roles throughout American life. From frontier families to iconic images of the
1950s nuclear family, changes in social structure, economic conditions, and interpersonal
relations left American families periodically in states of transition and change. Lynne
Segal (1993) comments that throughout the 19
th
century masculinity evolved from a
focus on spiritual and moral attitudes to a masculinity that valorized muscular and
militaristic display (p. 626), changes which would undergo continual transformation in
the 20
th
century. The early 20
th
century witnessed fears of American men being replaced
by machines, as increased industrialization began to displace men as the driving engines
of productivity and alienated men from work. The rise of feminism at the turn of the
century further provoked fears that men were no longer properly enacting their masculine
roles (Kimmel, 1987). R. W. Connell (1993) notes that this period also saw a split in

16
valued masculine performance, one that occurred between interpersonal dominance on
the one hand, and knowledge and expertise on the other (p. 613). The excesses of the
inter-war years produced new fears of men becoming soft with bodies that needed to be
better trained to provide for their families, a necessity brought into stark relief by the
Great Depression (Faludi, 1999a). Following the Second World War, the entry of women
into the workforce brought renewed fears from reformers both of men being eased out of
the public sphere and families suffering as a result from the lack of a sustained feminine
presence in the home. After the gains of the second-wave feminist movement in the
1970s, masculinity was again said to be in crisis as the advancement of the second wave
was blamed for giving women too much control and thus taking it from men (Douglas,
1995). And once again, in the late 1980s and early 1990s cries surfaced with a
destabilization in traditional male roles as men who were overly concerned with
sensitivity and political correctness were becoming too “in touch” with their emotional
selves, and abdicating their manly role in the home, the workplace, and society at large
(Messner, 1993). What Susan Faludi (1999) has termed the “betrayal of the American
man” forms the backdrop of this crisis, as straight, middle class, white men are displaced
from the social center, and with them comfortable notions of masculine authority and
unquestioned privilege.
It is this unsettling of privilege that is of particular importance. In an age in
which men still make more money than women, hold the higher level of high paying jobs
and have greater access to social resources; where heterosexual white men still also hold
considerable advantages over men of color and sexual minorities; and where American

17
citizenship is still defended vigorously and an era in which Prop 187, a voter endorsed
measure in California (that inspired similar measures in other states) that eliminated
access to social services, health care, and public schooling for illegal immigrants, was a
recent memory, how then is it possible to situate white, straight, middle class American
able bodied men as in crisis?
11
Part of the answer lies in the economic and social realities
of the 1990s. Men were facing increased economic hardship and a decreased level of
authority in culture broadly. The declining purchasing power of the middle class, the
steady drop in wages and earning potential and rapid deindustrialization saw the
economic power of men decline relative to what it had been for the previous fifty years
following the economic boom after the Second World War (Connell, 1995; Davis, 1997;
Lipsitz, 2006). Concomitant with this decline in economic power was a reduction in
cultural authority as the limited but important gains of feminism and identity politics saw
improvements in recognition, status, and economic opportunity for women and people of
color (ibid). The combined sense of economic distress and the shifting contours of
masculinity which positioned men as consumers in new ways (Faludi, 1999) and
demanded that they embrace new masculine norms of sensitivity and caring while still
holding them to standards of aggressive and rational masculinity, a contradiction which
Susan Bordo (1999) termed the "double-bind" of masculinity. What is important is the
need to understand the felt experience of crisis – to recognize that the economic distress
and new contours of white masculinity produce an anxiety about male privilege and
certainty, whether or not such men were comparatively stable. The sense of uncertainty

11
For statistics documenting the structural advantages of middle class white men in the 1990s, see Susan Faludi
(1991), Bonnie Dow (1996), and Sarah Projansky (2001).

18
and displacement of men from their traditional roles can lead to masculine anxiety in
identity formation and social position, as men become unable to form stable relational
links with the world around them or the people in it (Faludi, 1999; Robinson, 2000). This
sense of displacement works to erase the structural realities of privilege, as the men in
question occupy an unfamiliar position in which the remaining privileges and structural
advantages afforded them by virtue of not only their gender, but also of their race, class,
and sexuality seem to dissipate in comparison to the privilege usually accorded to
individuals accustomed to being at the social center.
What is in crisis, then, is not masculinity in general, but hegemonic masculinity.
Hegemonic masculinity, the constellation of ideologies and practices that are ascendant at
a particular historical moment, is constructed both in relation to femininities that are
dominated as well as other subjugated masculinities that are valued less than the
hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2002; Messner, 1993). This masculinity is constructed
in relation to race and sexuality as well, as men and women are afforded various levels of
social advantage in relation to different markers of identity. It then becomes important to
adopt an intersectional view of oppression, one which recognizes that oppression and
privilege do not exist as a static gender hierarchy, nor does it operate with white or
straight or wealthy individuals at the top and raced, queer, or poor folks at the bottom
(Collins, 1998, 1999; hooks, 1992). Rather, oppression and privilege work through the
intersections of various identity categories, what Patricia Hill Collins (1998) terms
“matrices of oppression”, instead of hierarchies. For example, white women enjoy more
structural advantages than black men due to their race in some areas, but less due to their

19
gender in others. In situating masculinity as in crisis, discourses of gender tend to
obscure these various intersections, in conscious and unconscious ways, assuming that all
men are in crisis the same way. The economic dislocation felt by middle class white men
in the 1990s had already been felt, or a status of economic security never acutely felt, by
some working class white men and men of color. The claims of crisis, as will be
examined in greater detail throughout the remainder of this dissertation, universalize the
experience of masculinity, obscuring the differential access to privilege not only of
women (both white and women of color), lesbians, and transgendered individuals, but
also of men of color, working class men, and gay men.
Further, a discourse of postfeminism also works to obscure the differential access
to economic and cultural power. The 1980s witnessed the rise of a public discourse that
manifested itself as a response to the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and
1970s. Stories in the popular press such as Time and Newsweek began to detail the
emergence of a new consciousness among women that saw feminism, despite its gains, as
no longer necessary in their daily lives (Dow, 1996). This popular discussion was taking
place alongside and followed by its manifestation in popular culture, political
discussions, and academic literature. Such a discourse obviously has implications for
those interested in gender studies in general, and the study of masculinity and feminism
in particular. Postfeminism is not a unitary discourse that is easy to theoretically isolate.
Various strains of public discussion that mount an attack or critique of feminism are
variously articulated as postfeminism, antifeminism, and backlash to feminism. Bonnie
Dow (1996), as but one example, makes an explicit distinction between postfeminism and

20
antifeminism in saying that the former recognizes that the goals and aspirations of the
feminist movement were good but have either been accomplished or have gone too far
and thus resulted in negative consequences (such as a separation of women from their
maternal instincts), whereas antifeminists advocate a retreat of women from the public
sphere and see no positive value in feminism (pp. 92-93). This treatment of
postfeminism is the one most that appears most often in media discourse of women who
feel that while feminism was valuable, it has outlived its usefulness (Dow, 1996;
Projansky, 2001).
12

Masculinity has a particularly precarious position in presentations of
postfeminism. The corollary to women transgressing their natural roles or becoming
more active in the public sphere is a corresponding decline in masculinity or the ability of
men to be properly masculine. Much of postfeminism has focused either on the assault
that feminism mounts on men, or its displacement of them from their traditional roles.
The former is located primarily in the rhetoric of religious leaders and conservative
commentators on the New Right, i.e.: Rush Limbaugh and the Reverend Jerry Falwell,
and popular defenders of masculinity such as shock jock Tom Lykas or Jimmy Kimmel
and Adam Corolla, hosts of The Man Show. The predictable patriarchal response is a
return to traditional values and a time when “men could be men.” While less virulent in
their attacks, other types of postfeminism also view masculinity as in crisis. Sarah
Projansky (2001) notes that some commentators even go so far as to say that the feminist

12
Postfeminism also identifies a corollary to masculinity crisis in discussing how feminism had also prevented women
from performing an ideal femininity. Though I have not run across proclamations of a “femininity crisis,” postfeminist
texts described as “new traditionalist postfeminism” by Sarah Projanksy (2001) often lament that women have left the
home and are not fulfilling their feminine duties as a result of living up to the legacy of feminism.

21
movement was “too successful,” leading to a reversal of positions and the oppression of
men (p. 84). Susan Faludi (1999) contends that men have begun “falling into a status
oddly similar to that of women at mid-century,” as they lose their ability to connect with
outside world, “respectful treatment in the culture,” a useful role in public life, and the
ability to earn a decent wage (p. 40). As a result, masculinity gets presented as in peril,
female femininity as on the decline, and feminism as the culprit. Finally, discourses that
focus on the rise of women in the public sphere and increased access to social services
ignore how queer women and women of color are still at a greater disadvantage versus
white women, white men, and minority men (Projansky, 2001). The linear march to
progress that is celebrated in some postfeminist discourse and reviled in others obscures
the unique position of racial, classed, and sexual minorities and their inability to cash in
on the gains of feminism. The rhetoric of choice rampant in postfeminism that proclaims
feminism has given women the choice to work outside the home or to remain within it
assumes a choice that is enabled by having another source of income, ignoring the fact
that working-class women often do not have such a choice between going to work or
raising a family as the latter necessitates the former.
What then becomes important are the particular ways in which discourses of
gender change as a result of social context. Though the recurrence of “crisis” may be
consistent, the ways in which the crises are dealt with differs. Discourses and cultural
ideologies of masculinity reorganize, resist, and respond to changing cultural conditions;
this dissertation examines the emergence of one discursive response to this crisis.
Previous iterations of masculinity seemed to take for granted that their presentations were

22
accurate, whereas considerable work is done in various texts and practices in a
contemporary setting to call attention to the authenticity of masculinity, an authenticity
that was present in some unknown past and is missing in the present.
13
It is no wonder
that notions of crisis produce a reflective yet partially accurate view of the gendered
politics of a bygone era. Nostalgia, the sentimental longing for times past, is a frequent
response to changing contemporary social relations. The past becomes presented as fixed
and immutable, a snapshot of time that tends to obscure the complexities of family life,
gender relations, and political realities (Coontz, 2000, p. 14).
Nostalgia, then, is an apt strategy to work towards resolution of the American
masculinity “crisis.” Nostalgia can perform a variety of cultural work: as a media trope
and representational strategy, as a consumer ploy and commodity object, and as a source
of political action. Nostalgia as a representational trope works to reclaim a straight white
masculinity that is “under threat,” one which “pins its hope,” so to speak, on the
resistance to time through the establishment of a masculine “space” for American men.
The use of masculinity in such a way is what I will refer to as nostalgic masculinity.
Nostalgic masculinity is the use of historical images, elements, emotions, or
representational tropes in the search for an “authentic” or “real” masculinity that is
timeless; timeless in the sense that it works across time and historical periods to be just as
effective in the present as it supposedly was in the past. Nostalgic masculinity is a
strategy used to resolve gender crisis through recourse to historical notions of what it

13
Even without a specific temporal dimension (locating authenticity as in a particular stable past), the very call for
authenticity itself is nostalgic. The assumption that men need to access their “inner guy” or their “true” masculine self
relies on a logic in which something is preventing the realization of that masculinity. And, if men are in crisis now,
with a presumed period of stability prior to crisis, then the impediment to accessing a natural masculinity must be in
some way recent. Thus, recourse to “authenticity” is also recourse to a history when the authentic was available to be
accessed.

23
means to be a man, both concrete and abstract. The multiply constructed nature of such a
masculinity then makes itself available to products in the consumer market, and fodder
for popular culture. Whether it be a reference to a particular historical icon (such as John
Wayne), or a general sense of history (i.e.: “when men were men”), nostalgic masculinity
is a strategy to provide stability and certainty to American masculine performance in the
late 20
th
and early 21
st
century. It is a strategy that is easily utilized in the service of
commodification; nostalgia is an “easy commercial ploy” that we all can fall prey to
precisely because of its affective component, its ability to appeal to individuals
emotionally (Pickering and Keightley, 2006, p. 935).
But this is no static process; rather, the particular forms of nostalgia and its
commodification must be understood in relation to the context in which they are
deployed (Moore, 2002, p. 312). Nostalgic mood and affective yearning are created in
relation to concrete historical circumstances, as our desire for “some particular past is
constructed through some engagement with what is changing, and why those changes are
not much liked” (ibid). This strategy relies on the search for an “authentic” masculinity
that is not couched necessarily in a conscious reference to history (though it can be);
rather, what underlies the search for authenticity, what makes masculinity genuine and
real, is the desire to have a masculinity located in the stability that preceded the most
recent crisis. As will be discussed in Chapter 1, a notion of crisis depends on an
imagined stability, whether or not that stability actually existed. The mediation between
individual experiences of masculinity and cultural notions of crisis through nostalgic
form construct an ideal masculine subject, one presented as a stable resolution to such

24
crisis. What becomes unique about the resolution to the crisis currently under
investigation is its recourse to historical tropes of masculinity for that certainty.
This dissertation will explore three primary ways in which nostalgic masculinity
is operative as a strategy in cultural discourses of masculinity crisis in late 20
th
and early
21
st
century America. These three ways of viewing nostalgic masculinity are distinct yet
have considerable overlap. In the chapters that follow each chapter features a particular
strategy as prominent, though all three strategies can be seen as active in each theme.
The first, and the subject of Chapter 3, is nostalgia as a framing strategy. As a framing
strategy, nostalgic masculinity identifies, delimits, and defines the crisis of masculinity.
In particular, nostalgic masculinity deploys representations of women, people of color,
and sexual minorities in such a way as to identify difference and Otherness as the cause
of American masculinity crisis. This chapter traces the identification of that Otherness as
the cause of masculinity crisis in the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture.
While not overtly signaling difference as the direct culprit, the framing of overly
feminine characteristics and an attempt to appropriate the styles of non-white cultures as
responsible for men not acting as they should indicates the loss of a space for American
masculinity (and thus the need for tactical action to resolve crisis), as well as sets the
context for, and explains the necessity of, the emergence of the Promise Keepers and
masculine popular culture.
The second is nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy, the primary focus of Chapter 4.
Nostalgic masculinity as a rhetorical strategy defines, encourages, and disciplines men as
to how to act within a context of crisis. Whereas nostalgia as a framing device indicates

25
the need for action and clarifies the problem of femininity, as a rhetorical device it
produces the possibility of action, the ability to challenge the feminization that led to
crisis, and constructs a strategy to reestablish the sense of place lost by the onset of crisis.
This strategy works to explain, contain, and then devalue the gains made by feminism,
gay liberation, and, to some degree, the civil rights movement by resituating white
masculinity at the cultural center through appropriation of valued characteristics of
difference (such as emotive connections) as appropriately masculine while denigrating
others (i.e.: irrationality coded as feminine). The rhetorical strategies used to resolve the
crisis place men as in crisis equally, thus masking the ways in which racial privilege
structures the experience of crisis, and what it means to achieve “stability.” Finally,
Chapter 4 details the fiercely nationalistic character of nostalgic masculinity, as
successful performance of masculine identity is linked to not just an adequate
performance of citizenship, but the very health of the nation itself.
The final way is nostalgia as a commercial strategy, the subject of Chapter 5.
Nostalgic masculinity is deployed as a representational strategy within men’s movements
as well as popular culture. It is as a commercial strategy that nostalgia is most like a
trope, as it includes both representing masculinity in popular culture and as a marketing
device to commodify masculine insecurity and desire in the service of a market (be it in
the mass market periodicals, television programming, or the Promise Keepers brand).
Here nostalgic masculinity is situated within an economic context in which therapeutic
consumption of masculinity and “the past” through purchasing products and consuming
culture creates a sense of stability in the present. This is not to imply that market desires

26
are enforced in a hierarchal, top-down structure imposed on particular men. Rather, if
consumption is “good for thinking” as Nestor Garcia Canclini (2001) has argued, then
these products are also a way for men to use consumption to make sense of their
gendered identity.

Why These Guys?
The Importance of Studying the Promise Keepers and Masculine Popular Culture

What is unique about these new forms of media is the way that they position
themselves as media products for men, aimed merely at confirming and supplementing
masculinity. As noted earlier, previous magazines were certainly aimed at a male
demographic, such as Popular Mechanics, Guns ‘N Ammo, Road and Track, Esquire and
Playboy, addressed a particular experience articulated with being male (shooting guns,
driving in or working on cars), and made attempts to raise the status of or improve the
particular experience of the American man. Men’s Health focused on making the reader
a healthy man, Playboy seeks a more refined and sexually liberated man, and Esquire
attempts to increase the reader’s sophistication (Nadel, 1995). Similarly, television
programmers and marketers often structured programming to appeal to one gender or
another, such that certain programming imagined a male audience (Spigel, 1992).
Further, television generally is male-dominated, from adult programming to children’s
television (Banet-Weiser, 2007); westerns, sports programming, and crime serials
presumed activities appealing to men.
14
In short, these media assumed, and thus
addressed, an audience of men, and were focused on appealing to particular interests of a

14
For further discussion of the gendered address of television, see Brudson, D’Acci, and Spigel (1997).

27
male audience. Masculine popular culture such as Maxim, on the other hand, is focused
on educating its readers to be men, providing a manual not in class, health and fitness, or
mechanics, but in masculinity itself.
Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) argue that in order for
rhetoric to be effective, the rhetorician must identify with the audience and its
worldviews to make use of existing experiences, beliefs, norms, and knowledge. To gain
the adherence of the audience (the very point of rhetoric for Perelman and Olbrechts-
Tyteca), it is necessary to create an “intellectual contact” to produce reasons “capable of
acting on this audience” (p. 14). In short, effective rhetoric creates identification, as
viewing the rhetor as consubstantial with themselves puts the audience in the same frame
of mind as the rhetor, and begins the process of coaching that audience’s attitude into the
rhetorician’s way of seeing the world. The Promise Keepers and masculine popular
culture use a variety of techniques to create identification with the men whom they target,
techniques that have substantial overlap. While they may not all be exactly the same,
there are dramatic similarities in the style of address that each uses, as well as a couple of
key differences.
The first, and primary, similarity is that they both announce themselves as for
men. This in and of itself is instructive. Initially, this could be seen merely as another
symptom of masculine dominance in the declaration of certain media, spaces, and texts as
for men only. Though it is true that the appropriation and control of space is historically
an avenue for the expression of patriarchal dominance, a distinctly “masculine” trait that
is exclusionary of women (Bordo, 2003), upon further examination such claims reveal

28
masculine insecurity produced by feelings of anxiety and not overwhelming dominance.
Promise Keepers are said to be “Men of Integrity” and self defines as a “Christ-centered
organization dedicated to introducing men to Jesus Christ” (“Core Values”, n.d.) and a
“ministry designed to ignite and unite men to become passionate followers of Jesus
Christ (“Seven Questions”, n.d.). Don Deardorff (2000) argues that the condition of
postmodernity leaves men in a profound state of “crisis” as a result of the lack of
traditional and stable gender roles. Noting the historical tendencies of such feelings of
crisis, Deardorff claims that PK “gives American men what they have not had in a long
time, if ever: a supportive community…For most members, it is a place of safety, hope,
and empowerment” (p. 77). Brian Brickner (1999) points out that the male-only space in
PK is presented by the organization itself, and experienced by its members, as critical for
allowing men to feel “‘safe’ again,” to truly experience intimacy with other men, and let
a man be “comfortable being himself” (p. 79). The idea that men need to feel safe
“again” reveals the insecurity of what PK calls the “masculine context” of its conferences
(Seven Questions, n.d.). In responding to “Seven questions women ask about Promise
Keepers,” the PK website indicates that men feel more “free and open” to express
themselves in a solely masculine context. At the conference I attended this was a
frequent theme. The emcee Reggie Daubs, as well as multiple speakers, intoned that the
conference was a special place where attendees could “huddle with their brothers”
without worrying about “what others thought”; the conference itself was located as a
“time”
15
for men to spend with other men and truly accessing the “depths” of their

15
As will be discussed later in this chapter, this is one of many instances in which spatial and temporal metaphors are
used and often conflated. Chapter 2 argues that nostalgic masculinity presents itself as a tactic – an attempt to secure a

29
hearts.
16
Men are presented as feeling threatened by culture, as needing a “safe space”
and so the move to exclusionary space is rhetorically situated as one to “protect” men, not
“exclude” women.
17

We see a parallel discourse in masculine popular culture. The title of Maxim is
uniquely instructive. A maxim is defined as both “a general truth” and “a rule of
conduct” (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000). The content inside seeks at once to be
both representative of the interests of men as well as a guide to performance and action; it
is the maxim for men. The subjects that make up the through-line of the magazine are
beer, fitness, sex, sports, gadgets, and clothes, subjects that provide the predominant
focus of the magazine, serving as the general truths of masculinity. Before the reader has
opened the magazine to look at the contents, they are already being hailed in a particular
way, as the cover indicates that this is the magazine that represents what they, men, truly
want. The Man Show has an even more blatant interpellation of men in its title, and its
theme song confirms that the show is a “place where men come together” to drink beer,
“check out” women, and discuss all manner of things masculine. When Maxim and The
Man Show claim to provide men with “everything they need,” and signal themselves as
being for men, they do more than merely identify their target audience. Such claims

time against the dictates of place/space – while actually being a strategy – the desire to establish a proper place that
transcends and counters time. This is one such place in which the masquerade takes place; the conference is a “place”
where men can take refuge against the march of progress – or time: to resist the destabilization of hegemonic
masculinity. It is presented to the men as a time to come together due to lack of a safe “place” outside of the
conference itself.

16
All observations of the Anaheim Awakening conference come from the author’s field notes, taken July 15-16, 2005.

17
The website makes this distinction explicit. In the “Seven questions women ask about Promise Keepers,” the
organization is quick to initially point out that women are welcome to attend PK events, and they have in the past.
Scholarship by female writers has also demonstrated the availability of access to PK events to women (Faludi, 1999;
Van Leeuwen, 1997), though Van Leeuwen speculates that having a press pass helps. The exclusion is premised on
the effectiveness of the teachings to help the men attending, and not a position of women being in some way inferior.

30
indicate that they are filling a space previously lacking, not only providing men with
viewing/reading material, but also securing for them a space to which they would not
otherwise have access.
18

Establishing themselves as uniquely masculine space further reinforces a frame in
which men are not only said to be in crisis, but under assault from dominant culture. This
frame rhetorically justifies the creation of uniquely masculine culture, and sets up the
need for and distribution of advice and instruction to men as to how to maintain their
masculinity in an environment of threat. A key strategy in this address is not merely
addressing men specifically; rather, what is also crucial about this address is speaking to
men “as men,” as a universal category. Chapter 3 detailed how nostalgia in particular
makes reference to a “shared” masculine history of crisis and rebirth/reclamation, a
history which glosses over differences in how racial, class, and sexual privilege
differently structure how men are in crisis; instead, men are all presented as in the same
crisis and living that crisis in the same way. Rhetorically, the men are appealed to as a
universal audience, the assumption being if they are all in the same crisis, they can all
resolve their crisis in the same way. As will be detailed below, this individualizing of
crisis resolution is a particularly white aesthetic that fails to get at the root cause of the
problems identified as putting men in crisis in the first place.
Part of this universalizing of masculine experience is in presenting the men in
Promise Keepers or who consume masculine popular culture as the “average Joe” or

18
As I hope is implied by the citing of the inaccuracy of such views of media, this is not to say that the feeling of
exclusion from mainstream media is justified. Such feelings of exclusion rely on whiteness and masculine privilege
being invisible as the “universal” character of most programming and visual media is actually raced and gendered in
particular ways; the average viewer is really the white, straight, middle-class male viewer. Rather, the argument is that
such claims contribute to and allow a rhetoric of victimhood, as situating men as lacking a media for themselves opens
up the rhetorical space for the construction of a uniquely masculine culture.

31
“everyday man,” one who may be capable of spectacular things, but is deep down truly
quite “ordinary.” This notion of an average Joe is hardly a given, and it is created in the
discourse of the texts themselves, a subject position called into being by the
representation of a regular guy that acts as a stand in for every man. The trope of
“averageness” is realized in a number of ways. In both PK and MPC, the use of common
and everyday experiences is one such way that men are set up as ordinary. Frequent
references to mowing the lawn, going to work, or hanging with the guys provides a
constant litany of “ordinariness”, encouraging as wide an identification as possible in the
common experience of daily life. Skits at the PK conference I attended frequently
presented men as “average” in contrast to celebrities, pro athletes, and media images such
as James Bond. Erwin McManus, a speaker at the 2005 conference, began his discussion
of “Discovering My Role in the Epic Story” by situating all men as ordinary, even those
who achieve great things. McManus’ point was to reveal to those men who felt frustrated
at “being ordinary” and not having a unique gift that everyone has a special talent, as
long as they are open to receiving the gifts of God.
19
PK texts frequently juxtapose the
hard boiled masculine images of popular culture (such as Bond, Clint Eastwood, and
Rambo) to the men who are being addressed as a way of distancing them from
“constructed” images of masculinity and towards the “natural” masculine image created
by God.

19
But in order for such an appeal to make sense, McManus has to both (a) situate all of the men as ordinary and thus
feeling the frustration, and (b) situate even extra-ordinary men as ordinary men who received the Word of the Lord to
encourage the identification of men in the audience with such biblical possibility. For example, McManus describes
Moses as someone who was no different than any of the men in the audience, one person who “thought he was an
ordinary guy” until he encountered a burning bush. Even though the purpose of McManus’ talk was to get men to
attempt to be more than ordinary, the men must first be positioned as such before being encouraged to reach for greater
heights or else the appeal makes no sense.

32
Dennis Felix, the head of Dennis Publishing, the company that publishes Maxim,
described the magazine, in contrast to other “boring mags” such as GQ (which is said to
be for men who prefer socks over sex), as being “happily lowbrow” and created for the
“average guy who will pick sex over socks any day” (Warner, 1997, p. 27). In the
introductory issue of Maxim, this appeal is made explicit on the last page in the “Maxim
Manifesto,” titled “Guy Pride” (p. 170). Here, mimicking the coming out narrative of a
gay man, men are encouraged to “come out” as the guy that they are and have been
hiding deep down, a regular guy who doesn’t need to dress themselves up in the
sophisticated accoutrements of modern culture. The initial hosts of The Man Show,
Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Corolla, are hardly the model for over-achievers, and
frequently discuss the audience and the hosts as “regular guys” in various segments of the
program. The appeal to the reader/viewer/member as an average guy functions as a
rhetorical strategy of identification, creating a broad category that has wide possibilities
for establishing similarity with a given male’s life. This is especially salient when
considering the downward pressure on the economy and increased competition for jobs in
the period that made being more than average difficult.
The appeal to the “ordinary” nature of the targeted men is enhanced in the
personal and engaging tone of both the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture.
Instead of a position of detachment which creates a separation between those who are
making appeals to nostalgic masculinity and those to whom the appeal is addressed,
Promise Keeper texts, mailings, and speakers, as well as the editors and writers of Maxim
and the hosts of The Man Show make a concerted effort to identify with the men to whom

33
the speak. Authors and speakers are not better than the men they address; rather, they are
represented as being located in the same context of crisis, and thus consubstantial with
the men they address in sharing the same motivations, drives, and desires.
This identification is encouraged not only through the use of everyday
experiences, but also in the appeal to personal narratives to describe the experience of
masculinity in the late 20
th
and early 21
st
centuries. Founder Bill McCartney begins his
treatise on the new PK masculinity in What Makes a Man with his own story by
explaining that “[E]ach one of us has a story to tell about how our life has unfolded.
From the youngest little guy to the oldest man, there’s a story that’s threaded through our
lives. I’d like to tell you some of my story” (1992b, p. 9). McCartney’s story is one of a
Godly upbringing, success in the world of competitive football, and the ups and downs
that life in the competitive arena brings. But for McCartney, it was only after he
surrendered control of his own life to Jesus Christ that he was able to gain “real
satisfaction and fulfillment” (p. 11). Elsewhere, McCartney repeatedly makes reference
to his own personal story and experiences as a football coach in his struggle to maintain a
Christ-like masculinity (1992a, 1999a, 1999b). Every speaker at The Awakening told
their own personal story of failure and redemption in their attempts to be properly
masculine.
20
PK texts witness this same appeal to personal narrative. Dan Seaborn
(2005), in The Awakening Experience, describes a brief moment of failure as he let the
television linger for sixty seconds on the film Basic Instinct and the internal struggle it
caused him for violating his sexual purity; Gary Smalley (1999) provides examples of his

20
For example, Reggie Daubs discussed how he was the son of a prostitute that had struggled to find meaning in his
own life; Jack Hayword was wounded in Vietnam and needed a recourse to his faith to find stability and meaning in his
life; Erwin McManus felt unimportant his whole life before recognizing God’s call.

34
own ministry and first hand experiences with the frustration of remaining properly
committed to a Christ-like masculinity in family and marital contexts; John Eldredge’s
(2001) text Wild at Heart is replete with his own narratives of living an extreme
masculinity. In fact, PK anthologies containing various essays from a range of PK
speakers nearly all use some form of personal testimony to appeal to their readers
(McCartney, 1992a; McCartney, Laurie, and Hayword, 1999; Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle,
and Richardson, 2005). The form of address throughout the texts of the Promise Keepers
and the conference was inclusive, privileging a style of “we”, “our”, and “us”, referring
to the audience as “brothers” to reinforce that all men are “in this together,” with the
additional authority on crisis resolution coming from experience and faith, not a natural,
hierarchal superiority.
Masculine popular culture adopts a similarly informal tone with recourse to
personal narrative, though the style is more of an older sibling or fraternity brother than a
spiritual brother. Narratives of masculine prowess or activity are rampant, be it editor-in-
chief of Maxim Keith Blanchard’s (2003) recounting of a fishing trip, The Man Show’s
Jimmy Kimmel discussing the latest frustrations with having to talk to his wife (Episode
101, Episode 103), or Adam Corolla’s antics with his drunk buddies (Episode 109). The
tone of Maxim and The Man Show alike are distinct from other forms of men’s media;
they are personal and engaging. The reader/viewer is continually addressed as “you”,
and the show/magazine refers to themselves in the first person, constantly self-reflective.
The hosts of The Man Show banter with the audience as if they were making conversation
in a bar. Maxim says that “Rebecca Gayheart has her way with us [emphasis added],”

35
(Golin, 1998), “the boys went fishing” or that “We [emphasis added] went to
Vancouver...” (Blanchard, 2003). The primary voice is of another person or a collection
of individuals, and not the magazine itself. Other men’s media take a position of
detachment, talking down to their readers, not with them (Turner and Gideonse, 1999, p.
52). Playboy and other men’s magazines refer to the consumer as the reader or the
subscriber, and do not use first person language such as “we,” but instead use a detached
third person perspective (ibid). Playboy in particular rarely addresses the reader directly,
and instead uses a language of description.
21
Maxim, on the other hand, speaks as one of
the guys and not as a media text, more of a friend than a detached writer. In the first
issue of Maxim, initial editor Clare McHugh (1997) says that the men she knows are
pretty uncomplicated, and that Maxim is the magazine for them; she compares Maxim to
other magazines for men, none of which “seems to talk to – or about – any of the guys”
she knows (p. 16), explicitly contrasting Maxim to its competitors in terms of its
accessibility.
The use of nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy is bound up with the personal and
engaged tone of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture. The disarming tone
fits in well with nostalgia for a simpler age when “men were men” – and were free to talk
about being men without fear of retribution for being sexist, chauvinist, or un-masculine.
This informal, personal discourse is an effective ideological instrument. If the advice and

21
A particularly salient example occurs in the April 2003 issue of Maxim. The editors are doing a story about traveling
to Vancouver for a weekend trip designed to “Conquer Quebec.” If Playboy were to do such a story, it would be in the
style of a travel narrative; detached, impersonal, and authoritative. It may sound something like: “In Vancouver, the
world traveler will find ample opportunities for entertainment, from a wide selection of bars and restaurants to more
risqué gentleman’s clubs.” Maxim, on the other hand, immediately situates the adventure as a road trip on the cover by
proclaiming “We spent our war chest on strippers” (Blanchard, 2003), and continues the narrative chronicling the antics
of “a few Maxim editors with moderate drinking problems and profound personality disorders” as they essentially
spend four pages mocking Quebec for not being enough like the United States.

36
worldviews are coming from another man (even if it is a group of men) who is a friend,
then they are more credible and thus more easily believed. Men are not being told what
to do by the impersonal pretension of advice manuals, “upscale media” or sanctimonious
talk show hosts of the Dr. Phil variety.
22
Rather, it is men with whom they can identify,
men that are “just like them,” who offer strategies for navigating the cultural landscape
that no longer presents a safe-haven for men.
In the case of the Promise Keepers, the use of narrative and personal address is
uniquely important as it resonates with cornerstone Protestant beliefs of personal
accountability and accessibility to God. Sally Gallagher (2003) makes the argument that
personal authority is one of two most salient sources of religious authority (the other
being the Bible), which makes locating these “truths” about masculinity within the realm
of personal experience particularly effective. While the address of the Promise Keepers
offers advice, it provides the semblance of self direction. It is clear that the men need
help, or they wouldn’t be in PK in the first place. But the address is framed so that it is at
“your pace” and “you discover” what is needed in your life. The subtle rhetorical
strategy is that what is needed in the men’s lives is dictated through focused activities and
scriptural reference, while the appearance of unique discovery is crafted. God’s plan is
revealed through how the PK and their texts frame the world and direct the purpose of its
members; the ideology of the group is redirected to be the plans of God.

22
Dr. Phil, who first appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and later gained his own program, was a popular
psychologist in the late 1990s and early 2000s notorious for dispensing matter-of-fact advice in an aggressive manner
to guests on the program in an attempt to get them to “face facts” and see their lives in a more harsh and supposedly
realistic light.

37
Susan Bordo (2003) argues that at different historical moments the body has been
criticized for its “locatedness,” as it is our embodied nature that locks us into a particular
perspective, thus eliminating our ability to examine the world in an “objective” manner.
As a result, we are pushed towards scientific notions of objectivity that seek a detachment
from the body, a “view from nowhere” which allows the master perspective to evaluate
what is “true” about our world. This flight from being “located” in a particular
perspective is gendered as a masculine trait, as masculine rationality provides the
detachment needed to truly understand and comprehend the world. Men’s media and
men’s social movement can generally be seen as taking this same objective or “abstract”
positioning. Objective evaluations of particular products (cars, electronics, travel) or
masculine nature (tough, rational, independent) run through masculine oriented media
such as Road and Track, Playboy, GQ, and Men’s Health and Fitness. One thing that
makes masculine popular culture unique, then, is its locatedness. Instead of an abstract,
detached, removed form of address, Maxim locates itself in the lives of men and is not
shy of its particular perspective towards the world. In personal narratives of failure,
strife, triumph, love, and defeat, the stories and discussions of PK speakers are also
embracing an embodied and perspectival knowledge. This would seem to flip traditional
gender binaries as masculine media forms make use of traditionally feminine forms of
knowing and representation.
However, the use of feminine media forms is more of a mimic than it is a switch
in gender ideology. The use of embodied knowing appropriates feminine traits while
attempting to distance such media products from the attendant costs of femininity. The

38
Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture still present their views of gender and
social relations as objective, detached, and natural. However, the form of that
presentation is an embodied address that works to situate men as part of the same group,
a group that is distinctly masculine and separate from women. In a rhetorical turn that
both PK and MPC use often, the additional support and camaraderie that results from
being consubstantial in a masculine identity is championed, without the negative
connotations traditionally associated with feminine media, or feminine views of the
world. The lack of objectivity that historically characterizes locatedness and justifies its
derision as preventing solid epistemological grounding is replaced with a new objectivity,
as the unique perspective of nostalgic masculinity is universalized, and thus rendered
objective, for its audience. Masculinity, then, is realized in action and speech, desire and
discourse. Discourses of masculine superiority are reframed and updated in a common
vernacular, further serving to naturalize the address, to call less attention to the
patriarchal undertones behind such modes of speech and action.
23

The final relevant similarity in address is the fact that both the Promise Keepers
and masculine popular culture announce themselves as instructive. This is significant in
and of itself, as one predominant construction of masculinity is of masculine
independence and self-reliance (think, in particular, of the cliché of men not wanting to
ask for directions when lost). Warner (1997) contends that prior to Maxim there had been

23
Though historically criticized, this is not the first time that men have appropriated communication styles identified as
feminine for their own ends. As will be discussed in Chapter 1, Tania Modleski (1991) and Sarah Robinson (2001)
point out that the fractured nature of crisis is often used by patriarchy to contain feminine agency, frequently using
feminine forms of knowledge and address. Tom Pendergast (2001) discusses early men’s magazines as talking to men
in a way women had already enjoyed, an argument updated by the initial editors for Maxim (both its British and
American versions), women who said that this new magazine was one for men that acted like “Cosmopolitan [a
lifestyle magazine for women] for men.” Similarly, Michael Kimmel (1996) indicates that fraternal orders enabled
men to “reinvent themselves as men” by experiencing the pleasure of each others’ company without feeling feminized
(p. 172).

39
a longstanding rule in American publishing (and by extension, American media
production generally): media producers would be wise to avoid advice articles and
including a wide variety of topics when appealing to men as men don’t want to read
articles telling them how to live their lives. However, PK and MPC ignore this warning
and instead highlight the fact that they are as instructional as they are entertaining; a
stance that would certainly be less effective without the informal style of address.
In announcing their intent to help men be better, both masculine popular culture
and the Promise Keepers use a masculine discourse of instrumental rationality to appeal
to their audience. Processes are broken down into step-by-step instructions that are easy
to follow. The Promise Keepers has the “Seven Promises,” “Five steps to being a better
husband” (Smalley, 2005), and the “five essential elements of biblical manhood”
(Smalley and Trent, 1992a). Texts and speakers continually ask if men are ready for a
change before providing advice. The Awakening conference was accompanied by The
Awakening Experience (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, & Richardson, 2005), a book that had
an in-depth process for men to truly experience the message of the conference through
worksheets, accountability exercises, vibrant examples, and suggestions for additional
reading and improvement, including a time planner that lets men schedule redemption
down to the minute. Maxim, besides announcing itself as a general rule or principle in
the title, also announced in its inaugural American issue that it was a magazine which
contained “lots of useful information delivered in an entertaining way,” with “none of
the…off-putting attitude you’ve come to expect from typical men’s magazines”
(McHugh, 1997, p. 16). The magazine also contains a regular feature titled “How To Do

40
Everything Better,” which, when not providing advice about walking through a
minefield, is very practical and situational, ranging from topics as how to make a good
first impression, get a job, or organize a closet. Each issue begins with a personal letter
from the editor directing the reader to the most salient features of the issue. The Man
Show instructs its members in the theme song that “its time to loosen those blue jeans,”
an indication that proper masculine training is on the way in addition to being the first
instruction of the episode.
Keith Blanchard opens the June 2004 issue of Maxim by assuring men that
“Whatever the challenge....We here at Maxim take gender training very seriously. And
we’re here to help” (p. 10). Part of the mission statement of the Promise Keepers
indicates the instructive nature of the organization:
Clearly, Christian men have an unprecedented opportunity to seize this moment
and make a difference for Jesus Christ. We believe that God wants to use
Promise Keepers as a spark in His hand to ignite a nationwide movement calling
men from all denominational, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds to reconciliation,
discipleship, and godliness (“Mission Statement”, n.d.).

The Awakening Experience similarly opens by informing men that the book they are
reading “was conceived during the planning of The Awakening conferences because
Promise Keepers’ leadership understands that Christ-like change and living is a process”
as the workbook is said to be “built around a process…that will guide you to design a life
map that is unique to God’s life purpose for you” (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, &
Richardson, 2005, pp 6-7). The opening monologue of the pilot episode for The Man
Show (Kimmel and Rosenblatt, 1999, Episode 101) has Adam Corolla opining that
“Enough is enough, the Oprahization of America needs to stop. We are here today to

41
reclaim the airwaves to take back the medium we invented.” After call and response with
the audience and identification of the type of programming which belongs on the
program,
24
Jimmy declares to the wildly excited audience that we (whether he means men
or The Man Show is unclear) want “to return to that era, and that is what this show will be
– a joyous celebration of chauvinism.” All of these examples begin with a rhetoric of
inclusiveness (“God wants us”, “we are here to help”, “we want to return”), and then
proceed with instructions on proper masculine performance. While there is some
divergence in the particular address, PK and MPC are very much alike in their desire to
“help” the men in question to deal with these new cultural conditions, and to situate them
as men on their way out of crisis – a way out that can be purchased for the low price of a
magazine subscription, a PK text, the right clothes, or admittance to a conference event.
In interrogating this moment of masculinity crisis, the question must not be “what is
in crisis” but, rather, “who/what groups are in crisis” and “for who is that crisis
problematic”? It is not a matter of identifying a particular and singular ideological
formation (i.e.: “masculinity”) that is in crisis, as that both de-historicizes the
contemporary moment by assuming an unchanging, trans-historical formation, and re-
inscribes a notion of monolithic culture, further perpetuating notions of whiteness,
patriarchy and hetero-sexism. To assume that there is but one stability and one crisis is
the great trick of patriarchal ideology - that if only we fix this one instance, then

24
After Jimmy asks the audience who invented television, to which they enthusiastically yell “A man!”. He indicates
that television was not invented for “Oprah, Rosie or Ally Mc Bullshit” (shows with strong female leads/hosts often
dealing with emotional or sentimental topics). Adam continues by noting that it was instead invented for “Charlie and
his angels, Hogan and his heroes, Starksy and his hutch,” as “those were shows men could enjoy.” Surprisingly
enough, all of these programs were popular at least ten years prior to the show, and two of the three (Charlie’s Angels
and Hogan’s Heroes) have seen remakes in the eight or so years prior to the show’s debut – meaning that The Man
Show opens with appeals to nostalgic certainty, and never looks back.

42
everything else will be okay. The trick is that everything becomes okay only for a select
group of people. But who gets left out of this stable utopia? Such proclamations
obscure that some bodies are more “in crisis” than others. Concern over cultural “gender
crisis” implies that the ways in which people “act,” “dress,” or “behave,” is inappropriate,
that there are “correct” and “true” ways that particular men and women are supposed to
conduct themselves as men or women: a stability to gender that can be put into crisis. A
stable and trans-historical essence is assumed, that there is one masculinity and one
femininity that is appropriate, and large manifestations of such individual behavior that
are not in accordance with those universal ideologies of gender provoke fears of
widespread crisis in the gender order. However, as scholars in a wide variety of
humanistic and social science disciplines such as cultural studies, sociology, psychology,
education, anthropology, and linguistics have demonstrated, gender is not a fixed or
immutable essence, but rather the result of social practices and cultural conditions that
manage, shape, direct, and influence gender.
25
In particular, Judith Butler’s (1989; 1990;
1993; 2004) theory of performativity provides a useful lens to explore gender identity and
constitution.
In contrast to earlier theories of gender as performance or display, Butler argues that
gender is instead performative. Viewing gender as performance assumes that one has a
concrete gender, or role, that one performs or enacts through practices of display,
behavior, dress, manner, and speech (among others). Performativity instead contends
that gender is constituted within its performance, as those varying practices of display,

25
See Connell 2002, Gauntlett, 2002, and Segal 1993 for a review of the variety and depth of such
scholarship.

43
behavior, dress, manner and speech destabilize a “concrete I” or stable subject and
instead continually recreate and re-present gender (1990; 1993). This does not mean, as
some have suggested, that gender performance is free-flowing, as people are able to “do”
gender at will. Rather, gender is conceived of as a “regulatory ideal,” a norm, something
that while marked on the body is discursively constructed, as livable and unlivable bodies
are determined by discourses which sanction some performances and condemn others.
Sex “is part of a regulatory practice that produces the body it governs, that is, whose
regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce –
demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls” (1993, p. 1).
26

As such, gender is always already in crisis. If the self is continually remade in
performance, then it precludes a stable subject that goes into and out of crisis, but rather
the self exists in this state of crisis. This is not to say that people don’t have stable
understandings of their own gender, as we have a conception of what that stable “I”
would be, but rather that there is no stable gender that we have access to that is suddenly
or occasionally “in a crisis” that can be resolved. With a variety of gendered discourses
circulating from which particular subjects make meaning, attempting to live up to a
particular cultural construct of femininity or masculinity can provoke notions of
individual crisis. This is particularly salient when social or economic changes
problematize the ability to perform gender, such as when economic downturn makes it

26
Butler (1990) is careful to note, however, that this does not make discourse determining of gender identity or
performance. While it does have a particular and very real effect, discourse constitutes the subject but does not
determine it. The nature of performativity as requiring or at least engendering repetition in the performance then means
that the discourses can be destabilized subtle or drastic variety within the repetition. The possibility of destabilization
provides a space for agency without ignoring structural limitations to performance. Gender, then, becomes “…a
practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Butler, 2004, p. 1).

44
difficult for men to act as the “breadwinner” and primary means of support for the family.
As gender is not purely discursive - people live, eat, sleep, dream, fall into and out love,
feel pain and pleasure in particular, concrete bodies - it is thus also related to structural
conditions and regulated by cultural representations that further discipline acceptable and
unacceptable performances, livable and unlivable bodies
Gender is in crisis for both masculine and feminine performances. Susan Douglas
(1994), among others, writes about how women are consistently urged in media
portrayals to exhibit contradictory traits in the same body, producing what she terms a
type of “cultural schizophrenia” and Barrie Thorne (1993) has noted that these same
tensions function in schools as well (see also Bordo, 1993). Similarly, Susan Bordo
(1999) discusses the "double-bind" of masculinity in which men are simultaneously
encouraged to be both gentleman and beast, aggressive and loving. The impossibility of
living up to either gendered ideal leaves gender performance in crisis, both in terms of
the enacting/constitution of a seemingly stable “I” and in the impossibility of living up to
all cultural conceptions of gender. Yet, people assume a particular identity to continually
perform, which is one contributor to what makes the mythology of stability and crisis
persistent and persuasive. Additionally, stability is frequently and constantly imposed as
biological fact. Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) notes that our cultural and personal
understandings of gender and sexuality are continually in flux, both throughout larger
human history and in our personal lives as what we do socially creates real and
meaningful changes in our bodies. Modern biological science has, however, consistently
relied on a “dichotomous formulation” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 9) of gender (two

45
genders, two sexualities) and enforced such a formulation through scientific evidence and
even surgery when necessary. When biological evidence is used to back up social
convention, it is no wonder that notions of stable and discrete gender identity abound, or
why that certainty is so vehemently defended.
Despite the history of changing understandings of masculinity and femininity, and
despite the fact that both men and women feel pressure to live up to cultural expectations
of gender, the period investigated in this dissertation situates men as uniquely in crisis,
presuming not only that women have access to an ontological stability escaping men, but
also that all men are in crisis the same regardless of their race, class, or sexual
orientation. In identifying “nostalgic masculinity” I aim to provide a cultural history of
the late 20
th
and early 21
st
century as a moment identified as “in crisis” to better discern
how discourses of crisis erupt in response to widespread cultural changes, and responses
to that crisis. But, in identifying “nostalgic masculinity” as a prevalent discourse of
masculinity, and a unifying discourse between the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture, I do not aim to engage in what Barrie Thorne (2004) has called an
“exercise in classification” where I identify the “newest” species of masculinity to add to
our collective academic collection (p. 134). Nor is it my argument that this is the sole
discourse of masculinity in the period I analyze. Any period sees multiple, often
contradictory depictions and discursive disciplines of gender. What this dissertation does
is identify nostalgic masculinity as one prevalent strategy to resolve gender crisis, and
engage its articulation to other ideologies of race, class, and sexuality. It asks how
cultural changes are negotiated in different eras, and what a cultural response to

46
masculinity crisis looks like in a context of a consumption and consumer citizenship, and
attempts to identify lines of similarity in arguments about gender. As a cultural history, it
works to continue the work done by those engaging earlier periods, such as Susan
Jeffords (1994) examination of “hard-bodied” Hollywood masculinity of the 1980s and
its transition to a more sensitive masculinity of the early 1990s, and see how discourses
of gender have evolved and changed. I argue that the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture use nostalgic masculinity as a rhetorical strategy and ideological
articulation to resolve male anxiety, often through encouraging consumption of products
situated as masculine, and masculinity itself.
As such, I am not as much interested in constructing or identifying the next
“passionate manhood” as Rotundo (1993) does or the newest iteration of the Self-Made
Man. Rather, this project is about identifying both lines of rupture and similarity in
contemporary representations of masculinity, to discover both commonalities and
divergences in strategy. This is especially salient given the current topic, as religious
culture and popular culture, as will be discussed in Chapter 1, have operated in somewhat
of a see-saw of patriarchy over the course of American history, as both seem to alternate
in periods of influence over gender politics. I do not mean to indicate a direct or one-to-
one relationship either lately or historically between the rise of forms of popular culture
or religious culture; instead, I locate these as two areas of culture in which there is
particular salience in struggles to map, define, and resolve masculinity crisis since the
middle of the 19
th
century in the United States. Pendergast (2000) notes that magazines
offer an ongoing commentary not just on the nature of American society, but that

47
magazines aimed at men also provide a commentary on masculinity itself (p. 17). The
same can surely be said for television. Stephen Boyd, W. Merle Longwood, and Mark
W. Muesse (1996) argue that religion and discourses of masculinity are two critical areas
of investigation for better understanding social contexts of power, especially in their
intersection where men are “conditioned and encouraged” to exercise power over others
(p. 3). Therefore, engaging Maxim, The Man Show, and the Promise Keepers is an ideal
site to investigate cultural responses to this most recent of masculinity crises. If two
things that seem so wildly disparate initially – such as a evangelical men’s movement
championing sexual purity and a magazine and television program encouraging sexual
promiscuity – are both successful with a similar rhetorical strategy and consumer mindset
within the span of a few years, then it can tell us something about what is going on in
society, and how concrete individuals work to make sense of felt instability.
In intervening into contemporary discussion of masculinity, I join a vigorous
discussion already in progress in both academic and non-academic circles. Scholars of
masculinity and religion as well as the popular press left, right, and center have chimed in
on the meaning of the newest masculinity crisis. The men that are a part of these
movements, and the ones targeted by popular culture, are alternately vilified and
celebrated, held up as manifestations of misogyny and pitied for their struggling response
to a massively ornamental culture that no longer values them. The popular discourses
that try to make sense of the cultural shift in masculinity both participate in and
contribute to these discourses of masculinity, further positioning, marking, and defining
both men and women in their response.

48
In particular, most feminist accounts of cultural manifestations of nostalgic
masculinity take one of two, equally misguided approaches. The problem is that both of
these views, in their attempt to remain faithful to a particular program of analysis,
obscure important factors and differences. The first is the traditional feminist view: that
the men targeted by pop culture or social movements, as well as those who produce such
media or direct such movements, merely feel slighted at their loss of privilege, and
function as an attempt to beat back feminism and restore patriarchy through new subtle
justifications that are just more of the same. This sentiment is remarkably consistent
across both evaluations of political movements (Adair, 1992; National Organization of
Women, n.d.; see also Faludi, 1999 for more examples) and popular culture (Sullivan,
2000; Whelehan, 2000; see also Gauntlett, 2002). While some of these writings concede
that there may be some cause for male anguish, it is usually in the context of berating
such movements for attempting to re-center white men in the social circle (Robinson,
2002). What is problematic is that an overabundance of skepticism prevents an analysis
that understands the feeling of persecution: “accurate” or not. These cultural phenomena
have their roots in feelings of insecurity and loss, which manifest themselves in
dangerous ways whether or not that sense of loss is justified. Further, some, but not all,
frequently assume too static a relationship between ideology and reception. In regards to
groups such as the Promise Keepers in particular, though the same issue arises in
scholarship on men’s magazines, the primary concern is with the message and its
production, not the reception by individual readers/participants. Assuming that those

49
who consume such messages necessarily interpret them in the preferred way denies the
complexity of both men and women’s experience in relation to such cultural artifacts.
The second is an apologists’ view which holds that the men who participate in
such culture are to be to some degree pitied by society at large. For authors such as
Faludi (1999), Gauntlett (2002), and Newton (2005), the loss of privilege and social
stature is said to be real as men are buffeted about by cultural forces beyond their control,
from deindustrialization to outsourcing. In such writings, the sympathy is more often for
the individual participants than it is for institutions, as the individuals surveyed for this
research are portrayed as insecure and lost in modern times, and genuinely trying to make
a change. This tendency sometimes results in a hesitant ambivalence as the authors
negotiate between the stated and public goals of such cultural institutions and the
individual members’ reaction to and use of such messages. However, there is a more
pronounced tendency to be too sympathetic towards such phenomena, obscuring the
rhetorical tactics used and the ideologies behind such issues, such that even if the
message is not directly internalized the ideology still circulates in a variety of ways. The
patriarchal tendencies of such messages and the politics they justify and promote are
overlooked in an attempt to not overly demonize the members of such groups (Faludi,
1999 and Gauntlett 2002 in particular).
In studying the creation, reinforcement, and challenge of ideologies of gender and
hegemonic masculinity, then, it is important both to consider the institutional context as
well as the experience of the consumers of those products. In focusing on the
institutional context of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture, it is all too

50
easy to rely on explicating the power of market forces in shaping the products that
emerge to fulfill a particular economic need. We must also remember that those who
produce these artifacts of culture are implicated in the feelings of anxiety and crisis as
much as those who consume them. Indeed, as the institutional histories of PK and MPC
that I trace in Chapter 1 reveal, it was often individuals who were the catalyst for the
creation of the religious movement, the magazine, and the television program. The
Promise Keepers was born of a conversation during a road trip between PK founder Bill
McCartney and a friend, and loaded, the British precursor that would eventually spawn
Maxim was started by two men who after stumbling out of a bar looked at each other and
said “We need a magazine that discusses this feeling right here” (Crewe, 2003) As
elaborated in Chapter 1, the historical antecedents and modern manifestations of the
Promise Keepers, Maxim, and The Man Show were often created in opposition to the
established market research at the time. This is also, conversely, not meant to imply that
gender ideology happens outside the context of market economics, nor is it meant to rely
on a “great man” theory of history in which individuals shape the course of society on
their own regardless of the consumer context involved. As the institutional histories also
reveal it was a combination of market forces and social changes that put these individuals
at the right place at the right time. Therefore, when considering how gender discourse
both manifests itself and works to discipline particular subjects, we must take pains to
engage the interaction between individual feelings of crisis and institutional opportunities
available to aid in the resolution of that crisis.

51
Methodologically, adopting a feminist cultural studies perspective, especially one
which focuses on ethnography and participant observation, I am cognizant of the line that
is too easily drawn between researcher and the “objects” of research, assuming a form of
superior knowledge obtained through the researcher’s use of a “critical distance” and
academic insight which takes note of ideology working through cultural products. Donna
Haraway (1991) writes about the “god trick” in research that presumes objectivity is a
given, critiquing the assumption of such a removed rationality as always implicated in
relationships of power to determine what gets to count as objective. Sarah Banet-Weiser
(1999), in writing about feminist discussions of beauty pageant contestants and their
potential incorporation into regimes of feminine beauty, describes this dilemma as one
which “results from the distinction between my critique of gendered rituals and my own
involvement with certain aspects of the dominant beauty system”(p. 14).
27
While I was
not able to conduct interview research for this project, one specific goal of attending a
Promise Keepers’ conference was to get a sense of the lived experience of conference
goers apart from the ideologies within PK texts. I do not claim to have an objective
reading of this experience, or that my observations constitute concrete and irrefutable
“evidence” of the claims I make. Rather, I take my observations as points from which to
compare and contrast the pronouncements of PK texts and the ways those

27
See also Susan Harding’s (1987) edited volume Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues and Mary
Margaret Fonow and Judith Cook’s (1991) volume Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research for
further discussion of the promises, advantages, and pitfalls of a feminist methodology. In particular, in their article
“Back to the future: A look at the second wave of feminist epistemology and methodology” in the volume they edit,
Fonow and Cook discuss the importance of reflexivity in feminist methodology, the call to “reflect upon, examine
critically, and explore analytically the nature of the research process” (p. 2). My initial reaction was to try to maintain
that critical distance, a reaction I later found to be impossible. As I will discuss below, my particular relation to these
texts makes reflexivity not only good methodological sense, but, I am sure, vastly improved my analysis in forcing me
to look for not only personal blind spots, but also to be cognizant of elements of presentation, style, and discourse that I
may have otherwise taken for granted as natural.

52
pronouncements are changed, reinforced or contradicted in the conference itself, as well
as the ways those ideologies interact with the consumer-oriented environment and market
context of PK conferences, discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
In particular I was cognizant of my own subjectivity in relation the objects I have
chosen for analysis. I was raised as a Catholic, and besides attending 12 years of
Catholic school, I was an altar server and a lector in my church. I am also the
approximate target demographic for Maxim and The Man Show in addition to the Promise
Keepers: white, middle-class, and male. My knowledge of religious doctrine and
previous life experience affects my interaction with Promise Keepers texts, and in
particular, as I mention in Chapter 5, at times directly impacts by ability to maintain a
sense of “critical distance” from the texts. I often see myself reflected in the messages
speaking to men’s faith, despite the fact that I myself am not evangelical, nor do I go to
church nearly as often as my grandmother would like. My interest in Maxim in part
stemmed from reading the magazine in college, and my curiosity as to how it could have
been produced and distributed with apparently overt sexist messages in a culture in which
political correctness seemed to be the norm for attracting advertisers. My suspicion was
confirmed by research into initial advertiser response when the American edition was
being launched, as there was an initial hesitation, a market dynamic which I describe in
greater detail in Chapter 1.
But more than that, I often receive a raised eyebrow and sly smirk in response
when I tell people that my research interests include representations of masculinity with a
focus on Maxim and The Man Show. Both those in academia and those I meet outside of

53
the university seem to think that I am studying this media as a way to be able to consume
it and justify that consumption on the basis of my doctoral study. This is frequently
paired with an assumption that there is really no need to study this media, as it is clearly
sexist, and thus defies further analysis. The prevailing attitude seems to be that there is
nothing more complicated than a desire for men to laugh at feminism, hear a good joke,
and view half-naked women with a voyeuristic pleasure. This suspicion goes hand in
hand with other objections on studying masculinity, white masculinity in particular, as an
object. Discussions about studying masculinity or doing men’s studies, and evaluating
white, (presumably) straight middle-class men, can lead to the argument that studying
these men is unnecessary and only a means of returning the white male to the center of
discourse. Previous studies of media, the argument goes, were purportedly gender
neutral, but actually studies of white straight men and their experiences. If the men that
are supposedly in crisis still benefit from their position in a raced and gendered hierarchy,
the argument goes, why should we worry about why they feel slighted?
A valid argument to be sure. Uncritical examinations of masculinity crisis, as
noted earlier, have tended to side with the men being examined. Texts such as Susan
Faludi’s (1999) Stiffed even go so far as to claim that what is needed is a “men’s
movement” to help remedy the betrayal of the American man. It is such uncritical
examinations that demonstrate exactly why a critical investigation of such a group is
needed. While mass media (television, film, radio, newspaper and periodicals) have been
aimed at a presumed male audience, I will contend that this experience of gender is
different when men are specifically hailed as men. While commercials and commercial

54
television and film may inherently position the viewer as male (i.e.: the natural
assumption of movies like Rambo is that the viewer is masculine), it is really the context
of men’s magazines initially, then men’s movements, and finally broader men’s popular
culture, that actually interpolate their viewer/reader as male. They are addressed,
positioned, and marketed to as men explicitly.
There are significantly different consequences in how men are interpolated as
consumers. Texts that presume a male audience are operating from an assumption of
stability. The primary audience is unmarked, and thus masculinity is not seen as in crisis;
it is still the uncontested norm. However, when movements and entire television
networks are aimed at men qua men, it is indicative of a discourse of crisis. Complaints
about the WE (the Women’s Entertainment television network) or BET (Black
Entertainment Television), for example, as being niche marketing for which there is no
male equivalent provide a space for a narrative of victimization. The claim “If there were
a ‘White Entertainment Television’ it would be racist” or billing Spike TV as “the first
television network for men” obscure the race and gender bias of the previous nine
decades of programming. Men have no need to mobilize into men’s groups like the
Promise Keepers unless they somehow feel threatened by culture. This is not to say that
these narratives are legitimate or based in material realities. Far from it. The point is that
as inaccurate as these claims of widespread and total material loss are, they are still
highly persuasive ways of rolling back the gains of women, minorities, and gays and
lesbians thus far. When texts like The Myth of Male Power (Ferrell, 1993) give
credibility to arguments that “Men are in more dangerous positions that women”

55
especially in regards to employment, it ignores that the highest paid positions in the
United States are held mostly by men and that the majority of those in the “more
dangerous” positions are most often lower-class men and men of color. When texts
contend that women have more consumer power because they get to spend the money
(Ferrell again), it ignores income disparities between men and women. Focusing on the
“masculinity crisis” and the costs to men diverts attention away from the fact that those in
crisis are mostly privileged, white, straight men, and deflects the reality of continued
structural racism. Studying these forms of culture and address then becomes important to
challenge the legitimacy of presenting white men as a victim, and as a way of generating
counter-discourses to such efforts. Tania Modelski (1991) argues that scholarship on
men and masculinity is most helpful when it is used to identify how patriarchy
appropriates feminine power in order to secure masculine privilege. A critical
examination of narratives of crisis and their resolution is an important first step towards
identifying those strategies.
Studying “points of crisis” and their proposed resolution provides a way of
examining how all people are disciplined according to its mandates. If the men of the
Promise Keepers or the consumers of masculine popular culture are encouraged to act in
particular ways in order to resolve their perceived instability, it has very real
consequences for women and subordinated masculinities. In order to resolve individual
crisis brought on by feminism or identity politics, men may act with less respect for and
greater violence towards women and sexual minorities. Michel Foucault (1975/1977)
notes that power is relational and diffuse, and is continually reorganized as relations of

56
force change and resistance forces new means of exercising power. If men are
disciplined in particular ways, made docile in the service of patriarchy, then how that
crisis is resolved, by what means power invests itself in masculine bodies, is of critical
importance.
Gender crisis, then, is not something that occurs in a vacuum, but rather crisis is
measured against some period of normalcy - presumably some time temporally,
culturally, or even spatially prior to the crisis period. However, at the same time, that is
also what produces crisis narratives of white masculinity; the difference from some
previously held norm of white culture that either is not or for various cultural reasons can
not be fulfilled due to some polluting influence. Indeed, the former is often conflated
with the latter, the argument being that if white men are not acting in the way that they
should be it is because they are functionally not able to. A range of culprits is identified,
including the interference of feminism, industrialization, various feminizing influences,
the lack of manual labor, identity politics, unruly blackness, and any number of practices,
ideologies, and changes that threaten to unseat the stability of the white male subject.
Men of color, sexual minorities, and, often, working class men face this same dilemma,
but from the reverse. Rather than some temporary, and thus fixable, impediment to
successful masculine performance, something inherent in those masculinities but absent
from white masculinity is held up as that which prevents a resolution of crisis and an
ontological stability. Crisis functions differently for men of color, sexual minorities, and
other subordinated masculinities. White men can resolve their crisis through recourse to
a nostalgic past that functions as resource for proper performance. Men of color, women,

57
lower class men, and sexual minorities, on the other hand, are relegated to a state of
perpetual crisis because of the necessity of that crisis to project images of white
masculine stability. Thus, black and gay masculinities are always in crisis as it is the
crisis of difference that white normality is defined against, and what is subordinated and
marginalized to provide the privileged space of white masculinity.

Chapter Breakdown

This dissertation is divided into five chapters, each tracing a different aspect of
nostalgic masculinity and how it functions to identify, resolve, and commodify the
American masculinity crisis at the end of the 20
th
century. Chapter 1 situates the Promise
Keepers and masculine popular culture within a broad historical context, and provides an
institutional history of the predecessors to the modern men’s lifestyle magazine,
programming targeted to a male demographic, and men’s religious movements. While
ideology certainly plays a part in the construction of texts and the rhetoric of speakers,
that ideology does not appear out of nowhere. Instead, particular confluences of
economic and social conditions, market factors, and a fair amount of luck go into which
groups, movements, and media products achieve widespread popularity, and which get
consigned to the historical dustbin of failed projects. To that end, Chapter 1 first engages
the history of masculinity crisis, beginning with the 19
th
century and the changing
conditions of American society which prompted anxiety and a redefinition of men’s and
women’s roles in social spheres. This redefinition was of course partial; the change in
roles and increased anxiety was for a particular class and race of men, and was applied

58
unequally both across genders and within them. After discussing the evolution of
discourses of masculinity from the “Self-Made Man” of the early 19
th
century to the
passionate manhood and consumer oriented masculinity of the early 20
th
century, I
engage the market forces and economics which led to the development of both separate
cultural enclaves for masculinity such as fraternal orders, sports, and religious revivals, as
well as the beginnings of the mass market periodicals, and trace their development
through the 20
th
century, culminating in the Promise Keepers in the early 1990s and
masculine popular culture in the late 1990s. In tracing these separate developments
(which often happened in close proximity to each other) I look at both the economic
forces that enabled markets, and the social forces that identified a need for those markets
to be filled.
A central crux of my argument about the uniqueness of this particular historical
moment is its reliance on nostalgia as a strategy to define and respond to masculinity
crisis. Chapter 2 is a theoretical elaboration of nostalgia. As will be detailed, nostalgia is
often trivialized as a response to anxiety and historical change, both in popular parlance
and academic writing. Initially situated as a singularly conservative impulse, more recent
theorizing has seen nostalgia as a potentially productive cultural agent for marginalized
groups to uncover devalued narratives. Chapter 2 problematizes what I argue is a
dichotomous divide in scholarship on nostalgia, arguing that nostalgia is not inherently
conservative or progressive, but instead can be used to retard social progress through
using the past as a resource to imagine the future, and not merely as an attempt to return
to an ideal historical moment bereft of change. Specifically, I argue that nostalgia is one

59
way in which dominant groups, in this case straight, middle-class, white men, are able to
adopt a rhetorical stance of marginalization and appropriate the strategies of feminism
and identity politics while disavowing the attendant costs of the lack of social privilege
that motivates those movements in the first place. Chapter 2 also examines how nostalgia
is “made operative” as a strategy. Previous research has identified the affective
component of nostalgia – how it makes us feel sentimental about the past – but not its
operative component – why/in what way it makes us feel sentimental about the past
(Pickering and Keightley, 2006). Using Burke’s notion of identification, I examine how
general affective components and historical referents are made salient to concrete
individuals.
Chapter 3 works to explain how nostalgic masculinity works as a framing
strategy. The advice of the Promise Keepers or masculine popular culture makes little
sense unless there is a need for that advice in the first place. To that end, both PK and
MPC provide an explanation of the situation that men find themselves in at the close of
the 20
th
century, and situates the audience in relation to not only other men, but also
locates feminism as one of the primary causes of masculine anxiety. What is unique is
the ways that this is accomplished. Relying here on Burke’s concept of frames of
acceptance and rejection, Chapter 3 engages how images of the past are used to explain
dissatisfaction in the present as a vehicle to imagine a better future. Feminism and the
increasing power of people of color and sexual minorities are not often specifically
identified as the culprit of masculinity crisis. Rather, it is a broader feminization of
culture that has led men into a position of peril. Comparison with previous periods, and a

60
selective interpretation of history is used not only to identify men as within crisis, but to
justify a market for products to resolve that crisis. While the Promise Keepers situates its
members as in a broad cultural crisis that needs to be resolved by a return to Christian
values and behavior, and masculine popular culture laments the lack of male spaces and
bonding, both lay blame at the feet of the decrease of institutional authority and privilege.
Once situated as in crisis, men are then provided with a model for resolving the
instability produced by a culture in chaos. Chapter 4 focuses on the ways that
masculinity is reimagined to take account of recent historical changes to provide a better
model of masculinity for the future. Though there is a lament for a time when “men were
men” throughout PK and MPC, a wholesale return to the 1950s is not presented as the
way out of crisis. Rather, historical images of masculinity are used to construct new
models of masculinity which work to contain feminine agency through rendering it as
either in need of masculine power to ensure its success (Promise Keepers) or as irrelevant
to the creation of a sound masculine identity (masculine popular culture). Specifically,
chapter 4 identifies metaphor as the dominant trope of the Promise Keepers and irony as
the dominant trope of masculine popular culture. Again, though they both use different
strategies, I argue that both mobilize a rhetoric of victimhood, one which presents men as
not only under attack by culture, but which indicates strategies to begin to “act like men
again” to check back the crisis identified in Chapter 3.
One central strategy for resolution of masculinity crisis within discourses of
nostalgic masculinity is consumption. Chapter 5 utilizes theories of consumer citizenship
and identity from Toby Miller, Nestor Garcia Canclini, and Lizabeth Cohen to unpack the

61
ways that the men of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture are constituted
as a market. Through various strategies, men are told not only how to consume in
accordance with a god-like or authentic masculinity, but also provide models for the
consumption of masculinity itself. Nostalgia is deployed within a particular political
economy as a way of exploiting anxiety in the service of the market. As part of this
discussion, I examine the presentational style of both, arguing that they are uniquely
suited for a postmodern context, and work to discipline men to be not only better men,
but better consumers as well. Taken together, the final three chapters provide the
symptoms, diagnosis, and cure for the ills of the modern man. I conclude with the
implications of nostalgic masculinity for the formation of a progressive gender politics.

62
Chapter 1:
The More Things Change…
Crisis and the Institutional Context of Nostalgic Masculinity

We keep on singing for the sake of the song, after the thrill is gone
- Glen Fry and Don Henley, “After the Thrill is Gone”

Sometimes we just outgrow the roles that we play. I hope you find a happy ending to
your story someday.
- Brother Ali, “Walking Away”

Judging by the popular outcry over the state of American men in the 1990s, one
would think that a “masculinity crisis” was a previously unknown experience in the
United States. The sudden panic around the “domestic apocalypse” underway was more
a condition of historical amnesia than it was a spontaneous eruption of instability in the
gender regime, as the phenomenon of a “crisis” in American manliness is far from
original. Indeed, within discourses of gender within the United States, masculinity is
always already in crisis. As discussed in the introduction, though narratives of
masculinity crisis present themselves as radical departures from a universal and
transhistorical understanding of proper gendered behavior, dominant conceptions of
masculinity are continually reworked in response to social upheaval, changes in cultural
understandings of masculinity and femininity, technological innovations, and evolving
social, economic, and political relations. Rather than a stable and definite model, gender
identity repeatedly undergoes dramatic shifts in cultural understandings of properly
masculine or properly feminine behavior throughout the course of history.
Crisis in popular writing is often ill-defined, and more often than not clarifies by
using examples instead of explanation. More attention is continually devoted to

63
lamenting the deficiencies of the status quo and vague allusions to previous notions of
stability without delving too deeply into what, exactly, is in crisis. The abstract nature of
crisis is a way in which a presumption of stability for those in power is maintained as
well as a potential threat to that presumed stability. Identifying gender as in crisis both
provides a means of disciplining gendered performance in line with dominant ideologies
while at the same time calling into question the “natural” quality of gender if it can be put
into crisis in the first place. Understanding crisis as a general disruption of social
relations relies on a blanket assumption that all who are “in crisis” feel that state of
unease the same way, as it is assumed that “all men” or “all women”, for example, are on
the same social footing and thus experience periods of disruption in the same way. This
broad assertion ignores the ways that not everyone can be “in crisis” in the same way,
and lacks a theoretical elaboration of what it means to either “have stability” or be “in
crisis.” Such elaboration is critical to investigating what about the moment in question is
unique and worthy of attention. Over-vague notions of crisis presume a time of stability,
as such interruptions that reach crisis proportions leave the impression that there is a
coherent system which is either, as R. W. Connell (1995) notes, destroyed or restored by
the outcome of such a crisis (p. 84). Connell continues by arguing that we cannot
logically speak of masculinity as in crisis, because it is not a system in and of itself.
Rather, masculinity is a “configuration of practices within a system of gender relations”
(ibid, emphasis in original), a system which forms patterns that endure over time. These
wider patterns create a structure, or gender order, within society.

64
For Connell, then, we can only speak of the gender order as a whole as being in
crisis, and not merely “masculinity.” He instead suggests that studies of masculinity
discuss “crisis tendencies” as opposed to “generalized instability” (or crisis) as the former
takes into account internal contradictions in gender structures, while the latter focuses
primarily on discourse, ignoring material conditions (Connell, 2002, p. 71). His point is
well taken; taking into account structural elements of gender constitution allows a focus
on the process of change, and those who mobilize for and against it, instead of focusing
merely on the discursive construction of crisis. However, the discursive is critical to
understanding the material conditions and functions of crisis.
28
While masculinity may
not be a coherent or transcendent system, it still enjoys a cultural presumption of stability.
Crisis narratives emerge as a way to give voice and narrative force to material conditions
that are deemed unsatisfactory or detrimental. The circulation of discourses of crisis both
create and are created by material conditions, as reactions to conditions produce such
fictions of an enduring, timeless gender order, and those fictions act on the public
imagination in ways that spur political actions and personal performances. Examining
how masculinity is spoken of as “in crisis” allows a critical investigation into the notions
of both crisis and stability through interrogation of how those concepts function
discursively.

28
This is not to suggest that Connell ignores the discursive. He argues that discursive theories do help us recognize
that “identities are always historically constructed and in principle open to change” (2002, p. 71), but cautions against a
performative theory which focuses on gender as a generalized instability. He does, however, overemphasize the degree
to which discursive theories necessarily posit a completely free floating or unrestrained conception of gender. As noted
in the introduction, claiming gender as always in crisis due to the need to continually reiterate the performance of
identity does address the role of institutional structures, in taking note of the ways that ideologies of power work to
discipline gender, and those institutional structures are one such place where that discipline occurs. His point on the
need to consider materiality, however, is critical to a well-rounded analysis of gender.

65
In particular, as will be detailed later in this chapter, crisis can function
rhetorically, so that the discursive identification of crisis, regardless of its verisimilitude
with the material or “real” conditions of existence, can act as a strategy of power to
maintain and reinforce privilege. I will define masculinity crisis as a situation when
familiar meanings and discourses of gender are problematized as changing social,
conomic, and/or cultural conditions prevent a performance of gender in line with its
traditional understanding. Discourses of crisis emerge as a way to identify and come to
terms with these disruptions as structural changes (i.e.: widespread economic shifts such
as the rise in industrialization, increased legal representation and advancements in civil
rights) produce concurrent changes at interpersonal levels, as people see their daily lives
change as a result of grander, large scale shifts (Kimmel, 1987).
29
Masculinity crisis can
be produced by changes in hegemonic understandings of masculinity or femininity, as
both can present a challenge to the successful enactment of masculinity within the gender
order.
To be clear: the presumed stability of gender relations, masculinity, or femininity
is not to suggest an actual stability, one in which crisis is not present, or a definite crisis
that lacks such a stability. Stability itself is a mythical construct.
30
While there may be

29
For example, if the familiar or dominant understanding of masculinity is of man as head of household and
breadwinner, and changing economic markets result in downsizing or less economic mobility, and/or cultural changes
see an increase in the presence of and need for two income families and women in the workplace, men are not able to
perform masculinity in being either the sole or the primary means of economic sustenance in the household, thus
changing what it means to act masculine, and preventing a recourse to established standards of masculinity as located
in economic ability.

30
But of course, stability is central to a sense of psychological well being, so we put faith in that imagined stability –
we sing for the sake of the song, as the epigraph from the Eagles reminds us. So even though we may outgrow the
particular “roles that we play,” (as the Brother Ali epigraph suggests) and imagine new ways of being in the world to
secure “a happy ending,” as will be discussed throughout this chapter history evidences that we often return to

66
periods where a particular representation or cultural understanding of masculinity is
dominant, or characteristics that are continually articulated to a particular gendered
performance (i.e.: masculinity as rational, femininity as emotive), there are always
alternate conceptions operating in a particular discourse. To say that crisis is endemic to
gender on both cultural and individual levels is not to suggest that there is no stability in
gender orders, structures, symbols, or representations. In fact, certain notions of gender
are remarkably stable over time. But given the inherent nature of crisis tendencies in
structures of gender, there is always the potential for crisis, and thus no absolute stability
nor pure crisis. Contradictory understandings of gender in which antithetical qualities are
thought to be able to co-exist in the same subject, as well as subjugated masculinities and
femininities (gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered individuals, women and men of
color), impede on any unitary or transhistorical conception of gender. Indeed, different
bodies are in crisis differently, and narratives of crisis universalize experience and ignore
how working class men, men of color, women, and sexual minorities have differential
access to structural advantages, as well as economic and cultural resources. Connell
(2002) sums it up aptly by noting that as a structure of relations, gender is constituted
within historical processes, and “accordingly can never be fixed, nor exactly reproduced.
The strategic question is not ‘can gender change?’ but ‘in what direction is gender
changing?’ Any situation admits of a range of possible responses” (p. 51). It is an
enduring cultural myth in such stability that persists, and which produces cries of outrage
or denial at moments when these tendencies become particularly pronounced.

structures that are familiar and connote stability, though those structures are reimagined in new ways to account for
changing social conditions.

67
As such, part of understanding a “crisis” in gender and its attendant cultural
responses is interrogating the conditions of emergence, both the historical antecedents
and their contemporary manifestations. Maxim and The Man Show exist as a way to tap
into a market, to sell audiences to advertisers. The Promise Keepers requires a
discernable audience of men to attend its conferences and purchase its products. The
fifth chapter is dedicated to exploring how Promise Keepers and masculine popular
culture work to get men to consume in particular ways. In order to make sense of the
emergence of those cultural products we have to look at the creation of the markets that
allow them to get off the ground in the first place, and set the frame for a particular
rhetorical strategy to be effective. Burke (1984) claims “art is the dial on which
fundamental psychological processes of all living are recorded” (p. 202, emphasis in
original), and so we must engage them as not mere cultural products, but as symbolic acts
of “both esthetic and moralistic strategy.” To examine the historical context and
conditions of production of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture then
becomes important to help provide an understanding of the “fundamental psychological
processes” of living that gives rise to particular discourses and cultural forms at specific
times. Both the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture invoke, criticize, mimic,
and respond to their previous historical iterations. The Promise Keepers joins a long
history of religious and spiritual men’s movements in the United States, and Maxim and
The Man Show are situated in a history of media targeted at men as their primary
audience. Though the responses to each cultural declamation of crisis are unique, what is
constant is that people continually form and reform communities as a response to

68
historical change, working to unite individuals as sharing a common frame of acceptance
despite their various differences which initially render them as separate.
The rest of this chapter will work to situate the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture within their historical contexts. It will do so by elaborating on the
economic and structural conditions of their emergence, as well as providing some
theorization as to how crisis works culturally in response to the economic, social,
technological, and political changes which produce the periodic and cyclical crises in
manliness in the United States. As part of this, this chapter will examine how various
discourses of historical crisis and responses to those crises were raced and gendered in
particular ways, ignoring the class, race, and gender bias inherent in the presumption of
white masculinity as universal. Initially, I will provide a brief examination of how
changes in American conceptions of masculinity in the second half of the 19
th
century
worked to establish the need for separate male enclaves, creating the first instances of a
distinctly “masculine” culture, and the evolution of what Anthony Rotundo (1993) has
termed a “passionate manhood” that set the stage for addressing men as consumers. I
begin the history of masculinity in this period because it is in the 19
th
century that the
changes which lead to the emergence of men’s religious movements and popular culture
in the 20
th
century have their greatest impact. Second, I will trace two parallel narratives
which provide the institutional histories of the Promise Keepers, Maxim magazine, and
The Man Show, including how the economic and cultural changes identified in the first
section contribute to the development of various religious and spiritual movements
primarily directed at men, as well as the rise of men’s magazines within the US with a

69
particular focus on GQ, Esquire, and Playboy. The third section examines the emergence
of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture themselves in the 1990s, and
identifies a few of their key similarities. Finally, the section concludes by taking a look
at what these histories can tell us about the cultural function of crisis rhetoric, and why
the sites under investigation in this dissertation are unique responses to the latest crisis in
masculinity.

Masculinity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The More Things Change…

Histories of masculinity have previously located the second half of the 19
th

century as a time of profound disruption in America gender roles, changes which
structured masculinity well into the 20
th
century (Bartkowski, 2004; Kimmel, 1996;
Rotundo, 1993). Indeed, shifting relations of work, family, self, and faith at the close of
the 1800s altered not only how men saw women, but how they conceived of their own
masculine identity. The departure from previous models of masculinity and femininity
produced new needs, desires, demands, and fears that resulted in new conceptions of the
self, and how to realize that self in the worlds of work and public life. Chronicling the
various ways that masculinity changed in the United States in the 19
th
century is not the
central concern of the chapter, and receives ample treatment in Anthony Rotundo (1993)
and Michael Kimmel’s (1996) exhaustive examinations of this period. Instead, this
section will focus on those changes most relevant to the creation of market conditions for
masculine popular culture, and those related to the rise of religious men’s movements.
As such, the primary emphases will be on the conditions producing a sense of crisis in

70
American masculinity at the turn of the 19
th
century contributing to a move away from
the Self-Made Man as model of American masculinity, the economic changes resulting
from and encouraging such reevaluations of manhood, the establishment of all-male
spaces and fraternal orders as a way of securing and revitalizing masculinity, and the
institutions, groups, and cultural products that arose to meet the newly established needs
of men and women at the beginning of the 20
th
century.
The turn of the 18
th
century witnesses a series of profound cultural and economic
changes in American life with the increase in industrialization, development of market
capitalism, and changing social demographics as urbanization increased with people
moving from rural areas to more metropolitan centers in search of work. In particular,
the development of canals to the interior of the United States shifted attention away from
coastal cities, and encouraged expansion westward and southbound not only for increased
economic opportunities, but also to utilize new, more fertile farm lands and textile
resources that were previous unavailable (Smith-Roseberg, 1986). In particular, the
development of capitalism based on liberal market principles and Enlightenment
rationality began to transform Americans’ relation with their work, and within their
families. Prior to the 1800s, communal notions of family and gender were the norm in
the United States, as a man’s worth was measured by his public contributions and the
conduct of his family in both public and private (Bartkowski, 2004; Rotundo, 1993). The
ideology of Western liberalism and the Enlightenment social and market principles
privileged individual self-reliance and objective contractual rights, necessitating a focus
on individualism as opposed to interdependence. The Self-Made Man became the

71
dominant form of American masculinity at the start of the 19
th
century, buttressed by an
ideology of meritocracy whereby individual worth was demonstrated not through
communal obligation, but rather through proving one’s worth through industriousness
and individual achievement. However, such a model did not bode well for social
cohesion, as a purely competitive atmosphere does not social harmony make. To rectify
this inconsistency, notions of dependence were situated in a natural gender order in which
it was women and children who were dependent, and men who were those most suited to
compete in the emerging market economies (Coontz, 2000; Smith-Rosenberg, 1986).
Within Enlightenment notions of the rational individual, subjectivity is realized
through engagement with the world using an objective rationality, one that is said to be
inherent within humanity’s intellectual capacity. The enlightened individual, however,
was gendered and raced; it was propertied white males that had a “natural access” to an
inherent rationality, while women, slaves, and property-less men were said to lack the
natural capacity of their social “betters” to access the resources of self-mastery and
improvement. As Stephanie Coontz (2000) notes, “the powerful legal, political, and
economic principles of liberal theory – liberty, equality, fraternity, and the rights of man
– could claim universality only by ignoring women and the family” (p. 59). With
dependence and individualism being incompatible in liberal theory, the redefinition of
spheres served both to resolve these contradictions in capitalism and to reconfigure
relationships between men and women, and between men and their families.
One key cite of this transition was in the development of the Cult of True
Womanhood, which was established within the bourgeoisie world of the 1820s, 1830s,

72
and 1840s as a response to changing economic conditions produced by increased
industrialization (Kimmel, 1996; Smith-Rosenberg, 1986; Welter, 1966). As the need for
brawn and physical strength decreased as the primary requirements for economic
production, thus weakening the justification for masculine exclusivity of the economic
realm, gender roles where redefined in the Cult of True Womanhood. This redefinition
of gender roles assigned femininity to the private sphere, the home, where the moral
purity of the family was the responsibility of women, and the masculine to the public
sphere, the workplace and politics, those spaces outside the home where it was the duty
of men to provide for their families. With industrial advancements no longer
necessitating the labor of the whole family unit to survive, gender discourses stratified
along new lines of responsibility, one in which rectified men’s fears of obsolescence, but
contributed to women’s economic oppression (Smith-Rosenberg, 1986, pp. 12-14).
The Self-Made Man was thus able (and in some sense required) to prove his
masculinity through his own industriousness and labor, a system of “individual interests”
in which “a man defined his manhood not by his ability to moderate the passions,” of
ambition, rivalry, and aggression, “but by his ability to channel them effectively”
(Rotundo, 1993, p. 3). Within this formulation, men were also situated as the heads of
household, as their authority to engage the public sphere and economic commerce was
what made them fit to lead and provide for the family (Coontz, 2000). But this authority
and redefinition of spheres was also inflected with differences of race and class. It was
largely bourgeoisie women who were relegated to the private sphere to care for the home;
working class women and women of color were not afforded the luxury of a sphere

73
devoted solely to caring for children as they often had to work outside the home (or, just
as often, in industry run out of the home itself) to ensure economic survival (ibid; see also
Smith-Rosenberg, 1986, and Welter, 1966). The additional time for white and middle-
class women to take care of their families was often enabled by the labor of domestic
servants in others who were of lower economic status, immigrants, or racial minorities.
31

Further, the ability of the Self-Made Man to prove his worth in the public sphere relied
on a privileged access to that sphere, an access that working class men or men of color
didn’t necessarily have access too by virtue of their marginal social status.
Rapid changes in the span of two or three decades had seen a profound reordering
of gender roles and definitions of masculinity, which problematized notions of masculine
stability. The move to industrialization also saw the breakdown in the artisan craft
relationship, where men developed in-depth relationships with a mentor while learning a
trade, often marrying into the family, and left men in want of new ways to bond
emotionally with other men and establish support in addition to changing notions of
economic productivity. These men “experienced themselves both as sons loosed from
the fathers’ ways and as fathers increasingly troubled as to how to provide for, control, or
even understand the experiences of their sons” (Smith-Rosenberg, 1986, p. 88). The
rapid progress of the market economy and shift to corporate capitalism did not provide
any certainty to these anxieties; while separate spheres gained ascendancy as a dominant
ideology, there was an ebb and flow in how men were able to obtain and maintain

31
Further, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1986) indicates, this construction of ideal femininity left those who did not fit
its prescriptions in a double-bind: economic necessity required work, and working women were constructed by
bourgeoisie morality of the time as morally inferior and suspect because of their violation of a “natural” gender order.

74
cultural and economic authority, a period of flex which saw the gradual collapse of
distinct spheres by the end of the 19
th
century.
Additionally, women did not simply accept the separation of spheres. Over the
course of the 19
th
century, women - middle class women in particular - acted to bring
private morality into the public sphere, through a variety of movements aimed at
sanctifying the wider world, including the Temperance movement, the First Wave
feminists and abolitionists, and movements to improve the poor, slums, factories, and
other aspects of public life (Smith Rosenberg, 1986, p. 86). The moral authority granted
women in the private sphere was used as a justification for feminine authority to remake
some of the public sphere as “during the very years when bourgeois men began to
formulate the Cult of True Womanhood, bourgeois women left the home in droves to
purify the world….Ironically, then, as men increasingly defined women as separate from
and unlike men, women’s experience came to parallel those of men” (ibid, p. 89).
Further, the end of the 1800s sees a shift towards corporate capitalism, which
also begins to once again change men’s relationship to work. With an increase in
industry and corporations as the dominant site of men’s employment, the notion of the
truly Self-Made Man “was fast being revealed as a sham in both public and private life”
(Bartkowski, 2000, p. 26), as men were losing autonomy in the workplace due to
corporate culture instead of individual success, and the assumed superiority of men to
lead the family and the home was questioned by women’s challenge to the strict
separation of spheres. While not all men had access to the autonomy of the early 19
th

century, those who had been positioned as the head’s of the home and masters of their

75
destinies due to their abilities to make use of an Enlightenment Rationality were now
faced with a new set of changes in which they had to make sense of their roles as men,
and conversely how to relate to women, their families, and other men. As rising
industrial capacity and mechanization reduced the focus and value of the body in
demonstrating economic acumen, there was a corresponding shift to a focus on the self,
and the body in particular, in demonstrating intellectual mastery and creating individual
value outside of the realm of labor and employment (Rotundo, 1993). A healthy body
was seen to be reflective of a healthy mind and a focus on physicality and appearance
came to take on increased importance at the beginning of the 20
th
century. Conceptions
of “the self” were divorced from realization in purely social terms, and “came to mean
that unique core of personal identity that lay beneath all the layers of social convention”
(ibid, p. 6). Indeed, part of the change towards commercial and corporate capitalism
meant that men were gradually “released from the narrow confines of defining their
masculine identity solely through the ownership of property” (Pendergast, 2000, p. 2),
and increasingly through leisure, commercial purchases, and other forms of self-
gratification.
Further, the turn of the 20
th
century saw increased anxieties about the constitution
of men within society. The rise of feminism at the turn of the century further provoked
fears that men were no longer properly enacting their masculine roles (Kimmel, 1987), as
women increasingly clamored for recognition as human subjects and not just the
domestic accoutrements of men. To compound such social disruption, the doctrine of
separate spheres had also contributed to an anxiety over the development of children,

76
young boys in particular. Relegating children to the “feminine” private space of the
home, which was seen as eroding the natural savagery and aggressive nature of American
boys, lead to speculation that men were becoming soft as a consequence of their
upbringing. Increasingly, the passion and impulsiveness that was seen as a bane to men
in the early 19
th
century due to the need to discipline the self for economic success was
being reestablished as a virtue; the natural “primitiveness,” selfishness, and ambition
were increasingly seen as qualities necessary to the healthy functioning of the individual
male and the American nation (Rotundo, 1993). Competitiveness, also a vice in the
community oriented 18
th
century, and growing in importance throughout the 19
th
century,
became celebrated as a hallmark of effective masculinity at the dawn of the 20
th
century.
Thus, the turn of the century had witnessed yet another reordering of gender roles, as
increased presence of women in public and the redefinitions of the public sphere as a
result of the first wave of feminism, the changing economic conditions of an evolving
capitalism that reduced individual autonomy, and changing cultural trends that focused
on the body as a site of strength and self-interested leisure all led to anxiety about the
state of society, and masculinity.
This masculinity “crisis” created new evaluations, needs, and desires for men,
both in terms of the ways they made sense of themselves and in their access to a uniquely
masculine space for leisure and emotional development. The end of the 19
th
and
beginnings of the 20
th
century challenged the clearly defined borders of space,
masculinity and femininity. The response to these changing standards of masculinity was
by no means uniform. A variety of institutions, markets, social groups, and cultural

77
practices emerged as ways of dealing with the instability in the American gender regime.
I will now turn to two different, yet overlapping developments in American culture that
emerge at the end of the 19
th
century and continue through the 20
th
, developments which
set the stage for the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture at the turn to the 21
st

century. It is not possible to cover in detail all of the transitions in masculine identity in
the Unite States over this period. However, I have chosen moments that evince particular
salience to evolving discourses of gender, and the institutional and material conditions
that provide a space for those discourses to gain cultural resonance. The two histories
that I now turn to are the development of homosocial spaces that provide the foundation
for the Promise Keepers, and the emergence of a commodity market specifically for men,
initially as men’s fashion, that lay the groundwork for Maxim Magazine and The Man
Show in the late 1990s.

Homosocial Spaces: Fraternal Orders, Sports, and the Intersection of Gender and Faith.

Rotundo (1993) points out that as bourgeoisie manhood looked to deal with the
changing mores of masculinity at the end of the 19
th
century, there emerged “[m]any of
the cultural forms which give shape to manhood in the twentieth century” (p. 222).
Among other changes, men began to view “primitive” sources of manhood in a new light,
as previously denigrated aspects of masculinity, such as competition and martial virtues,
attracted admiration and were “transformed into male virtues” (ibid). Alongside these
transformations, the rise of feminism at the end of the 19
th
century created a yearning for
“the mythical separation of spheres that had kept women about men’s public lives”

78
(Kimmel, 1987 p. 262), as the lack of that separation gave rise to “fears of social
feminization” (Messner, 1997, p. 9).
32
One way that men dealt with this perceived lack
of masculine public space was the establishment of men’s fraternal lodges and other
organizations for adult men. The early twentieth century saw over three hundred
different fraternal orders, frequently oriented to particular classes or races of men, and
“claimed the allegiance of nearly six million American men” (Bartkowski, 2004, p. 29).
In an estimated 70,000 fraternal lodges (Kimmel, 1996, pp. 171-72), men met weekly in
an exclusively masculine space, both to “avoid the feminizing influence” of women, as
well as provide material support to those that were facing hard times, and allow men to
develop “profound emotional attachments to one another” that were largely precluded by
the doctrine of the Self-Made Man (Bartkowski, p. 30). Further, Kimmel (1996) argues
that these lodges also served to provide men with a form of mobility denied them in the
economic arena, as the initiation into higher levels of order allowed men to experience
“the mobility the nation had promised but not delivered” (p. 172). Fraternal orders thus
helped men “reinvent themselves as men” as they were able to take refuge from the
turbulent social changes around them in an atmosphere of fellowship and camaraderie,

32
The establishment of men’s separate enclaves needs to be viewed in light of a variety of changes, not just the
redefinition of masculinity. While changing notions of manhood that shifted attention away from physical prowess
were certainly important impetuses for the development of these spaces, it was also changing notions of gender in
relation to other public spaces. One such space was entertainment, as women were increasingly targeted as an audience
in the second half of the 19
th
century, changing not only conceptions of venues such as the theatres as masculine
spaces, but also stimulating the development of alternate spaces such as the pub which further served to discipline
acceptable and unacceptable femininity as respectable women were not to frequent such establishments (Butsch, 2000).
Further, the potential disorder that resulted from increased urbanization was met with bourgeoisie attempts at
constructing voluntary organizations to both contain disorder, and serve emotional needs that were no longer served by
the Protestant Church or the integrated family unit (Smith-Rosenberg, 1986). Finally, competing religious cosmologies
of those who rejected this new order also abound, complicating a vision of a smooth transition into and out of separate
spheres in the middle of the 19
th
century (ibid).

79
and where “the lodge was alternately the artisanal guild, the church, or the home—or all
three simultaneously” (ibid).
33

Further, as Bartkowski (2004) contends, “one of the best ways for men to
recapture their manhood was to define its essence and transmit it to the next generation”
(p. 28). Concomitant with the rise of fraternal orders was also the dramatic growth of
organizations devoted to the cultivation of young boys into young men in gender
segregated clubs and groups. Groups such as the Boys Brigade, the Knights of King
Arthur, and the Boy Scouts of America were a reaction to the improper moral training
and development of men at the hands of women in the private sphere, and served as a
way of inculcating the values of both competitiveness and obedience to authority that
were becoming central aspects of twentieth century masculinity (Bartkowski, 2004; Kidd,
2004; Kimmel, 1993; Longinow, 2000; Rotundo, 1993).
34
Aggression and
combativeness were valorized in young men, as the “natural” drive to fight in boys was
seen as central to their developing masculinity. The savagery and primitiveness of the
boys was seen as a natural development in their maturation, one that could be properly
focused within boys organizations (Kidd, 2004). The savage virtues of boys were
harnessed within these groups in much the same way that the fraternal organizations of
their fathers made use of rituals and mysticism to create a greater connection to “nature”

33
See also Deardorff (2000), Putney (1993) and Rich and de los Reyes (2000) for a discussion of fraternal participation
in fraternal orders at this time and their function as providing a male space, often defined as sacred and containing
elaborate rituals for the enactment of masculinity.

34
It also served to lay the blame for improper masculine performance by young men and boys at the feet of women
through blaming the feminized private sphere, even though such a separation was not championed or instituted solely
by women themselves. This reevaluation of gender roles in which men appropriate responsibilities or abilities
previously situated as “feminine” or “women’s work” is a theme that will repeat itself, in particular in the development
of the Promise Keepers in the late 20
th
century, and is discussed at length in Chapter 4.

80
and man’s basic instincts. In both the fraternal orders of the older men and the youth
organizations of the boys, religious institutions and influences often, though not always,
played a prominent role. As Kimmel noted earlier, fraternal orders often served as a
church for men in the early twentieth century, and Christianity was the dominant religion
of those who made up the orders’ members. Similarly, it was with the aid of religious
institutions that many of the boys organizations, most notable the Boy Scouts, were
founded, ran, and maintained.
A final outlet for reestablishing masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century
was the emergence of sport as having central importance in American culture. Here too
religious organizations and communities played an important role. Athletics has a long
history in the United States, with sporting contests being played by the earliest British
settlers (Rotundo, 1993, p. 239). Initially, sports were seen as a way of maintaining both
physical and spiritual health, as the exertions of athletics were thought to not only refresh
and strengthen the body, but to work off excess energy that may lead to sexual
temptation, gambling, and other vices (Bartkowski, 2004, p. 30; Burstyn, 1999, pp. 91-
93; Rotundo, p. 239-242). Sport was a way to move towards salvation in creating a pure
mind, body and soul through “a balanced masculine character” (Burstyn, p. 91). But,
beginning in the mid 19
th
century through the beginning of the 20
th
, sport took on a whole
new meaning within American culture; as a means of competition and establishing
superiority. In particular the new focus on measurement and improvement of the body
was used to demonstrate the superiority of white men, as training of the body through
weightlifting and playing sports which were previously dominated by immigrants and

81
men of color were now seen as the province of all men (Bartkowski, p. 30). With the rise
of martial values as integral parts of both masculine and American national identity, sport
provided a competitive outlet that stood as a substitute for war. Men were at the same
time trained in the determination and courage needed to succeed in the new century, as
well as indoctrinated into a collectivist “team” mentality through valuing cooperation and
submission to a central authority such as a coach. Here, values which were useful in the
new corporate capitalism as well as the vision of America as an international force in
foreign policy were nurtured in competitive athletics. They further served to develop
self-control and an aversion to self indulgence, reducing the “feminine qualities” being
encouraged by a more luxurious culture and providing the moral training that was lacking
from women in the private sphere (Balmer, 2000; Rotundo, p. 242). As such, “early in
the twentieth century, sport became a key site for proving superiority in the form of race,
class, nationality, and now gender” (Bartkowski, p. 31).
Given the developing trajectory of American masculinity at the beginning of the
twentieth century, it should be no surprise that the increased focus on proper training of
the body as the “embodiment of mind, spirit, and character” (Rotundo, 1993, p. 224)
merged with the accumulating influence of sports, fraternal orders, and a need to resist
the “femininization of culture” in the rise of Muscular Christianity. Rotundo (1993)
writes of the call from Century Magazine in 1896 for “a vigorous, robust, muscular
Christianity, devoid of all the etcetera of creed” and envisioned a Christianity “which
shows the character and manliness of Christ” (Greene, as cited in Rotundo, 1993, p. 224).
The Protestant Church was seen as a primary area in which the increasing feminization of

82
culture was particularly pernicious; given that bodily fitness had been articulated to
spiritual health and well-being, and such corporal and spiritual health was central to
masculinity, then a crisis in the Church was a profound crisis indeed. Professional
baseball player turned evangelical preacher Billy Sunday is perhaps the most well
recognized leader of this movement, which also included James Naismith, the inventor of
basketball. With a desire to “masculinize evangelical Christianity” and spread the gospel
to non-believers (Bartkowski, 2004, p. 31), Muscular Christianity promulgated an image
of Christ as a man with a defined, muscular physique, a man who was “an enforcer,” “no
prince of peace at any price” who boldly confronted “the snarling pack of his pious
enemies and made them slink away” (Curtis, as cited in Rotundo, p. 224). Sunday, who
had left a prosperous professional baseball career in order to spread the Word of Christ
much like Bill McCartney would leave a successful career coaching college football to
start the Promise Keepers, proclaimed Jesus as not a “dough faced, lick-spittle
proposition” but instead “the greatest scrapper who ever lived” (as cited in Kimmel, p.
177), and was said to have “brought bleacher-crazy, frenzied aggression to religion” (as
cited in Kimmel, p. 179). In reversing the common Christian dictum of Christ as “spirit
made flesh” to “flesh made spirit,” as one’s character was dependent on the condition of
one’s body, Muscular Christianity not only proved to be “creatures of their time”
(Rotundo, 1993, p. 224), but also provided an arena for Christian men to be “fiercely
competitive in their athletic pursuits but equally passionate in their love for Jesus Christ”
(Bartkowski, p. 31; see also Balmer, 2000).

83
Muscular Christianity saw its zenith in the Men and Religion Forward Movement
(MRFM), an interdenominational organization comprised of an assortment of nearly
every national Protestant men’s organization, denominational brotherhoods, the
International Sunday School Committee, the Gideons, and the YMCA (Bederman, 1996,
p. 107). MFRM responded to census data reporting that 75% of America’s churches
were populated by women, with three million more women than men.
35
MFRM had a set
timetable, launched on September 18, 1911, and lasting until 1912, and was exclusively
dedicated to revitalizing Protestant churches through remasculinizing the Church.
According to Bederman (1996), the events saw over one million attendees, cost hundreds
of thousands of dollars, and witnessed the participation of seventy-six major cities and
over one thousand small towns (p. 107).
If the separate spheres of the 19
th
century had been designed to keep masculine
aggression and independence in check, then Muscular Christianity generally, and MRFM
in particular, worked to reverse the previous gendered understandings of faith and public
action. While the previous century had begun with religion and morality coded as
female, and set in opposition to business and politics which was coded as male, then a
primary impetus of the Men and Religion Forward movement was to “collapse these
oppositions” through articulating religion and faith as masculine, and akin to business
and politics (ibid, p. 111). In an effort to realign the separate masculine and feminine

35
Bederman (1996) explains that the lack of men was presented as a “crisis” of the Church that was a result of recent
historical changes. However, as she goes on to explain, this was mostly a constructed crisis given that the ratio of men
to women has been the same for approximately 200 years. In fact, early Protestants coded religion as gender neutral –
neither masculine nor feminine – and even with the establishment of separate spheres in Victorian America did not feel
a cause for concern. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century with shifting economic relations and a
reorganization of public and private space that a “crisis” was suddenly said to emerge, and the “feminine” church
identified as a problem.

84
spheres of activity, Men and Religion proponents worked to situate faith and morality as
a manly endeavor, primarily through locating it as a useful, productive, and almost
business-like enterprise. In fact, the organizers used new “corporate techniques such as
bureaucratic organization and aggressive advertising” in order to demonstrate that far
from being feminine, religion was “as manly as the biggest, strongest corporation
president” (p. 120).
36

Though commentators at the time had mixed feelings on the overall success of
Muscular Christianity and the Men and Religion Forward Movement, it succeeded in
realigning ideas of “female” religion and “male” business, challenging the strict
separation of the two. Using a variety of tactics, including sponsoring masculine leisure
activities such as sporting leagues and men’s clubs, the social justice aspect that was
promoted at the height of the movement waned, and the ultimate effect was the
“defeminization” of Protestantism, often to the detriment of women within Protestant
churches who had gained some measure of authority and autonomy within the church
(Bederman, 1996, p. 134-137). Women’s organizations were substantially reduced or
disbanded altogether, men’s interests were situated as the most important within the
Church structure, and the Church took on a masculinized, business-like perspective.
Further, the movement focused almost exclusively on white churches, leaving out black
and immigrant churches in their desire for a muscular masculine faith. Having

36
See also Kintz (1997) Longinow (2000) and Moore (1995) for a discussion of the various ways that evangelical
revivalists and Protestant organizers made use of commercial techniques in the service of increasing participation in the
Church in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
century. In particular, Moore works to problematize the assumption that religion
and the market have been in a strict opposition throughout American history, and only recently became commercial.
Moore argues that religion has always been intertwined with the commercial market, and this relationship became
particularly pronounced during and after the antebellum period in the United States as religious clergy and movement
leaders used new technologies and the availability of books on a wide scale, in addition to advertising and commercial
techniques, to try and increase membership among a culture of competing interests, comprised both of other
denominations and faiths as well as non-religious activities.

85
successfully navigated a (constructed) crisis in the Church, and reestablished white male
superiority, Muscular Christianity and widespread evangelical activism largely
disappeared from the American cultural landscape for the next fifty years.
This is not to say that evangelicalism disappeared completely from American
culture. In 1925 the state of Tennessee put public school teacher John Scopes on trial for
teaching evolution in schools. Even though Scopes was convicted, the national attention
generated by the trial largely served to portray conservative Christians as “stupid,
irrational, and backward” (Hendershot, 2004, p. 25), and treatments of evangelical culture
tend to locate this as the pivotal moment of the disappearance of evangelicalism from
American culture. While it is true that there was a withdrawal from the broader culture,
Heather Hendershot (2004) emphasizes that it did not go away completely. Instead,
conservative Christian culture turned inward in the 1930s and 40s, and focused on
building “their own separate networks of Bible schools, radio programs, churches, and
publishers” (p. 26). However, large-scale evangelical activism centered on gender in
relation to faith was absent from the American cultural landscape until the late 1970s.
There is some activity in evangelical culture in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, as
Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ is established in 1951 to bring Christ’s message
to college campuses, and Billy Graham gradually raises the profile of Youth for Christ (a
national organization focused on Christian youth revival) before setting off on his own
and creating massive crusades of conversion en route to becoming “the unofficial
spiritual advisor to the postwar generation of US presidents” (ibid). However, these
movements were focused on Christian activism broadly, and not gender specifically.

86
The election of Jimmy Carter, a self-described born-again Christian, helped put
“evangelicals onto the popular culture map” (Hendershot, 2004, p. 27) in publicizing an
evangelical culture that had largely been forgotten in the public mind. Though
evangelicals hoped that Carter would reflect conservative Christian beliefs while in
office, he turned out to be “something of a liberal in sheep’s clothing” (ibid). Though
Carter’s presidency first brought evangelical culture back into the mainstream media, it
was Second Wave Feminism that provided a primary foil for the genesis of an
evangelical politics. Traditionally said to begin with the publication of Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique (Foss, 2004; Douglas, 1994), the Second Wave of feminism
focused on securing increased women’s rights and access to social services, employment,
and status, increasing women’s cognizance of their oppression, often through
consciousness raising, and challenging patriarchy as a structural means of maintaining
that oppression.
A key part of this challenge was to reconfigure “traditional” notions of gender
which preached male superiority and female domesticity as the primary role for women, a
challenge which clashed with conservative evangelical beliefs about essential gender
roles ordained by God.
37
Though active as a community of faith prior to the 1970s, the
explicit call for members to engage in politics was a new development in the evolution of

37
The Second Wave of feminism is often described, and indeed responded to by both popular and evangelical culture,
as a monolithic movement with one set of goals and a singular politics. Patricia Hill Collins (1991) reminds us that the
Second Wave’s call for unification around gender often unproblematically assumed that all women had the same
experience of patriarchy, and calls attention to the different experiences of oppression based in the intersections of
other axes of difference such as race. Further, Benita Roth (2004) calls our attention to the presence of feminisms,
plural, within the Second Wave, as Black women and Chicana activists were also a part of the second wave. These
women operated in dialogue with White feminist groups, while also organizing as part of their own movements for
racial and social justice, problematizing both racial and gender privilege. However, responses to the Second Wave
often referred to it as feminism generally, and also adopted a focus on gender politics, ignoring the racial connotations
of patriarchy as well.

87
conservative evangelical culture, as the increased cultural prominence of evangelical
Christians helped begin Anita Bryant’s crusade against gay rights in 1977, the foundation
of the Moral Majority by Jerry Falwell in 1979 (with particular opposition to sexual
liberation, feminism, and gay rights), Phyllis Schlafly’s crusade against feminism and the
Equal Rights Amendment, and the election of Ronald Regan, another avowed born-again
Christian (Hendershot, 2004; Messner, 1997). Perhaps the clearest example of
conservative Christian politics to re-emerge at this time was the work of Edwin Louis
Cole, an evangelical author and public speaker who railed against the “sissification” of
the American male, and espoused a gender ideology based in a biblically endorsed view
of categorical differences between men and women. In what Messner (1997) deems a
“late-20
th
century version of Muscular Christianity” (p. 25), Cole published his solution
to the latest crisis in American masculinity (said to be brought on by feminism),
Maximized Manhood: A Guide to Family Survival in 1982. Having gone through
eighteen printings and over one million copies in print (Bartkowski, 2004, p. 46), Cole’s
text is viewed as a “classic” by many Promise Keepers.
38
With its affinity for Muscular
Christianity and cries for a re-masculinization of the Church, Cole’s writings serve as “a
bridge between the Promise Keepers and bygone forms of conservative Protestant
political mobilization” (ibid).
But there is one more stop on our history of movement responses to “masculinity
crisis” of the 20
th
century. Although Cole was a popular speaker in the 1980s with a
variety of media and personal appearances to his credit, he did not truly “organize” a

38
Even though it pre-dates the PK by about 10 years and is not an official PK text. Cole is, however, a contributing
author to Bill McCartney’s initial work What Makes a Man, the earliest Promise Keeper literature

88
men’s movement like the fraternal orders of the late 1800s or Muscular Christianity of
the early 1900s. Immediately prior to the Promise Keepers, the U.S. witnessed the
emergence of a men’s movement that received substantial national attention. In the
1980s, men began to attend lectures and weekend retreats of the mythopoetic men’s
movement, and in 1990 Robert Bly published Iron John: A Book About Men, the key text
of the movement and a national bestseller. Much like the fraternal orders of the late
nineteenth century, Bly (who was a central but by no means the sole figure of the
mythopoetic movement) focused on the need for men to return to the primitive forces of
manhood that have been obscured by the dominant culture. Bly and others desired to
“guide men on spiritual journeys aimed at rediscovering and reclaim the ‘deep masculine’
parts of themselves” through tribal rituals that had been lost in modernity but were central
for the passage to manhood (Messner, 1997, p. 17). Based in a “loose essentialism”
which argued for fundamental, but not immutable, differences between men and women,
the mythopoetics saw their movement as necessary to counter the attack on men and
masculinity of the late 20
th
century (Schwalbe, 1996).
The movement was largely a response to “dissastisfaction with the other ideals
and images of men” that had recently dominated American culture (Rotundo, 1993, p.
287). Like the groups at the turn of the century, mythopoetics worried that boys were not
learning proper manhood due to absent fathers and learning about how to be a man from
mothers and other women. In attempting to either live up to dominant conceptions of
masculinity or learning masculinity from the women in their lives, Bly sets up men as
reverting either “to destructive hypermasculinity or to a ‘femininity’ that softens and

89
deadens their masculine, life-affirming potential” (Messner, 1997, p. 16). Instead, men
were to go on essentialist retreats, return to nature and perform “primitive” pre-modern
rituals to locate the spiritual warrior within.
39
These rituals help men to establish bonds
with each other, compensate for the lack of father-son connections, and challenge the
oppression of men at the hand of industrialization and modernity (Clatterbaugh, 1997;
Messner, 1997; Rotundo, 1993). Not truly anti-feminist, but rather “selectively apolitical”
(Schwalbe, p. 517), the men of the mythopoetic movement didn’t have a problem with
feminist women,
40
or the general tenets of feminism, but with the ways that industrial
society prevents men from establishing deep emotional connection. Relying on a sense
of the “deep masculine,” mythopoetics constructed a homosocial masculine space as a
way to reconnect with male passion, and attempt to free themselves of “consumerism and
the competitive ethic” (Rotundo, 1993, p. 289). The retreats waned in popularity in the
1990s, and were eclipsed on the national media stage by the emergence of the Promise
Keepers in the mid 1990s.
Thus, the last two decades of the 20
th
century witness similar developments to
those at the turn of the 19
th
century. The creation of fraternal orders, Muscular
Christianity, MRFM, Cole’s Maximized Manhood, and the mythopoetic movement were
all largely, if not exclusively, oriented to a middle-class, white, straight audience of men.

39
This move to nature and a sacred space for men is reminiscent of the establishment of fraternal lodges, their
valorization of the “naturalness” of “savages” such as Native Americans, and the move to cultivating and taming the
natural savagery of boys at the end of the 18
th
century.
40
If anything, the mythopoetic movement was defensive about feminism. Michael Messner (1997) indicates that the
group sets up a false symmetry between itself and the feminist movement, as the movement ignores “the social
structure of power” (p. 19), and relies on an anti-intellectual epistemology that allows it to sidestep criticism based in
sociological, psychological, and biological advancements in gender theory (pp. 21-22). Further, Scwhalbe (1996)
indicates that the men of the group distinguish between feminists who want to see all people equal, and the ones that
blame men. The mythopoetic men only have an issue with those that blame men, largely because they see gender as
part of a deep essence, and not the result of social structures of power.

90
While the mythopoetic men were not evangelical Christians, they very much relied on
essential notions of gender and located their gendered ideologies in the higher power of a
spiritual realm that held higher authority than recent cultural changes. All of the groups
gained prominence in times of economic uncertainty and changing conditions of capital;
the rapid industrialization of the early twentieth century had given way to the
deindustrialization and increased internationalization of commerce of the late twentieth
century. Like commentators of the 1910s and 1920s, those in the 1970s and 1980s
proclaimed men as in crisis due to excess feminization, an excess that could be corrected
with a return to masculine roots. In all of the aforementioned periods women’s
workforce and political participation had increased exponentially, often as a result of a
sustained women’s movement meant to reduce structural imbalances of power between
men and women. The similarities between men’s movements at the beginning and end of
the 20
th
century are not the only ones. Much like, as will be explained in greater detail
later in this chapter, the Promise Keepers have a fair amount in common with Muscular
Christianity, so to does Maxim magazine and The Man Show have a good deal in
common with the emergence and development of men’s media culture.

The New Man: Mass Market Periodicals and the Evolution of the Men’s Market

In her examination of the rise and popularity of romance novels, Janice Radway
(1991) argues that we can’t examine cultural products from a purely textual standpoint,
assuming a direct relationship between the messages found in a text and the audience that
consumes it. Rather, Radway reminds us that texts produced in an industrial culture are

91
“the result of a complicated and lengthy process of production,” as technological
advancements, changing economic relations, and “ideological shifts in the surrounding
culture” (p. 19) all have an effect on the products that are available in a given market.
While the needs and expectations of audiences and cultural understandings of identity
and power certainly have their place in the form and content of cultural products, we
must also recognize that the act of consuming texts is also bound up in the “material
nature” of publishing as a “socially organized technology of production and distribution”
(p. 20). While Radway is specifically concerned with the advent of the romance serial
and the rise of mass market book publishing, her insights are particularly useful for
providing a more holistic understanding of masculine popular culture, especially given
that the two – magazines and books – see radical shifts in their production, distribution,
and consumption at about the same time.
The economic shifts that began to destabilize gender roles in the second half of
the nineteenth century – the move from a more small scaled and localized entrepreneurial
capitalism to a larger, more national, and industrial corporate capitalism – also helped to
shape the market conditions that allow for the emergence of mass market magazines.
Early American magazines from the mid-18
th
through the mid-19
th
century were more
local enterprises, often having a short lifespan due to a lack of advertising and restrictive
postal regulations (Wood, as cited in Nourie, 1990, p. viii). These magazines were
political in nature, functioning to disseminate political information and opinion, in
addition to essays, criticisms, business and economic news, fiction, and some religious

92
material (Nourie, 1990).
41
Beyond the cost to distribute such magazines through the
postal service, production costs and cover price prevented magazines from becoming
truly “mass-market” products until the end of the 19
th
century. The rise of magazines as a
mass-market phenomenon is tied up with the rise of mass market books and the changing
nature of book publishing in the middle of the 19
th
century. Increased industrial
technology and communications technology made it easier and cheaper to produce
magazines, but there was also the creation of a new marketing purpose for these
magazines. Radway (1991) notes that the serialization of novels and the creation of
“story newspapers” in about 1839 was an instant success in distributing literature across
the United States in an affordable fashion, dramatically lowering prices through
competition, and putting books within the financial means of a large number of
Americans. When the postal service changed rate regulations barring supplements from
being carried at the rates of newspapers, Radway argues, it “effectively closed off the
first real channel for mass distribution of books ever used in America” (p. 24).
However, while it may have ended the practice of supplements, it also provided a new
function for magazines.
Harpers Magazine, which is still around today, was first published in 1850,
largely because the Harper and Brothers book publishing company “had extra time to fill
on their printing presses” (Hart, 1990, p. 149). After initially focusing on reprinting
material from British periodicals, Harpers began to actively shape literary tastes in the US
through featuring prominent American writers and an editorial policy that championed

41
Though there were magazines in the 19
th
century with a particular focus on agriculture, it wasn’t until the mid 19
th

century that more general interest magazines on topics beyond politics became common.

93
more American styles of writing (ibid). Other publishing houses, seeing the success of
Harpers, followed suit, realizing that magazines resolved a primary dilemma of book
publishing at mid-century: companies were unsure of which books would be popular, and
how to reach particular audiences that would purchase those books (Parker, 1990;
Radway, 1991). One means of reaching those audiences was to advertise the novels of
the publishing houses within their magazines, as well as serialize those novels to induce
audience interest. Often, the use of serialization in magazines increased sales of
hardcover versions of the novels (Parker, 1990, p. 213-214). These developments
occurred in tandem with other changes in the magazine industry. Throughout the 19
th

century magazines were sold direct to consumers as “monthlies,” and while there was
some advertising in mail order magazines, they were largely driven by subscription, and
thus depended on selling magazines directly to consumers (Garvey, 1996). The markets
were thus more directed at specific audiences, such as rural readerships or elite groups.
The changing economic situation at the end of nineteenth century America saw a
series of rapid developments in the production, distribution, and consumption of
American periodicals. Cheap and well produced magazines became a possibility as a
result of technological improvements, such as the rapid cylinder press, the halftone
photoengraving process, the invention of the linotype machine, and the reduction in
printing costs with cloth replacing wood in the manufacture of paper (Chlebek, 1990).
Further, the doubling of the US population, increased literacy rates, stricter copyright
laws, the increase in industrial mass production and distribution, and the establishment of
a “national culture” enabled magazines for a much wider and larger audience who could

94
read literary content, and were increasingly hungry for it (Chlebek, 1990; Pendergrast,
2000). Increased service by the United States Post Office such as second-class mailing
privileges and the move by Congress to provide low-cost mailing services in 1879
allowed further distribution to readers (Nourie, 1990). The critical turning point came in
1893, when three popular monthlies – McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Munsey’s – decided
to lower the cost of their magazines to 10 cents.
42
With the rapid reduction in price,
American magazines were located in a commercial context in profoundly different ways
than they had at any point previously. Now, magazines subsidized the costs of
production with advertising, as the move towards a more corporate capitalism of the
United States changed relations of work and leisure, and saw the rise of a more
managerial and professional class in the cities and suburbs (Garvey, 1996, p. 11). This
was a profound shift, as this saw the switch from selling magazines to consumers to
selling consumers to advertisers. The new nature of mass-market periodicals being more
beholden to advertisers also saw changes in content as editorial decisions on what content
to include were more detailed and managed to ensure that the magazine would appeal to a
demographic that was attractive to advertisers.
As noted earlier, the nineteenth century evinced a shift to a more “passionate
manhood” in which self-expression and increased attention to leisure pursuits due in part
to changing economic conditions encouraged men to define themselves in terms of

42
Ellen Garvey (1996) emphasizes that this was not the first time that magazines had been this cheap in the United
States, as mail order monthlies had also priced at 5-10 cents and used advertising. However, the form of the new
magazines were addressed to a broad, national audience – as opposed to a poor rural readership – and were cheaper
than the more elite publications whose style they modeled. This price reduction of 1893 is repeatedly, and nearly
universally, located by historians of American magazines as the watershed moment in creating mass distribution, even
by Garvey herself, as it was the combination of changes in price, marketing strategy, and content that cast the die for
“the reign of the of the low priced, heavily illustrated popular monthly publication” (Chlebek, 1990, p. 248).

95
consumer products and individual choices in order to express the “inner self” as a
foundation for identity (Rotundo, 1993, p. 6). The changing notions of manhood begin to
pave the way for the rise of magazines targeted explicitly at men, but it is not until the
1930s that men are successfully targeted as an explicit market. Pendergrast (2000) argues
that since the medium was becoming organized around commercial success through
consumerism and advertising revenue, mass market magazines in general, and those
aimed at men in particular, have always been about promoting a consuming lifestyle, and
thus a consuming masculinity (p. 3). However, targeting men as consumers was not
initially an easy or a successful proposition. As previously discussed, magazines were
initially literary or political, and thus not aimed at a specifically male demographic,
though male readership was substantial. Some magazines such as the Saturday Evening
Post were initially created as magazines for men, but difficulties in attracting both
advertisers and readers made such specificity a failing venture (ibid, p. 20). There were,
however, magazines targeted at women as they were constructed as consumers in gender
specific ways, especially in regards to proper maintenance of the home and personal
appearance (Garvey, 1996). Though, as Pendergrast details, magazines may have
constructed particular images of masculinity, or addressed “masculine” topics such as
sports or fishing, magazines were not exclusively focused on men or their needs. Though
the 1910s and 1920s saw some small changes with the introduction of Vanity Fair in
1913 as an elite “smart” men’s magazine and American Magazine as the fare for
corporate men, it was still a comparatively small section of the magazine market. For the
large majority of the first thirty years of mass market publishing, and indeed of the first

96
200 years of magazine publishing generally, a male audience may have been assumed in
readership, but women, not men, were targeted as a primary demographic.
That all changed with the introduction of Esquire. The groundwork for Esquire
had been laid during the 1920s with the initial run of Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ) in
1926. GQ was initially a quarterly booklet of men’s fashions produced by David Smart
and William Weintraub, and was sold directly to clothing retailers, who then gave it away
for free to their customers. As a result, the store stimulated customer demand for the
products within the booklet. GQ eventually morphed into a trade publication, Apparel
Arts, and was designed to give the customer something to use to get a sense of available
fashion and not have to rely on the clerk or tailor’s taste in picking their own clothing
(Howd, 1990). What happened next, as is to be a theme in men’s magazine publishing,
was a happy coincidence of market forces and ingenuity. At the time, there was no
magazine aimed at men who were 25-45, educated, and in the professional class.
Retailers told Smart and Weintraub that while they enjoyed Apparel Arts, they also
missed the advertising booklets, and suggested to the men that they produce a fashion
booklet to be sold to customers at clothing retailers for 10 cents (ibid). Launched in
1933, during the middle of the Depression, the magazine should have been a dismal
failure. However, as Dean Howd (1990) indicates, Roosevelt’s New Deal was ushering
in a “new optimism” in the country, and thus the time was “ripe to attract a new man of
leisure: the one who worked a five-day week and had time to read, relax, and think about
the finer things in life” (p. 109). Pendergrast (2000) offers a succinct summary for the
establishment of the market that Esquire quite literally stumbled into:

97
By the end of World War II, most everyone still accepted that a man should hold
a job and support his family, but men were encouraged to individuate themselves
by pursing a number of possible avenues toward self-expression…There were still
confines on the way men were encouraged to behave…but men had been released
from the narrow confines of defining their masculine identity solely through
ownership of property and the subscription to a narrow code of gendered
morality. Cultural notions of masculinity had changed, and they now largely
suited the corporate capitalist socioeconomic order (p. 2).
43

Though the end of World War II (and, for that matter, the beginning) was still a
few years off, the initial publishers of Esquire, who were “not quite sure what just what
type of publication they were creating in the beginning” (Howd, p. 108), had created a
publishing monster. Initially planning on publishing quarterly, the first release included
100,000 copies for clothing retailers and 5,000 for newsstands, both large numbers for
1933. In fact, they expected to sell less than half of the newsstand copies in the first run
(ibid, p. 109). Within five hours of Esquire hitting newsstands all 5,000 copies had been
sold and the publishers were pulling 95% of their initial shipment for retailers in order to
put them in newsstands. Plans to publish monthly began in January of 1934.
Billing itself as a magazine for “Man at His Best,” Esquire aimed to be a
“common denominator of masculine interests--to be all things to all men” (as cited in
Howd, 1990, p. 108), and featured not just articles on quality fashion and accessories, but
also literature, poetry, and photography. Initially and over the course of its publication,
Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt
Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and numerous other
authors, commentators, humorists, and social critics published features, short stories,

43
Pendergrast is careful to note that this change is slower for men of color than it is for white men, as the Self-Made
Man was still a primary discourse of masculinity in magazines such as Ebony targeted at an African-American
demographic, and that it wasn’t until about World War II that magazines aimed at a black audience were seen as
economically viable and more fully incorporated into the mass periodical market.

98
travel narratives, and a variety of other content for the magazine. Using a blend of humor
and social commentary, Esquire was hailed as ringing with a uniquely “American style”
that adapted with the times (Howd, p. 113). In fact, it became so popular that GQ, which
had ceased publication when its publishers had started Esquire, was restarted in 1957 to
take up the overflow of fashion advertising from Esquire as there was not enough ad
space in one magazine alone (Varner, 1990). Similar in content, GQ was like Esquire but
without as much fiction, focusing on fashion with its primary demographic being
upwardly mobile young men who were trying to get to the stage in their lives where they
could live up to the Esquire image of the “successful man” (ibid, p. 137).
Of course, Esquire and GQ did not remain the sole offerings for popular culture
aimed at a primary male demographic; through the late 1950s, however, they were the
most successful. Then, in December of 1953, a young man who had been a copywriter at
Esquire founded Playboy. Hugh Hefner, like Smart and Weintraub before him, identified
a gap in the men’s publishing market and created a product to exploit it. Much like
Esquire and GQ were responding to particular cultural conditions, so was Playboy. The
cultural anxiety of the turn of the century, changing notions of masculinity amid the
depression, and an increased focus on leisure marked the key organizing elements of the
pre-World War II period of America history in regards to the magazine market. Playboy
is a response to new conditions in the United States after the Second World War.
Increased economic prosperity and the transition to an economy based primarily around
consumption provided a suitable economic context for the emergence of Playboy, as
more spending, more leisure time, and an enhanced cultural expectation of upward

99
mobility made it possible to devote a magazine to the pursuit of a lifestyle that
encompassed all of those things. In particular was the way Playboy worked to
reconfigure sexual politics through challenging the presumption that discussing sex in
public was necessarily dirty, instead insisting on sex as a natural part of human
experience, and, in particular, masculine identity.
The social context in which it developed was as critical as the economics of the
time in its emergence as the most successful men’s magazine of the 20
th
century.
Playboy utilized the increasing acceptability of conspicuous consumption amid rising
economic prosperity in the United States as a backdrop for the “playboy” lifestyle in
which men could learn not only what products to consumer, but also how to consume
products in line with the “playboy” image. Initially, it followed a remarkably similar
format to Esquire (Ogersby, 2001; Tate, 1990), as the diversity of men’s interests, glossy
pictures, and framing consumption as a masculine pursuit were straight from the Esquire
mold. There were, however, a couple of key differences. The first was that Playboy
didn’t initially focus on fashion, a distinct difference from its predecessors. It eventually
did incorporate fashion as a critical component to the successful cultivation of a playboy
ethos, but always as one among many interests, and not the focus: Esquire was a fashion
magazine, Playboy a lifestyle.
44
The second key difference was in its use of advertising.
Playboy had very little advertising in the beginning, and even after becoming more
established, claimed to refuse advertising that didn’t go along with the “Playboy” image
(ibid).

44
It could be argued that having pictures of naked women was also a fairly key difference. However, as will be
discussed later in this chapter, it was the ways in which the nude photographs were used in the magazine to aid in
cultivating the Playboy ethos that was the key difference between Playboy and other magazines of its time.

100
The gap that Hefner identifies as crucial for the establishment of Playboy was the
attitude that other men’s magazines of the time took towards sex. Magazines were either
geared towards outdoorsy male bonding through activities such as fishing, or treated the
public discussion and enjoyment of sex as something mildly perverse, and established a
distinction between women who men “desired” sexually, and those women in their real
life, an ideology that separated masculinity from sex (Nadel, 1995, pp. 129-130), a
distinction which presumed a difference between private desire and acceptable, public
expression of that desire. Playboy explicitly positioned itself against these trends;
Hefner’s initial editorial in the magazine said that it was to be for men who enjoyed the
finer things inside, in their apartments, and those finer things included enjoying “mixing
cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting on a little mood music…and inviting in a
female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex” (as cited in
Ogersby, 2001, p. 126). Playboy worked to make the expression of sexual desire a
central concern of masculinity and situating the public consumption of appropriate
femininity as a natural part of being a man. This attitude is what set Playboy apart from
its competitors (Nadel, 1995; Tate, 1990); the upscale focus, slick, finished layouts, use
of softer backgrounds and visual strategies to create a “girl-next-door” image of the
models, and increased price distinguished it from other “skin” magazines of the day to
provide an air of respectability, while the slogan announcing a focus on the “mind and
body of the modern male” separated it from fashion magazines (Nadel, p. 129; Tate, p.
367). The use of the “girl-next-door” as a strategy to make Playboy acceptable is one
that reveals that it was a carefully managed desire to be expressed; the “girl-next-door”

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has racial and class connotations, implying a white, middle-class woman (one who would
live next door to the reader), and not women of color, working class women, or
prostitutes.
45
Situated as uniquely for the postwar urban male, Playboy positioned itself
as a response to an increasingly corporate culture dominated by the image of the man in a
“grey flannel” suit and emblematic of a “restrictive social climate” that “was becoming a
chafing mantle worn by the younger generation” (Tate, p. 368). Playboy tapped into a
market that wasn’t being served by other products by using some of the familiar tropes
and features of earlier successes, and by bucking conventional wisdom in what would
appeal to men. Indeed, Hefner’s primary claim was that if he could “create a magazine
that appealed to him, it would also appeal to others” (Tate, p. 367) seems to have born
out. Within six years it had hit one million in circulation and flew past Esquire as the
number one men’s magazine in the United States (Tate), a distinction it still retains. By
the late 1960s the circulation of Playboy was surpassed only by TV Guide (Sterns and
Sterns, as cited in Nadel, p. 129), and the spending power of its upscale an audience was
rivaled only by those of US News and World Report and The New Yorker (Nadel, p. 130).
The three magazines thus far described shared some interesting things in
common. For one, the producers of the magazines moved from one magazine to the
other, with those working at one magazine moving on to one of the others – such as the
publishers of the original GQ starting Esquire and Hefner leaving his former employer to

45
In this way, it still maintained the virgin/whore dichotomy it purported to challenge in making sex “natural”; it just
reframed who was situated as virginal, and thus pure, and who was an unacceptable target for desire. Bill Ogersby
(2001) calls attention in particular to the whiteness of the magazine. Despite its fairly progressive racial politics,
including explicit denouncements of racism, Playboy was very much about a hip white masculinity, one which often
“drew on signifiers of ‘otherness’ (for examples the music and styles of African American culture…) as a reference
point and source of inspiration” but remained a fundamentally white cultural phenomenon (p. 13).

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start its successor.
46
They all emerged in a period of masculinity “crisis” when there was
both a perceived lack of content appropriate for an emerging masculinity and a market
niche to exploit in resolving gendered anxieties and feelings of crisis. All three focused
on particular men – often excluding men of color and lower class men. The reliance on
upward mobility positioned them not just as manuals in the products that were available,
but also in how to consume culture: which products are appropriate and why. They all
have a reputation for their literary content, fiction and non fiction, as well as their use of
brash and risqué humor. They all experienced meteoric rises in success immediately.
And they were all started based on individual publishers seeing a gap in the market, and
acting to fill it, all in explicit contradiction to prevailing wisdom of the time.
All three continued to enjoy success throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and
remained relatively stable, though market fluctuations and increased competition saw
some changes in editorial content, length, advertising, and pictorial content.
47
The late
1970s witnessed a drop in sales and circulation from all three, followed by some
revamping of their formulas to regain success in the 1980s (Nourie and Nourie, 1990).
48

It was in the 1980s that there was a pronounced change in the men’s magazine market.

46
Such a similarity in personnel helps to account for the similar formats as well as distinct differences; in order to
stimulate market competition the publishers worked to exploit a need they saw lacking in their competitors, a lack in
part gleaned from their time working at that competitor. This cross-pollination of personnel would continue among
men’s magazines up to and through Maxim as not only did GQ and Esquire repeatedly exchange personnel, but the
staffs of the American version of Maxim were often made up of editors and publishers who had left its competitors,
often to leave the British market for the American.

47
Most were merely changes in editorial stance, or the focus of their social criticism. It is noted that Playboy begins to
alter its pictorials to include more full frontal nudity to compete with upstart Penthouse in the late 1970s, but never
really loses its overwhelming dominance of the category (Tate, 1990).

48
Playboy changed the least of the three, according to Tate, while Esquire changed the most. When Esquire’s
founding editor died, the magazine went through a rocky period in which it was sold multiple times, and at one point
became a fortnightly. In 1979 it was bought by an American company, 13-30, resumed as a monthly, and was stocked
with a mixture of young blood and previously successful Esquire editors. By 1983 it had regained profitability, but lost
its footing to GQ in terms of market share.

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For one, Esquire and GQ, previously brother magazines, became direct competitors as
GQ was purchased by Conde Nast. Declining circulation and an aging readership at the
end of the 1970s led to some personnel and editorial changes, including updating the
magazine to grow with its readers, with a particular focus on using older models. In
1984, GQ had become the fastest growing men’s magazine, largely by positioning itself
as more of a life-style magazine (Varner, 1990). In fact, publisher Steve Florio, who had
previously worked at Esquire, explicitly positioned GQ against Esquire, competing for
writers and adding departments and articles about “men’s services” such as grooming,
health, food, and travel (ibid, p. 138). Another competitor, M, entered the market, and
staked its claim to the high-end of the consumer pool, focusing on a wealthier consumer
base. The 1980s saw a massive increase in advertising (including Playboy), as the largely
white and economically successful audience was more relentlessly targeted as a niche
consumer group (Nourie and Nourie, 1990); the focus was increasingly on “looking
good” as the magazines shifted from their literary focus to an even more consumerist
orientation towards the fashion conscious “New Man” of the 1980s (ibid; Edwards,
1997). There were, of course, differences between the magazines, largely in terms of
which segment of the market they were targeting. Robert Farley, senior vice-president of
the Magazine Publisher's Association, broke down these differences in saying “For M,
Fairchild Publications' entry in the field, the theme is ‘Having It Made.’ Esquire's theme
is ‘Man at His Best,’ which appears as the motto on the cover, and GQ's theme is
‘Making It.’” (as cited in Varner, 1990, p. 138). This market segmentation, combined
with an increasing focus on men as consumers of products, and not just “culture” led

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some to speculate about the reasoning for the changes. Gail Pool, a magazine reviewer,
posited that some may claim that the trend towards life-style magazines was a response to
the “women’s movement” as “men are more vulnerable, more concerned about looking
good and pleasing women, more open to advice” (as cited in Varner, 1990, p. 138). Pool
concludes that the “more likely explanation” was “that service magazines, with their
advertising links, are economically safer than other types. Thus Mr. Reader is now
addressed as Miss and Mrs. Reader have long been addressed: as M. Consumer” and
concluded that men’s lifestyle magazines will continue in their apparent direction, as the
magazines attempt “as literally as possible, to find answers to the question: What do men
want . . . to buy?” Pool had a point – by 1988, GQ was the unquestioned leader of the
men’s lifestyle market with a circulation of just over 660,000, and the format of a heavy
dose of fashion mixed with features and departments had become the standard for the
genre (Varner). However, Pool may have elided the question of men’s vulnerability too
easily. She is certainly correct that the economics has a profound effect on the style and
content of the magazine. But the question remains as to what induces or enables
economic shifts that allow a style to be popular? If it is purely a question of attracting
advertisers, then how were the most successful magazines of the first 80 years of the
twentieth century conceived counter-intuitively? The history recounted to date in this
chapter makes it reasonable to conclude that it is a combination of social and economic
factors that lead to the emergence of particular cultural forms. With this examination of
their historical antecedents, we can now turn to the particular emergence of the Promise
Keepers and masculine popular culture in this latest period of “masculinity crisis.”

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...The More We Pretend They Stay the Same:
The Emergence of Promise Keepers and Masculine Popular Culture

The Promise Keepers

When Robert Bly was atop the bestseller list with Iron John in 1990, and the
mythopoetic men’s movement was seeing upwards of 300,000 men attending their
gatherings, another men’s movement was on the horizon. The birth of the Promise
Keepers as a national organization is universally traced to a rather non-descript
beginning: a car ride. On March 20, 1990, Promise Keepers founder Bill McCartney,
then the head coach of the University of Colorado football team, was on his way to a
meeting of the Fellowship for Christian athletes, and was accompanied by his friend
Dave Wardell, the athletic director at UC.
49
During the ride, Wardell asked McCartney
what he would do for the remainder of his life if money was not an issue. McCartney
responded:
More than anything, God has put it in my heart to witness a tremendous
outpouring of His Spirit upon men. I envision men coming together in huge
numbers in the name of Jesus, worshipping and celebrating their faith together. I
long to see men openly proclaiming their love for Christ and their commitment to
their families (McCartney, 1995, p. 286).

The conversation did not end there. Over the course of the next five or six years, the
Promise Keepers would grow exponentially. From an initial meeting of 72 men later that
year, a broader ministry was conceived to reach the men of the United States that

49
Given the historical connections in the United Stats between sports, masculinity, and evangelical revival, it should
not be surprising that the Promise Keepers had a similar beginning to that of Muscular Christianity. Like Billy Sunday,
McCartney also leaves a lucrative career in athletics to lead an evangelical men’s movement; and McCartney, like
Sunday, has no shortage of sports metaphors in his ideal vision of Christ. The connection to sport is significant, as not
only are sports situated as a central concern of men within American culture, but as Chapter 4 will discuss, sports
metaphors have both an elasticity of their own and an easy articulation to metaphors of war and conflict, and act as
particularly effective rhetorical devices.

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McCartney and others saw as being in need of the healing power of Christ. McCartney’s
initial vision was a ministry that was more than the standard bout of preaching and
biblical passages. Instead, he envisioned something that captured the spirits and souls of
men rather than just their attention, a vision that included 50,000 men in a football
stadium learning what it means to be “godly men”: McCartney wanted nothing short of
“a revival among Christian men who were willing to take a stand for God in their
marriages, families, churches, and communities” (History of Promise Keepers, n.d.).
The particular organizational form that PK takes is connected to McCartney’s (as
well as co-founder James Ryle and early PK president Randy Phillips) membership in the
Vineyard Fellowship Churches, a Pentecostal branch of Protestantism that is
controversial even among evangelicals (Brickner, 1999).
50
The Vineyard churches were
established in the late 1974 as an outgrowth of the Calgary communities of the 1960s,
and focused on a charismatic faith in which a personal relationship with God and
dedication to the Spirit could substantially alter an individual’s life, and returning to the
Spirit could provide salvation (Chastra, 2000). Further, the charismatic beliefs also
stressed spiritual healing and accountability groups where men were held responsible to
one another for all aspects of their lives: home, family, work, sexual (Quicke and
Robinson, 2000). Finally, one of the hallmarks of the Vineyard churches was what
Vineyard Church reverend, and influential leader, John Wimber called “power

50
The controversy stems from the Vineyard’s focus on modern day prophesy and revelation of Godly purpose through
dreams, an aspect of the Vineyard that has been attributed to the Promise Keepers, and seen for some as cause for
concern at best, and heretical at worst. This influence is reflected in McCartney’s saying he has a vision of men, put in
him by God. Promise Keepers is similarly not universally endorsed by conservative Christians or fundamentalists.
Besides books such as Phil Arms’ Promise Keepers: Another Trojan Horse which lambaste the group as not
conservative enough, there was a protestor from an unspecified fundamentalist group outside of the conference I
attended in Los Angeles who held up a sign blasting PK for focusing on a marital lifestyle to the exclusion of single
men and eunuchs, endorsing an “effeminate” God, and shouted at the men on their way in to the conference that he
hoped they were ready to have their “ears tickled” by the music and feel-good vibes.

107
evangelicalism” (ibid), which featured “emotionally charged sermons” and rock music
(Swomley, 1997). The whole package is designed to fill the faithful with the power of
the Holy Spirit, rendering them able to go out and convert others to the Word of Christ.
The Promise Keepers are by no means a carbon copy of the Vineyard churches; there is
no laying of hands on men to drive out Satan, speaking in tongues is not featured, and
signs and wonders are not a staple of PK conferences. Further, while the revivals of the
Vineyard Churches in the 1990s witnessed the frenzied shaking and jerking of members
caught in the power of the Spirit, PK resembled more of the tent-style revivals of Billy
Graham (Chastra, 2000). The influence is undeniable, however. Promise Keeper
conferences feature Christian rock bands and emotionally charged speakers, members are
encouraged to join smaller accountability groups to reinforce the lessons learned at
conferences and in PK texts, and, as will be detailed in Chapter 4, the focus on individual
accountability in turning back to God is a central focus of the group.
After the initial meeting of 72 in 1990, the rise of the Promise Keepers can best be
described as astronomical.
51
The first large-scale conference was held in 1991 at the
University of Colorado basketball arena and drew 4,200 men; the next year, the outreach
ministry included 1,000 churches, and the conference venue was moved to the
university’s football stadium, where 22,000 men attended. 1992 also saw the publication
of the first Promise Keepers book, What Makes a Man: 12 Promises that Will Change
Your Life, a collection of essays that set the foundation for the organization and its
beliefs, and which was distributed to all of the men at the 1992 conference. In 1993,

51
The following numbers are based on a number of sources, including the Promise Keepers website (History of the
PK), as well as Claussen 1999, Brickner, 1999, and Lundskow, 2002.

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McCartney saw his initial dream realized as over 50,000 men attended the convention
(from every state in the nation, according to the PK website), and over 3,000 pastors
attended the national leadership conference. 1994 was the first year there was multiple
conferences, as seven cities saw more than 230,000 men attend PK conferences. It also
witnessed the publication of the self-described “manifesto” of the group, Seven Promises
of a Promise Keeper, and was translated into 10 languages and published around the
world (Arabic, Chinese-Cantonese – Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, German, Japanese,
Korean, Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish).
Significantly, Seven Promises was published by James Dobson’s conservative
Christian organization, Focus on the Family. Heather Hendershot (2004) notes that
Focus on the Family is the country’s largest producer and distributor of Christian media,
a multi-million dollar organization which provides an array of Christian lifestyle and
media products, in addition to a nationally syndicated radio program hosted by Dobson.
Focus on the Family was born of a series of “separate networks of Bible schools, radio
programs, churches, and publishers” that emerged largely unnoticed by secular culture
following World War II (Ibid, p. 26). This growth of separate networks allowed the
development of smaller Christian bookstores and radio programs, establishing an
infrastructure to be exploited in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the time the Promise
Keepers began sponsoring conferences, Focus on the Family was generating revenue of
$78 million dollars. Dobson was an early and avid supporter of the Promise Keepers, and
used the reach and considerable financial resources of his organization, as well as his
radio program, to advertise the Promise Keepers and encourage men to attend their

109
events. By 1994 when Seven Promises went to press, Dobson was a frequent contributor
and speaker, Focus generated $100 million in revenue and provided a developed market,
audience, and institutional network for the Promise Keepers to take advantage of and
build on. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, PK returned the favor by
including Dobson and Focus’ products alongside its own at conferences.
While the publicity from Dobson’s radio program certainly helped, the Promise
Keepers was effective at generating its own revenue. With a paid staff of 22 people,
1993 saw $4 million in revenue; by 1994 it had increased six-fold to $26 million and a
staff of 150. The Promise Keepers could boast of 727, 342 in attendance and $64 million
in revenue by 1995, and in 1996 at the height of their popularity, over 1.1 million men
attended 22 Promise Keeper events, 39,000 clergy attended a conference designed to
increase PK penetration in local churches, and the organization generated $87 million
from conference admission fees and donations (Lundskow, 2002). In 1997, the Promise
Keepers had 360 full time employees, eight state and regional offices, 59 area managers,
and launched its most high-profile event: Stand in the Gap (SITG). SITG attracted
hundreds of thousands of men to the mall in Washington D.C. for a day of prayer and
reconciliation,
52
and was covered widely by visual and print media. Perhaps the ultimate
symbol of the Promise Keepers, it was also its apex. In part because of the decision by
the organization to stop charging admittance fees, revenues dropped off sharply in 1997,
down to $76 million, and attendance at 19 conferences dipped to 639,000. The loss of
revenue forced the PK to layoff its entire paid staff (though many were eventually

52
This figure is somewhat contested. The Promise Keepers list an estimated 1 million men on their website, while
others put the figure at closer to 500,000-600,000 (Lundskow, 2002; Claussen, 1999).

110
rehired), and saw it resume charging for conferences in 2000. McCartney initially
resigned as president of PK in 2003 to care for his ailing wife, but continued to speak on
occasion at conferences.
53
Though they have “reached” over 5 million men since their
founding, PK conference attendance, attendance has steadily dropped, having failed to
crack 200,000 since 1999, with 179,000 in 2004.
54
Though their attendance and revenue
have dropped from their peak, the organization still commands an impressive number of
attendees at its conferences, as well as a variety of products.

Masculine Popular Culture

Right about the time that the Promise Keepers was hitting its stride and seeing a
five-fold increase in conference attendance, the beginnings of a dramatic shift in
magazine publishing was just beginning. While Esquire and GQ enjoyed market
prominence in the men’s lifestyle category in the United States, their dominance was
about to be challenged in the United Kingdom. In April of 1994, a new contender in the
British market, provocatively titled loaded, released its first issue. Loaded debuted to “no
fanfare reception in the publishing trade press and no protracted debate over the likely
success of this new kind of men's magazine” (Crewe, 2003, p. 1), slipping almost
anonymously on to the crowded UK magazine racks. Three and a half short years later,
however, there was a dramatic difference. After For Him Magazine (FHM) topped
500,000 copies per issue sold, overtaking Cosmopolitan Magazine (a monthly lifestyle
magazine for women dubbed Cosmo for short, and a longstanding industry leader in the

53
McCartney later returned as president of the Promise Keepers and featured guest speaker in 2008.
54
I could not locate an attendance figure from 2005.

111
category) as the number one selling lifestyle magazine in Britain, there was a
substantially larger interest in the British press over this new category of magazine. The
men’s lifestyle monthly, featuring an array of articles on “music, affordable fashion,
sport, sex and comedy,” had become a genuine market contender after more than 25 years
of “being known as the ‘graveyard’ of magazine publishing” (ibid). Ben Crewe (2003),
in his exhaustive and insightful study of men’s lifestyle magazines in Britain, argues that
this new brand of magazine – the “new lad” magazine – had replaced Arena, GQ,
Esquire, and other magazines focused on “the new man” as “the dominant emblem of
contemporary masculinity” (p. 2). Indeed, the predecessors to the American version of
Maxim seemed to have the same basic idea in mind; James Brown, initial editor of the
British version of loaded located the purpose of the magazine as “addressing men who
‘have accepted what we are and have given up trying to improve ourselves’ (Independent,
August 9, 1994, p 26).
This was not always the case, however. Initially, the “black hole of publishing”
in Britain was seen as unable to be filled by a men’s general lifestyle magazine (Crowe,
2003). Tentative launches in the early 1990s slowly expanded on this nascent market by
creating film and music magazines that presented themselves as “parts of the overall
lifestyles of their readers rather than as sole hobbies” (Crowe, p. 43), a small but dramatic
step forward in carving out a niche market for men that was not focused on fashion. This
was still not a widespread practice, however, as the British market was focused either on
high end fashion magazines such as Esquire and GQ (themselves initially seen as
unlikely contenders in the British market) or magazines targeted to specific interests such

112
as sports until 1994. At the start of 1994, GQ was Europe’s most popular men’s lifestyle
publication (ibid, p. 44), establishing itself as the market leader on both sides of the
Atlantic. That dominance was not as long lasting as GQ would have hoped. Within four
years the market for men’s lifestyle publications had grown 674% (Crowe, 2003) as the
format, editorial style, and novel content caught on and generated copy cat publications,
among them the original British version of Maxim. Published by Dennis Publishing,
Maxim did not get off the ground immediately. In 1993, two music journalists Mat Snow
and Lloyd Bradley presented Dennis with a 40 page proposal for a general interest
magazine aimed at men in their thirties. Initially conceived as being a loaded type
magazine aimed at an older crowd (30-45), the first dummy copy was rejected as
untenable. Felix Dennis, the head of Dennis Publishing, still desired to expand into new
markets, and saw the concept itself as viable. It was eventually retooled and targeted to
an older audience than loaded, but younger than its first incarnation, seeking to attract
men 25-35.
Eric Fuller, tapped to be the magazine’s development manager, hired Gill
Hudson, who had previously revived seemingly defunct magazines by emphasizing a
“‘common touch’ and the recognition of the selling power of sex” (Crowe, 2003, p. 54)
as the editor-in-chief charged with bringing Maxim to fruition. Without a proper dummy
copy, Hudson approached the development of the magazine as a Cosmo for men,
reasoning that there were men in the world who were supposed to “know” how to do
manly things and possess a particular set of life skills, yet had never been taught the
requisite information. Initial research from consumers was again negative as to the

113
viability of the magazine, but Hudson pressed on, as she “absolutely knew there had to be
[a market]” for such a product, reasoning that “women have read about this stuff for
years” while the men she knew had no such resource (as cited in Crowe, 2003, p. 54-55).
Targeting men who were “too old” for loaded, and who were old enough to have money
to spend but young enough to want to spend it, Maxim hit British newsstands in April of
2005, and within three years it was selling six times its original target, and had a
circulation of almost 2/3 of the original Cosmopolitan for women.
With the success of Maxim in particular, and the men’s lifestyle category in
general, Felix Dennis “peered across the ocean at the sleepy American newsstand” and
saw that women’s magazines populated the market in the United States without “a
pretense toward literary legacy” matched with cover lines about sex, while men’s
magazines “were occupied with picking up National Magazine Awards” (Turner and
Gideonse, 1999, p. 52). Believing that American men wanted more exciting fair, Dennis
hired an American editor, Clare McHugh, and set about developing a scaled down
version to attract American advertisers. Much as the genre was considered the “black
hole” of British publishing, there had been a “longstanding rule” in the United States that
men’s magazines would do well to avoid advice articles and including a variety of topics
(Warner, 1997), and instead should focus on one primary area, such as fashion. Even
though Esquire and GQ had begun to diversify its content and include more lifestyle
items, they were still primarily fashion magazines. Dennis saw these magazines as taking
themselves too seriously and being targeted to men who “like socks better than sex” (as
cited in Warner, 1997, p. 27). Unlike the British market, however, the American market

114
reacted with immediate vitriol towards the news of the upstart magazine. Michael
Lafavore, the executive editor of Men’s Health claimed that they were a big magazine,
and if Dennis wanted to “play, he’d better have really deep pockets” (ibid). Dennis
countered by boasting that the magazine could turn a profit in three years (five years
faster than the average magazine), and said he was prepared to lose $10 million to make
Maxim a success. Florio, now the president of Conde Naste, responded “And he can be
sure he will.”
55

Much like Hugh Hefner saw a need for Playboy in the 1950s despite social and
economic conventions of its implausibility, and Smart and Weintraub began a new
fashion magazine in the midst of the depression, Dennis went ahead and released his
magazine anyway. In April of 1997, two years after its British launch, Maxim debuted in
the United States with an initial circulation target of 175,000 and released on a quarterly
basis. The next year it increased to 10 issues a year, settling on a monthly schedule in
2000. After its first 15 issues, its circulation had soared to 600,000 (Turner and
Gideonese, 1999). Within one year of beginning publishing, Maxim had already equaled
the rate bases of GQ and Esquire, and by September of 1998, less than a year and a half
after its first issue, was already the sixth best selling men’s lifestyle magazine (“The
Timeline, 2002). By December of that year, less than two years after publishing its first

55
There is a certain irony in the historical development of the men’s magazine market. There appears to be a cycle of
anticipated failure, followed by jealousy and resounding success. Esquire and GQ started as a response to the lack of
popular magazines for men and the need for greater access to a market for fashion. Playboy began as an explicit
reaction to Esquire and GQ, was expected to fail, and quickly achieves market dominance. Esquire and GQ once again
were leading the market charge at end of the 1980s by changing their content and tone, and expanding to overseas
markets where they were initially expected to fail but are quite successful because of their identification of an
unfulfilled desire for such titles for men. Lad magazines counter GQ and its ilk, and were initially expected to, you
guessed it, fail and then overtake their predecessors in circulation. Finally, Maxim and other men’s lifestyle magazines
begin in England, are not projected to succeed in the United States, contrast themselves to GQ like Playboy had 50
years earlier, and are more successful than Esquire and GQ ever were.

115
issue, it had become number one. In June of 1999 it set a publishing record by having the
largest single year-to-year circulation increase in magazine history. Maxim then
proceeded to break its own record five months later. In early 2000, Maxim was not only
the best selling magazine in the American’s men’s press, but it had over 1.5 million
monthly buyers (Crowe, 2003, p. 61), and by August of 2000, Maxim broke the two
million circulation barrier, “long held to be impenetrable by the men’s lifestyle category”
(Kerry and Marshak, 2000). On newsstands at the time, Maxim was outselling Esquire,
GQ, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated. Combined. The “regular
guys” of Maxim were the American counterpart to the “British lad,” and its success
spurred the crossover of other British titles such as FHM in the summer of 1999, evincing
an interesting reversal: whereas at the beginning of the 1990s GQ and Esquire had gone
across the pond to capture the lax British Market, the decade’s end saw British magazines
moving into the American market, but with much greater success.
The year that Maxim debuted also saw another surprise in American popular
culture. South Park debuted on US cable network Comedy Central. Featuring four foul-
mouthed 8-year olds, gratuitous violence, and incisive social commentary as its defining
elements, both the network and advertisers were initially skeptical about the program; in
fact, the network only ordered half a dozen episodes (Millar, 1997). Though justified, the
initial fears proved to be unfounded as the program rapidly attracted viewers and, as a
result, advertiser interest. After debuting at a Nielson rating of 1.3 in August 1997, it had
already reached a 2.0 rating after its first six episodes, and landed an astounding 4.8
rating for its Thanksgiving episode, the highest the network had experienced to date, and

116
impressive for an original cartoon for adults in cable.
56
South Park did not have a male
audience in mind in its creation (it was originally commissioned as a video Christmas
card for a television executive), nor was it targeted or marketed to a male demographic
specifically. Despite their differences, the success of South Park is of particular
importance for the emergence of The Man Show.
57

Comedy Central was launched as a network at about the same time that Bill
McCartney was gearing up for his first PK conference. Formed in 1991 as a merger
between HBO’s “Comedy Central” and MTV’s “Ha!”, Comedy Central was attempting
to carve out a niche market in the rapidly expanding cable broadcast spectrum.
Increasing sophisticated marketing techniques were beginning to create a more finely
tuned audience demographic, with the possibility of narrowcasting to specific audiences
increasingly becoming possible and commercially viable (Turrow, 1997). Though there
had been targeted channels since the 1980s, such as Nickelodeon and MTV, it was in the
1990s that there was an explosion of niche programming on cable television. Initially,
Comedy Central was a moderate success at best. It had almost no original content and

56
As a point of comparison, an average Comedy Central show at the time received a .60 rating in prime time, and a
rating point for Comedy Central represented 460,000 homes (Carter, 1997), which means that almost 600,000
households watched its debut and 2.2 million homes tuned in to the Thanksgiving episode in the show’s first season
while average primetime viewership was 276,000 homes.

57
Similarly, South Park benefited from an animation renaissance that had begun with Nickelodeon and its
programming block of cartoons, NickToons, and in particular the show Ren and Stimpy, which follows the lives of a
dysfunctional pair of best friends: a Chihuahua (Ren) and a very lovable yet exceedingly stupid cat (Stimpy) (Banet-
Weiser, 2007). Since the mid part of the century, cartoons had been consigned to the waste bin of television
programming, as advertiser driven cartoons had situated animation as trivial fare for children, in contrast to its earlier
history of being for adults as well, and had left it languishing on Saturday Mornings. Though able to easily generate
profit from marketing to kids, animation based on commercial products lacked the respect and engagement of adults.
The late 1980s and 1990s sees a change in this dynamic as cartoons which made use of “irony” and double-coding to
generate transgeneratational viewing became commercially viable and once again established animation as acceptable
fare for adults (and thus even more profitable for advertisers). Debuting in 1997, South Park was able to take
advantage of this renaissance, as well as the program Dr. Katz, a cartoon on the network that was already successful
and targeted towards an exclusive adult audience.

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was mostly made up of reruns and movie programming. As of 1993, the network only
had 26 million subscribers (Bryant, 1993), and was largely seen as a disappointment in
not living up to its potential. However, that began to change in 1994 with the addition of
original programming, notably Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Mystery Science
Theatre 3000, a show which spoofed bad Hollywood movies, and later Dr. Katz:
Professional Therapist, an animated series. By 1995 the network had tripled its
subscriber count since 1991, and reached a higher proportion of affluent, educated, 18-to-
49-year-old viewers than any other network on broadcast or cable. (Bellafonte, 1995).
After losing Politically Incorrect to ABC in 1996, the network was looking for a new
staple program.
South Park became that staple program, and was successful not only in drastically
raising the network’s profile, but also in attracting a whole new segment of advertising
and demonstrating the viability of a new market demographic for Comedy Central.
While the network had previously had some shows that were somewhat controversial in
their commentary, including Politically Incorrect, South Park pushed the envelope of
appropriateness. The show did more than capitalize on an existing audience; South Park
was substantially raising viewing levels, meaning that it attracted an audience that would
not otherwise be watching the network at that time, but tuned in specifically for the
program (Millar, 1997). Further, the network was willing to air the show even though
they knew it could turn off potential advertisers because of the specific market to which
the show provided access.
58
At the time, males ages 18-34 were somewhat of a “holy

58
In her discussion of the children’s television network Nickelodeon, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2007) explains that cable
networks with a strong brand identity and a discernible market segment are able to take greater risks both due to the

118
grail” for advertisers as they were the lightest television viewers and notoriously difficult
to target (Kiger, 2000). For the most part, the primary way to reach these “light
television” viewers was during Monday Night Football, a crowded and expensive
proposition (Millar, 1997). A large portion of South Park’s audience was precisely this
male demographic, and they were tuning in specifically to see South Park, thus delivering
the grail to the advertisers. In particular, it was useful for those advertisers who couldn’t
necessarily afford to advertise on NBC during football, but still targeted young men. In
fact, by 2007, Comedy Central’s audience was over 70% male, with boys and young
men being the primary age groups (18-24) while only ESPN (a network focused
exclusively on sports) had a higher male viewership (Carter, 2007). The subscriber rate
rocketed from 40 million in 1997 to 56 million in June of 1999, and at the time had
reported its 15th consecutive quarter of full-day ratings growth, while its prime-time
ratings rose 40 percent over the previous year (Strum, 1999).
Thus, South Park provided the market access needed for The Man Show to be
successful. South Park had quadrupled the network ratings, and they needed to follow up
with something to maintain that momentum. In the summer of 1999 Comedy Central
introduced a new slate of shows, including The Man Show, whose pilot had already been
green-lighted and then dumped by ABC for being too risqué, and passed on by Fox for
the same reasons. The program was formed as the brain child of Adam Carolla and
Jimmy Kimmel, two friends who had met on Los Angeles radio station KROQ’s morning
program and had previously had co-starring roles on separate shows as sidekicks on

exclusive audiences they can deliver, and because of the differing economics of cable versus network television (which
is entirely supported by advertising).

119
MTV’s Loveline and Comedy Central’s Win Ben Stein’s Money (for which Kimmel won
an Emmy), respectively. Advertisers were still looking for a way to truly capture the
young male demographic, as programming still primarily targeted women, and there were
no shows focused on men at the time (Werts, 1999). With the rise of cable and a
deregulated communications industry allowing more segmented marketing that focused
on particular demographics, thus creating highly specialized niches for advertisers
(Banet-Weiser, 2007; Turrow, 1997), The Man Show presented just such a show.
Kimmel and Carolla indicated that they hadn’t planned the show to fit in with executive’s
programming desires or advertisers’ needs, but just wanted to make a show that would
make guys like them laugh (Kiger, 2000).
59
Previous forays into similar programming
(such as Men Behaving Badly, a show focusing more on crude skit comedy) had failed to
generate an audience, so Comedy Central was taking a risk in centering a program on
men and masculinity, as opposed to merely targeting a male demographic.
It was a risk well-rewarded. The program debuted on June 16, 1999 after South
Park and garnered a 2.8 ratings share, or nearly 1.3 million homes (Natale, 1999), with an
estimated 80% ratings spillover from its lead-in, and becoming the highest rated premiere
the network had ever had, a full point higher than South Park. As of September 2008 it
had yet to be matched. By August 2000 it was the network’s second highest ratings-
getter, right behind South Park, and was itself used as a lead-in to other programming.

59
Which is once again reminiscent of loaded and Playboy, in that the creators desired to create a product for men like
themselves that happened to be responsive to a market niche, further demonstrating the necessary relationship between
the market for such media, their production and their consumption, as market forces are not the sole explanation for the
emergence of such media. While the show would have certainly failed without the previous success of South Park to
provide Comedy Central with a ready-made audience for advertisers (as demonstrated by its inability to get on the air
on other stations), it was also a felt need for such a product among its target demographic that led to its production and
attendant consumption.

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By 2001 Comedy Central had a subscription base of 70 million (Brownfield, 2001), and
The Man Show enjoyed dominance in its category. As with the magazine market, the
success of The Man Show on cable spurred other, similar shows such as the F/X
Networks The X Show, billed as The View (a talk show devoted to women’s perspectives)
for guys and the USA Network’s Happy Hour, a variety show featuring the Zappa
brothers, though they were not as successful. By 2002, both Maxim and The Man Show
were exceedingly successful, having both captured substantial audiences not by simply
targeting a male demographic, but through recourse to a discourse of men as men.

The Cultural Work of Crisis

Given the seemingly cyclical nature of masculinity crisis throughout American
history, how, then, can this particular moment be theorized as uniquely “in crisis?” The
above history of masculine anxieties throughout the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries of American
life would seem to indicate that gender functions as a continual process of change, not a
static, universal essence. Yet, calls of impending doom signal a new gender “crisis”
every few years as gender roles become inadequate and see a process of realignment.
Which begs the question: What is this crisis point being compared to? Therein lies the
character of crisis, and a hint of the cultural work that it performs. In order for crisis to
make cognitive sense, there needs to be an assumption of stability, a time before crisis
when things were “as they should be.” If gender crisis can be explained by the
interaction between larger structural changes and the individual experiences of those
changes, and it is the contrast with traditional, “stable” notions of gender that works to

121
make that interaction salient to particular individuals, elaboration of crisis needs to deal
with the investment in such traditional discourses of gender as constituting where the
presumption of stability is located.
As Connell reminded us earlier, the question is not whether or not gender can
change, but the direction in which it is changing, as given historical situations have a
range of possible responses. Further, as Segal argued, for white heterosexual men
(perpetually located as those experiencing masculinity crises), the extent and direction of
that change has occurred when individual possibilities for change have been greatest.
The key question then becomes not whether or not there is evidence of masculinity crisis,
but rather how men are said to be in crisis. Crisis is not a purely invented fiction; the
rapid economic changes at the turn of both centuries, as well as changing discourses of
masculinity at the same time, showed that there was some change, and often attendant
confusion and anxiety, over the new changes. However, neither is it a purely material
crisis; the popular press, religious leaders, cultural elites, politicians, popular culture and
a host of other engines of popular opinion proclaim crisis, but identify it in particular
ways, selectively highlighting some aspects as particularly salient (i.e.: Muscular
Christianity’s claim of the Church being overwhelmingly female; the notion that all men
were in crisis in the same way) while downplaying or ignoring others (the fact that
women had made up the majority for 200 years of American church history; that men of
color and lower class men had different access to privilege and thus different experiences
of economic and cultural dislocation). Crisis is cultural and individual, ideological and

122
material. Social conditions, such as the economic base, undergo change which produces
new cultural arrangements and ideologies to explain changes.
It is important, then, to remember the role and importance of individual cultural
producers as well as the structural impetuses of crisis. After all, it is an ensemble of
individual behaviors which are identified and grouped together as indicators of
widespread crisis. Playboy begins by noting the need for a new type of magazine for
men who enjoy reading and discussing certain authors, and spending their leisure time in
ways that don’t involve the great outdoors; the Promise Keepers began as a conversation
on a road trip; the creators of loaded recount that they came up with the idea for the
magazine one night after leaving a bar and desiring to have a magazine centered around
the experiences they just had; Jimmy and Adam just wanted a show for them. These
particular individuals did not single-handedly start or call attention to a crisis; they did
experience something as missing in their own lives, and possessed the organizational
resources, the business prowess, and drive to act on them. And they could not have acted
on them had the economic conditions not enabled them to create products, movements,
and markets to broadcast their anxieties on a larger scale. The history of men’s religious
groups, homosocial spaces, and targeted media indicates that it is both market forces and
opportunity as well as the groundswell of individual experiences of crisis that produce
new cultural forms. In part, this resonance is both about having the right product at the
right time (fulfilling a market niche), but it is also how new media and movements locate
themselves in the cultural conditions of crisis, thus justifying their existence, attracting an
audience, and resolving the anxiety of that audience.

123
The history of crisis also reveals that crisis is not uniform or monolithic. There is
not one crisis of masculinity because there is not one masculinity to be destabilized.
While there are characteristics articulated as masculine in broad and substantial ways, its
articulations to other ideologies render different textures of crisis. As patriarchy is a
system of ideologies, not a monolithic entity, there is also struggle within discourses of
hegemonic masculinity. Though there are shared similarities among hegemonic
masculinities – all of the movements discussed above, as well as the various strands of
magazines for men, were all addressed to a similar demographic – there is also a
collection of interests vying for power with one another. Patriarchy is uneven. The
evolving market forces which change men’s understanding of themselves as consumers
and thus enable the creation of men’s magazines are also the same feminizing cultural
influences that Muscular Christianity rails against in the early part of the 20
th
century.
The increased focus of the body and changing notions of public and private that saw new
inflections on how men were to prove their masculinity resulted in Esquire being popular
for men seeking to navigate new expectations of a leisure-oriented masculinity as well as
worries about a lack of natural savagery in men, partly responsible for the move to
fraternal lodges and boys organizations. Changes in the standards of publishing and
public morality in the 1970s that affected men’s magazines as their initial audience aged
and the magazine no longer spoke to American men were happening alongside the rise of
the Moral Majority and evangelical politics. And the Promise Keepers have over half a
million men converge on Washington D.C. begging forgiveness for transgressions against
their wives and children the same year that Maxim begins obliterating publishing records

124
with sex tips in its features and suggestively posed women on its covers, which was also
when Comedy Central is taking off as the network of sarcasm and irony. Each period of
crisis sees a need for resolution and stability, but there is a contested understanding of
what the proper solution is, even though men are said to be in crisis in similar ways.
While there is agreement that there needs to be versions of masculinity that respond to
cultural and economic conditions, there are different versions of masculinity articulated
as that response.
Further, as will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 3 and 4, the
universalizing diagnosis of crisis obscures how different bodies are in crisis differently.
The masculinity crises discussed throughout this chapter happened for a variety of
reasons and in different cultural contexts. Yet they all share a common theme: those
purportedly at risk from a crisis of masculinity were white, straight, and almost
exclusively middle and upper class men.
60
Fears of industrialization and the rise of the
Muscular Christianity movements to reinvigorate masculine men go along with a lack of
civil rights for blacks and newly freed slaves, and the realization that economic success
was predicated on the exploitation of slaves and recent immigrants. The rise of American
magazines and the increasing targeting of men as a demographic in the late 19
th
century
was about white masculinity, as the Victorian masculinity that was “in crisis” was still
valid within the black community, and magazines aimed at African American men were
not a viable market until Ebony in 1945, fully 12 years after Esquire (Pendergast, 2000).

60
One key way in which this crisis is resolved, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, is through the market, as consumption
is situated as a way to not only generate increased status and cultural capital through purchase of properly “masculine”
products, but that men can generate the stability that comes from having cultural capital in consuming masculinity
itself. The presumption that everyone has equal access to that capital belies the class differences among men and
between men and women, and thus universalizes the experience of class in addition to race, gender, and sexuality.

125
Threats to men’s public space and the lack of work for men after the Second World War
hide the lack of equal access to rights for women and denigrated the newfound sense of
responsibility and purpose reported after war-time work, while the move to masculinize
the Protestant church in the Men and Religion Forward Movement was at the general
exclusion of minority communities, the near total exclusion of women, and the removal
of the limited authority women were able to secure in the church (Bederman, 1996). A
stable white, responsible masculinity is set against discourses of the collapse of black
families through absent fathers and welfare mothers (Kelley, 1997). The morality and
purity of the straight body is measured against the disease and immorality spread through
the gay body (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Gross, 2001). The upright, lawful American man is
set as superior to the illegal immigrant subverting the law for their own ends. The
powerful, rational masculine figure is to remain in a position of power over the emotive
and irrational woman. When masculinity is “in crisis,” it serves to mark whatever
tendencies are causing a condition of crisis as abnormal and un-masculine, and create a
discourse of salvation when practices and polices are suggested to remedy these issues
and discipline masculinity in particular ways.
Masculinity crises, then, are about both whiteness and patriarchy; within a
dominant patriarchal narrative through which subordinated and white masculine identity
are formed, there are crisis tendencies in the ways in which both whiteness and patriarchy
become inscribed, challenged, reconfigured and reified (Grey, 1994; hooks, 1992). The
work that narratives of crisis perform is to enable the continued entrenchment of white
patriarchy; it is only when white masculinity is situated as the norm and thus presented as

126
stable that it can be in cultural crisis. It is this mythos of stability that presents the
illusion of a unique crisis as a stable masculinity allows discourses that position other
masculinities and femininities as in perpetual crisis in their difference from that white
masculinity. A “stable” white masculinity becomes the unmarked signifier that
produces the crisis of dominated masculinities and femininities.
These strategies operate in a variety of ways, sometimes leading to “positive”
changes in masculinity, such as a greater acceptance of feminine agency or racial
tolerance, but often use complicated strategies to contain feminine power in resolving
masculinity crisis (Modleski, 1991, p. 7). The stability which is threatened is presented
as “challenged” by various forms of femininity and so increased female power is located
as what is at fault in changing social conditions. Further, this is often accomplished by
appropriating some feminine and raced forms of knowledge, discourse, or spheres of
influence while delegitimating others. When changing notions of the public and private
were reducing the power and autonomy of 19
th
century men, there was a move to
recapture the home in the training of young boys as a masculine prerogative; and we shall
see a similar strategy with the Promise Keepers redefinition of the home at the end of the
20
th
century to save American families from crisis. Much as Playboy appropriated a
sense of “cool” from black culture in the 1960s while maintaining a white aesthetic, so
too does The Man Show presume a greater cultural authority for African American men
that white men can mimic but not truly access. Rhetorics of crisis work to impose “a
certain narrative logic on an event or…a social trend or cultural formation,” creating a
prolonged tension that is resolved by “centering attention on dominant masculinity”

127
(Robinson, 2000, p. 11). In describing or representing culture broadly and men
specifically as “in crisis,” whether or not any such “crisis” exists, provides a rhetorical
space to allow for resolution of that crisis.
What is unique about the crisis of the late 20
th
century is the use of nostalgia in
response to crisis. This is not to say that nostalgia is a wholly new emotion or cultural
strategy in American culture at the end of the last century. In her discussion of nostalgia
and American families, Stephanie Coontz (2000) details how in times of “crisis” or
change people rely on nostalgic understandings of their past to provide a benchmark for
crisis resolution. In particular, she locates this finding in contemporary debates about
family life, debates which often use a highly idealized patchwork of historical
relationships, which are less of an “accurate” representation of a particular stable past
than nostalgic remembering which gloss over the difficulties and challenges of previous
periods to project an image of tranquility, safety, and, above all, stability. By no means
benign, these idealizations of the past are translated both into narratives of what is at
stake in a particular crisis, and methods to resolve that crisis (often involving changing or
blaming a particular segment of society for breakdown of the nostalgic ideal).
61
This
conservative nostalgia is in contrast with the nostalgia that characterizes the
contemporary moment. The nostalgia found in American history tended toward wanting
to recreate a specific past in the present, a return to that time; modern nostalgia seeks
more to use history as a resource to create new understandings of gender and family life
in the present.

61
Additionally, Kimmel (1987) has noted historically how nostalgia has functioned at times as a coping strategy as
men yearned for “the mythical separation of spheres that had kept women about men’s public lives” with the rise of
feminism (p. 262).

128
There is a historical unevenness in the use of nostalgia in times of crisis. Previous
scholarship on Esquire or Playboy, Maxim’s progenitors, does not identify nostalgia as an
important textual element. In fact, Pendergast (2000), in his study of men’s magazine
from 1900-1950, explains that the magazines were more often forward looking as
opposed to nostalgic. These magazines looked towards the future to make a new, more
civilized man (or later, playboy), instead of reaching back to a past for a sense of
masculine security. Men’s movements are somewhat more complicated. The
conservative tendencies of fraternal orders were more about returning to nature and
creating male space, as discussed before, but sporting activity and cultivation of boys
were often as much about improving for the future using new values of competition than
returning to historical certainty. Lundskow (2002) provides an excellent history of
American evangelicalism, which provides a way to understand what is unique about the
Promise Keepers. He notes that there are two primary responses to upheaval of the 19
th

century within evangelicalism – either a forward looking, revival inspired evangelicalism
that worked to a more equitable future, and a conservative Protestantism based heavily in
millenarianism and thus a rejection of secular modern culture and desirous of a return to
agrarian societies (p. 117). Further, the evangelicals of the period established a focus on
moral perfectionism, literal reading of scripture, separation from modernity, and
perpetual struggle against good and inherently and irredeemably evil forces (p. 118), a
model carried into the 20
th
century and levied against modern developments such as
feminism, humanism, evolution, science, and pluralism. Political views and gender roles
that follow from such a philosophy are also a hallmark of 20
th
century evangelicalism. Its

129
use of the past was also conservative, but these narratives were located within a divine
narrative of the sanctioned social order. Biblical inerrancy worked to provide an
established and mandated social order created in scripture, and in need of revival in the
present day; it wasn’t that the previous agrarian societies were good for their own sake,
but because the changes taking place went against God’s will (p. 122). The Promise
Keepers does follow previous evangelical tendencies, but supplements the traditionally
conservative nostalgia for biblical times with a cultural narrative of an actually existing
time in recent history as the model for a more ideal society (most often the 1950s). As
will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, PK uses a nostalgia that is forward looking, but has
nostalgic elements; nostalgia is used as a rhetorical strategy to direct action towards the
future. This is what makes PK unique in a contemporary context, and why an
examination of its use of the past is critical to a greater understanding of the variety of
responses to “masculinity crisis.”
62
The latest responses to masculinity crisis are
nostalgic in a way that their predecessors aren’t – so understanding nostalgia is key to
understanding the particular appeal of these products in this time.
63

62
There is an irony in the contemporary nostalgia of both the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture. Both at
various points locate the 1950s and 1960s as ideal times for models of family life and masculinity, drawing on the
periods both for the stability present and the masculine icons as role models. However, as Coontz (2000) discusses and
the above history illustrates, these were times that were felt as in crisis at the time, and were considerably more
complicated than modern discourses suggest. Maxim uses images of 1950s masculinity, a time when Esquire and
Playboy enjoyed market prominence, two magazines against which it explicitly defines itself; the PK uses the 1950s, a
time of gender uncertainty in which notions of the family were in flux, rather than fixed
.
63
Marita Sturken (2007) in discussing the use of kitsch culture as an act of memorialization of national trauma and a
way of dealing with loss through recourse to memory argues that the end of the 20
th
century is uniquely characterized
by this tendency to be preoccupied with the past. She locates this tendency as distinct from earlier periods of American
history which were more forward looking, partially based in a sense of lost innocence that only be reclaimed with a
recourse to the past. The Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture also presume a sense of innocence, as the
rhetoric of crisis discussed here in Chapter 1 relies on an erasure of the structural privilege of masculinity, and thus a
position of innocence vis-à-vis crisis.

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Chapter 2:
Narratives of the Self in Time
The Uses of Nostalgia

“It’s just a folkstory,” she says. “People made up the stories in the first place.”
“Does that change things?...People respond to the stories they tell themselves, the stories
spread and as people tell them the stories change the tellers. Because now the folks…are
starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the
wallpaper’s changed, yes? People still have the same story, the one where they get born
they do stuff and they die. But now the story means something different to what it meant
before” (p. 291).

- Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

Nostalgia is often thought of as a sentimentalized relation to the past, one which is
a romantic mis-remembering of historical events. When one speaks of nostalgia, it is
often in regards to an affective yearning for “days-gone-by”, as we are nostalgic for the
past to the degree that there is some aspect of our individual and collective history that is
inaccessible in the present; a feeling, sentiment, or sense of place that is distinct from,
and irretrievable in, our current lives. Pam Cook (2005) elaborates that nostalgia is a
state of longing for something that we know to be irretrievable, but which we seek
anyway. She continues that nostalgia is “generally associated with fantasy,” an
association which leads nostalgia to be “regarded as even more inauthentic than memory”
(p. 4). This question of authenticity highlighted by Cook, in which nostalgic yearning for
a bit of personal history is seen to be rooted in escapist fantasy that incorrectly recalls the
past, is central to the theoretical elaboration of nostalgia. Understanding nostalgia as an
inauthentic or inaccurate relationship with history serves to normalize nostalgia as purely
sentimental, escapist, and thus unimportant. Trivializing nostalgia in this way obscures

131
the ways in which nostalgia is not merely a passive response to the present, one which
strives to honor a bygone era, but an active strategic relation to the present. And far from
being neutral in its estimation of the status quo, nostalgia is instead deployed in a variety
of ways as a particular strategy of power. Privileging history or memory over nostalgia
and situating nostalgia purely as sentimental longing obscures the ways that all histories
are constructed, as history functions to impose a sense of temporality and linearity on
experience; we create history in the act of recalling events and experiences. Susan
Stewart (1993) locates this tendency of history as always ideological, as history is a
process by which we narrate personal experience, and in doing so situate ourselves in
relation to a particular history. In seeking an “authentic” past, untainted by
sentimentality or context, Stewart argues, we seek a past that “has never existed except as
narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a
felt lack” (p. 23).
64

Readings of conservative social movements and popular representations
frequently fall prey to this naturalization of nostalgia. While Michael Pickering and
Emily Keightley (2006) discuss this as a general tendency in research on nostalgia, it is
particularly prevalent in feminist discourses on nostalgia, history, and cultural memory.
65

Writings that critically investigate our notions of history and memory are attempting to
situate history as more than the “objective” retelling of the past through facts and figures;
instead, history is viewed as a constructed object in which certain narratives are

64
While arguing that all history functions within a desire for narrative as we attempt to impose order on experience,
Stewart situates nostalgia itself as a “desire for desire,” as it is really the longing for an authenticity that was never
present, that is always located in narrative; nostalgia is a longing for the desire of unmediated experience (p. 23).

65
See, for example, Boym, 2001; Greene, 1991; Kuhn, 1995. For further discussion of this tendency in feminist
memory work, see Hirsch and Smith (2002) and McDermott (2002).

132
privileged over others. The act of examining history to recover devalued or repressed
narratives is the focus of those engaged in “memory work,” pointing out the constructed
nature of history and the ways that individual and cultural “memories” influence our
reading of history and historical events. Often in these accounts, the attempt to justify the
validity of the memories of marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, a
“hierarchy of remembering” is established, with history at the top as the “objective”
representation of the past, nostalgia as the tragic forgetting of the past, and memory as a
link between the two (Cook, 2005; Pickering and Keightley, 2006). What gets to count
as an “official” history is determined by those in positions of power and privilege, who
have access to regimes of knowledge, and can thus delineate some forms of knowing as
legitimate and others as illegitimate (Foucault, 1977; Spigel, 2001). The formulation of
cultural memory is a means of denaturalizing those histories and recovering repressed
narratives that have previously been labeled illegitimate. However, the tendency is then
to justify that use of memory through contrasting it with nostalgia in order to establish the
legitimacy of memory (Cook; Hirsch and Smith, 2002). Nostalgia is thus naturalized as
an unproductive strategy of dealing with the past, one which is “tragic” precisely because
it obscures the realities of the remembered past and promotes a present that is ignorant of
the oppression of women, people of color, and sexual minorities in that past.
In particular, the Promise Keepers (and other men’s social movements) as well as
masculine popular culture such as Maxim Magazine and The Man Show are said to
engage in this relation to the past. With their calls for servant leadership that “takes
back” a man’s role in the home (The Promise Keepers) or denigration of feminism as

133
mounting an assault on manhood (The Man Show), these artifacts of masculine culture
are accused of utilizing a romantic view of gender relations to counter the gains of
feminism and the civil rights movement.
66
While they are not necessarily charged with
being nostalgic per se, the construction of these artifacts’ relation to the past as
sentimentalized and inaccurate resonates with theoretical elaborations of nostalgia. With
nostalgia constructed as necessarily based in fantasy, a “longing for a prior state” which
will “always remain unfulfilled” (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, p. 217), the texts of the
Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture are criticized as purely conservative
impulses that passively yearn for a lost past of total male dominance, a past that is gone
forever. While the motives of such conservative impulses may be criticized as a desire to
reinforce patriarchy, the form of those impulses, the nostalgic character of the
interpretation of the past, is normalized as a sentimental, inaccurate, and thus trivial
relation to history.
And therein lays the problem. Nostalgia is evoked so frequently in the context of
our everyday lives that it becomes commonplace and unremarkable. Marita Sturken and
Lisa Cartwright (2001) discuss the use of nostalgia in commodity culture as an ever
present trope to evoke traditions of taste and value (p. 110), or to create a sense of history
and lineage (p. 217-18). Pickering and Keightley (2006) note that nostalgia functions in a
variety of ways as an “easy commercial ploy” to which “no one is fully immune” due to
nostalgia’s capacity to activate personal memory (p. 935). Nostalgia is frequently used as
a general referent to the past, a yearning of affection for our own, personal, history, a

66
For the Promise Keepers, see for example N.O.W. n.d., Kimmel, 1999; For masculine popular culture, see Sullivan,
1999; Turner and Gideonese, 1999.

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“desire for desire.” But, as Svetlana Boym (2001) argues, nostalgia is never a purely
individual reaction or experience. Instead, nostalgia mediates personal history with
collective cultural experience, functioning as a bridge between individual recollections as
those recollections are situated in relation to cultural context. We yearn not only for our
specific past, but for the cultural connotations associated with that past – national crises
and triumphs, social understandings of kinship, romantic love, race, gender, and
sexuality, war, peace, and the uncertain spaces in between. Affective response could be
tied to one or any number of cultural constructs. The sheer number of potential
articulations with emotional investment leaves nostalgia necessarily abstract in its media
articulations. Often, when describing why a particular time period is happy people are
left unable to pin-down the exact referent they yearn for, but instead describe it as a
generalized feeling (Coontz, 1992). What tends to emerge is a pastiche of images, often
mediated through popular culture and mass media representations of the time.
With such ubiquity it is no wonder that nostalgia is regarded as nothing more than
wistful recollection, so common sense and self-evident that it defies further examination
or analysis. However, we need a more systematic investigation into the uses of nostalgia.
Far from being a mere sentimental reflection, nostalgia is a strategy, a way of using
collective and individual experiences of history and memory in the service of power.
Nostalgia is a representational form, a trope, a particular figure of expression in the
language of cultural production. It is a way of speaking about history and memory in
cultural texts to generate particular affective responses. Nostalgia can be used as a

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strategy to produce interpretations of the past and present in line with the interests of
patriarchy as well as the commercial market.
I borrow the notion of strategy from Michel de Certeau (1984). De Certeau
makes a distinction between strategies and tactics. Strategies are practices used by those
in power (organizations, institutions, etc) to structure the experiences of those that are
subject to their power (p. xix, 34-39). A strategy is a mastery of space over time such
that certain actions and activities are delimited as “proper” or appropriate, and thus
populations managed according to the dictates of those in power. A strategy, for
example, is the limiting of e-mail communication to company business at a workplace to
ensure productivity in the office. A tactic, on the other hand, is used by the “weak,” or
those that lack institutional power to try and regain control of practices in their own lives,
however limited. A tactic is a victory of time over space, in which the subject is able to
make their own meaning without regards for the proper locus or space suggested by those
in power. These tactics are fleeting and ephemeral, necessarily temporary by virtue of
their absence of a position of power from which to continually and concretely act. A
tactic would be an employee sending a personal e-mail on company time, a subtle gesture
of resistance towards the totalizing of space by company policy.
67
Strategies, then, are
always backed by power as it is the position of power that allows the imposition of spatial
structure onto time; the institutional and cultural resources enable the privileging of space
over time through the establishment of a limit on what is “proper” and what is not,
regardless of time.

67
The examples of strategy and tactic are drawn from Sturken and Cartwright (2001), p. 368, in the definition of tactic.

136
The Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture are imbued with such
strategies through the operation and deployment of nostalgia as a practice and
representational trope. The search for an “authentic” masculinity that is untainted by the
forward march of time and progress is at the heart of such cultural products. The
ideologies behind the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture are a response to
the present through recourse to the past – a longing for authentic masculine experience.
These cultural artifacts are nostalgic in the sense that they make recourse to previous
images of masculinity as a resource for doing gender in the present. The search for “real
men,” an authentic masculinity, functions as an attempt to reclaim previous notions of
masculinity from an unspecified yet concretely envisioned past. De Certeau sums up the
function of strategies by arguing:
Strategies…attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the
analytic attribution of a proper place to each particular element and through the
combinatory organization of the movements specific to units or groups of
units…strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place
offers to the erosion of time. (p. 38, emphasis in original)

The Promise Keepers as an organization exhorts its members to “reclaim” the masculinity
and leadership in the home that they have given up; Maxim lists historical “badasses”
such as Evel Knievel, Rambo, and John Wayne as models for modern masculinity; The
Man Show envisions itself as a place (spatial) for men that supersedes the progress of
feminism (temporal) by creating a space for men to occupy that exists before “the tide of
estrogen” began to rise and influence culture (Kimmel and Rosenblatt, 1999).
68
Each of
these strategies is a way of establishing a spatial location (the home, the television

68
This is an actual quote from the pilot episode, entitled “Oprahization.” One of the main focuses of this episode,
setting the tone for the rest of the series, was how Oprah was ruining America through giving women greater
independence, and thus less attention to men.

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program itself) that identifies proper masculine action and performance, one which resists
the advance of time that has threatened stable notions of masculinity.
Pickering and Keightley (2006) lament that often in discussions of media and
nostalgia, the affective component – what it means to feel nostalgic – is detailed, but the
operative component – how nostalgic feelings are produced through media texts – is left
under-theorized. Part of this difficulty is the way in which nostalgia functions as a trope.
Given its removal from historical specificity, interaction with individual memories, and
elements of fantasy and romanticization, there is no one way to be nostalgic. It can’t be
pinned down as a singular representational strategy, but instead is composed of a variety
of elements to produce a sense of history. Textual styles and visual images that appear
“quaint” and “old fashioned” are often produced by using particular fonts or technology
that give the appearance of being old or outdated (think of programs that make paper
appear older and yellow to give a sense of being worn). Language can also be used to
produce nostalgic effect, through colloquial expressions of a bye-gone era. Historical
images juxtaposed with one another that are archetypal of a period also lead to nostalgic
yearning, such as fashion or historical icons (i.e.: Marilyn Monroe or older versions of
Mickey Mouse). Similarly, media often acts as our access to history, either as visual
repository for those who weren’t alive at the time (Coontz, 1992), or in the form of
recycled popular culture such as remakes of popular films or re-runs of old television
programs that remind viewers of younger days (Spigal, 1995).
Nostalgic masculinity is produced in a collection of practices that make nostalgia
operative; in using framing, rhetorical, and commercial strategies to use history and

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memory as a resource, nostalgic masculinity is able to be operative as a strategy in a
particular context. In order to understand nostalgic masculinity and how it functions as a
strategy, nostalgia must first be situated within a theoretical context that accounts for its
varying uses, and articulates it as a precise term in relation to gender and consumer
culture. What this demands is that we engage nostalgia in terms of its unique context.
Instead of assuming that a particular form of nostalgia resonates with a designated
politics, we should realize that “nostalgia becomes an action rather than an attitude,
showing how the politics of nostalgia are realized in its applications rather than being
inherent in the affective phenomenon itself” (Pickering and Keightley, p. 937). To get
this sense, we must go back to the beginning when nostalgia was first used as a medicinal
term in the 17
th
century. What follows is a brief genealogy of nostalgia itself and its
myriad historical uses and connotations. Then, I will theoretically elaborate nostalgia as
a strategy, including its distinction from other ways of viewing nostalgia as a concept and
conscious practice. Rather than seeing nostalgia as either conservative and reactionary or
progressive and forward thinking, we need to consider how nostalgia can function as a
conservative strategy to reimagine the future as a strategy to maintain heterosexist
patriarchy. Finally, I will discuss why nostalgia is such a fitting response to masculinity
crisis, including why an examination of white, straight men is important to its
elaboration, as well as how its location within a commodity structure is a problematic
resolution to such crisis.

Tracing Nostalgia

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While colloquially thought of as a romanticized yearning for the past,
theoretically nostalgia is the subject of much debate as to its particular elaborations,
functions, and correlation to other terms that suggest a relationship with and to the past
(such as history and memory). Svetlana Boym (2001) points out that even though
nostalgia has Greek roots, it is only “pseudo-Greek” or “nostalgically Greek” (p. 3).
Nostalgia was originally coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688 as a medicinal
term, and he chose the word because he believed that the force of the sound of the term
itself could define the pained longing to return home that those afflicted felt (ibid). Over
the course of the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries, it gradually fell out of medicinal discourse into
more common usage. Despite its separation from the Greek, the etymology of nostalgia
sheds some light on its various uses in academic debates.
C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994) provides an extensive discussion of the meaning of
nostalgia within Modern Greek (p.4). In opposition to the English translation which
posits it as a trivial relation to the past, an examination of the root words produces a more
complex rendering of the familiar term. It is composed of two roots: nosto and algho.
Nosto functions as a verb, to indicate one’s return or travel, usually back to a homeland,
and the noun nostos means “the return” or “the journey.” Algho means “I feel pain, I
ache for,” while the noun alghos describes “one’s pain in soul and body, burning pain
(kaimos).” As a result, nostalghia is the “desire or longing with burning pain to journey.”
Serematakis continues to explain that the term also contains a mix of both corporal and
emotional or psychic pain, a “sensory dimension of memory in exile or estrangement”
and is “linked to the personal consequences of historicizing sensory experience,” which

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can be a painful emotional and physical journey (ibid). Further, Boym (2001) reminds us
that the term nostos comes from the Indo-European root nes, meaning “return to light and
life” (p. 3), and argues that while nostos in mythology symbolized a mythic journey to
understanding, nostalgia in modernity is “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical
return – for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (p. 8). It is
interesting to note that nostalgia here is discussed as a response to a loss of clear place
through the march of time, which is also the way de Certeau discusses the functions of
strategy – to achieve a mastery of space over time. This history also provides insight into
its split usage as a theoretical term. It is both a painful longing, a journey into memory as
sensory experience of the past, as well as a potentially progressive move to the future – a
mourning brought on by what is lost in the forward progress of modernity as well as a
move towards “light and life” that evidences a maturity brought on by the journey.
Boym’s observation about nostalgia occupying a particular relationship to
modernity is critical to understanding the function of nostalgia in popular and political
discourses. Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2006) argue that nostalgia operates
in a direct and almost inverse relationship to modernity. The forward march of progress
heralded in modernity produces a sense of mourning for what is “socially and culturally
lost” in the name of such progress, and it is that sense of loss that characterizes nostalgia
in contemporary society (p. 920). With its emphasis on linear progress and dismantling
of tradition in search of the new, modernity encourages a relationship with time that
privileges the temporary over the permanent, the ephemeral over the eternal. Modernity
is necessarily oriented toward the future, as the desire to achieve progress is one that

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focuses on where we go next, not where we have been or where we are. This complicates
the formation of an active relationship to the present or the past. The devaluing of
tradition in favor of modern advancements brackets the past as temporally and spatially
distinct from the present and the future. Stewart (1993) similarly argues that nostalgia is
an intrinsic feature of modernity and postmodernism, as our desire to reclaim a sense of
authenticity through narrative and personal experience, motivated by the loss of the sense
of verisimilitude present in Realism, manifests itself not only in our attempts to
historicize our experience, but in language itself as we attempt to close the gap between
our “history” and our ability to describe it, much like we use language to try and establish
a presence through perfectly describing experience (p. 23-24). Frederic Jameson (1991)
situates nostalgia as an aesthetic style, a visual convention of postmodernism that is a
“desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past” (p, 19) one that was simpler and allows
access to the innocence of history.
When nostalgia is seen as a strategy of “capitulation” as one resolves themselves
to the irretrievable loss of what is culturally familiar (Seed, 1999, p. 91), it is this
opposition to modernity that is at play. The sense of transience and being unmoored in
time produced by the relentless forward march of progress leaves nostalgia as a fitting
response as the affective yearnings for the past are also a desire for stability, a sense of
place. Thus Wendy Wheeler argues that nostalgia is really nostalgia for “all those things
which are the Other of Enlightenment Reason...‘which are excluded, lost, or repressed as
a condition of modernity and the subjectivity it produces’” (as cited in Morley, 2000, p.
247). Further, David Morley (2000) argues that modernity can also be seen as haunted

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by “living in a permanent state of homelessness” (p. 42), which generates cultural
anxiety. Cultural anxiety about the loss of the past in the present is dismissed as romantic
sentimentalizing under modernism, leaving nostalgia as the conceptual opposite of
progress and negatively valuing the loss of the past; nostalgia becomes an unfortunate
side-effect of the modern world which must be overcome (Pickering and Keightley, p.
920).
The intricate relationship between nostalgia and modernity provides some insight
into why nostalgic masculinity is a fitting response to masculinity crisis. As discussed
earlier, Pickering and Keightley (2006) argue that the “experience of loss is endemic to
living in modernity” precisely because social mobility, change, and advancement bring
with them “attendant feelings of loss” as some of our past is lost in the pursuit of constant
progress. Particularly relevant for our purposes is their observation that this feeling of
loss alters how “the past is seen and considered” (p. 921-22). Social and technical
progress are essential elements in the construction of “masculinity crisis” in that the
advancement of women and minorities as well as rapid industrialization are located as
antecedents to the decline in stature and social power of men. Walzer (2002) elaborates
that in a specifically post or late modern context globalization entails the loss of a cultural
center, and removes a locus of authority for white middle class men. Thus, if the general
argument of crisis is that modernity is in some way threatening masculinity, if crisis
continually happens because progress is something that changes how masculinity
functions and threatens the stable notions of masculinity, then nostalgia becomes a
particularly apt response to postmodern masculinity crisis. Whereas the initial pushes of

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modernity and industrialization in the first half of the 20
th
century saw responses that
generally were forward looking in resolving masculine instability, the end of the 20
th

century sees nostalgia for that initial period of optimism and security to resolve the latest
crisis.
Medical experts diagnosing and treating nostalgia over the course of the 19
th
and
early 20
th
centuries consistently framed nostalgia as a frivolous condition that
sentimentalized previous personal or cultural experience, be it childhood or a native land
(Boym, 2001). Treatment ranged from sympathetic furloughs home to ridicule to bring
soldiers and other affected “back to their senses.”
69
Ultimately, the past that was longed
for was seen as irretrievable, and thus the desire to recuperate it an escapist fantasy. John
Durham Peters (1999) discusses how it wasn’t until the 1920s that nostalgia took on the
meaning of a wistful yearning for the past and became less about the separation from
home. This genealogy of nostalgia also reveals a “lost home in space (the patria) to be a
lost home in time (the past)” (p. 30). This shift from being a spatial issue to a temporal
one again demonstrates how nostalgia can function as a strategy of power. Nostalgia
may appear as a mere “by-product of loss” but it is actually a “productive cultural agent”
(Peters, p. 30). Concern over a lost home in time is an expression of angst and productive
of a desire to secure a sense of stability, a sense of place. So while nostalgia may make
use of the past as a resource, it is still often “future looking” (Morley, 2000) in its

69
Though none of the readings I came across discussed the gendering of nostalgia, the discussion of responses to
soldier’s complaints of homesickness indicate, at the very least, a devaluing of the experience based loosely in a
feminization of the sense of loss. As noted, though some soldiers were given understanding treatment and allowed to
go home, other times, and more often, they were mocked mercilessly for not being “tough enough” to handle life in the
army, implying a sense of demasculinization attached to nostalgia in the 19
th
century. I would like to thank Sarah
Banet-Weiser for pointing out that this resembles similar discourses of hysteria in women, as uncontrolled emotion was
seen as a sign of mental imbalance and feminine weakness of constitution.

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capacity as a trope to construct visions of a better life. Wheeler argues that such
“postmodern nostalgia” can ultimately be marshaled in the service of conservative
movements, so we need to view nostalgia as more than a backward looking
sentimentality if we are to develop an effective political response to such nostalgic
desires (as cited in Morley, p. 247). Elaboration of nostalgia has seen two primary ways
of understanding nostalgia as a relationship to the past. Though discussed briefly before,
here I will trace the ways nostalgia has been used in theorizing our relationship to history
as a means of situating nostalgic masculinity as a cultural construct and strategy of
power. The first way of viewing nostalgia is as “wistful yearning” and escapist fantasy;
the second argues that nostalgia can allow a productive relationship with history through
using the past as a resource to critique the present and envision a better future.

Nostalgia as Escapist Fantasy

Nostalgia is frequently located as a conservative response to modernity in that the
pace of change causes only unhelpful recollection and romanticizing of the past without
meaningfully engaging history.
70
In particular, those arguing for memory work as a
productive way of understanding and making meaning of the past have consistently
devalued nostalgia (McDermott 2002; Pickering and Keightley, 2006; Probyn, 1996)
Annette Kuhn (2002) urges a move away from nostalgia with its tendency to embalm
“the past in a perfect irretrievable moment” (p. 10). In writing on the uses of memory in
feminist fiction, Gayle Greene (1991) locates nostalgia as “antithetical” to memory work,

70
Much like the treatment of nostalgia historically – afflicted soldiers were told to come to terms with their
homesickness and to deal with the irretrievability of their home while away. Nostalgia, similarly, is theoretically
treated as a flawed relationship to history as the past was ultimately irretrievable and should be left there.

145
a purely conservative impulse, one which views the past as “a repository of lost value”
and functions as merely a regressive forgetting that is disabling to women who wish to
move away from a past with oppressive gender norms (pp. 292, 294-95, 297-98).
Conceptualizing nostalgia and memory in this way is exactly what creates a “hierarchy of
remembering.” The privileging of memory over nostalgia as an “appropriate” strategy
for engaging history locates nostalgia as tragic and trivial. In the context of memory
work and cultural memory, exploring devalued narratives is a way of challenging
totalizing narratives of history; opposing nostalgia to memory in this way locates
nostalgia as inherently antithetical to progress and non-productive in its relationship to
history. This view is not without merit. Stephanie Coontz (1992, 1997), in discussing
the ways that nostalgia is used in public policy debates about family life, argues that
nostalgia tends to act as a frequent and persistent “misremembering of the past” that
creates an idealized image of the past based in an amalgam of historical instances and not
a singular, “accurate” representation of the past. Such understandings of family life lead
not only to cultural amnesia about what life in the past was like, but to problematic social
policies aimed at restoring “traditional” family values that never existed. Nostalgia is
thus locked into one of two equally problematic positions. It is either seen as a way to
avoid problems in the present by resorting to a past that is seen as more pleasurable
despite its own problems, or as a purely conservative impulse that attempt to valorize the
past to justify efforts by those with social power to retard social progress and maintain
dominance over subordinate groups.
71

71
See also Boym, 2001 and Hirsch and Smith, 2002 for detailed discussion of this tendency.

146
Further, postmodern authors have elaborated how mediated representations of the
past function to situate nostalgia as a shallow engagement with the past. The very nature
of time in postmodernism is said to leave nostalgia as an empty gesture towards the past.
Jean Baudrillard (1994) discusses how nostalgia deals with the loss of memory and/or
history, and posits that the continuing replication of signs prevents an engagement with
the meaning behind texts. For him, the acceleration of signs in media products produces
a condition where there is no deeper meaning, no historical context or access to the past
in images. This inability to retrieve history outside of representation locks us into a
system in which the continual replication of signs resembles more of a perpetual present.
We only experience the representation of the past, and are thus nostalgic for something
that we can no longer access in a postmodern context. Nostalgia for Fredric Jameson
(1991) functions to favor those parts of our history that we view as beneficial and leaves
out the parts of experience that are not as romantic. It is the projection of what we wish
to have in our present that characterizes our nostalgic yearning.
History, in these formulations, may not have any relationship to our material
reality, and hampers our development of historical awareness through the insistent
replication of signs and signification (Pickering and Keighlety, p. 923). In a postmodern
media culture, we are bombarded with a succession of images, often designed to
communicate presence through including what Baudrillard calls “signs of the real” which
stand in for the real themselves. These relationships with the past can be generated
through kitsch, pastiche, and other formalistic elements that privilege style over
substance, or perhaps more accurately, where style is the substance. When we see the

147
markers of history – retro fashion, historical slang, black and white photographs – we
engage the representation of the past as if it was the past itself; our engagement with
history happens through images, pictures, films, books, songs, and descriptions of the
past, representations which we take as being “accurate” depictions of that past. Given the
current lack of effective time travel, the only way we can experience history is through its
simulation, a condition which, for Jameson and Baudrillard, means that we exist in an
eternal present, consuming the past as style and taking it for “authentic” historical
experience. In the context of American popular culture, Boym (2001) suggests that
nostalgia functions by avoiding the difficulty in resolving temporal paradoxes and
conflicts – instead of engaging the interactions of past, present, and future, it merely
provides narratives in which the three are reconciled. These “techno-fairy tales” interrupt
a mourning or meaningful relationship to the past and substitute for it an easily digestible
way out of temporal conflict (ibid, p. 33). Here, the means of representing history is said
to direct our experience with that history, and nostalgia as a means collapses the past and
future into an uncritical present.
Though there are a variety of strategies for producing nostalgic effect, these
understandings of nostalgia assume that there is but one nostalgia, and one uniform
experience of loss for the past. Viewing nostalgia as experienced the same in all
situations for all people normalizes nostalgia as universal, and prevents an understanding
of the complex rendering of nostalgic style, and how that style produces affective
response. Further, decontextualizing individual experiences of nostalgia assumes that
everyone longs for the same past, the same historical periods, and the same affective

148
content. Coontz’s (2000) previous discussion of family policy reveals that people
frequently envision different pasts, even when referencing the same object, as nostalgia
for the “traditional” family results in various combinations of aspects of family life, such
as merging colonial families with Victorian ideals. While this view of nostalgia is able to
interrogate the ways that modern media can shape experience, it has a tendency to
assume that such media also direct experience. A universal nostalgia that necessarily
precludes meaning making or access to history privileges the medium over the audience,
and renders the audience as nothing more than blank slate to be written on by such media
(Pickering and Keightley, 2006). It also assumes that nostalgia functions the same
regardless of markers of social identity such as race, class, gender, or sexuality. Instead,
we need to consider how each person’s experience of nostalgia and relationship to the
past is mediated by their own personal experience and social location.
Such a view finally fails to understand nostalgia as a practice in addition to a
representational strategy. If viewers are actively making meaning with media texts, and
reading those texts through their own experience, then nostalgia functions a way to access
and establish an active relationship to the past within mediated representations. Nostalgic
tropes may encourage a nostalgic reading of a particular media text or commercial
product, but such affect can be generated unintentionally by media producers as well.
Reading strategies in which a consumer identifies a particular artifact with a part of their
individual or cultural past may also serve to establish a relationship to history. Caution
and attention to context in evaluating nostalgia prevents merely examining form over
content. What is being waxed nostalgic about (the image, sound) is as important as the

149
representational form that produces such nostalgia. Viewers and consumers make
meaningful engagement with history outside as well as within nostalgia, such that
aesthetic style is important, but doesn’t override personal experience and engagement
with social remembering. If nostalgia can be read through personal experience, then
historical experiences that have been marginalized and repressed can be redeemed
through engagement with the past, allowing nostalgia to function as a progressive
impulse, and not merely as conservative sentimentality.

Nostalgia as Progressive Tactic

Alternately, Pickering and Keightley, among others, urge that we not conceive
nostalgia solely as universal and conservative because it locates nostalgia as too static a
concept. Rather, we should view nostalgia not as a uniform experience of loss for/of the
past, but instead should recognize that there are multiple nostalgias and experiences with
history. Under this conception, viewing nostalgia as a singular or universal melancholic
experience obscures the potentially progressive uses of nostalgia as utopian critique to
envision a different future. (p. 937). Phillip Moore (2002) contends that while nostalgia
is traditionally associated with a “yearning for yesterday” (p. 310), we can adopt a
strategy of “practical nostalgia,” wherein we view our active relation to the past with an
“enduring sense of continuity” that gives meaning to that past by opening a rhetorical
space for critical engagement with historical narratives (p. 312). Through our recognition
of the disjunction in time, we can use idealized narratives of the past not to assume that
all things were better, but instead for creation of critical space to re-imagine a better

150
future. Similarly, Cook (2005) argues that while nostalgic practice may engage history in
a way that foregrounds fantasy that could be a reactive and regressive position colored by
sentimentality, we can instead use nostalgia as a way to “come to terms” with the past
and allow it to be exorcised so individuals in the present can move on (p. 4). For Cook,
nostalgia gets to the heart of processes of remembrance as we engage our inevitable
selective appropriation of the past.
Boym (2001) also recognizes the dual tendency of nostalgia to be both
sentimental fantasy and critical resource. She suggests a distinction between these dual
tendencies: restorative and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia focuses on nostos,
and works to rebuild that which was lost in the past, a return to historical time. She
likens it to Eric Hobsbawn’s notion of invented traditions, as the past is used as a
resource to make and recover sweeping, conservative traditions to ensure continuity with
the past through selective remembering (p. 42). Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand,
dwells in algia, the sense of loss. This nostalgia is ironic as it does not seek to rebuild the
home, but rather narrates experiences of historicity to open a multitude of possible
orientations towards the future – orientations that linger in the “patina of time and
history” and seek to offer a non-teleological incorporation of history into the present (p.
50). Here, the past functions not as frozen frame or mourned space to which we return,
but instead the “ruins of time” are plundered to act in the present and offer new
opportunities for action. Leo Spitzer (1998) and Sinead McDermott (2002) also view
nostalgia as a way to productively engage the present while not forgetting the past. For
Spitzer, nostalgia can function as productive resistance to reclaim marginalized

151
experience, while McDermott sees nostalgia as a way of apprehending the past as
resource to suspend it, to recover devalued narratives, and to ultimately change the
meanings in the present to account for those narratives.
In particular, nostalgia has been theorized as uniquely useful from a feminist
perspective. Gendered accounts of both nostalgia and cultural memory have been
deployed to recover lost or marginalized narratives, as well as to aid in generating
counter-memories to the “authorized” history of male dominance and exclusion of non-
masculine and non-white Others. Initial theorizing of practices of history saw a great
deal more attention paid to cultural memory than nostalgia. Feminist accounts of cultural
memory frequently contrast memory work with nostalgia, viewing the latter as inherently
conservative and a poor basis for a political strategy to challenge oppression. Recently,
however, there has been work to resolve this disparity as nostalgia has been approached
from a feminist perspective.
72
Specifically, Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith (2002)
discuss how we can reclaim nostalgic narratives for their political potential. They argue
that while such narratives are “often dismissed as inherently conservative, if not
reactionary and escapist,” nostalgia can actively mediate rituals that “evolve out of
gendered historical experience” which ultimately allows a criticism, rather than an
idealization, of the past. These narratives “resituate the politics of nostalgia by
recuperating devalued, marginalized, or repressed cultural formations” (p. 9). Amy
Hollywood (2003) further elaborates on the importance of distinguishing between the two
modes of nostalgia – that which looks to rebuild a lost home from the past, whole in its
completeness (what Boym has termed restorative nostalgia) and that which recovers

72
See Hirsch and Smith, 2002, as well as McDermott, 2002 for a review of this literature.

152
traces and fragments from the past to critically interrogate the future (Boym’s reflective
nostalgia). For Hollywood, nostalgia is a potentially central practice in feminist
theorizing as it seeks to recognize the active presence of women in history, regardless of
their subjection to hegemonic norms, and secure a place for feminine subjectivity in the
past not totally colonized by masculine subjectivity. Nostalgia can function as a
progressive political practice, then, by refusing to view the past as a perfect unified
structure and instead viewing it as fragmented, disjointed, and varied. With a critical
appreciation of nostalgia, some argue, we can challenge ways of viewing ourselves and
our subjectivity to create an “act of witnessing in the present” and “recuperate devalued,
marginalized, or repressed cultural formations” (Hirsch and Smith, p. 9). Instead of
treating nostalgia as a singular, universal experience of selective forgetting, we can
approach nostalgia as an act of selective remembering as well, one which opens a critical
space to (re)imagine better futures. In this formulation, nostalgia functions as a tactic in
de Certeau’s sense. Those seeking a progressive use of nostalgia seek a victory of time
over place, as the proper “place” of subordinated experiences and knowledges is retrieved
from “the ruins of history” and brought into the present. Such a view of nostalgia is
ironic in the sense that it uses the contrast between the past that is ideal and the present as
troubled not to valorize the past, but to bring the past into conversation with the present
to form a challenge for the future. The act of bearing witness in the present through
nostalgic narratives makes the present (and arguably the future) the time for exploration
of marginalized experiences; reflective nostalgia, in its attention to the particular and the

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contingent, challenges the notion of certain activities assigned to their proper place by
using the pieces to construct a better whole.

Nostalgia as Strategy and Tactic.

In theoretical literature, nostalgia is conceived of as not just as a feeling, but as a
representational trope, an orientation towards the past and texts, and as a tactic for
remembering/dealing with cultural memory. Far from being an individualized emotional
response to a text, it is also described as an active practice in negotiation with the past
and a way of representing the past. The history of studies on nostalgia has seen it
discussed in two principal ways. First, it has been primarily dismissed as reactionary,
and escapist as nostalgia is discussed as a conservative “retreat from the present,” and the
preserve of the cultural and political Right. The second way recognizes the potential for
such a conservative and reactionary impulse towards history, but urges a reading of
nostalgia as a more varied and theoretically nuanced concept. While it may be
conservative, progressive aims are possible in viewing nostalgia as “retrieval for the
future” when we view nostalgia as complicated, reflexive, potentially sentimental, but
also potentially transformative in its refusal of universalized structures of feeling in
relation to history Alastair Bennett (2006) sums up this debate nicely in noting the
“effort that characterizes contemporary reassessments to differentiate good forms of
nostalgia from bad forms of nostalgia” (emphasis in original, p. 27). This drive to
classify nostalgia as effective politically or morally may challenge the hierarchy of
history-memory-nostalgia that Cook (2005) urges a move away from, but it constructs in

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its place a hierarchy of nostalgia, one which “implies that nostalgia is a subtle art, which
the ignorant can easily ‘get wrong’” (Bennett, p. 27). In either formulation, there are the
“good” or “preferred” ways of dealing with the past (memory work or reflective
nostalgia) and the bad ways of engaging the past (restorative nostalgia). The preferred
modes of historical engagement are celebrated as being more critical, and thus the best
ways for those concerned with social justice to work against oppression and domination.
The non-preferred modes are seen as irrevocably conservative and necessarily harkening
back to a specific stable past to be entrenched in the future and maintain the domination
of those in power.
The problem with this theoretical split is the absoluteness in which the two
strategies are grouped into political objectives. A nostalgia which is a “retreat from the
present” and looks for a particular place, time, or set of values to be wrenched from
history and restored in the present is seen as necessarily conservative, a tool of dominant
groups, and socially regressive in intent. A nostalgia which is a “retrieval for the future”
and uses the past as a resource from which to ironically appropriate history and reclaim
devalued narratives to re-imagine the present and future is seen as necessarily liberal, a
tool of subordinate groups to resist those in power, and socially progressive in intent.
The two are presented as distinct strategies, each with their constituents and attendant
political ideologies. Bennet (2006) argues that while making this distinction is useful in
charting the operation of nostalgia, such a distinction couched in moral or political terms
is a loaded distinction as these two approaches have a tendency to overlap and “invade
one another” (p. 27). He suggests that we instead recognize that nostalgia is not wedded

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to a specific ideological or political practice, but that both can be deployed in multiple
ways and by those with different political agendas. Pickering and Keightley (2006) have
also cautioned against this tendency and note that nostalgia “as retreat from the present
and nostalgia as retrieval for the future are not mutually exclusive, any more than either
impulse is the preserve of dominant or subordinate groups” (p. 937-8). Unfortunately,
like others who wish to reclaim the positive uses of nostalgia (notably McDermott), they
nearly immediately proceed by assuming that the differing strategies of nostalgia are
wedded to particular political projects:
The acknowledgement of what is involved in creating and sustaining a
relationship between past and present makes it possible for us to conceptualize
nostalgia as a critical tool and distinguish between positive, productive, active
uses of the past and those which are sterile, impotent, non-transactional. The
critical use of nostalgia has been centrally concerned with the emergence of a new
way of relating to the past in modernity that has generally, for various reasons,
been considered regressive. We hope to have shown that it can just as feasibly be
considered as progressive (938).

Nostalgia is again presented here as a tactic when reflective, a transactional process by
those who wish to challenge power and oppression, while being presented as a strategy
when restorative, a sterile process that merely reclaims a static history for a dynamic
present.
Nostalgia is viewed as a tactic of the weak to resolve the temporal conflict of
modernity; the master narrative of modernity focuses on progress, the ephemeral, the
temporary, marginalizing and erasing the voices of those who do not fit into the
Enlightenment vision of progress. It resolves the conflict through bringing bits of that
missing past into dialogue with the present, refusing the colonization of space by
imparting the devalued knowledges into the narratives from which they were previously

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excluded.
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This wrenching of narrative elements from their “proper place” privileges
time (the examination of the past to re-envision the present and the future) over space
(the arrangement of the original text) as it is the temporal relationship that is more
important than the spatial one; the content of the narrative (its various elements) is
privileged instead of the form (the relation of elements to one another in the master
narrative).
Nostalgia can also be a way of securing place over time by bringing the past into
the present to recolonize particular narratives through recourse to a variety of timeless
tropes. Reflective nostalgia, a nostalgia that is a retrieval for the future, is said to be
progressive precisely because it refuses the attempt to return to a particular place by
interrupting totalizing narratives. However, a fragmented access to history, a selective
appropriation of memory, can also be used to re-frame the future towards conservative
ends. Time can just as easily be plundered to reclaim memories of dominance and power.
De Certeau (1984) discusses the role of memory and nostalgia through the metaphor of
walking through the city. He notes that “walking” can substitute for “exits,” “ways of
going away and coming back that were formerly made available by a body of legends
[local knowledges] that places nowadays lack” (p. 106). The move back and forth
suggests a temporal escape from ineffective places, that we can “go away” (to the past),
but our recourse to memory and nostalgia allows us to “come back” as such travel is an
“exploration of the deserted places” of our memory, producing a body of legends that are

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For example, McDermott (2002) discusses how a nostalgically feminist reading of the novel “A Thousand Acres”
can reinvasion a story about an abusive father’s dominance into one of the mother’s lost story and the family outside of
the father’s control; that a nostalgic reading of the text resituates the story as about the women in the story and their
relationships, reconfiguring the place of the story (the farm, the family, the setting) through a disjointed reading of the
time (narrative arch, character growth and development) of the story.

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“lacking in one’s own vicinity,” objects and places that are “no longer there” (p. 107).
Memory and nostalgia thus invoke the places that can’t be seen, the difference between
our current situation and our past, as the recollection and invocation of individual
memories can produce “anti-texts” that disrupt totalizing narratives. Memory functions
as an “inverse Panopticon” one that holds knowledge which is individual and not elicited,
a knowledge which is not spoken.
However, just as de Certeau writes about memory as individual and fractured
(which is part of what generates nostalgia’s reflexive and transformative potential),
nostalgia and memory are also cultural. They are mediated through spaces of national or
cultural context. Such individualized memory can also be used as a strategy of power to
encourage a certain reading through creating an affective connection with particular
content. By invoking nostalgia in individual, historical contexts, by triggering the
nostalgic effect through articulation to consumer goods, historical objects, personal
heroes or cultural memory, tropes of familiarity and place - the use of “what is no longer
there” - can help frame and produce an understanding of contemporary contexts.
More than just a purely formal device or a micro-reading of individual meaning,
the combination of individual memory and affect when articulated to objects and texts of
cultural significance provide a powerful basis for the dissemination and reconfiguration
of ideology. For de Certeau, a place is “composed of displacements and effects among
the fragmented strata that framed it” (p. 108), and so it is these individual experiences of
memory that can be marshaled in the service of privileging a particular place – the home,
the workplace, public spaces – with specific forms of acceptably gendered behavior.

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Coontz (1992) elaborates on just this phenomenon when she discusses how pastiche
images of historical figures and tropes of gendered behavior generate a sense of “The
Past” that is both stable, and missing from the present. Thus, the temporal conflict of
modernity that privileges progress over stability and privileges what is next over what is
now can be resolved through the use of individual and fragmented narratives (reflexive
nostalgia). However, it is not through reconciling narratives and disrupting place (a
progressive tactic), but through the imposition of space across time, as historical and
cultural memories are linked with individual affect to bring the past back to life in the
present (a conservative strategy). Given that neither a progressive impulse nor a
conservative impulse is inherent in nostalgia, nostalgia can be reflexive and deployed by
those in power: nostalgia can function as a conservative retrieval for the future.

Nostalgic Masculinity as Conservative Retrieval for the Future

. Nostalgic masculinity functions as a strategy which masquerades as a tactic, as it
appears to be securing men a time to be men in a place of uncertainty - “crisis” - while
actually functioning as a strategy by re-securing the central placement of hegemonic
masculinity across and against the forward march of time. Hirsch and Smith (2002)
argue that the “longing for a lost home or group identity can serve as a form of critique
rather than idealization” (p.9), and conclude that as a result we as scholars need to study
nostalgia from a feminist perspective in order to better understand how women can use
memory as a critical praxis. This is certainly the case, given the “significant theoretical
intersections between feminist theory and theories of social and cultural memory” that

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Hirsch and Smith identify, intersections, they note, that “can only be clarified when the
question of gender is posed explicitly (p. 5). However, a feminist analysis of memory
that examines more than feminine narratives is just as crucial to challenging the
disempowerment of women, and providing spaces to challenging historical narratives
which erase, or forget, the agency of those who have been marginalized from the social
center. It is the possibility of nostalgia working as a conservative retrieval for the future
that indicates why it is vital to critically examine nostalgic masculinity as a discursive
formation and cultural phenomenon. Too often, discussions of conservative social
policies disregard the social conditions and rhetorical strategies that give rise to and
support nostalgic yearnings for masculine stability amid times of “crisis.” The
assumption is that conservative discourses which posit a need for a return to more
“traditional” conceptions of gender relations are inaccurate, and thus lack validity as
social arguments
But what if the narrative of the feminist movement is told as if feminism was the
dominant cultural narrative? What happens when the advancement of women and
minorities is seen as the privileged discourse, and the “crisis” of masculinity is positioned
as the result of feminism going too far? How does the operation of nostalgia change if
the cause of crisis is that culture has become too feminine, as feminine cultural influences
– femininity itself as well as feminism as a movement – are what work to produce crisis
tendencies in masculinity? The same nostalgic strategy of actively critiquing the past
presents itself as recuperating devalued masculine narratives. Uncovering and
intervening into these narratives is a way to prevent appropriation and effective

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deployment of feminist strategies in ways that work to retard the progress of oppressed
peoples. Nostalgic masculinity uses a rhetoric which positions men as victims of culture,
and this rhetoric then suggests the marginalization of those whom patriarchy serves best.
It is the rhetoric of victimhood that allows the symptom, diagnosis, and cure for the
malaise of the modern man to use critical, “progressive” nostalgia as retrieval for the
future and contradict feminism at the same time! If the reason nostalgia is an effective
strategy for feminist authors, in particular for recovering the devalued narratives of
women, is because of the position of being disenfranchised – that women’s unique
relation to history in these narratives is based on their being oppressed as Hirsch and
Smith, McDermott, and others argue – then when men’s groups replay the formal
characteristics of oppression, even without comparable content, the strategies can be just
as effective.
The notion that white, straight, privileged men as a social group have a claim to a
position of marginalization is absurd. Despite the gains of feminism, the civil rights and
gay liberation movements and other progressive groups, men in general, and white,
straight, economically advantaged Christian men in particular, still hold a
disproportionate amount of social power, access to education and employment, greater
political authority, and personal agency than do women, racial minorities, sexual
minorities, the poor, and their various intersections. Evangelicals complain about the
secularization of culture and the marginalization of Christian perspectives at a time when
religious influence in culture and politics is rampant. Women still suffer from structural
inequalities such as lower pay scales for the same work even with higher education

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levels, a higher risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, less access to vital social
services and less representation in corporate management and higher presence in low-
paid jobs such as typing or clerical work (Dow, 1995: Faludi, 1991; Projansky, 2001).
The nostalgia for an era of masculine power and hegemony indeed appears misplaced in
light of the reality of continued structural oppression.
However, as David Morley (2000) reminds us, “if such nostalgic feelings are, of
course, ultimately directed towards an imaginary past of plentitude and security, their
strength is no less pertinent for the fact that their object is imaginary” (p. 247). This
disjunction between the felt experience of crisis and the material reality is exactly the
problem. When the men of Promise Keepers or the consumers of masculine culture are
position themselves or are positioned as “under threat,” “in crisis,” or any number of
other euphemisms suggesting a loss of political, economic, or cultural authority and
power, that positioning is treated as inaccurate, sentimental and reactive – which, by and
large, it is. Regardless, such a reading prevents an understanding of why such framing,
rhetorical, and consumer strategies are effective, and why they resonate so powerfully
with the men who join men’s movements and consume that popular culture. The analytic
separation that locks nostalgia as either a conservative retreat form the present or
progressive retrieval for the future ignores the ways that narratives of crisis are used by
dominant groups, white men in particular, to reclaim lost authority through imposition of
a narrative that resituates attention on dominant masculinity.
In particular, the assumption that nostalgia for conservative aims relies on a
conservative retreat from the present posits that dominant groups are resigned to

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recreating that lost past, viewing such nostalgia as necessarily freezing the past in a
particular moment that can be romanticized and brought into the present. But, as Coontz
(1992, 1997) reminds us, it could just as easily be the vague desire to return to aspects of
the past because nostalgic recollections operate as a pastiche of historical ideas, and not
necessarily a stable referent. Maxim magazine and the Promise Keepers aren’t
advocating a return to the past; in discourses of masculinity crisis history is not bracketed
off as a sacred space, nor is it frozen in time as a target to which society should aspire in
the present. Rather, nostalgia is deployed as a strategy to re-imagine the future while
taking account of the present. The Promise Keepers aim to have men “take back” their
role in the home but through servant leadership that recognizes the changes in family
structure and social arrangements (at least on face). Maxim accepts feminism as an
inevitable part of the American cultural landscape, but presents its readers with ways to
still be properly masculine in the face of, and often in spite of, that landscape. Instead of
fully sentimentalizing the past as a perfect and wholly retrievable moment, it is the
selective appropriation of elements of that past to transform or re-make the future that
taps into emotional resonances of those that feel victimized, regardless of their material
social location.
Angela McRobbie (1994) reminds us “there is no clear sociological divide
between 'lived experience' and 'texts and representational forms'” (p. 192), as the two are
always merging with one another, both socially when we are with others, and
individually when we encounter texts on our own. She continues by arguing that cultural
forms function as “identity-formation material” as they reach into the subconscious of

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their audience and form connections through the shared experience of popular culture
(movies, music, books) and social activities (such as dance). In this way, identity
becomes an “ongoing reflective process” in which who one is or wants to be can be
explored through “strong symbolic structures” within cultural forms (ibid).
Kenneth Burke (1969) notes that in the master trope of synecdoche we name a
relationship between two things (whole for the part, part for the whole, container for the
thing contained and vice versa) as a relationship of representation, of convertibility,
between those two things. In particular, he says that for the term “represent” we could
“substitute be identified with” (p. 508). Representation often functions as a rhetorical
strategy, as audiences are encouraged to “be identified with” a particular representation, a
given text. Further, in representing gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and/or class, the
universal can be converted to the particular, as norms of identity are presented as
universal, and a relationship between the whole is established for the part (i.e.: the
universal “masculine” for the particular “man”). The ways that a text appeals to or
addresses its audience is strategic; texts are appealing because the audience can see
themselves reflected in the representation and hailed by its address. And, as McRobbie
argues, individuals seek out the symbolic structures of cultural forms as a way of
engaging the ongoing process of identity formation. We may not see who we are at that
moment. We may also see who we were, or who we would like to become. Both in the
cultural forms we seek out, and in those that hail us as the audience of their address, we
identify with some representations, and not others; for each text there is a resonance with
a particular audience, in part because of individual experiences and in part because of the

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social context in which we make meaning of those texts. Rhetorical and cultural analysis
can help uncover at least some of the reasons why and how textual appeals function as
they do.
Burke (1984) writes about frames of acceptance and rejection, noting that “one
defines the ‘human situation’ as amply as his [sic] imagination permits; then, with this
ample definition in mind, he [sic] singles out certain functions or relationships as either
friendly or unfriendly” (pp. 3-4) and either accepts these functions or rejects them.
Frames of acceptance, then, refer to the “more or less organized system of meanings by
which a thinking man [sic] gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation
to it (p. 5). Cultural forms provide functions and relationships, as the various artifacts of
popular culture referenced by the Promise Keepers, as well as Maxim and The Man Show
themselves, the skits and presentations at PK conferences and the exhortations in their
printed material are resources for people to form their own systems of meaning around,
against, and through.
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Stuart Hall (1996) has argued that theories of ideology and the
process through which ideology is naturalized often do not resolve what the attraction of
those ideas and practices are for concrete individuals. In particular, Hall questions why

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Though Burke’s language may initially imply complete consciousness and choice as the “thinking” person “adopts”
a role in relation to the world, Burke also notes that frames of acceptance are necessarily limited by the human
imagination. The definition of a situation, the reading and making meaning out of a social contexts, is limited,
constrained, and enabled by what has already made sense as natural. In other words, social discourses provide a range
of potential “choices,” or definitions of the situation, and the individual then acts based on what they consider to be
potential performances.
Alan Nadel (1995) provides a historical example of this in his discussion of the cultivation of the “domestic
playboy” in the fifties and sixties. Nadel uses the language of narrative as opposed to frames, and claims that there is a
personal narrative, which is created as the individual organizes acts in the world into clusters of meaning, and a social
narrative, larger systems of meaning such as nationalism or religion that shape and guide individual experience. People
use the personal narrative to make sense of their surroundings, and that social narratives, such as the Cold War, can
“unify codify, and contain – perhaps intimidate is the best word – the personal narratives of its population (p. 4). As
such, the Cold War created a social narrative of containment with a particular version of masculinity and sexuality, and
the individual male created a personal narrative of gendered action out of the available acts of meaning, themselves
bound up in the social narrative of the Cold War.

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“certain individuals occupy some subject positions rather than others” (p. 10), and
indicates that it is important to theorize the process by which “these automatic
‘interpellations’ might be produced or…fail to be resisted or negotiated” (p. 12). The
question then becomes: why do people feel drawn to particular representations? What
about the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture is appealing to the men it
addresses? These questions are similar to the one posed by Pickering and Keightley
(2006) in their earlier lament that often the affective component – what it means to feel
nostalgic – is detailed, but the operative component – how nostalgic feelings are
produced through media texts – is left under-theorized.
Here, Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification aids in resolving such a dilemma.
Burke (1950) notes that “[I]n being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a
person other than himself [sic]. Yet, at the same time, he [sic] remains unique, an
individual locus of motives. Thus he [sic] is both joined and separate, at once a distinct
substance and consubstantial with another” (p. 22). He continues by arguing “to begin
with ‘identification’ is…to confront the implications of division…Identification is
affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division…If men [sic] were not apart
from one another, there would be no need to proclaim their unity” (p. 23). While Burke
is specifically speaking to political persuasion, his conception of identification can help
explain why individuals feel compelled by particular representations of gender. If the
discourse of what it means to be a man is composed of biological norms (having the
proper sexual organs), behavioral norms (acting a certain way) and emotional norms
(feeling, or more often for masculinity, not feeling a certain way), no individual male

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feels compelled by each and every one of these expectations. However, there is enough
similarity between those conceptions of masculine gender identity to induce the
individual to feel “consubstantial” with that identity, while, at the same time, maintaining
a division that prevents a particular individual from possessing all of those traits
simultaneously. This process is an active negotiation, as the individual strives to
reconcile their own “locus of motives” with the dominant discourses imbued in cultural
products. Indeed, Burke (1984) seems to recognize this relationship between
representation and rhetoric in noting how a “poetic image and rhetorical idea can become
subtly fused-a fusion to which the very nature of poetry and rhetoric make us prone. For
the practised rhetorician relies greatly upon images to affect men’s [sic] ideation”
(Introduction, page 2, 3
rd
paragraph). As cultural products such as the Promise Keepers
and masculine popular culture address men in a particular way and evoke comparisons
between the products’ representation of masculinity and the concrete individual’s
personal history, identification is made with that representation; the ideal masculinity
proffered by the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture aids in creating a shared
cultural experience as it resonates with the particular experience of consumers.
Nostalgia works as one means of creating a shared experience of culture. The
references and shared worldview of masculine popular culture, as well as the cultural
references and past experiences discussed in the Promise Keepers (by the conference
speakers as well as in texts and other materials), encourage a shared identification
precisely because of the shared world view that is constructed for their consumers. As
men are said to be in crisis generally, and particular experiences, memories, and historical

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referents are identified with the individual members of the reading/viewing/listening
audience, then the representations of masculinity and crisis can become resonant with the
personal experience of those engaging these cultural forms. Rhetorical appeals in the
Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture create frames of acceptance for their
audience, and encourage them to identify and “be identified with” representations of
masculinity.
The function of identification in representation allows nostalgia to be invoked in a
variety of ways, and renders nostalgia as a particularly effective rhetorical device. Elisia
Cohen (2003) argues nostalgia can “be rhetorically enacted through narrative appeals to
cultural myths” (p. 54) as a focus on an “ideal” society functions to divert attention from
the material reality of culture. This process of “forgetting,” in which certain elements of
both the present and past are erased in the drive to create a more “collective” memory, is
central to the rhetorical function of cultural forms such as Maxim and The Man Show, as
well as the Promise Keepers. Marita Sturken (1997) contends that debates about cultural
memory open up debates about meaning, and is often part and parcel of a contention over
how community, nation, and identity are to be imagined. Rhetorically, the Promise
Keepers and masculine popular culture operate to mobilize interpretations of the past and
present, and provide a space in which those men that are targeted by this address, and
whom have sought out these cultural forms, can imagine themselves as part of a
masculine community. The affective component of nostalgia, the longing for the stable
past and a desire to achieve that stability, provide an impetus to use such artifacts as the
identity formation material that McRobbie describes; and identification provides the

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theoretical grounding for how nostalgia becomes operative to mobilize that affective
desire. Nostalgia itself is often located as the repository of the authentic. If history
provides the models of masculinity missing in the present, and men are urged to “return”
to that state of security, then it is the historical models of masculinity held up as the
“true” masculine character missing in the present.
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In identifying the status quo (and the
men within it) as in crisis, and the recourse to a nostalgia which imagines things as “they
never were” in the search for an authentic and stable masculinity, nostalgic masculinity
mobilizes mythic conceptions of an “ideal society” to resolve masculine gender crisis.
What remains is the return to the idealized state of stable, authentic masculinity.
The desire for stability amidst crisis is a desire for order, a desire which Burke (1969)
argues is fundamental to being human. For Burke, we are motivated by a desire for
perfection, or as he would say, “goaded by a sense of hierarchy” (p. 16) and “rotten with
perfection” (p. 17). Intrinsic to this desire for perfect order is the principle of victimage,
whereby we compensate for the guilt we feel in violating our social order by sacrificing
that which violates the order to achieve redemption (Burke 1989/1968, p. 280). Burke
sums up this process in saying “If order then guilt; if guilt, then need for redemption; but
any such payment is victimage” (ibid). As such, that which offends the social order,
which causes crisis, must be symbolically eliminated so that order and stability can be
restored. Masculine popular culture and the Promise Keepers offer the men to which
they appeal the victimage necessary to resolve masculinity crisis through demands,

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Stu Weber (1993) and John Eldredge (2001), both bestselling Promise Keepers authors, make this connection
explicit. In describing his four “pillars of masculinity,” Weber maintains that such masculine pillars are “sourced in
Scripture, observed in history, and experienced personally, these four pillars bear the weight of authentic masculinity”
(p. 43, emphases added). Similarly, Eldredge informs men “if you are going to know who you truly are as a man
[emphasis in original]…you simply must get your heart back [emphasis added]” (p. 18).

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suggestions, exhortations, and instructions, both explicit and implicit, of how to reclaim
their masculinity.

Fitting Response: Why Nostalgic Masculinity Resonates

Masculinity is usually safely individualized, as the unmarked normalcy of
masculinity allows men to stand in for the Enlightenment Ideal of the rational individual
(Messner, Moon, Ray, & Thorne, 2004; Robinson, 2000; Smith, 1996); the universality
of the masculine subject creates individuality as a powerful feature of masculinity. This
is precisely what makes organizing around masculinity difficult. Robinson (2000) argues
that this puts men in an unfamiliar position at having to mark themselves as in crisis.
Yet, this is precisely what the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture do in their
interpellation of male subjects. Men are encouraged to unite around their shared
experience of masculinity in crisis, a subjectivity usually sought by women, sexual
minorities, and people of color to achieve political gains. But while nostalgic masculinity
unites men on the basis of their gender, it does not offer a prescription for a men’s
movement to challenge the victimization of masculine identity. Rather, the longing for a
historical certainty in masculinity is resolved through individual action and performance
to restabilize gender. It is not the structural problem of masculine privilege that needs to
be resolved, but an individual male’s need to accept Christ or abandon the trappings of
ornamental culture that provides the salve for a wounded masculinity.
Popular culture functions as a uniquely productive space for such nostalgic
reimaginings, as it is so easily attached to commodity products, divorcing it from an overt

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politics. When the songs of the PK7 band at conferences or articles in Maxim make use
of nostalgia as a trope it is disarming precisely because as we tend to view pop culture as
“trivial.” Ideology can be “sought uncoercively” in the terrain of popular culture
(McRobbie, 1991, p. 87), allowing messages couched in nostalgic longing to resonate
firmly within our affective desires. Nostalgia works as a strategy to induce an audience
to overlook the details of privilege in the present in seeking the plentitude of the past. If
the advance of modernity has left no “place” for modern masculinity, masculine popular
culture and the Promise Keepers provide a space to imagine a “time” of that lost gender
identity. Memories of masculinity, personal and cultural, real and fictitious, mediated
and located, are used to respond to crisis in a historical moment. This use of memory can
be effective precisely because memory “often serves to help draw general readers into a
scene of relevance of history for their own lives. Memory appeals to us partly because it
projects an immediacy we feel has been lost from history” (Klein, 2000, p. 129).
Though presented as creating a “time” of masculinity in the place of a hostile
culture, this nostalgia serves not only to lament the present with its crowded social arena
and decentering of white masculinity, but also sets up the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture as locations in themselves outside of the current time. Promise Keeper
conferences are repeatedly described as a place where men can create a “sacred male
space” (Deardorff, 2000), an environment in traditionally masculine space – a football
stadium – in which men can relax the posturing of masculinity with one’s self and others
(Messner, 1997) amid the encouragement of a coach with everyone on the same team. PK
provides both concrete locations – the accountability meeting, the conference – but also

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an abstract location, as PK is framed as a fellowship that men can join together. The Man
Show is described as a “place” where man can come together. Both Maxim and The Man
Show take place in familiar, typically “masculine” locations: the set of The Man Show
resembles a living room or a bar, and Maxim takes place in the workplace, the home, the
pub, and encourages consumption through a style and address that mimics a friend’s
couch or a frat house, further spatializing its masculine appeals. This rhetorical
articulation of space and place plays an integral role in the establishment of nostalgic
masculinity. Despite differences, both PK and MPC offer men an island of stability in a
sea of crisis by creating a space for masculinity resistant to the march of time
Nostalgia can thus function as a critical resource for both progressive and
conservative ends, an access to history than can be used as a method of reenvisioning the
future for those who are members of dominant as well as marginalized groups. As a
discursive strategy, it can be deployed in the service of those in power against those who
lack social power just as easily as it can be used to challenge totalizing narratives of
history that erase diverse experiences from the historical record. Nostalgia can “invoke
the places that can’t be seen” and that are “lacking in our vicinity”, as de Certeau would
say, by selectively appropriating elements from the past in order to draw contrast with
what is missing in the present to work towards a different future. The following three
chapters aim to challenge the tendency to see nostalgia as normalized and sentimental,
and to examine the cultural stakes of this normalization by interrogating the function of a
particular discourse, nostalgic masculinity, in three primary areas: nostalgia as a framing
strategy, nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy, and nostalgia as a commercial strategy.

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Chapter 3:
Where Have All the Good Men Gone?
Nostalgic Masculinity as Framing Strategy

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for
danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the
opportunity.

- John F. Kennedy, Indianapolis, April 12, 1959

The Arrowhead Pond, Anaheim, California, July 15, 2005. Thousands of men
pour in from parking lots surrounding the sports mega-complex in the middle of July. It
is off-season for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, the hockey team that usually calls the Pond
its home. These men come not for a sporting event, but for The Awakening, a Promise
Keepers conference. As I sat among the men in the rapidly filling arena for forty-five
minutes prior to the start of the conference, large video screens contained various
statistics on sleep, its importance to proper bodily function, suggestions for resolving
insomnia, and ends with the effects of “waking up” or appearing to wake up without
actually being awake. While I sat and wondered how the conference would link its theme
to these opening segments that seemed only to serve as a reminder that I didn’t get
enough sleep as a graduate student, a steady, upbeat drum track began and a countdown
appeared on the screen. The men in the stadium began to enthusiastically applaud and
cheer as the lights went down, the music gained in speed and volume, and the flashing of
the word “awake” faded from the screen, to be replaced with the exposition that “Inside
each of us is a warrior.” The tempo of the music quickened as spotlights began sweeping
over the crowd while the screen revealed that men are “at war” and “under attack.” The

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countdown clock reached zero as colored spotlights furiously swept the ecstatic crowd
and the phrase “Unleash the Warrior!” dominated the screen and the roar of the men in
attendance swelled to a deafening level. The Awakening had begun.
The opening montage at the Anaheim conference was more than just a catchy way
to ameliorate pre-conference boredom with interesting statistics that tied into the
conference them; it was not simply an attention getting device to get the men in the
audience ready for the opening musical act. Though it surely served both of these
purposes, the combination of the sleep metaphor and the command to “Unleash the
Warrior” also acted as a way to frame the experience that the men attending the Promise
Keepers conference were about to undergo. The accompanying booklet passed out to all
attendees of the conference, which is both a program of events, a series of
advertisements, and a workbook to use during the various segments of the conference,
contains an opening message from Tom Fortson, president and CEO of the Promise
Keepers. He too begins by demanding that men “Wake Up!” as they are not really
snoring, but are instead in “more like a half-sleep/dream” state (The Promise Keepers,
2005, Introduction, para. 1). Fortson continues by noting that the weekend “is designed
to expose the lies of the world against our manhood. We’re aiming to put tools in your
hands and courage in your heart to follow God’s ways exclusively…and we know you’re
the man to make a difference in this world” (ibid). As Kenneth Burke (1984) observed,
beginnings are strategic moments in rhetorical appeals as they set the “tone for reception
of one’s message” (p. 22).

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The opening montage in conjunction with Fortson’s message not only began the
conference, but also provided a description of the state that men find themselves in; a
sleepy dream state, at war with a culture that is telling “lies” about the manhood of the
men in attendance. In this way the Promise Keepers framed the context of the conference
in a particular way, setting the tone for the speakers that were to follow. The rhetorical
work of getting men to make a difference in the world only makes sense if that world is
lacking in some way: the frame of crisis needs to be articulated before there can be a
rhetorical response to that crisis. We can witness a similar framing that occurs in
masculine popular culture. The Man Show pilot episode begins by celebrating the
achievements of the men who built the Hoover Dam, and indicating that the program was
a new dam being built, one that would “hold back the tidal wave of feminization
threatening this country” and “stop the river of estrogen that is drowning us in political
correctness” (Episode 101). Prior to the launch of the United States version of Maxim,
publisher Felix Dennis characterized the American market for men’s magazines as “B-O-
R-I-N-G,” saturated with titles (such as Esquire and GQ) that take themselves too
seriously and lacking in an offering for “the regular guy who likes socks better than sex”
(Warner, 1997, p. 27). Before The Man Show can “take back the airwaves” for the men
that invented television, before Maxim could proclaim in the manifesto in their initial US
issue that men should “Leave that toilet seat up proudly” (McHugh, 1997, p. 170), the
airwaves have to be located as hijacked, and the toilet seat as either shamefully up or
resentfully down.

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Even in these brief sketches and quotations there is evidence of a nostalgic
masculinity. The Promise Keepers indicate that men are “asleep” and need to return to a
state of being awake; The Man Show imagines a time before the flood waters began to
rise and the airwaves were a solely masculine preserve; Maxim posits that guys no longer
need to be bored in pretending to aspire to the high minded ideals of Esquire or to endure
the demasculinization of mixed-gender indoor plumbing. What all of these artifacts have
in common is the idea that there is something that is, at best, not quite right and, at worst,
terribly wrong with dominant narratives of masculinity, something that lies to, shames,
and threatens to overwhelm modern men; they all frame the contemporary moment as
lacking in some way, and identify prevalent cultural narratives of masculinity as failing to
account for the lived position of the men that are the subjects of that narrative. Further,
the frame of crisis also indicates that there has been a reduction, or at times destruction,
of masculine enclaves and the ability of men to act “authentically” masculine as the lack
of physical and cultural space/places for masculinity inhibit men’s ability to act “normal”
or “as they should.” The culprits of this destruction of masculine space are most often
ambiguously referred to as “culture”, as things that are happening “to the United States”
are also happening to “guys” specifically. The feminization of culture, the Church, or
men themselves are presented as one source of male anguish in late 20
th
century America.
Women as a group and feminism as a movement are sometimes blamed for the woes of
modern men, but more often it is a denigration of femininity, or particular feminine
characteristics, that are said to be at fault. This is a rhetorical move, as the Promise
Keepers and masculine popular culture appear to be focusing on femininity as a source of

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crisis, but use femininity or overly feminine men to stand in for feminism. Ultimately,
the gains of feminism, the increased agency of women, sexual minorities, and people of
color, and the de-centering of the white male perspective in general are constructed as
responsible. However, it is just as often a subtle framing of the crisis and indication of
lack that reveals this responsibility as it is explicit finger-pointing. When feminism is
explicitly blamed, it is usually in the ironic tone of masculine popular culture meant to
signify that men realize sexism is “silly” and out of place in a modern context (Gauntlett,
2000), thus acting as a shield (albeit a flimsy one) against cries of sexism and patriarchy.
This chapter will argue that what is of equal if not greater concern is the variety of ways
in which the discussion of feminism and feminine agency are more covertly articulated as
in opposition to straight, white, male privilege, and act to provide a rhetorical space for a
re-articulation of masculinity.
In Chapter 2, I briefly discussed Kenneth Burke’s notion of “frames of
acceptance” in articulating the rhetorical function of popular culture. Burke (1984) begins
Attitudes Toward History by noting that “getting along with people is one devil of a
difficult task, but that, in the last analysis, we should all want to get along with people
(and do want to)” (Introduction, p. 1, first para.). To work on “getting along with others”
people live within “history” (what Burke defines as “man’s [sic] life in political
communities”) and as critics we can obtain an understanding of “characteristic responses
of people in their forming and reforming of congregations” (ibid). In constructing ways
of living within the world people form attitudes towards that world, and these attitudes
take on grander symbolic “frames” of acceptance and rejection. Within these frames, we

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construct our “notion of the universe or history” and shape attitudes in keeping with those
notions (p. 3). We define the “human situation” and then “single out certain functions or
relationships as either friendly or unfriendly” (pp. 3-4). Further, as we name these
relationships, we do so in a way that allows us “to do something about them” as our
naming of objects, people, emotions, actions, and other facets of our social world acts to
“form characters, since the names embody attitudes; and implicit in our attitudes there are
cues of behavior” (p. 4). The various ways that we “name” the world around us not only
prepare us “for some functions and against others” but also “how [we] shall be for or
against” (p. 4, emphasis in original). Thus, our understanding of the world is created
with “reference to the results we would obtain, and to the resistances involved” (p. 5). A
frame of acceptance, then, is “the more or less organized system of meanings by which a
thinking man [sic] gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it” (p.
5).
76

Here, Burke has presented not one, but two functions of frames acceptance; these
frames work both to provide a system of meanings in order to “gauge” a historical
situation and also encourages the adoption of a role in relation to that historical situation.
Frames of acceptance are not eternal; rather, historical frames are strained and “crack” as
new factors begin to call attention to the blind spots of a particular frame of acceptance,
factors “it had not originally taken into account” (p. 23). Though adherents to historical
frames will attempt to stretch its relevance to new periods, eventually dissatisfaction with

76
If this sounds reminiscent of theories of ideology, it is. Michael Denning (1997) notes that, taken together, the
authority of frames which shape action and direct thought are another way of describing ideology. In fact, Denning
reveals that Burke himself saw this connection, but translated ideology into his own terms to stress the role of ideology
as “word magic” (p. 439-440).

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frames that are no longer seen as representative will produce a condition of crisis within a
culture as people need new orientations, new frames, to provide an organized system of
meanings (p. 27). The recognition of inadequacy creates a space for rhetoric as “lines of
action” are drawn in new ways in competing frames of acceptance, encouraging new
attitudes, which themselves are an “incipient program of action” (p. 20). Some aspects of
a frame are rejected, and there is a “shift in the allegiance to symbols of authority” (p. 21)
which works to construct new frames of acceptance with the new emphasis in mind.
77

Thus, a central focus of this chapter is how established frames of acceptance regarding
masculinity were identified as inadequate, as the Promise Keepers and masculine popular
culture gauged the historical situation in order to construct a new relation of men to that
situation.
Further, addressing the contemporary crisis in masculinity is also about justifying
a market project. Not only is Promise Keepers identifying a crisis that necessitates the
group as a response, it is also justifying itself to the men of its target audience – which is
critical to establishing both the rhetorical strategy to change the behavior of men, as well
as the commodity market that opens in response to the needs for those changes.
Masculine popular culture requires a market to be successful; a condition reflected in the
early skepticism that Maxim would be successful as other magazine editors did not think

77
In this sense, Burke’s discussion of frames is akin to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1984) conception of
organic crisis describing a condition in which people’s material realities don’t match the way those realities are
described by those in power, or Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) notion of scientific revolutions or paradigm shifts, describing
the evolution of knowledge as the process in which new theories come to disprove and then replace old ones. A
concrete example can be seen in the feminist movement, in particular the First Wave. Women came to challenge their
place in the dominant masculine narrative when a liberal discourse of human rights is elaborated in political theory.
This discourse postulates the equality of all people based on their status of people, which then led women to challenge
their position in arguing that they too were people deserving of such rights. The frame of acceptance of liberal theory
became cracked when the articulation of rationality and civil rights could not suitably justify the propertied white man
as universal, and sole, political subject. In naming the position as untenable, and arguing for abolition and women’s
right to vote, feminists encouraged “new lines of action” to create a new frame of equality for all.

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it would survive (Turner and Gideonse, 1999; Warner, 1997), and the fact that ABC
ordered the initial pilot for The Man Show, but then declined it as too risqué (Snierson,
1999). In situating men as in crisis, masculine popular culture both identifies and
clarifies social relationships for men, and induces the anxiety that it resolves through
cultural production. This is the very character of markets, as they stimulate need, and
then provide satisfaction through external action. A lack is identified, and then resolved
through consumption of the proper commodity object or brand. In terms of crisis, men
are said to be losing cultural authority and ground, producing an internal anxiety, which
demands external recognition of the “natural” state of men as warriors/heads of state and
family; recognition provided in the commodity of the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture, a relationship I will develop in depth in Chapter 5.
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Of course, the Promise Keepers, The Man Show, and Maxim did not just emerge
as fully formed markets, ready to slide into the American media and cultural landscape.
All three are part of the evolution of a variety of historical processes of changing notions
of masculinity, as well as the institutional conditions of production that enabled their
emergence. Burke (1984) has described frames of acceptance as “collective poems,” or
“total frames of thought and action” (p. 99) when they take on a collective nature and are
proffered by those who wish wide adherence to those frames. The individual’s frame of
acceptance and a wider “aggregates” of acceptance are not mutually exclusive as “the
individual’s frame is built of materials from the collective frame, but the change from one
to the other shifts the emphasis from the poetic to the historical” (p. 111, emphasis in

78
I am, as so often happens, indebted to Sarah Banet-Weiser for identifying this dynamic and aiding in the formulation
of my explanation.

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original). When a particular rhetor, or set of rhetors/agents, attempt to organize a “logic
of action,” they must always do so, for Burke, “with reference to the period” in which
they write, and as such the “drama of the past must frequently be rewritten – and the last
act in one version may even become the first act of a later version” (ibid). Those that
create cultural products or who write to inform larger audiences of a particular point of
view – an act of poetics for Burke
79
– always do so within their immediate context, and,
further, do so in reference to the material provided by history that has led them to their
current situation.
As such, the construction of frames of acceptance is intimately bound up in a
process of history, as agents located in a particular time and place must make recourse to
the narratives and frames of acceptance that have come before. An individual (or set of
individuals) uses history as a way of setting up their own interpretation of the
contemporary moment as they work to coach as “set of meanings” through synthesizing
large amounts of information into a coherent worldview in a “‘strategy’ of writing and
thinking” (p. 106). Chapter 1 examined the historical antecedents of the Promise Keepers
and masculine popular culture, and Chapter 2 elaborated on the effectiveness of nostalgia

79
Burke (1973) highlights the difference between semantic and poetic meaning. Semantic meaning attempts at a pure
transparency in language, where terms function as direct corollaries to material objects, devoid of context or particular
meaning; Burke describes this state as the “semantic ideal,” and is related to history in that (as discussed in Chapter 2)
we often view history as our objective relationship to the past. Poetic meaning is contrasted with this semantic ideal, as
poetic meaning is the imparting of emotion and attitudes in language, where we “poeticize” an event in using language
symbolically, as there is never a direct correlation between our language and the objects we describe. It is for this
reason that Burke maintains that this semantic ideal is a fraud. Each person, as per frames of acceptance, defines a
situation in terms of their experience with history, and that situation is but a shorthand term for motive (1935, p. 29).
This indicates that any appraisal of a particular situation will be colored by personal experience and attitudes towards
that situation. No discourse can ever be truly transparent as it is always a function of the way a particular symbol user
names the world, a naming that will always be both a selection of salient aspects of reality, and a deflection of other
aspects. Transparency assumes a position of objectivity that is outside of language, a position that we cannot access
discursively because of our biases and interpretations. Instead, Burke urges us to see the relationship between semantic
and poetic meaning as dialectic, as they depend on each other to fill out the drama of human experience; the semantic
provides a common base for understanding, the poetic the human capacity for interpretation and symbolic action.

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as a strategy for dealing with the current crisis. Chapter 3, then, focuses on the crisis
itself, and how that crisis is identified and defined. If part of constructing a frame of
acceptance is adopting a role in relation to history, then nostalgic masculinity works to
size up history in particular ways to enable rhetorical strategies in line with the gendered
ideologies of PK and masculine popular culture. The remainder of this chapter focuses
on nostalgic masculinity as a framing strategy, one that situates masculinity (and
frequently all of American culture) as in crisis as a result of femininity and feminism. As
a framing strategy, nostalgic masculinity indicates the loss of a space for American
masculinity (and thus the need for tactical action to resolve crisis), as well as sets the
context for, and explains the necessity of, the emergence of the Promise Keepers and
masculine popular culture.
The chapter is not meant to compartmentalize difference. In focusing a good deal
of the analysis of femininity, gay masculinity, and race in Chapter 3, what is intended is
to highlight the ways that gender, race, and sexuality are constructed as relational. As
noted in Chapter 1, the idea of “crisis” presumes stability, and that “stability” is measured
against non-whites, women, and subordinated masculinities. In identifying Otherness as
the cause of crisis, rhetorics of masculinity crisis work to situate dominant masculinity in
a superior relation to those Others. If it is the femininity or a homosexuality that
problematizes white masculinity, then it is the symbolical removal of those traits from
masculinity that allows a return to “stability.” In particular, when modern men are said
be too feminine or gay, or too “ethnic,” and the presence of an undisciplined Otherness in
the performance of masculinity that is framed as problematic, then identifying those

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qualities as the problem, and reframing masculinity so that it does not depend on
Otherness for its realization, works to manage the crisis produced by difference and
achieve stability.
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This chapter traces the identification of that Otherness as the cause of
masculinity crisis in the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture. In
universalizing masculine experience and eliding the racial differences in masculinity, the
rhetoric of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture appeals to all men in the
same way, obscuring the differential experiences of gender, sexuality, class, and race.

Promise Keepers

In the Promise Keepers, it is an inappropriate masculinity that is presented as the
cause of male anguish, and thus masculinity crisis. On the surface, it appears fairly cut
and dry: men have not been acting like good Christian men, and that has left individual
men and culture at large in crisis. This inappropriate masculinity, while initially focused
on the men within Promise Keepers, frames the crisis in such a way that it locates an
inappropriate femininity as at the heart of crisis. This is a source of the debate between
apologists and detractors of the Promise Keepers discussed in the introduction. In saying
that men are at fault and need to be better husbands and fathers, those who attend to the
suggestions for men to listen to their wives and children see the group as instructing men
to be a positive force in family life, which they surely would be. In attending to the
directives of men to take leadership in the family back from women, those who label the

80
This is not meant to imply that difference is “successfully” removed. As indicated earlier in this chapter and the
introduction, the process of identity formation is relational, such that white masculinity depends on femininity and
difference to situate itself as central and universal. In saying that difference is managed in the resolution of crisis, I am
describing a rhetorical strategy that works to resituate white masculinity as universal, and not in need of difference for a
condition of ontological stability.

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Promise Keepers as a reassertion of patriarchy focus on the ways men are encouraged to
be a positive force as a destructive resolution to masculinity crisis. Though men being
more empathetic would clearly be a positive change, and men asserting a natural
superiority to women a negative one, the articulation of the reasons why men are said to
be in crisis is more nuanced than either side indicates.
While feminism is sometimes located as an evil, it is more often the lack of an
appropriately strong masculine presence that is said to have put culture and the men
themselves in crisis; absent fathers, sexual temptation, a lack of willpower, and apathy
are all said to be crisis elements in modern masculinity. What we need to attune our
scholarly attention to is how the phenomenon of absent fathers, temptation, and a need
for a greater force of will are gendered and raced in particular ways to obscure the
universalizing of white male experience. For one, all men are situated by the Promise
Keepers as in crisis the same, which obscures the different experiences of masculinity,
and thus crisis, by men of color. Some commentators go so far as to locate portions of
the African American community as in crisis because of unruly blackness that needs to
return to a universally masculine (read: white) model.
The flesh is one such temptation, setting up women and gay men as always
potentially destabilizing to a godly masculinity; the texts are unequivocally clear about
the need for non-sexual intimacy between men, as homosexuality is a sin, and thus a
threat. In describing the deficiencies in American culture, the pressing issues identified
are gendered in particular ways. Teenage pregnancy, for example, can be located in both
parents, as absent fathers are frequently the source of misery for PK speakers, but more

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often than not it is the women who become pregnant in the first place that are the focus of
contemporary stories (i.e.: Velasquez, 2005). Abortion is presented as solely a problem
for women as they are the ones who abort their children, as opposed to the men who were
just as involved in procreation (Boone, 1992; Palau, 1999). Homosexuality is a sin
against God and proper masculine nature (McCartney, 1992a; Palau, 1999), while
pornography takes the desire for women which is the cornerstone of heterosexuality too
far (Seaborn, 2005).
In order to resolve these crises, men are implored to take responsibility for their
sexuality, as well as that of their children to ensure that pregnancy out of wedlock is not a
regular occurrence. At times, women function as metaphor for temptation and sin. At
other times it is the material bodies of women that are problematic; the very presence of a
woman worries PK authors as those bodies contain the inherent capacity towards
temptation and sin (Maxwell, 1999, p. 81). It is not all feminine behaviors which are
troubling; as is detailed in Chapter 4, some aspects of femininity are said to be
appropriate for men, and are recharacterized as in fact the very basis of Christ-like
masculinity. The ideological work of reaffirming patriarchy is done in which aspects of
femininity are to be denigrated, and thus identified as part of the crisis tendencies of
masculinity, and which are to be valorized and reframed as masculine virtues. What
follows is an examination of the various strategies for the elaboration of crisis, and how
those strategies evince racial, sexual, and gendered politics.

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One prominent strategy for identifying men as in crisis is the use of metaphor.
The primary metaphors within Promise Keeper writing and speaking are those of war
81

and sports. “Throughout Church history,” as Randy Balmer (2000) explains, “dating
back to the New Testament, Christians have used two metaphors for spirituality:
militarism and athleticism” (p. 194). He continues by nothing that American history has
witnessed various organizational forms that use the military metaphor in the service of
Christian Piety, such as the Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus, and the Campus
Crusade for Christ. Multiple commentators have noted the tendency of men’s religious
groups such as the Men and Religion Forward movement and Muscular Christianity to
use sporting and militaristic metaphors in their invocations of proper masculinity
(Balmer, 2000; Bartkowski, 2004; Beal, 2000; Kimmel, 1997). Balmer indicates that “in
more recent years, athletics has gradually eclipsed militarism as the predominant
metaphor for evangelical spirituality” as Vietnam dimmed cultural enthusiasm for
warfare (p. 195). And while he and others are correct in noting the overwhelming use of
sports metaphor in Promise Keeper discourse, what is surprising is the lack of attention to
the militaristic metaphors in scholarly work on the group. Often, as in Balmer, they are
mentioned in passing with their connections in sports but not elaborated, though Balmer
does spend time detailing the similarities in their metaphorical structure. It is surprising
given the frequency with which metaphors of war, battle, conflict, and strife appear
throughout the range of texts I analyzed, and the use of the war metaphor to situate men
as in crisis, and to motivate their response to that crisis.

81
War is described in a variety of ways through PK texts. For the purposes of brevity, I will use the term “war” to
refer to metaphors of conflict, battle, or war. Excluded from this usage are interpersonal conflicts – the term war will
only be used when there is an allusion to some form of broad scale, military type conflict.

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The Awakening conference in Los Angeles, situates men as in conflict from the
very start of the conference, as they are urged to “Unleash the Warrior” since men are “at
war” and “under attack.” This theme was carried on throughout the weekend. Both the
conference and the accompanying text were divided into sections, each a battle, such as
“The Epic Battle for a Man’s Home” or “The Epic Battle for a Man’s Heart.” And it was
the Promise Keepers that had the plans to win those battles. Dave Roever, a disfigured
Vietnam veteran who is a staple of PK events and texts, often uses his own experiences in
Vietnam as a metaphor for the battle that men face in trying to remain with Christ. He
uses a graphic narrative of his disfigurement by a grenade in Vietnam and subsequent
recovery as motivation to the men in the audience that have surely suffered less physical
injury, but, as Roever says, may have experienced just as devastating a spiritual injury.
During the Anaheim conference, at which he spoke on “The Epic Battle for a Man’s
Soul,” Roever began by welcoming veterans home from Iraq, and says American soldiers
are “fighting a holy war in a godless place” (Field notes). This metaphorical equivalence
between the War in Iraq and the Battle for a Man’s soul is instructive. Roever makes no
distinction between these battles as men are in a desperate battle for their soul in a
godless culture in much the same way that the men in Iraq were/are said to be fighting a
holy war.
This blurring of narratives – actual war and spiritual battle, secular conflict and
holy war – is rampant in PK discourse and is strategic. The video played at the Anaheim
conference after the emcee’s introduction and Roever’s sermon offered a dramatic
example. Two armed soldiers are sitting in a foxhole, fighting an enemy who is said to

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“attack repeatedly” without end. Slowly the scene dissolves and it is revealed that we are
merely witness to the interior monologue of a man at work, whose co-worker is asleep on
the job. The first man wakes up the second man, as that is the only way that the two will
be able to survive the battles ahead. The men are said to need to work together in Christ
to win their own personal war. Such a blurring of narratives further connects the eternal
narrative of Christians in constant crisis battling Satan with the contemporary narrative of
Christian men in a culture in crisis battling for their masculinity. The constant slippage
between representations of military warfare, spiritual warfare, and cultural warfare
rhetorically links all three, and raises the stakes for the men of Promise Keepers who
must reclaim their masculinity, and further situates the resolution of that crisis as
ordained by a higher power and not the result of a contingent gender ideology.
This battle is not one of discrete battlefields, though there are common places the
fighting takes place such as the home. Men are said to be in a “broken and battle torn
world” fighting a “cosmic battle for our souls, hears, and lives” (Velasquez, Rasor,
Hinkle, & Richardson, 2005, p. 2). And although Satan may have started the initial
conflict, but men witnessed a counter attack in the rebirth of Jesus. Men are battling
constantly, daily (Roever, 2005), as the “all out war” for a man’s heart is waged by a
never-ceasing adversary (Velasquez, 2005, p. 49). Satan is leading “an invisible terrorist
attack” through his “dangerous networks of demons,” which are the “underworld’s
version of Al Qaeda” (Stier, 2005, p. 207). The battle that rages in men’s “immediate,
extended, and global communities are between the armies of darkness and the body of
Christ” as Jesus needs “a few good men – spiritual marines” such as Promise Keeper men

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to “advance the Kingdom of God in their neighborhoods and in their world” (ibid, p.
213). The use of military metaphors, especially these using examples from the War on
Terror, aid in making this not merely an individual crisis, but also a national one; and, as
will be discussed later, the home is located as a primary “battlefield” on which this war is
fought, linking the “homeland” of the nation to the “home” of individual Promise
Keepers. Such a constant battle demands constant response, and so men are perpetually
in this state of crisis.
82
Even when they have made strides in their own lives men must
move out into their surrounding communities and help others. And of course this
requires constant attendance at PK events and purchase of PK products.
Evangelical culture is particularly suited for this articulation of individual action
and failure to cultural and national crisis. One of the central narrative themes that repeat
within evangelical texts generally, and those of the Promise Keeper particularly, is that of
the fall of Adam and Eve. As a result of this initial fall, when Adam and Eve disobeyed
God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge, all of humanity is doomed to separation from
God, tainted by that Original Sin. All hope is not lost, however. God sends Jesus Christ
to die for the sins of humanity, and provides an opportunity for redemption through

82
While it is certainly true that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 could have motivated such explicit war
imagery (particularly hard to deny given the Al Qaeda reference), war and conflict imagery appear in the analyzed texts
released prior to 2001 as well. McCartney (1999a) is quite clear in the opening essay to Seven Promises of a Promise
Keeper that men are in a war, “whether we acknowledge it or not,” as “the enemy is real, and he doesn’t like to see men
of God take a stand for Christ” (p. x). Men cannot be “drilled out of the corps” of Christ (Hendricks, 1999, p. 34) and
need to continue to battle the Adversary. Gary Smalley and John Trent (1992c) recount the story of a marine lieutenant
in Vietnam who remained in an indefensible position to allow his men to return to safety as a model because they
believe “we need more men like Lt. Bobo, particularly today, when there is such a battle raging over the lives and
hearts of many families. The ultimate mark of a man is that he is willing ‘to stay put’…rather than turning and running
from his wife and children when times get tough” (p. 85). Boone (1992) warns that the gates to the inner-city have
been captured by those who are enemies of the black community, gates that can only be reclaimed if men head “a
trumpet call that sounds the alarm and calls Christians to battle” (p. 188).

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acceptance of Christ as personal Savior, and a dedication to serving Him.
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Satan, the
Adversary, full of arrogant pride and disdainful of God is said to constantly tempt Man to
forsake the Lord, and entice humanity into evil and eternity in Hell away from God’s
love. The primary narrative of Christians, then, is one of perpetual crisis, as the
Adversary is said to be relentless in his desire to “beat our butts as badly as possible”
(McCartney, 1992b, p. 12). The very nature of humanity is crisis, as the destabilizing
influence of Satan constantly threatens not only our lives but our very souls.
Within the discourse of the Promise Keepers, this central evangelical narrative is
wedded to a particular gender ideology through a narrative of contemporary cultural
crisis. American society is said to be in a state of near ruin, as indicated by the
prevalence of violence, crime, idolatry, and a lack of family values and moral guidance.
What becomes of particular importance is that the cause of this cultural crisis is said to be
the lack of faith by the non-believing public. Gallagher (2003) notes that this is a
recurring feature in American evangelicalism, as modernity repeatedly destabilizes
family and social structures and evangelicals have to adapt to new cultural conditions. In
particular, the 20
th
century witnessed the rise of neo-evangelicals who believed “biblical
authority and historic Christian doctrine were themselves the necessary ground from
which to develop a sustained critique of modernity and exert a Christian influence in
government, science, education, and the arts” (p. 8).
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In this way, the narratives of the

83
The Promise Keepers include this narrative in their Statement of Faith on their website (Statement of Faith, n.d.)
84
Gallagher is careful to note that there is not one, singular evangelical stance towards modernity. She indicates that
there are three primary stances that have been successful in maintaining continued viability for evangelicalism in
American culture: the first is “reacting against and resisting contemporary culture,” the second is “accommodating
feminism and compartmentalizing work and family life,” or the third, “reinterpreting traditions in a way that retains the
forms but infuses them with meanings that are more amenable to the broader culture” (p. 9). However, all three focus
on faith in Christ and prosthelytizing to those that don’t believe as critical to redeeming society.

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Christian in contemporary cultural crisis and the perpetual crisis of humanity are merged;
the current crisis is but a manifestation of the eternal struggle against Satan.
The Promise Keepers acts to situate men in the United States in the late 20
th

century within this narrative by articulating the Christian duty to resist the Adversary and
save society to proper masculine performance. A gendered division of labor and
responsibilities in the family is not new to evangelical culture (Gallagher, 2003). What is
unique is the particular manner in which the Promise Keepers locate the abdication of
men’s proper role in society generally, and the family in particular, as responsible for that
crisis. The men who join the Promise Keepers are thus saddled with a dual
responsibility: they are not to be merely Christian and masculine, but proper Christian
men. They are to live their lives as Christians in perpetual crisis, while acting to resolve
the specific crisis that America has found itself in at the end of the century. Articulating
the personal crisis of masculinity to both the broader cultural crisis and the transhistorical
crisis of humanity is both a clever rhetorical move as well as an ideological one. The
function of the Promise Keepers is not presented as telling men what to do; the
organization, its speakers, and their texts do not come across as having an “agenda,” nor
is it acting to “convince” or “persuade” men in a given direction.
85
Rather, the discourse
of the Promise Keepers positions itself as merely revealing God’s Truths and His plans
for the men of PK. In taking steps to solve the individual crisis that the men have found

85
A sentiment generated not only in the informal, inclusive tone, but also in repeated declarations by the group that it is
not a “political” organization. As Quicke and Robinson (2000), Bartkowski (2004) and others take care to point out,
some of the more vocal leaders of PK may have conservative political agendas (especially Dobson and McCartney),
the organization itself is careful to distance itself from political causes that give the appearance of an agenda.

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themselves in, they also help their family, their country, and meaningfully participate in
God’s plan.
Throughout PK texts, Christ acts not only as the savior of men’s souls but also as the
ideal model of masculinity. This use of Christ as model for masculinity serves to position
women and femininity within the PK gender ideology. In his complex and detailed
examination of the Promise Keepers, Brian Brickner (1999) argues that within the
Promise Keepers, the dialectic between masculine and feminine no longer provides a
coherent framework for the men of PK to understand traditional gender (pp. 84-85). For
Brickner, some traditionally feminine traits (such as crying, embracing others etc) are
valued in the “modern man” at the same time that the increased agency of women
challenges traditional ability of men to read femininity as the asymmetrical “Other” to
masculinity. As a result, the Other to masculinity becomes “androgyny” instead of
femininity (androgyny also becomes the Other to femininity), creating an overly-
amorphous gender identity that does not fit in with a “biblically rooted movement based
on responsibility, accountability, and promise keeping” (p. 85). He argues that the PK
gender ideology functions to resolve this dilemma by eliding “femininity from the
construction of masculinity” (p. 85) through creating Jesus Christ as the masculine imago
to be emulated by PK men. Here, Jesus is posited as a reflective symmetrical Other for
men to model their masculinity against. Brickner explains how such a repositioning
“enables men to perform almost any characteristic and still remain within the parameters
of biblical manhood as performed by Christ. Christ nurtured; men can nurture. Christ
experienced fear, men can be afraid, Christ cried, men can cry” (p. 86).

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While I agree with Brickner’s claim that such an eliding of femininity is an
“ideologically violent” aspect of Promise Keepers gender ideology (p. 85) in its dismissal
of femininity, I take issue with his claim that using Christ as masculine model moves
away from constructing femininity as the Other to masculinity. On the contrary, one key
aspect of PK gender ideology is the use of femininity to provide a context for what is not
masculine.
86
While Christ may be held up as the model for a fully developed
masculinity, femininity is still located as a threat to the successful realization of a Christ-
like masculinity: masculinity and femininity are still co-constitutive in delimiting proper
gendered behavior. Femininity is used to provide a context for which feminine behaviors
are acceptable (crying, non-sexual physical contact with other men), and which threaten
the successful performance of masculinity. Given that Christian men have to be ever
vigilant against the Adversary and the attempts to undermine a godly masculinity, and
that the prescriptions for masculine action are so vague, a construction of femininity
becomes important to help concretize proper masculine action. If men are to reject and
resist temptation, and protect those around them, the representation of femininity
provides some clues as to where this temptation and threat may originate.

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It would be disingenuous, and inaccurate, to imply that Brickner’s argument is that femininity is removed from the
gender equation completely. He is careful to note that the Promise Keepers still use a biblical essentialist
understanding of gender (p. 80), and merely “move away” from the “traditional asymmetrical reflection of masculinity
constructed as the other of femininity” as such a construction relies “on a construction that reciprocates the other of an
other” (p. 86). He also indicates that women are “alluded to as the assumed other of marriage, motherhood, and
heterosexual desire” (p. 84), and subverts traditional understandings that map feminine/nature as opposed to
masculine/culture, thus causing the destabilization of gender hierarchy (ibid) , an issue I return to later in this chapter.
However, Brickner is quite clear in saying that the Promise Keepers “cast off” femininity as the “unnecessary other”,
failing to engage Simone de Beauvoir’s question of “why is woman Other?”, a question posed to inquire as to why
“women do not even get to be part of the questions asked” (p. 85). I argue that while the gender ideology may
marginalize and frequently ignore femininity in the construction of masculinity, the representation and construction of
femininity is still a crucial “Other” in defining what is properly masculine behavior. After all, protecting the women in
their lives is one of the reasons most oft-repeated by the Promise Keepers for men to reclaim their masculinity.

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Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (1997), a self-proclaimed Christian feminist, wonders if
we should refer to the Promise Keepers as “servanthood” or “soft patriarchy”, due to the
conflicting notions of gender present in PK rhetoric. Men are encouraged to listen to
their wife and spend more time with the kids at the same time they are proclaimed as the
heads of household who need to take over the reigns to protect the family. What is
crucial to this discussion is the role accorded to femininity in PK rhetoric. As has been
repeatedly documented, the Promise Keepers make use of a biblical essentialism that
locates men and women as categorically different, a difference ordained by God
(Bartkowski 2004; Brickner, 1999; Ferguson, 1999; Kimmel, 1997; Lockhart, 2000;
Messner, 1997). While these authors have disagreements as to whether such an
interpretation is the sole or the dominant conception of gender in PK ideology, all agree
that essentialism is at least a recurring theme in PK texts. This essentialism operates to
allow an ambiguity in regards to the nature of women and femininity; while women
themselves are to be cherished and respected, particular forms of femininity are to be
rejected. At some points it is women that are the potential problem of masculinity (when
their bodies produce sexual temptation), while at others it is femininity that is at issue
(when men do not act masculine enough). This is precisely why femininity cannot be
removed from the consideration of PK gender ideology, but why it can be difficult to
locate as a continual influence in PK rhetoric.
Brad Stine, an evangelical stand up comedian, provides a salient example of this
ambivalence. Stine performed at The Awakening, and was a hallmark of the weekend.
During the lunch break on the second day of the conference I heard several men excitedly

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anticipating Stine’s routine, and it was advertised to many cheers the first day.
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Stine’s
routine began with a slew of jokes on the essential differences between men and women
(they do things different, dress different, react different, even yell different), including a
pointed comment about how cultural theories of gender are out of touch with reality.
88
At
one point he noted that men need “all male events” such as the PK conference because
men are “unique and different.” Stine, accompanied by much cheering, claimed that
what we need is to reject feminine encroachment on male space, and allow testosterone to
run free. He is careful to note that it is not women that need to be rejected, just the lack
of masculine space. For Stine, this is emblematic of a larger cultural problem, as men are
discouraged from being men by a culture of political correctness. When men should be
doing, according to Stine, is leading their daughters and their wives, loudly proclaiming
“We will not be neutered by a culture who says to not be a man”, as masculine leadership
is key to “a society of right” (Field notes).
Here, women are to be cherished and protected, but they are categorically different
than men; it is not women that are the problem, but a “culture” which seeks to neuter men
and remove their masculinity in telling them what to do and removing masculine
responsibility as the key to a “society of right.” Acting like a woman, or not enough like
a man, is located as the source of societal ills, and thus acting like a man is what is
needed to resolve cultural crisis. Other texts witness this same oscillation between

87
Stine can be described as a cross between Dennis Leary, a notoriously foul comedian whose primary trademark is
pacing back and forth on the stage while yelling his vociferous opinions on all matter of things, and Tim Allen, whose
persona of the average guy who wants to build big machines and grunt like a dog was the primary character on
television’s long running Home Improvement. Lacking Leary’s obscenity while adding a Christian twist to Allen’s
“typical guy” shtick, he easily appealed to the men in the audience with a mix of secular and faith based humor.

88
His particular example here was that girls play with dolls like they were people and boys play with dolls by ripping
their heads off.

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notions of egalitarianism and sexism. John Eldredge (2001), a bestselling evangelical
author, provides a number of instructive passages in his tome Wild at Heart, as to the
proper relationship between men and women. Eldredge maintains that the world “kills a
woman’s heart when it tells her to be tough, efficient, and independent” (p. 17), as these
qualities are naturally those of men. In fact, it is cultural notions of how men and women
should relate that Eldredge faults for the loss of men’s hearts. For Eldredge, pop culture
feeds men lies that if they only to secure masculinity men need to “[G]et the beauty- win
her, bed her, and you are the man” (p. 92). In fact, in searching for masculinity, “the
deadliest place a man ever takes his search, the place where every man seems to wind up
no matter what trail he’s followed, is the woman” (p. 90). What men need to do, for
Eldredge, is to stop focusing on women, and instead focus on themselves; to reclaim their
hearts, they need to not let women or their attainment be the core of masculine identity or
purpose, but instead act as God intended them.
While Stine and Eldredge may represent the extreme of such tendencies to locate the
attempt to live up to femininity as a primary problematic of masculinity, they are by no
means alone. The denigration of femininity as an Other to masculinity is done both
overly and subtly throughout PK gender ideology, both in the discuss of femininity and
the representation of femininity. The creation story of Adam and Eve is one such avenue.
Again, Eldredge provides our extreme as he recounts the story of the Garden of Eden in
which humanity is banished from the perfect Garden as a result of Adam being tempted
by Eve, who herself had been tempted by the devil. Eldredge locates this narrative as
explaining the essential differences between men and women, as Adam was created

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“outside” of the Garden, as wild nature, and he was brought into Eden afterwards. Since
then, “boys have never been at home indoors” (p. 3-4). Gallagher and Wood (2005)
illustrate the rhetorical nature of this exposition that Eldredge could just as easily have
read the story as Adam being incomplete until he entered the Garden, that “essential
manhood is one that isn’t finished until it is applied to the cultivation and nurture of
growing things,” yet he chooses not to (p. 140). He later continues by arguing that every
man “remembers Eve. We are haunted by her. And somehow we believe that if we can
find her, get her back, then we’d also recover with her our own masculinity” (Eldredge p.
91). Eve, here, is at once an exemplar of essential gender difference, the cause of
humanity’s banishment from paradise, and the constant threat to modern masculinity in
the guise of contemporary women.
Again, Eldredge represents a more over the top interpretation of gender roles than a
majority of PK texts. At least on the surface. The creation narrative is retold at several
points throughout Promise Keeper literature, but men are frequently blamed too. Men are
said to have failed Eve in the process of disobeying God (McCartney, 1992a), and that
men need to fix this initial failure by no longer succumbing to temptation. Here, it
appears that it was men and women who equally disobeyed God, and men must take
responsibility for their own actions (a key Promise Keeper theme). However, this is a
clever rhetorical move which situates men’s responsibility in opposition not necessarily
to women, but to feminine weakness. Men are to rectify their failure in falling to
temptation, a failure located as a unique problem for Adam. The act of being tempted
was a feminine failing as Eve initially takes the apple from the serpent, a failing that

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Adam repeated, and must now atone for. Varying degrees of fault are laid on Eve for
tempting Adam to failure in the first place; what is invariant is the need for men to take
back spiritual leadership such that Eve cannot be the catalyst for failure again. To be
properly masculine is to resist feminine temptation in order to be a man with Christ.
This same ambivalence towards women as emblems of femininity is repeated
throughout various PK narratives, texts, and skits. Women are the necessary compliment
to men, but represent constant danger and temptation; they are serious objects of
interaction and companionship as well as potential hindrances to fulfillment. At The
Awakening, women appear in several skits, though never as critical characters. As
Brickner (1999) observes, they are more often “alluded to as the assumed other of
marriage, motherhood, and heterosexual desire” (p. 84). Other times women appear as
representatives of distraction. In one skit, designed to reveal the importance of hearing
the call of God, two basketball teams are playing each other. The coach of one team, a
man, is attempting to give his players instructions, instructions the players can’t hear
because the coach of the other team, a woman, is shouting over him. Because the players
are not listening carefully, the feminine noise is drowning out God’s masculine call.
Joe Callington, a speaker at the conference, said that men tend to not listen to
their wives or mothers because they don’t want to hear what they say, but that men
should listen to what God has to say. He continues in saying that God teaches not to
look at a woman walk by in a lustful matter, but then adds with a smile and a wink to the
men in the audience that “If I don’t look, how will I know to pray for her?” Initially, this
can seem to be a joke about the persistence of masculine lust, a failing of the men

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involved. But ultimately it is a joke about feminine seduction and sin, as the presence of
the woman is needed to induce lustful thoughts in the first place, and it is the man’s
corresponding duty to pray for her deliverance. Dave Roever initially seems to praise
women in saying that there is a lot men can learn from women, as women “judge on
character” while men are more likely to focus on physical attributes. A positive
evaluation of women’s strength of character is reduced to physical attributes as Roever
says that men “judge on hair and legs. But hopefully not hairy legs” (Field Notes).
Erwin McManus begins to tell of the wonderful gifts of his children, both his daughter
and his son. His son projects to the future with wisdom and logic, while his daughter
kisses stuffed animals to show compassion. His son rationalizes his choice in toys and
clothes while his daughter takes a while to get dressed because she “feels sorry for the
blouse that isn’t chosen” (ibid). The speakers repeatedly set up an initially positive
appraisal of both masculine and feminine behavior, but ultimately end up using the
feminine modes of knowing and feeling as the butt of the joke.
This humor is done out of defensive insecurity; men are worried about constantly
being tempted, and so must be willing to resist the material temptation that constantly
threatens. Women are presented as almost comical, ancillary, but very much dangerous
to masculinity. This back and forth appears in the lessons of the accompanying
Awakening text as well. Wives and daughters are to be communicated with, as a chart on
loving and learning unique designs in life focuses on how men can make sacrifices to
express love for the women in the their life (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, & Richardson,
2005, p, 35). Then, a scant 12 pages later, it is the pregnant daughter of an author that

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causes anger and feelings of failure at not preventing his daughter from succumbing to
sin (Velasquez, 2005, p. 47). Velasquez does not blame his daughter. Instead, he locates
the blame in Satan being on the offensive for the battle over Velasquez’s heart (p. 47-8).
His daughter was merely the vessel for this temptation, a tale which sounds suspiciously
like the Creation story. It was the initial feminine weakness that produced self-doubt,
also an unmasculine trait, one which Velasquez was able to overcome later in his story by
being a good man, supporting his daughter, and becoming a grandfather.
Even when women are represented as an integral part of masculinity, they also
function as a potential hindrance. Promise Keepers texts often include advice on how to
let women into the faith of men after they dedicate their lives to Christ, as this is seen as
potentially disrupting. Even Bill McCartney faced such a challenge, as he recounts his
wife’s friend saying to her that his conversion and passion would blow over (1992b, p,
11). McCartney claims that it didn’t blow over because he “immediately started getting
together with other men” (ibid), and not due to the support of his wife. Men are
encouraged to consult and speak with their wives, to plan their new life in Christ with
them. However, this conversion is not an equal partnership. The ultimate goal is to
“invite your wife in a full awareness of your awakening plan…you will want to move
toward oneness in allowing her fully into your thinking and planning…introduce your
wife to your discoveries…if she hasn’t [been doing the process with the men] it might be
too much for her to absorb” (p. 235, emphasis added). Women generally, and wives and
daughters specifically, are always a threat to proper masculine action both because they
may tempt men into acting in non-Christian ways, but also because their failures, their

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inability to fully comprehend masculine conversion, is also the particular Promise
Keeper’s failing. Eldredge (2001) again provides an apt summary in saying that
“Femininity can arouse masculinity…But femininity can never bestow masculinity. It’s
like asking a pearl to give you a buffalo. It’s like asking a field of wildflowers to give
you a 57 Chevy. They are different substances entirely” (p. 93). Masculinity is both
based on the successful management of femininity, in the leading of women, and the
elimination of inappropriate femininity in men themselves: “bad” femininity is opposed,
“good” femininity is protected, and “appropriate” feminine characteristics are to be
cultivated.
Another failing of PK men that has led to this crisis is by encouraging an
inappropriate femininity through leaving a “spiritual void” in the home in not taking a
proper position of servant leadership and “forcing” a woman to do it instead. This may
be best revealed in Tony Evans’ (as cited in Faludi, 1999) injunction to PK men about
how to take responsibility for their lack of success and involvement in the spiritual and
economic health of the family. Evans indicates to men: “Sit down with your wife and say
something like this: ‘Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve given you my role. I gave
up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role’”
(p. 229).
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Evans sums up the dilemma PK men are said to face nicely. Men have left

89
The essay by Evans is removed from the most recent version of Seven Promises, but the theme is still present. One
could conjecture that the over the top tone in Evans’ essay is one reason why it is removed. The line that follows the
one cited is possibly the most quoted line in any Promise Keeper text. After urging men to “reclaim their role” Evans
goes on to say “Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I’m
urging you to take it back” (p. 79). As Susan Faludi (1999) muses, “Evans’s words seemed like a smoking gun,
incontrovertible evidence that…Promise Keepers was promoting a stealth campaign of misogyny and macho
dominance” while ignoring that the remainder of the passage is devoted to Evans chastising a culture which privileges
the uncaring and violent machismo of Rambo over caring emotive men (p. 229). John Bartowski (2004) also takes
issue with the repeated use of Evans’s quote, and is particularly virulent in his claim that this is the most oft quoted and
overblown quotation (pp. 11-12). Both Faludi and Bartowski immediately remind readers that men are encouraged, by

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their proper masculine role, and “forced” women to take over that role. Men stopped
acting masculine and needed women to do it instead. This presents a profound crisis
indeed as both men and women are acting outside of their proper gender roles; the lack of
proper (read: masculine) leadership has left men themselves, the family, and the wider
culture in crisis.
Here the rhetorical device of locating men as at fault for “creating” this situation by
abandoning their proper role doesn’t so much directly call out feminism, but removes it
as a positive and productive force. In this narrative, women do not enter into the
workplace and take stronger positions of leadership in the family and culture because
they are capable and deserving of such roles. Rather, greater social mobility and gender
equality are reduced to problems created because men have abdicated their proper role.
While men are encouraged to take “responsibility” for this void, they wouldn’t need to
take that responsibility if women had not entered as the spiritual and economic head’s of
household. Feminism is not said to be the problem; it is men not acting properly
masculine.
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But removing the blame from feminism also delegitimizes the gains it strove
for, and its power as a movement. The progress of women into the public sphere is
located as masculine failing, not feminist success.
The lack of masculine leadership in the public sphere is said to have put the very
nation itself in crisis. This vision views contemporary American culture as deficient, and

Evans no less, to turn off the TV, speak with their wives, and show more emotion. I will return to the relationship
between stated activities and underlying gender ideology to explain this seeming discrepancy later. For now, however,
what I find to be most theoretically interesting is not the injunction for men to take their role, but the justification of
why it went away in the first place.

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Again, this is not meant to suggest that the Promise Keepers don’t see feminism as an obstacle or hindrance to proper
social order, which, I argue, they do. Rather, the framing of crisis is used so that feminism is already removed as an
obstacle through its delegitimation as a reason for increased feminine authority in the public sphere.

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in crisis, longing for the stability of a bygone era. The Promise Keepers explicitly link
the dissatisfaction with social conditions in the late 20
th
and early 21
st
centuries with the
lack of an appropriately Christ-like masculinity. The family is presented as a microcosm
of American society, such that repairing the crisis in one leads to repairing the other. The
construction of the nation is indeed a material practice that is often connected to the
family, and to individual bodies. Coontz (1997. 2000) has written about the various ways
that the family is imagined as central to the nation in public policy, as various “crises” of
the family are framed as indicative of a broader crisis of the nation itself, and thus
legislating the family is a way of resolving that crisis. Patricia Hill Collins (2000)
elaborates by noting that family, acting as a fundamental principle of social organization,
“transcends ideology” in its universal appeal for public policy, movement politics, and
individual accountability. Further, Paul Gilroy (1987) argues “families are not only the
nation in microcosm, its key components, but act as the means to turn social processes
into natural, instinctive ones" (p. 43). While he is discussing British culture, Collins
(1998) extends his claim, noting that in the United States, “families constitute a primary
site of belonging” and that “family remain[s] central to the issues of responsibility and
accountability” (p. 32). Making recourse to the family as an object of crisis or stability
is thus one way to denaturalize ideology, as the sacred family unit is an issue of personal
identity and belonging in addition to an issue of national health. Both Gilroy and Collins
situate the family within discourses of race as well, as not only are differently raced
families subject to different degrees of regulation and discipline (as will be discussed

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later in this chapter), but that the whiteness of the nation naturalized in recourse to
ideologies of the typical “American” family.
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The performance of gender is one way the materiality of the nation is expressed, as
the actions of individual men and women, in addition to cultural notions of masculinity
and femininity, are ways in which the nation is represented and produced. Sarah Banet-
Weiser (1999) writes that the nation is “formulated as an abstraction, and one is not
necessarily compelled to fight for, to place beliefs within, or to give up one’s life for an
abstraction. Rather, we are compelled by desires” (p. 8), and these desires are produced
in public through representations of femininity. Similarly, Robert Westbrook (1993)
discusses the construction of women as a public obligation during World War II, and thus
a reason to fight and defend the nation. Taken together with the articulation of race to
discourses of family and nation, the individual performance of a Christ-like masculinity
as central to family survival within the Promise Keepers provides a ready-made
justification for the discipline of PK men in the explanation and elaboration of
masculinity crisis, one which further acts to universalize white experience as
representative of masculine behavior.
Wellington Boone (1999), a particularly invective PK author and speaker, is quite
clear on the relationship between the family and the nation. Boone warns about the need
for prayer to cause the “multitudes to be drawn to Christ” as “America needs revival.
The church needs revival. Families need revival. Men need revival” (p. 12). All are
dramatically linked, as it is only after men return to their needs and begin praying that
something will happen (p. 14). For Boone and others, America is “sick and dying”

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See also Banet-Weiser (1999) and Berlant (1997) for discussions of the articulation of race to national belonging.

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precisely because men have “no understanding of the great power” within them, and need
to stop acting helpless to bring about change, and live a committed life of prayer which
will have “an immediate, ongoing effect on families” (p. 17). The home is frequently
located as the key battlefront in this battle, making the role of father and husband
uniquely crucial for PK men. The home is center stage in the “epic battle” against Satan,
as Satan is said to target the home as “He knows that what happens in our homes has the
potential to point others toward Christ” (Seaborn, 2005, p. 147). Satan will ambush men
in a number of ways partially because “the stakes are higher” in the home than anywhere
else. To be “asleep to temptations and sins that threaten your home” is perhaps the most
devastating failure of masculinity, as to “lose” at home is to “lose completely. But to live
the awakened life at home – to win at home – is to win all” (ibid). Resolving masculinity
crisis is not merely an issue of personal fulfillment – it is a competition in which the very
fate of the nation hangs in the balance.
The lure of culture and sin which can derail effective leadership in the home, and
thus exacerbate rather than resolve crisis, are described in a variety of ways throughout
PK texts. As noted before, it is sometimes women, but more often femininity that is
located as the threat to masculinity. Though women are sometimes located as the object
of men’s desire, and thus the impetus towards impurity, it is just as often an ambiguous
reference to a “culture” that is ungodly, and leading men to abdicate their role. In
Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo (2003) traces the tendency in Western culture and
thought to locate the body as feminine, and thus frequently responsible for the limitations
of the flesh. She argues “if…the body is that duality, the body is the negative term, and if

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woman is the body, then women are that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from
knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire” (p. 5). The problem
with culture in the rhetoric of the Promise Keepers is that it has become too feminine: too
distracting, too sexual, too seductive. Culture is presented as the temptress which moves
men away from their families and God.
This is not a new trend in Christian gender ideology. Ulrike Wiethaus (1996)
describes how a similar reframing occurred in Europe in the 12
th
century as Europeans
faced their own masculinity crisis. Medieval masculinity was reframed to maintain a
patriarchal social structure in the face of rapid economic changes. As part of this change,
the body was identified with women and negative male characteristics, in order to create
a split between the “useful” feminine traits (such as humility) and those that were impure
and problematic (the material, the visceral, and thus the non-spiritual) (p. 57-59).
Wiethaus argues Medieval masculinity articulated previously devalued feminine traits to
Christ, and thus to a godly masculinity, as a means of (re)establishing gender hierarchy
and sustaining hegemonic masculinity.
Promise Keeper men are also warned about the temptations of the flesh, the body,
and the feminine. To counter such temptation, the members of PK are encouraged to be
good men, gentle men – not super heroes. In a marked contrast to Maxim, it is not the
“kill all the bad guys and bed all the women” masculine images of James Bond that is
held as the ideal. Rather, it is the ordinary man. A skit at the PK conference I attended
dramatized exactly this tendency. The skit begins with a man on stage in standard golf
attire: funny hat, plaid pants, checkered shirt. As he takes a couple of practice swings, a

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dapper gentleman in a tuxedo dives in from the side, somersaults next to the golfer, draws
and then holsters a weapon at an imaginary foe, stands up and slicks back his hair. We
come to find out that these two are brothers. Initially, it is the James Bond character that
is the masculine ideal – he travels the world, sleeps with a variety of women, and has
dangerous adventures. The Bond character feels sorry for his golfing brother. But then
an interesting switch happens. By the end of the skit, it is Bond who is crying and upset
about his unfulfilled life, and his brother the golfer that is the picture of contentment.
Bond decides to give up his worldly ways and settle down to be just like his brother – the
ordinary family man.
So then it is a feminized culture, and some of the influences of feminism, that put
men as under attack, and thus in crisis, and in need of some help. Precisely what causes
the social anxiety of the late 20
th
century is what Susan Bordo (1999) terms “the double
bind of masculinity” being brought to a head. Bordo argues that American culture
expects men to be aggressive, tough, and at times violent, but expects that violence to be
carefully controlled and managed in its proper location. Using the metaphorical
distinction of “gentleman or beast,” she reveals the contradictory expectations of
American masculinity, as men (especially athletes) are encouraged to be “fiercely
competitive and aggressive in ‘manly arenas’” (p. 240), such as in defense of honor (his
own or his girlfriend/wife’s), in war, on the athletic field, court, or in the ring, but gentle,
tamed, and respectful in other venues.
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Masculinity is concretized as tough enough to

92
Messner (2004) also discusses this dual tendency in regards to sport, as male athletes are encouraged to be violent
and aggressive on the field, which often translates into violence off the field as the suppression of empathy needed to
inflict violence on the opponent during competition carries over into everyday experiences of bonding and performing
masculinity.

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defend a woman, gentle enough to treat her with respect; a blazing inferno of
promiscuous libido and desire that is doused when she says no. For Bordo, this is
problematic not because men shouldn’t behave as gentlemen (and clearly, should douse
said libido when instructed), but rather because these discourses of masculinity pit two
opposing ideals of proper masculine behavior as both possible and desirable in one male
body.
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The impossibility of being both at once is central to the masculinity crisis under
investigation. When men are told to be dominant in some areas but respectful in others;
when men are encouraged by the media and religious discourses to be the breadwinner,
the dominant presence in society, the emblem and repository of patriarchal dominance at
the same time that it becomes vogue for men to be “metrosexuals” who are fashion
conscious, wear makeup, show their “emotional” side and act as what some have referred
to as the “sensitive new age guy,” it produces a sense of anxiety through attempting to
live up to such contradictory roles. The Promise Keepers foreground this anxiety in
locating men as in crisis, and as a result in need of the Promise Keepers. Thomas Forston
(2005), current President and CEO of the Promise Keepers, writes “One doesn’t have to
look too hard to conclude that the American man today is confused. Consider how the
media inundates us with images that portray men as either weaklings or as predators to be
feared: while at the same time, society bemoans the loss of strong, godly, ‘real men’” (p.

93
The double-bind of masculinity is a dichotomy that women have historically faced in the construction of femininity,
in such binaries as virgin/whore, in which women are positioned as sexually desirable to contain the heterosexuality of
men, but who must remain chaste and pure to be seen as respectable models of femininity. Susan Douglas (1994)
discusses the “cultural schizophrenia” induced in women, American women in particular, by popular culture which
often makes these and other conflicting demands on women, such as the need to be humble, yet always beautiful, as
women who don’t take care of themselves are not properly performing femininity, while women who make a conscious
attempt at beauty may be seen as narcissistic. Sandra Lee Bartky (1991) also discusses this as a tendency in
disciplinary regimes of beauty aimed at women.

208
224). Similarly, Eldredge (2001) contends that society “can not make up its mind about
men” (p. 6) since it first tells men to be sensitive, safe, manageable, and “well, feminine,”
and then cites examples from the popular press as it wonders why all men act like boys
and wants to know where all the men are. He concludes that there is “gender confusion
never experienced at such a wide level in the history of the world” (p. 7) by men as
society has “asked them to be women” (ibid, emphasis in original).
Beyond the confusion men experience in having to manage contradictory
expectations of gender, a central concern of the Promise Keepers is the way that racism
has worked to put American society in crisis. In McCartney’s (1999b) “Call to Unity” in
Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, he describes racism as a sin against God, as Christ
calls all of His children to be united in Him (p. 154), and discusses what motivated him
(McCartney) to move against racism: his experience at a funeral. However, this attempt
at moving past the racism he had previously failed to notice is located in particular views
of black culture. He identified with the sense of loss; a sense of pain and anguish that he
“had never experienced” and from which he has never been the same (p. 152). As he
continues to discuss several other narratives McCartney repeatedly focuses on the
emotive content of African-American culture – the way they “doubled over in pain” so
great was their grief (ibid); the “rage mixed with fear” his friends felt at injustice (p. 152-
53); that the “black kids were clearly more animated…while the white players were more
subdued” (p. 153). There is a voyeuristic quality to the writing, as McCartney’s attempts
to expunge his own sense of guilt and locate the importance of challenging racism are
situated within the black community’s unique ability to feel pain because of their past.

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This pain is said to be remedied by “building bridges across the divisions that currently
separate believers” (p. 155). Here we get a glimpse of the whiteness of the PK
organization. While its current CEO and several recurring authors, speakers, and board
members are African-American, and there are a variety of races and ethnicities among
their speakers, the goal is to erase those differences in a common cause for Christ. All
Christian practice is said to be the same, and the unique experiences of minority men are
to be valued not as unique experiences that shape their experience of masculinity, but as
the vestige of individual sin that men need to overcome with the Promise Keepers.
The articulation of racism with denomination further serves to universalize the
experience of masculinity crisis. In both the Seven Promises which form the core of the
Promise Keepers mission, as well as McCartney’s (1999) essay on promoting unity,
racial reconciliation is mentioned concurrently with establishing interfaith unity. The
sixth promise is “A Promise Keeper is committed to reaching beyond any racial and
denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity” (“Seven Promises”,
n.d.), and McCartney proclaims that “Almighty God wants to bring Christian men
together regardless of their ethnic origin, denominational background or style of worship”
(p. 156).
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Both are said to be surface level differences that obscure unity through belief
in Christ, and both need to be overcome by individual men making commitments to reach
across such barriers. The unique and distinct experience of racism is equated with
potential theological conflicts that happen among various Christian denominations. Here,

94
McCartney (as cited in Lockheart 2000 and Jones and Lockheart, 1999) also makes this same linkage of
denominational and racial unity in speeches at Promise Keeper events and promotional material for the Stand in the
Gap march in 1997. Further, whenever other authors in the text Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper mention one of
the two forms of difference – racial and denominational – the other is discussed as well, implying that the two are the
same kind of difference. Race was not mentioned as a unique or particularly salient issue at the Awakening conference
in Los Angeles, or in the accompanying text.

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the resentment that a Catholic may hold for a Protestant is presented as the same as the
historical legacy of racism among people of color, or between people of color and White
Americans, which, besides being ludicrous, further normalizes race as a cosmetic
difference between the men in Promise Keepers, and one that can overcome as easily as
moderate differences in faith.
While an admirable goal to challenge the sin of racism, that challenge is located not
in institutional structures of racism, nor is it framed as a way of understanding how men
may be tempted by Satan or challenged differently due to their social location. Instead,
difference is highlighted only to be erased under the master signifier of masculinity. The
problem, for McCartney, is not that racism and classism oppress men in different ways
and produce ontological and real physical violence – as the initial appropriated narratives
may suggest – but that “So many people of color, like the friend I mentioned earlier, have
been totally turned off to the God we proclaim by our obvious lack of love” (p. 155).
Racial reconciliation is but another step in an “outbreak of revival in America” for God
(much like resolving denominational strife), a resolution of the latest crisis, and not the
particular experiences of men of color. The experience of masculinity is universalized in
its appeal to Christ, as men are urged to “call each other brother instead of always
emphasizing our differences” (p. 156).
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McCartney later asks his readers to imagine how they would feel if “a family of
another color sat next to me in church…or moved in next door” (p. 156) (along with a

95
Ironically, this mirrors some tendencies in Second Wave feminism. As discussed in the introduction, in agitating for
women’s rights and the challenge to patriarchy, organizations such as the National Organization of Women centered on
gender as the key category of analysis, often eclipsing the importance of race and class in creating differential
experiences of femininity. Histories of feminism often make the same mistake, in assuming that feminism was a
singular, and often white movement, ignoring the variety of Chicana and Black feminisms present in the 1970s (Roth,
2004).

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variety of other hypothetical examples of inter-race contact), McCartney (perhaps
unconsciously) makes two implicit assumptions. The first is that his audience is White.
bell hooks (1992) writes about how people of color generally, and African Americans in
particular, are always conscious of living in a White world due to their unique historical
experiences. The assumption that sitting next to someone of “another color” is unique
and potentially awkward situation presumes a white, universal subject who may not have
to worry about race in their daily lives, a luxury most people of color are not afforded in
the United States. Second, it assumes that anxiety or prejudice against white individuals
is on the same moral and psychological footing as that against people of color. This is
not to say that racism or violence against those constructed as Caucasian is acceptable
due to a historical legacy of racism. Rather, giving McCartney the benefit of the doubt
and assuming he is intending to speak to a variety of races, he assumes that the racism
experienced by all members of his audience is the same. Another of his hypothetical
questions, “How would I react if…my child’s teacher were a person of another race”
(ibid), implies that such a situation functions the same for a white child with a black or
Hispanic teacher as it would in the reverse. The situation in which a white child were to
be a taught by a person of color is a difference of kind, not just of degree, than the
uneasiness, racism, or anxiety that may be felt be a child of color with a white teacher.
Given that within the United States the overwhelming majority – approximately 80% - of
educators below the college level are white (Howard,2003; Saluja, Early, & Clifford,
2002), when asking his audience how they would react McCartney presumes the less
likely scenario: that it is white students encountering minority teachers. And considering

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that white culture and colonial experience has been universalized and taught as objective
“history” to children in the United States, even with a teacher of color, white children are
more likely to still receive an education in a “white American experience” that is less
threatening to their sense of self or cultural identity.
Despite the recognition that the PK membership is made up of a mix of races and
ethnicities, Promise Keeper discourse addresses a universalized White male subject, and
erases the historical specificity of masculinity crisis for men of color. Washington,
Kehrein, and King (1999), in a brief essay following McCartney’s “Call to Unity” in
Seven Promises, make an initial attempt at recognizing the difference among PK men
when they discuss how social location dramatically changes one’s experience in life.
They even go so far as to note that nostalgia has the effect of erasing different historical
experiences, as they point out that “the good old days” of the past included dehumanizing
Jim Crow laws, and that Ellis Island may evoke different memories for European
Americans than for Hispanic immigrants (p. 163).
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This is followed by five essays by
men of various races, who define themselves as black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American,
and White, which provides individual perspectives of race in relating to the larger culture.
All of these essays have some key similarities: they all discuss the past as containing
injustice, but also discuss a cultural history that has the potential of a pre-racist legacy;
none of them discuss the unique experiences of masculinity, only of race; and all of them

96
As will be discussed in the next section, nostalgia is frequently used to both criticize the past and present, as well as
to provide resources to reimagine the future, precisely the reflective nostalgia Boym describes and I argue is useful for
conservative purposes. While nostalgia is here cited as potentially problematic as a relationship to the past, it is
elsewhere used as a strategy to imagine masculinity.

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(including the introductory essay) use their essays to call for greater individual
understanding and engagement among men.
Here, the different and historically specific experiences of racism, and how the
feelings of masculinity crisis may be felt differently by those in different social locations,
are erased. The structural conditions which normalize whiteness and thus white privilege
are not only left unchallenged, but supported in some descriptions of the current cultural
crisis. Earlier it was noted that McCartney speaks of the problems of “certain segments
of the population,” and that such description lays the blame for structural conditions on
communities of color in locating racism as an individual problem. He is somewhat more
explicit later when he argues that Promise Keeper men must “pray for your community to
address the problems caused by racism. The inner cities and slums need resources to help
lift them out of total apathy. We need to dissolve the gangs” (p. 159). Here, the problems
of racism are said only to be in the inner city, articulating the “inner city” or “slums” with
people of color. Further, these problems are caused by individual apathy to the problems
of crime and gangs. Wellington Boone (1992), a black preacher,
97
is not as kind in his
assessment of the black community, as he explicitly locates the lack of faith as the
primary problem of black America. According to Boone, the black community is
committing genocide on itself, and that even though “White America has been far from

97
I highlight Boone’s race because the Promise Keepers do as well. In introducing his essay, Garey Smalley and John
Trent (1992d) note that while they expected to discuss what it meant to be a Promise Keeper and to affirm godly
masculinity, what they didn’t expect was “the testimony of an African-American pastor to touch us all so deeply” (p.
183), apparently sharing in some of McCartney’s white guilt. What is most telling, however, is the chronicle of the
“awful conditions” Boone’s childhood, including being conceived out of wedlock, raised in a non-nuclear family by his
grandparents, and having to “survive on the streets of that New Jersey ghetto” (ibid). Despite these challenges, a strong
and committed faith God led Boone to transform his life, and through his prayer and preaching, the lives of others. Not
only does this narrative further pathologize black families and articulate “ghetto life” to blackness, but in telling his
story of redemption provides both proof that the “inner-cities” can be saved in prayer, and situates Boone in an
individualistic narrative of American meritocracy, further eliding the structural conditions of racism and poverty.
Boone’s race also, to some degree, authorizes his often venomous attacks on black culture.

214
innocent of wrongdoing concerning blacks,” that if blacks continue to “insist on blaming
whites for our bondage, we will have to look to them for our deliverance” (p. 184-85).
He continues to argue that inner-city blacks (and never is the inner-city, poverty, gangs,
violence, or any other social problem associated with whites) are faltering because they
have turned to Islam, humanism, black pride and nationalism, all which are disengaging
from the real problem – “their abandonment of Jesus Christ” (p. 185). Individual
experiences of racism and a history of domination are ignored as a universal faith in
Christ is affirmed as the solution. Boone concludes that American blacks need to do
what the slaves did, and sustain themselves with a newfound faith in Jesus Christ (the
civilizing religion of white missionaries and slave owners), as it is the intrinsic quality of
black individuals and contemporary black culture that is the problem, not larger more
macro issues.
This description of black communities as pathologically criminal and in need of
individual salvation is part of a historical trend identified by Robin D. G. Kelley (1997)
as a game of the “dozens” being played with black culture. The dozens is a game
prevalent in the African American community in which participants insult the families of
others playing the game (their mothers in particular). Kelley indicates that such games
were focused more on linguistic mastery and “an effort to master the absurd metaphor, an
art form intended to entertain rather than damage” (p. 1). While the dozens may be an
instance of play and performance for marginalized communities, Kelley points to a more
damaging and systematic version, as he describes sociological representations of the
inner-city as a “cruel, high-tech game of the dozens that has continued nonstop since the

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first slave ships embarked from West Africa…images of the lazy, irresponsible Negro
endure in the form of ‘the underclass’…and ‘dysfunctional’ to name a few,” a tendency
which sets up people of color as “the thing against which normality, whiteness, and
functionality have been defined” (pp. 2-3). For Kelley, both calls for individual action
(typically conservative) or “self-help” strategies (such as the prayer suggested by Boone
and McCartney), or calls to engage in more collective action instead of individual identity
politics (typically liberal, such as the organizational calls for unity over particular
difference) function to further normalize white experience at the expense of minority
communities. In its subtle and dramatic representations of minority culture as in “crisis”
due to a cultural loss of faith in Christ, the Promise Keepers ends up reinforcing racism in
its attempts at racial reconciliation.
Thus the Promise Keepers situate men as in crisis in three primary ways. PK men
are located as in perpetual crisis as a result of their Christian identity, as Satan is always
attempting to tempt men into sin. This temptation often manifests itself in the advance of
an inappropriate femininity, one that threatens to undermine the sexual purity of the
individual body, the leadership and integrity of the home, and the moral underpinnings of
the nation. Finally, through the sin of racism, in which prejudice threatens to undermine
the transformative potential of a Church emboldened by Jesus and committed to public
outreach.

Masculine Popular Culture

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One primary impetus for the creation of Maxim was said to be in response to “a
huge untapped universe of men that weren’t being served” (Pappas, 2000, p. S1), as the
increase in political correctness has led men to suppress their “natural” male urges. An
overriding theme of such media is a desire to do away with disingenuous portrayals of
masculinity, to stop trying to get men to be something that “they are not” and instead
return to an “authentic” masculinity. The first ever “Editor’s Letter” of Maxim
proclaimed that it was for guys who are “pretty uncomplicated” and who “don’t study
their masculinity under a microscope, or worry too much about getting in touch with their
inner child” (McHugh, 1997, p. 16). Mark Golin, the second editor-in-chief of Maxim
argues in a 1999 interview that “guys know they have their inner swine rooting around in
there somewhere, and they’re dying to let it out….People say it’s a clarion call to go out
and be a pig, when really its to be a bit more honest” (Turner and Gideonse, 1999, p. 52),
a quote which comes on the heels of a discussion on how the magazine is not an attempt
to pretend feminism never happened, but rather acts as a direct response to the political
correctness and forced civility of the 1990s. This is backed up by the “Maxim
Manifesto” from the first issue which declared “It’s time to stop living the lie” as men
need to take their destinies’ into their own hands and “admit, in public, what society has
been trying to suppress for so long”: “You are guy” (Issue 1, p. 170). The theme song for
The Man Show tells men “its time to loosen those blue jeans,” and promos for the
program on G4TV.com proclaim “It’s okay to be a man again.” There is a presumed
concreteness in masculinity, as it is merely being held in check by feminism or political

217
correctness, and that the arrival of such media makes it once again acceptable to act
naturally: like men.
With such definitive purpose, then, one wonders why so much instruction is
needed. If men merely need to “be a bit more honest,” why is there such constant
education in proper masculine behavior? Though there is an air of certainty to what men
are supposed to do, an authentic masculinity residing deep in every man that is
suppressed by the overly politically correct and feminine culture, that masculinity is also
constantly under threat – from women, and from other men. Whereas the Promise
Keepers locate men within an epic battle against the Adversary, masculine popular
culture sees men more as in a series of skirmishes. To aid men in successfully navigating
the terrain of masculinity and “win” these skirmishes, masculine popular culture acts as a
beacon of certainty, providing definite contour and shape to American masculinity in
response to the change, sensitivity, and confusion produced by the latest masculinity
crisis. This confusion is further emphasized in Maxim’s initial “Editor’s Letter” when
McHugh says the magazine is giving men “what you want…more ways to improve your
life” (p. 16, emphasis in original): men both want an entertaining magazine, but also
suggestions on how to navigate a new cultural landscape. Both through direct instruction
or providing models of manly behavior, masculine popular culture acts to rhetorically
situate its audience as “authentic” men, as well as articulating the practices, beliefs, and
ideologies appropriate to such authenticity. They all signal themselves as being ‘for men’
which does more than merely identify their target audience. It indicates that they are

218
filling a space previously lacking, not only providing men with viewing/reading material,
but also securing for them a space to which they would otherwise not have access.
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The masculinity that it situates is broken, fractured. The ironic tone helps provide
stability to a constantly threatened masculinity by allowing men to laugh at the absurdity
of masculinity. David Gauntlett (2000) concurs, devoting substantial discussion to this
irony in his analysis of lad magazines such as Maxim and FHM. He argues the
“magazines really show men to be insecure and confused in the modern world, and
seeking help and reassurance even if this is (slightly) suppressed by a veneer of irony
and heterosexual list” (p, 167, emphasis in original). He later describes the function of
this irony in the magazines as a “defensive shield,” one which “sweetens the pill” of
advice because men don’t like being told what to do and so the irony makes it okay to
accept the advice. He notes that criticism of the irony in the magazines often (though not
always) “misses the point” in that advice that is given is nuanced, and the writers of the
magazine as well as its readers realize that sexism is “silly” and out of place in a modern
context. The same can be said of The Man Show, which often uses skits to dramatize this
irony, with such segments as Adam Carolla going on a romantic date with is own mother,
or Jimmy describing his visit to a strip club for “a big night of sexual frustration and
phony chit chat with women who find me pathetic” (Episode 301).
These are clearly not the superheroes of popular culture portrayed in what Susan
Jeffords (1994) refers to as the “hard body” era of the 1980s such as Rambo or the

98
Episode 303 of The Man Show explicitly targets other potential masculine media, Esquire in particular. After
noting that the “affordable” suits in Esquire are over $2,000, Adam remarks that the magazine obviously knows
nothing about “real” men, and so Adam and Jimmy have a fashion show for “regular guys.” At once a mocking
Esquire’s pretension and offering a tongue-in-cheek assessment of “normal guy’s fashion,” the show includes an old
man wearing shorts with an elastic waist and colostomy bag, the “superfan” wearing all Dallas Cowboys apparel, and a
man wearing a tracksuit.

219
Terminator. These are men who have been living in a culture that has begun to
emphasize feelings and emotions as well as increased sensitivity to racial and gender
difference, a change that was further reflected in the popular culture of the late 1980s and
early 1990s (ibid). With the Terminator becoming the Kindergarten Cop, a traditionally
aggressive masculinity seems out of place, but missed. References to older popular
culture and their iconically masculine heroes pervade masculine popular culture, as James
Bond, Evel Kneival and anything John Wayne are celebrated as lost paragons of manly
virtue. The presentation of men as broken, as continually fighting small skirmishes of
masculinity with other men and women, is part of the nostalgic yearning. The longing
for a time when TV was filled with images of “Charlie and his angels, Hogan and his
heroes, and Starsky and his hutch” (Kimmel, Episode 101), as pined for by Jimmy and
Adam in the pilot of TMS, dramatize a dissatisfaction with the present state of fractured
masculinity. Recurring references to pop culture of the past as ideal, and lacking in the
status quo, help to mobilize interpretations of the past in the present in creating a
collective memory of masculinity. Such mobilization provides space for nostalgic
masculinity to yearn for the authenticity of masculinity present before the rise of
feminine power constrained the ability of men to be dominant.
The typical man in masculine popular culture is thus not idealized as a superhero.
He is not strong, exceptionally good looking, or particularly talented at anything. He is
average. In their study of beer and liquor ads in mega sports media events, Michael
Messner and Jeffery Montez de Oca (2005) argue that this “Average Joe” quality
constructs the white male consumer as a “loser,” one who hangs out with his male

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buddies and lives a life of leisure. The male figure in this trope is a loser precisely
because he is not super wealthy, overly muscled, or dating a supermodel. He is a solidly
middle class man with disposal income and a moderate anxiety about his place in the
world as his masculinity is always potentially upset through humiliation “by their own
stupidity, other men, or worse, by a beautiful woman” (ibid, p. 1887). Messner and
Montez de Oca posit that what is unique about the ads they examine from 2002 and 2003,
in comparison to alcohol ads at other periods of masculinity crisis such as the post-World
War II era or the late 1970s, is that instead of a simple crisis/resolution narrative where
the perils of masculinity are resolved within the context of the ad, modern ads rely on
“lifestyle branding.” Advertising functions not to merely attach “a name to a product,”
but rather to create a series of images that “construct a plausible and desirable world to
consumers” that seems to “emanate” from the brand (p. 1880). The construction of men
as particular types of consumers will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 5. What is
critical to note here is the idea of images of masculinity acting to be “more literary and
evocative than simple crisis/resolution narratives,” (ibid) to emanate a lifestyle, a feeling
of masculinity as opposed to a definitive roadmap.
The loser ethos is one way to present men as in crisis, and resolution of that crisis
through relationship to other men and women. Though there is no simple resolution to
the crisis, no one ultimate act that can be taken to resolve masculinity crisis (as opposed
to the adoption of Christ as savior with the Promise Keepers), this “feeling” or sense of
masculinity produced by representing men as losers constructs the present as potentially
dissatisfying because of the additional strictures on masculinity that may situate men as

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losers. Recall from Chapter 2 that Pickering and Keightley (2006) argue that nostalgia is
such and easily commercial ploy because of its ability to appeal to us emotionally,
merging cultural conditions with individual experience. Further, Moore (2002) reminds
us that nostalgia is created within concrete historical circumstances, as “some particular
past is constructed through some engagement with what is changing, and why those
changes are not much liked” (p. 312). The likely anxiety produced by rapid social
change which is constantly a potential masculinity challenge is contrasted with an idyllic
feeling of masculinity, a sense of what men were like before they were losers. Here is
where we find a similar theme of reclamation to that of the Promise Keepers. While for
PK the desire is to reclaim a biblical masculinity that existed prior to recent cultural
crisis, for MPC it is a time of when men were men and didn’t have to worry so much
about being losers.
Though masculinity can be threatened by other men, it is both femininity and
women that represent the most potentially destabilizing force to a hegemonic masculinity
within masculine popular culture. De Beauvoir (1953) discusses how men use their
relation to women to define them as Other and solidify their sense of self. Sandra Bartky
(1991) argues that women are subject to a particular range of disciplinary practices done
with a “generalized male witness” in mind (p. 145). Given that a traditional marker of
masculinity has historically been the ability to conquer women, and ideologies of
femininity are disciplined with a male audience in mind, both idealized and disparaged
femininity, as well as relationships with women must be reframed to resolve crisis and
provide stability to masculine identity. Feminism is situated as attacking masculinity in

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the contemporary era, as increased feminine agency reduces the role of men in society,
and fosters the political correctness and sensitivity that suppresses the authentically
masculine character. Messner and Montez de Oca’s (2005) in their article on the “loser”
trope in mega sport advertisements identify a model of feminine representation wherein
feminists and other hostile women are situated as “bitches.” These are the women that
men find in their daily lives to whom they are not related. While mothers and sisters are
treated as just another member of the family, other women such as wives, girlfriends, and
feminist strangers are presented as wanting nothing more than to rob the fun out of men’s
daily lives. These women act to potentially threaten masculinity through containment of
men’s natural desires. Represented as perpetually unreasonable, these women take life
too seriously, and see sexism and chauvinism in even the minutest of details. Such
women are, in large part, to be disregarded or treated as objects of ridicule. The first
issue of Maxim includes an advertisement for its new website, including “rules women
should know” (such as simply responding “yes” if a waiter asks if everything is alright)
and “feminist-baiting” screensavers (the pictured example: “7:00 Simpsons, 7:30 Sex,
8:00, Baywatch). Later articles in Maxim include “How to talk to a feminist if you have
to” and “How to date a feminist,” both complete with boilerplate answers to questions
that use feminist slogans for the sole purpose of distracting women from the readers’
authentic masculine character which cares nothing for the feminist cause. The Man Show
includes a segment in which they try to get women to sign a petition repealing “Women’s
Suffrage,” described as a humanitarian act to protect women, complete with extended
disparagement of the one woman shown who realizes that suffrage is a woman’s right to

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vote. The references to feminism are not done in a manner suggesting overt hostility.
While clearly not portrayed in a positive light, it is the way in which feminism is made
light of that is more significant. Feminism is made the butt of jokes, as women marked
as feminists through their beliefs in gender equality are alternately ridiculed or silenced.
Since feminism is a joke, to be laughed at and nothing more, there is no need to take it,
and by extension feminism’s concerns about feminine agency, seriously. Much like the
Promise Keepers situates the rise of feminism within a narrative of masculine negligence,
masculine popular culture works to contain the agency of women not by suggesting it is
inappropriate, but that feminism has already been too successful and is now a punchline
rather than a movement with concerns to be taken seriously.
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Messner and Montaz de Oca (2005) provide a second formulation for the
presentation of women: “hotties.” With “bitches” functioning as the challenge to
masculinity, and often described as the one’s doing the castrating, one may expect hotties
to affirm that masculinity. And in a way they do. Hotties are women who appear as
“highly sexualized fantasy objects” (ibid, p. 1887), conventionally attractive women who
are not only beautiful, but have large breasts, firm buttocks, and slim stomachs and
waistlines. Messner and Montez de Oca indicate that while hotties may serve as a
validation of men’s masculinity, they also have the potential to destabilize that
masculinity by affirming men’s status as “losers” (p. 1887). With a relentless
heterosexism throughout masculine popular culture, it is hotties that have perhaps the

99
Again, like the Promise Keepers, Maxim is certainly hostile to feminism, but uses rhetorical strategies to denigrate
feminism and calls for women’s rights in more subtle ways, not only as a way to deflect criticism and perform an ironic
voice, but also as a way to reframe attention away from women and back towards men. I identify the slight differences
in focus and tone as a way of demonstrating the more complicated ways that masculine popular culture challenges
feminism than simply proclaiming it disastrous for American men (which it, of course, also does).

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greatest potential to challenge masculinity as it is they who can exert control over the
function of the penis. Both men’s inability to secure and then sleep with these women, as
well as the threat of homosexuality which can negate the desire for women in the first
place, dramatize the vulnerability of masculinity through non-use or misuse of the male
sexual organ.
Hotties are further represented as potentially challenging masculinity through
manipulating men, using male sexuality (thinking with one’s penis) to persuade men to
do things in the hope of being able to sleep with them. One of the few times women
appear as active, speaking subjects in Maxim is when women write columns on sex for
the men reading, both on how to be a better lover and how to “pick up” women. These
writers are not merely docile being who sit and wait for unrequited love. They tease the
men, using the same rough humor and mocking irony that exists in the rest of the
magazine. Women interviewed for these pieces discuss enjoying using sex as a way to
get men’s attention. The proximity to a beautiful woman is often presenting as creating
anxiety in men, as the possible embarrassment of rejection and failure acts as a
masculinity challenge.
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Episode 411 of The Man Show provides a stark example of the
imagined potential of hotties to make losers out of men. Vanessa, one of the dancers,
goes to a clothing store wearing nothing but a bikini and approaches men to ask how they
think it looks on her. The camera follows the men (3 in all) as they watch Vanessa in the
store, and when she approaches them they are immediately struck by her beauty,

100
Early in its publication, Maxim dramatized this potential anxiety by running an advice segment titled “Guy on the
Wall” in which women discussed relationships, sex, attraction, and dating in a roundtable interview format, with an
accompanying transcript. Male readers were able to “spy” on these conversations and pick up valuable tips that could
prevent future embarrassment, and overcome the lack of knowledge that may later threaten their masculinity when
confronted with a “hottie.”

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rendering the men nearly incapable of speech. After stuttering about how great she looks
in a bikini as she makes sure to call attention to her breasts, she invites the men into a
dressing room to “help her try some other things on.” She then asks the men to hold her
things while she wanders around the store, which all of them do. Men are already shown
as unable to think for themselves once around such remarkable beauty, as they all do
what they are told. Once she leaves, the camera shows men’s individual reaction,
including gratuitous crotch adjustment, and one man who smells the suit bottoms to much
laughter by the audience. After she has tried several suits on, Vanessa alternates between
trying to get the men to buy her suits for her, or shoplift them outright. She is able to
convince one man, the one who smelled the bottoms of the suits, to not only give all of
his cash to her, but also to try and steal one of the suits for her. The man is clearly
uncomfortable, but goes along with the scam anyway. All of the men in this skit are
presented as losers, unable to think for themselves (to the point of participating in crime)
or even carry on a conversation at the mere possibility of sharing physical space with
Vanessa.
The men in the audience are encouraged to laugh at the helpless men in the
segment, as the scenes selected are done so for their comedic value, in addition to the
lessons offered by the behavior of the loser exemplars. Messner and Montez de Oca
(2005) indicate that while hotties may potentially embarrass the losers, alcohol ads
reaffirm that it is okay as “losers can always manage to have another beer” (p. 1894), as
the ad sets up the product (alcohol) as the solution to this potential problem. The Man
Show reflects this tendency rather overtly, as the men in the studio audience are actually

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drinking beer during the show. Men are positioned as like the men in the sketch on some
level, as all men are located as having felt such frustrated desire, but different enough to
allow them to laugh. Vanessa is shown as an object of scrutiny, but not one that men can
possess, as she is really only showing interest in the losers to fulfill her own needs. This
sense of identification is revealed in comments on a portion of this video clip posted to
Break.com, as the poster indicates “the unsuspecting doofus” is tricked by Vanessa, but
concedes that “its not like any of us would have been any cooler in this situation” (“Man
Show Bikini Shoplifting Video”, n.d.). Other comments repeatedly call the subject of the
video a loser, taking special care to mock his sniffing of the bottoms, but also indicate
that they would have done the same thing, and lament “if only this would happen in real
life.” The sexual agency of women is highlighted as a threat to the men, but one which is
contained by locating such experiences in fantasy, as something that doesn’t happen in
“real life.” Women are positioned as threatening masculinity in one of two ways: the
“bitches” that trap men in commitment or impinge on their fun or the “hotties” that make
them look like “losers.” These threats to masculinity, potentially introducing crisis into
men’s lives are alternately contained by rendering them the source of comic relief
(bitches) or as pure fantasy as the men who attempt to engage them in real life are shown
to be out of their league, and thus not worthy of consideration (hotties). As will be
discussed in Chapter 5, women presented as “hotties" are not eliminated from men’s
worlds, but are situated as objects to be safely consumed instead of interacted with, thus
taming the potential for women to make men look, act, or feel like losers.

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While both TMS and Maxim proclaim themselves as for all men, both speak for
white, straight, middle class men. This is never said explicitly, of course, as they both
want the broadest possible consumer base. But, much like PK, masculine popular culture
universalizes white experience as representative of all masculine experience. However,
while the Promise Keepers work to explicitly foreground race, masculine popular culture
leaves race decidedly unmarked. The trope of the “average man” emphasizes this
whiteness, as even if the body in question is marked as “average” or generic,” this is
“usually in reality a white…body passing as the norm for all (Bordo, 2003, p. 34). The
discourse of both is usually couched as if it was race-neutral, and geared toward men of
all races. The non-specificity of the male subject in the text leaves race unmarked, and is
coded as white (Hall, 1996). Messner and Montez de Oca (2005) argue that the “loser
motif” itself “constructs the universal subject as implicitly white” in its focus on
primarily white men as the subject of its address (pp. 1905-06).
One way that whiteness is enforced is in the presence, or rather absence, of people
of color. Coding images that appear in both the advertisements and the features of
Maxim reveals that 30% of the people in the magazine are represented by people of color,
initially a high number for mainstream media. However, this number shrinks
dramatically when advertisements are removed from the sample, leaving us with the
illustrations and photos that go along with the text, crucial images that provide additional
context to the features with the accompanying visual representation. Without
advertisements, people of color make up approximately 10% of people shown in the
magazine. Both of the hosts of TMS are white, as are the “Uncle Phil” icon that

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accompanies the show’s title, “The Fox”, emcee of season one, all of the adult film stars
that appear, all but one of the dancers, and the show’s producer. People of color
occasionally show up in the audience, and in the “man on the street” segments, and
almost never in the filmed skits or as guests on the show (with a couple of interesting
exceptions, to be discussed below). When these images are so overwhelmingly white, it
constructs the “average guy” who is the target audience as white, naturalizing whiteness
as the “unmarked” category of masculinity. This leaves two equally unattractive
alternatives; either all masculine experience, especially experience of anxiety or crisis is
represented as being the same, or the experience of non-white “others” is marked as
different, a difference that exists outside of the pages of the magazine. This lack of
consideration for the unique situation of people of color contributes to a discourse of
post-identity politics that obscures the “influence of race on the lives of all Americans”
(Panish, 1997, p. 6), and encourages a view that American society is no longer plagued
by the ills of race.
What is perhaps more enlightening are the places where race is made salient. In
Maxim, none of the issues analyzed in the sample made race an explicit issue on its own.
Instead, the majority of people of color (84%) appeared in advertisements. Often
appearing in clothing ads, raced bodies, and black bodies in particular, were used to sell
products, to provide an aura of machismo and sexuality to images, further acting to
oversexualize men of color. Nixon (1996) describes how the masculinity of people of
color, African Americans especially, has been equated with a hypermasculinity, made
more pronounced by a “pathology of blackness” and a tendency to equate black

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masculinity with sexual prowess. If the “regular Joe” of Maxim is thus coded and marked
as white, it contributes to an eroticization of the masculinity of people of color, as white
masculinity becomes portrayed as “normal” and non-white masculinity functions as
hypermasculinity.
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The Man Show more explicitly marks white and non-white masculinity as
different, with particular reference to black masculinity. The majority of recurring non-
white characters on the show (all but one, which will be discussed shortly) are made up
of Snoop Doggy Dogg, Don Magic Juan, and other black men represented as pimps.
Snoop shows up in multiple sketches, and always as the essence of masculine cool. The
first time Jimmy and Adam meet Snoop (Episode 203) they go on a visit to his house, as
they heard he had a “fly crib.” Throughout the sketch they appear anxious and nervous,
and speak in “gangsta” accents and slang, asking to see “tha baffroom” and “tha green
room” in an apparent attempt to fit in. As Snoop turns his back, Jimmy calls Adam a fool
and tells him to not “act like an idiot.” After laying down a track of Jimmy farting into a
microphone which is looped into a beat by Snoop, they smoke marijuana with their host,
stumble around like idiots, and then leave after telling Snoop he has a “wonderful” crib,
giving Jimmy some ideas for his own home. On a later episode (406), Jimmy and Adam
attempt to learn to become pimps (literally, not figuratively), and so travel to a house
filled with black men and the Dogg Father himself, Snoop, smoking blunts in the corner.

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Of course, not all non-white masculinities function the same. Hamamoto (1998) notes that representations of Asian
male sexuality alternates between hypermasculinization and demasculinization. In particular, he argues that Asian
male sexuality is often used to establish the superiority of White sexuality, and functions as a counter to the aggressive
sexuality of blacks and Hispanics which threaten White masculinity.

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After a few key lessons in flamboyant style and slang, the hosts again leave stoned and
awestruck.
In this series of sketches, blackness is exoticized as Other, mysterious, and
possessing of a supernatural cool that escapes our white hosts. They attempt to mimic
what they set up as black dress, style, and manner of speech in order to access the
masculinity that seems so effortless for Snoop and his pimp friends. Worried about being
seen as “uncool” by Snoop, the loser motif reappears as Jimmy and Adam’s masculinity
is threatened by the certainty of Snoop and the other black men. The black men have the
attitude and the ability to relate to women in such a way that they are not threatened by
the same things that Jimmy and Adam are. This serves two ideological functions. First,
blackness is again pathologized as Other and hypersexual.
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Second, black masculinity
is marked as distinct from white masculinity in its naturalness and status as not being
threatened by the white men in the room. This then locates black masculinity outside of
the loser motif, and thus not in crisis. It is only white masculinity that is fragile and in
need of salvation, obscuring the racist undertones of such assumptions of black
masculinity, as well as the privilege the structures white masculinity.
In masculine popular culture, men are also constantly in crisis. Whether it be
from other men who could reveal their loser ethos through superior masculine

102
This further contributes to a discourse in which difference generally, but blackness in particular is marked as exotic
and more interesting than whiteness, not only marking difference, but also in situating whiteness as “average” and
“normal” for the exotic character of blackness to be measured against. Herman Gray (1994) indicates that historically
images of black men as being “more cool” than whites abound in controlling images of black masculinity, as whites
appropriated avante garde and jazz cultures after seeing dominant “white culture” as fixed and boring. Similarly, bell
hooks (1992) in her chapter “Selling Hot Pussy” writes about the condition of black female sexuality as not only
exoticized and standing in to represent the wildness of black sexuality, but also as a way to project white desire and
voyeurism onto black women, which both constructs white feminine sexuality as “unexotic,” boring even, but also
which presents whiteness as purity, and restraint, and black women as the epitome of the fallen woman in their natural
sexuality.

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performance (both other white men who are “cooler” than they are or men of color who
are “naturally” superior) or women who can alternately seek to make them something
they are not (bitches) or embarrass them in their attempts at masculine conquest (hotties),
white, straight men need to continually be on their guard against those who would make
them less than real men.

Conclusion

The anxiety created by the crisis of masculinity brought on by an untenable
masculinity and the threat of femininity leads to a frame of acceptance maintained by a
rhetoric of victimhood in which men are positioned as in a position of subordination in
relation to dominant culture. This rhetoric functions to open a space for discourses of
masculinity to challenge the marginalization of men through recourse to tropes of
victimization instead of superiority. This same tendency has been alternately described
by others as an “identity politics of the dominant” (Robinson, 2000) and a politics of
resentment (Balmer, 2000), brought on by a sense of victimization (Messner and Montez
de Oca, 2005) or betrayal (Faludi, 1999) of white masculinity. As Messner and Montez
de Oca (2005) argue, men that are the target of the loser trope are “caught between the
excesses of a hypermasculinity that is often discredited and caricatured in popular
culture” and the advancement of women, people of color, and sexual minorities (p. 1906),
a position in which the traditional ways of establishing masculinity are framed as unfit for
a modern context. The sense of nostalgic alienation from such models of masculinity is
pervasive in both MPC and PK, as men realize they cannot measure up to such images

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even though they still hold such classic figures as role models. The examples discussed
earlier in this chapter of the “golfer” skit at the Awakening conference (in which the
Bond figure is the one shown to be ultimately unfilled in his masculinity in comparison to
his “average” family man brother), Maxim’s reference to men’s expectation of being such
a James Bond figure, and The Man Show’s “Museum of Annoying Guys” (which include
hyper-masculine or “cool” men) evidence the location of men between the two poles
described by Messner and Montez de Oca. Men are lambasted in the popular press for
not living up to their masculine attributes, while at the same time encouraged to abandon
those attributes in an ornamental culture. The response is creation of separate enclaves of
masculinity – the conference, the magazine, the program – as a way to respond to the
victimization of men at the hands of culture.
In writing about representations of white masculinity in crisis in the 1980s, Sally
Robinson (2000) argues that portraying such reactions by white men as merely
“backlash” oversimplifies struggles over what gets to count as “normative” in American
culture. In particular, Robinson wishes us to see that there is not so much a “singular,
pitched battle between the white man and his various others,” but instead a constant
struggle over normativity, one which is “constantly under revision,” as it “shifts in
response to the changing social, political, and cultural terrain” (p. 4). She points to an
“identity politics of the dominant,” whereby white masculinity uses similar strategies to
movements fighting for recognition or status through marking difference and making it
salient as a political rallying point. Thinking of white masculinity as always “unmarked”
elides the ways that the “marking” of white masculinity is used to locate it in a field of

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struggle over cultural priority, as the power to represent the “normative” must be
constantly “rewon” (ibid). This move to constantly “resecure” cultural priority is
evidenced in the framing of masculine identity as a process throughout PK and MPC
literature; readers need a subscription to the magazine to read new issues, the tone of
Maxim and The Man Show is a familiar “welcome back”, providing the appearance of a
regular meeting, Promise Keeper men are to go to conferences every year, not just once,
and rededicate themselves to Christ, as well as re-read PK texts for motivation and
inspiration. As masculinity is continually in crisis, it needs to be continually redone.
Robinson (2000) later explains “the reality of a particular crisis depends less on hard
evidence of actual social trauma or do-or-die decision-making than on the power of
language, of metaphors and images, to convincingly represent that sense of trauma and
turning point” (p. 10). If white masculinity is to remain the dominant mode of social
identity, it must “negotiate its position within the field of identity politics, white men
must claim a symbolic disenfranchisement, must compete with various others for cultural
authority bestowed upon the authentically disempowered, the visibly wounded” (p. 12).
The rhetorical power of locating men as “in crisis” is the constant deferral of
definite resolution, as the “perpetual crisis” of masculinity also serves to center “attention
on dominant masculinity” as whether or not men are “actually” in crisis is a moot point
when masculinity is able to present itself as in crisis (p. 11). Thus, while we may “sneer
at the white male victim as the latest ruse of a white supremacist patriarchy under attack”
(p. 12), the effects of such a rhetorical move are profound indeed. As Stuart Hall (1996)
indicates, the identification with dominant representations of identity is a construction,

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something that is always “in process” and thus never completed (p. 2). The articulation
with the subject has to be continually redone, and the subject is repeatedly encouraged to
identify through various venues such as culture, school, the law, and politics. Heath
(2003), in referencing the Promise Keepers, argues “…social changes among groups that
hold a privileged, vulnerable position are often attempts to rehabilitate that position” (p.
439), and that the Promise Keepers do just that as they resist things usually marked as
“unmasculine” in dominant culture. Examination of the particular rhetorical strategies of
MPC and PK allow us to see how men are encouraged to respond to their “victimization”
and rehabilitate their position as men to secure masculine identity.
This erasure of privilege also works to leave whiteness unprobelmatized. The
address of the discourses of postfeminism present a picture where differences in the
experiences of racial and sexual minorities as well as the working class are effaced in
place of an image of female equality and male dystopia. Feminism has either served
these women well, or done more harm than good, despite structural inequalities that still
remain: institutionalized patriarchy, racial and sexual oppression, and a host of other
social ills that leave the goals of feminism as unrealized. The Promise Keeper’s focus on
individual accountability as resolution to racist politics obscures not just the structural
nature of racism, but the institutional privilege of whiteness. This universalizing of the
masculine experience is made explicit in the unification drive as PK attempted to reach
out to non-white men in the late 1990s, urging all men to unite based on their shared
masculinity (McCartney, 1992b, 1999b), as well as one of the seven promises being
explicit about the need for PK men to reach “beyond any racial and denominational

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barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity” (Seven Promises, n.d.). Despite the
focus on how men may experience culture differently as racism is linked to different
experiences of masculinity (Claus, 1999; Cooper, 1999; Fong, 1999; Kehrein, 1999;
Miranda, 1999; Washington, Kehrein, and King, 1999), the crisis of masculinity is
represented as uniform, and successfully overcome by the call to unity based on shared
humanity, and not individual perspective. We see a similar trend in masculine popular
culture, though it is less obvious. Lacking the specific move to racial reconciliation,
Maxim and The Man Show universalize masculine experience in saying that they are
merely the “Man” show or the maxim for “men,” the presumption being that all men
would desire the same things, and thus be appealed to equally. Masculine popular
culture’s ostensibly “race neutral” appeal to men actually situates men of color either as
objects of white fascination or as not any different as any other masculinity.
In marking masculinity in crisis, it is really about marking a white masculinity;
when the appeal to the audience of both PK and MPC situate men as all same based on
masculine experience, it also furthers the normalization of the white body as normative.
As the citizen is assumed to be a white masculine body, in constructing a politics of
resentment mobilized around masculine identity it obscures the ways that raced and
sexualized bodies experience crisis differently, and universalizes white experience as
masculine experience. Men of color are urged to unite around their gender, forsaking the
bonds to be forged amongst racial communities with women on the basis of shared
oppression which has proved critical to the success of movements for racial equality
throughout American history (Swomley, 1997, p. 6). Further, it represents an “ongoing

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possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 2006; Messner and Montez de Oca, 2005).
The articulation of whiteness with masculinity naturalizes notions of while male
superiority and inhibits considerations of race. Racism thrives when it is left unmarked,
and the identification of universal masculinity with whiteness not only presents men of
color in crisis with limited resources to challenge racism as well as masculinity crisis, it
further acts to justify white anger in rallying around a masculinity that is supposed to be a
given.
Though men initially locate the sense of failure in self, as it is men who gave up
their roles in culture or who have been acting like losers, it is the identification of
femininity as the problematic characteristic. The expression of deep seated masculine
anxiety is produced by increased feminine power and the loss of white privilege is made
manifest in the identification of the cause of crisis. Burke (1989) argues that one way to
maintain frames of acceptance when they are under attack is through casuistic stretching,
when “one introduces new principles while theoretically remaining faithful to old
principles” (p. 229), as new challenges and impieties are situated within the culturally
familiar. Nostalgic masculinity works to identify the feminizing influences of culture as
the culprit of crisis. Crisis is resolved by introducing new principles (the revaluation of
masculinity, and its “acceptance of feminism”) while remaining faithful to the old
(masculinity as privileged). By attacking the femininity of men in causing crisis instead
of the femininity of women as evidence of inferiority, it initially appears to be in line
with feminist demands for female agency. However, it is really about containing female
agency and power. The feminization of culture is described as happening concomitantly

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with the rise of feminism, as it was the latter’s increase in feminine agency that produces
the former, a culture where men are no longer in charge. This casuistic stretching allows
feminism to be the scapegoat for masculine anxiety without directly calling it out, and
allows for subtle denigrations of feminine agency as a strategy of creating masculine
stability. Masculinity is stretched to account for new feminine power, either being
responsible for it or encouraged to find the humor in it, instead of challenging how
masculinity functions or is to be imagined.
Such a casuistic stretching fits in well with the postfeminist context in which
nostalgic masculinity finds itself. Much as Bonnie Dow (1996) and Sarah Projansky
(2001) worry about postfeminism and commodity feminism’s potentials to preclude a
feminist identity in women through the commercialization of feminist politics as lifestyle
instead of politics, as well as pitting a feminine identity against a feminist identity,
nostalgic masculinity works to resolve masculine crisis through a rhetoric that situates
feminism as having gone too far in its move to liberate women, and reestablishes
masculine authority through the delegitimation of feminine agency.
A Maxim article on “gender theft” provides a stark example of the relationship
between nostalgic masculinity, rhetoric of masculine victimhood, and postfeminsim. In
“Women Behaving Manly” (n.d.), the authors describe a phenomenon whereby women
have been “brainwashed” by a generation of “we’re all the same” gender theory, and so
have begun to invade traditionally masculine preserves. Men no longer have time to be
“just guys” with the friends as the “guy’s girl” will always be there ready to enjoy
historically masculine pursuits. These women are evidence of a “nation in crisis” that

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leaves men in need of emotional rescue. Postfeminist author Christina Hoff Sommers,
author of The War Against Boys is quoted at length, bashing a hard-line feminism that
“wants to deny that men and women are different and insist that we fully integrate,” and
challenges men to “resist pressure to forfeit their guy time by including women”
(paragraph 7). The article concludes with its “Hope for the Future” in which men are
said to be acceptance of the “basic premise of feminism,” an acceptance that is threatened
as women invade male spaces and decrease male bonding time (echoing Brad Stine, the
PK comedian’s claim that men need their own space in modern culture, spaces such as
the conference). The article ends by reminding men that “gender theft isn’t a victimless
crime. It affects the most vulnerable members of society: you” (last paragraph). This has
all the making of nostalgic masculinity in a scant 16 paragraphs: men are in crisis
because increased feminine agency is precluding masculine space and identity as
feminism/femininity runs amuck, a worry that did not exist in the “past,” but that
provides hope for a better future as long as men take the individual action to have “the
courage to call bullshit on the trend” (last paragraph). And while the authors of the piece
will surely point to the ironic tone of the article in defense, it is the locating of feminine
agency as a nuisance instead of a productive aspect of society that is most troubling.

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Chapter 4:
Act Like A Real Man!
Nostalgic Masculinity as Rhetorical Strategy

I need to make myself a plan, cause I don’t want to end up an angry man. Looking in the
past and thinking, “Damn, 40 years old with nothing in my hands” What you want can
slip like sands if you don’t respect and understand, what’s been put out in front of you…
The future looks much brighter than those bad yesterdays. Not saying it was so bad, but
tomorrow’s another day.

- Audio Bullys “Get Myself on Track”

The camera pans over the audience of enthusiastically hollering men (and a
moderate amount of more subdued women) drinking beer; women wearing short, tight
spandex shorts and tops dance like cheerleaders on raised platforms, in the aisles of the
seats, and behind the cameras near the stage; a man known only as “The Fox” plays the
piano and raises a glass of beer to toast the viewer as they enter the mock living room
stage for the show; our intrepid hosts of The Man Show (TMS), Jimmy Kimmel and
Adam Carolla, enter through doors to the rear of the stage as a sign above the stage
demands “Clap you bastards!”; finally, they wave to their adoring audience, and take
their places at center stage. Adam takes a loving look over the crowd and yells “Settle
down! Settle down you animals!” The audience continues to yell and applaud as the
hosts attempt to rein them in to start the show.
This beginning is not atypical for The Man Show, but it is significant. While most
live action, hosted shows speak to their audience this program is a bit different. Despite
the fact that there are women in the studio audience and women watching at home, the
men are the primary addressees of the hosts, the dancers on the program, and even The

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Fox. Women on the program are frequently an afterthought in terms of being addressed
as potential participants in the program. This is no accident. After all, the show is
supposed to be a place “where men come together” (The Man Show, n.d.), and thus
outside the control or even the presence of women. This gender specific address is
critical to the rhetorical import of the program, as addressing the men in the audience
specifically is one rhetorical strategy for resolving masculinity crisis in the creation of a
space and a show just for men.
The Man Show is not unique in this regard. Maxim and other masculine popular
culture use a similar rhetorical style to hail the men in their audience. This is uniquely
ironic given that 20% of Maxim’s readership is typically women (Hymowitz, 2008), as
was 30% of the audience for The Man Show (Kiger, 2000). Women are mentioned,
examined, discussed, put on display, and reminisced about, but never addressed. We see
a similar pattern in the Promise Keepers (PK). This is to be expected given that the group
explicitly targets men as its primary audience, and, in fact, specifically excludes women
from its conferences in order to create an “all-male environment” that is said to be
necessary to allow men to truly open themselves up to the conference experience.
Though the men in PK are said to have failed the women in their lives in some way, the
women themselves are only discussed as objects in writings, conferences, and mailings,
not as subjects. Women are to be a critical component of the men in PK’s lives, but are
to be absent as subjects from their primary texts.
This is not to imply that masculine popular culture or the Promise Keepers are not
about women. As discussed in Chapter 3, the gendered discourses of both PK and MPC

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discuss, describe, and deploy representations of women and conceptions of femininity in
particular and strategic ways. It is in part the discussions of women and femininity that
are needed to situate American men as in crisis. Further, as will be elaborated on further
in this chapter, conceptions of proper masculine behavior are just as often about not
acting feminine/like a woman as much as they are about how to act like a man. Women
are a fundamental part of the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture; they are
just not addressed as an essential portion of the audience. In fact, nostalgic masculinity
as a rhetorical strategy makes calls for men to give up or stop acting feminine, as well as
describing an ideal femininity as one that relinquishes its hold on masculine space or
masculine behaviors. Men and women are encouraged to relate to each other in
particular ways, as some relationship behaviors are signaled as appropriate (for example,
the Promise Keeper edict that women submit to their husband’s leadership) or
inappropriate (as when The Man Show or Maxim suggests that women are invading
masculine arenas such as sports, areas in which there should be no interaction between
men and women). As this chapter will argue, the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture make use of rhetorical strategies that make the various texts (as well as
representation of various controversies, challenges, and cultural objects within those
texts) appear not to be about women and/or femininity when they frequently are. Further,
sexual politics are openly and continuously highlighted, as the conceptions of both
masculinity and femininity are relentlessly heteronormative in both the Promise Keepers
and masculine popular culture, where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered identity is

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presented as a (curable) sin against God in PK, and a blasphemous offense against
masculinity in MPC.
103

Nostalgic masculinity is not merely about masculinity, or even gender. Rather,
nostalgic masculinity also produces discourses of whiteness and nationhood that are
inextricably linked to cultural conceptions of masculinity. Both the Promise Keepers and
masculine popular cultures universalize masculinity as an identity category, constructing
notions of proper masculine behavior for all men, regardless of race or ethnicity. As
discussed in Chapter 3, the Promise Keepers explicitly, and masculine popular culture
implicitly, present themselves as equally available to all men while relying on ideologies
of gender that are raced, highlighting white racial identity as the norm and thus the
standard for masculinity. The rhetorical strategies used to resolve the crisis under
investigation place men as in crisis equally, thus masking the ways in which racial
privilege structure the experience of crisis, and what it means to achieve “stability.”
Further, the rhetorical positioning of the members of the Promise Keepers and the
consumers of Maxim and The Man Show as “ordinary guys” obscures the ways in which
the “ordinary male” is also quintessentially the American male. Bound up in notions of
masculinity are discourses of national identity, as the nostalgia for a stable masculinity is
also nostalgia for a particular vision of what it means to be an American. Despite the
worldwide reach of both PK and MPC, their iterations in the United States bare a
particularly nationalistic character.

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The heteronormativity of masculine popular culture is further gendered. While sexual relationships or attraction
between men is located as a sin against masculinity, homosexual relationships between women are not as vigorously
contested. Lesbianism is instead presented as an avenue for masculine voyeurism, as the intimate contact between
women is oft discussed as a male fantasy assumed to be typical and universal. The naturalizing of lesbianism as
“typical” male fantasy further enforces this heteronormativity as all men are represented as sexually excited by sexual
contact between women, implying that all men are straight.

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Suffused with an ideology of rugged individuality and Horatio Alger inspired
meritocracy, nostalgic masculinity presents its ideal masculine figure as the common man
who with enough hard work and dedication can overcome the current crisis and reclaim
masculine stability. The fiercely nationalistic tone of Maxim and The Man Show
legitimate certain performances as not only properly masculine, but properly American,
furthering the ideological and psychological baggage associated with remaining in crisis
and not living up to a masculine ideal befit for the “greatest country on earth.” The
Promise Keepers locate men as not only in the midst of the gender crisis, but further
indicate that there is an intricate relationship between the contemporary crisis in
masculinity and the social decay and deterioration of American values and hopes; in this
formula, the resolution of one crisis (masculinity) is central to the resolution of the other
(American society). Such nationalistic understandings of masculinity also serve to
further mask the differential experience of race within the American experience, as
uniting under the banner of American masculinity perpetuates ideologies of meritocracy
and universal masculine experience while ignoring the structural barriers to equal
participation in such a masculinity (Berlant, 1997; Wiegman, 1995).
Thus, this chapter focuses on the ways in which the search for an authentic and
genuine masculinity through recourse to nostalgic images, representations, and concepts
of masculinity construct gender, race, national, and sexual identities, and the
performances appropriate to those identities to resolve the masculinity crisis of the late
20
th
century. Situating men as under threat from the advances of feminism and identity
politics, nostalgic masculinity offers a diagnosis of contemporary crisis and proposes

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treatment through using masculine resources, practices, and tropes of the past. Chapter 3
dealt with nostalgic masculinity as a framing strategy, one that situated masculinity (and
frequently all of American culture) as in crisis as a result of femininity and feminism, as
well as raced bodies and other masculinities. As a framing strategy, nostalgic
masculinity indicates the loss of a space for American masculinity, and thus the need for
tactical action to resolve crisis. In framing the crisis as a result of an aggressive feminine
culture, nostalgic masculinity sets the context for the emergence of the Promise Keepers
and masculine popular culture, and explains the necessity for that emergence. Nostalgic
masculinity as a rhetorical strategy, then, defines, encourages, and disciplines men as to
how to act within a context of crisis. Whereas nostalgia as a framing device indicates the
need for action and clarifies the problem of femininity, as a rhetorical device it produces
the possibility of action, the ability to challenge the feminization that led to crisis, and
constructs a strategy to reestablish the sense of place lost by the onset of crisis.
If men are in crisis and left in uncertain social situations, then they seem to be
asking the question: What do real men do? Both the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture answer the question by saying “They act like men are supposed to,” and
use recourse to history, memory, and nostalgia to concretize and legitimate their
suggestions, though their specific suggestions differ. Both are nostalgically masculine
for a period of authentic masculinity that existed before – but the operation of nostalgia
as a rhetorical strategy functions differently to motivate different responses, and indeed
different consumer contexts. The Promise Keepers use metaphors of war and sport to
suggest that real men “play hard” and “fight” for their homes, their families, their

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countries, and their soul. Real men act like God intended them to, in Christ’s image and
as accountable servant leaders. Maxim and The Man Show, use a strategy of irony to
suggest that real men drink beer, ogle women, avoid their wives or domestic
responsibility, and idolize the “badasses” of their cultural past. Real men are “losers”
who are not in need of women to sustain their masculine identity, but rather can ignore
women to reclaim masculine space. With the frame set and the men positioned, what
each cultural form does is unique, and why they appear so wildly disparate. This
dissertation does not argue that PK and MPC are identical. Rather, the argument is that
nostalgia functions in very similar ways as a framing, rhetorical, and commercial
strategy, in response to a period of cultural instability and crisis. Promise Keepers and
masculine popular culture use nostalgia differently, and with different intents; when
examining the differences between the two, we get a sense of the variety of ways in
which nostalgia is articulated.

Promise Keepers

Burke (1970) argues that religion is at its most basic rhetorical because “religious
cosmogonies are designed…as exceptionally thoroughgoing modes of persuasion. To
persuade men towards certain acts, religions would form the kinds of attitude which
prepare men for such acts” and that “the religious always ground their exhortations (to
themselves and to others) in statements of the widest and deepest possible scope,
concerning the authorships of men’s motives” (p. v). Burke contends that religion
provides a “good instance of terministic enterprise in general” as religious terminology is

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a way of relating humans to God through language; theology is made up of words, and
thus for Burke is “preeminently verbal” (vi). As theology seeks to explain and relate the
concept of God, the ultimate subject, though words about God, language seeks to size up
our experience in its totality, to completely express the meaning or motive of a given
situation. For Burke, then, we secularly seek out God terms, terms so ultimate and
radical that they cannot be countered by another word as they thoroughly relate our
meaning.
In evangelical culture generally and the Promise Keepers in particular, the God
term is, in fact, God.
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The rhetorical thrust of the Promise Keepers and the prescription
for proper gendered behavior are set within an evangelical narrative of the inerrancy of
the Bible as authoritative text, personal accessibility to God, and redemption through
being “in the world” but not “of it” as believers work to save not only their souls, but the
souls of others through spreading the Word of God. Discourses of gender have a
particular contour, shape, and function within evangelical narratives precisely because
they are drawn from both Biblical authority and personal experience. As noted earlier,
the personal tone of the Promise Keepers is uniquely more powerful when articulated to
an individual man’s story; this is all the more true when that man is placed within the
larger narrative of humanity found within the Bible. With the Promise Keepers,
masculinity functions as a God term in the same sense that God does in evangelical

104
Colleen Kelley (2000) elaborates in discussing why NOW was unable to discursively compete with PK in saying “it
is difficult if not impossible to rhetorically surpass a vision derived almost entirely from ‘god terms’…which
themselves originate in the Highest Authority and the ultimate source of His Word: the Bible… it is difficult to dispute
that authority, as it seems to originate in the word of God itself” (p. 231).

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culture generally. As will be elaborated below, acting in properly masculine ways is not
a performative choice by men, but rather the result of the Word of God.
The Promise Keepers are rhetorical in their very nature. John Bartkowski (2004)
elaborates in noting that religious artifacts such as sermons and hymns are “made
possible by bringing seemingly ‘static’ symbols (words) to life through the strategies of
rhetoric, oratory, and musical composition” as these strategies act to “set new meanings
in motion…. these nascent meanings themselves often feed into new strategies of action”
(p. 35). The rhetoric of the Promise Keepers is intimately bound to its gender ideology
because of the way men are situated within the dual narratives, and encouraged to adopt
“new strategies of action.” They must understand themselves as “Christian men,” not as
men or as Christians. Gendered behavior is directly related to performance of
spirituality, both through being a proper Christian man in acting masculine in God’s
image, as well as being a proper Christian man in working to fight Satan and redeem
one’s self, family, neighbors, culture, and nation. Nostalgic masculinity as a rhetorical
strategy works to articulate discourses of gender to the individual men in the Promise
Keepers, creating a space for that discourse to resonate with men in the performance of a
properly masculine identity.
What is initially striking is the vagueness and ambiguity with which proper
masculine behavior is described and encouraged.
105
At the conference I attended, guest
speaker John Tesh said that PK was for men who were bad, or could be bad, (effectively

105
That is not to say that there are no specific edicts or commands to be a godly man; in fact, as noted before, one
hallmark of PK is its instructional nature. However, while specific steps are elaborated, the steps themselves are vague
– things such as “recommit to Christ” are listed as steps, though particular actions are not often listed. At other times,
hypothetical men, or fictional men used as examples, engage in specific actions, but the men of the Promise Keepers
reading the text are rarely given specific instructions.

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including all men in PK’s potential membership) and urged those in attendance to take
“small, measured steps” in order to begin and sustain the transformation. The creation of
an identity as a man of integrity centered in Christ is repeatedly referred to generally as a
process: at the conference, in the accompanying book, in 7 Promises, and McCartney’s
initial volume What Makes a Man. Again, McCartney (1992b) is very clear about the
need for men to begin this process:
We have a unique opportunity today, the chance to stand up, be counted, and give
men who have chosen a different road an alternative before it’s too late. We need
to recapture the spiritual climate in our own homes and cultivate a heart for other
men…we can’t just worry about our own homes. We’ve got to foster regard and
concern for the homes around us. Together we must stand up and be counted for
Almighty God. To accomplish all this, to till the rough ground of this hostile
culture and plant some new seeds for Christ, each of must commit to model what I
call the three non-negotiables of manhood: integrity, commitment and action (11).

Even here in McCartney’s clarion call to the men of the Promise Keepers, he speaks in
broad platitudes, colorful metaphors, and generalizations. Committing oneself to Jesus
Christ and engaging in appropriate worship are constantly championed as critical for men
to truly embrace servant manhood (McCartney, 1992a; Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, and
Richardson, 2005; McCartney, Laurie, & Hayford, 1999), yet the difference in processes,
between committed worship and non-committed worship, is only ever located as the
difference between the man who goes to church and follows a religious regimen
(committed) and the man who thinks he can do it on his own (non-committed). The
purpose of the Awakening Experience is said to be “to connect with God, hear from Him”
so that “in time you will gain clarity on your purpose in life so that you can live
awakened and alert as you move forward” as fellow men help each other “tap into God’s
heart” (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, and Richardson, pp. 13-14). Promise Keepers are

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encouraged to “pour Christ’s life in me into others, beginning with my wife and kids…”
(ibid, p. 133).
Properly masculine behavior is frequently represented instead of directly discussed.
Throughout the texts this is done in narratives of “ordinary men,” both fictional and real,
who made difficult choices to follow Christ, changed their lives, or embarked on new and
unexpected journeys. At the conference it was done using live action skits and video
clips whose central characters were faced with challenges (such as a boxer who is
fighting Satan) which are resolved through maintaining faith. Men are to be accountable,
practice integrity, reinvigorate the Church, protect the home, and lead their families; yet,
despite the practical advice for realizing the portions of their life on which they need to
work and improve, more often than not it is overly broad and abstract actions such as
“support” “commit” “hold accountable” and “serve” that are suggested to realize the full
potential of living as a godly man. The often imprecise nature of suggestions has two
primary effects, both to be further detailed. The first is that it allows a wider potential
articulation to individual men in PK; the general platitudes and litany of common
experiences creates a broad base for men to see themselves in the PK narratives. Second,
it allows those ideologies to be identified with a variety of different consumer goods,
products, and actions, as long as they are associated with the general PK brand.
What is unequivocally specific and concrete is that to reclaim their masculinity
and truly live as men of integrity, men need to give themselves over to Christ as savior.
The abstract nature of the steps men need to take to achieve such a masculinity makes
more sense when surrendering to Christ is viewed as the pre-requisite for a godly

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masculinity. If it has been the turning away from God that lead to crisis in the first place,
then once men accept Christ into their hearts and become saved they will naturally begin
to act in godly ways. Though constant vigilance must be maintained due to the ever-
present threat of the Adversary, living an “awakened” life in the service of Christ
provides the primary form of guidance as Christ will lead men to make the right decisions
once they open their heart to Him.
Christ as both savior of men’s souls and model of masculinity functions perfectly as
a God-term for a Christ-like masculinity. The standard question of “What Would Jesus
Do” is reframed as more than a statement of Christian faith in action. Not only is Christ
repeatedly described as manly Himself, but with Jesus as masculine model following his
example is also a question of proper masculine behavior. Joesph Stowell (1999) explains
that to be a man of righteousness, Promise Keepers need to follow the model of Jesus as
he recounts a story of a time when he initially felt too busy to minister to someone in
need on a flight to Toronto. He regained his path in saying to himself “Stowell, I thought
you were a man of the Word!...Well, what do you think Jesus would do if He got on this
plane?” (p. 25). A man of the Word, a righteous man, would of course follow the model
of Christ and minister to one in need. Both God the Father (Ford, 1992; Oliver, 1992a;
Smalley and Trent, 1992a) and Jesus Christ (Smalley and Trent, 1992a) are said to be
men who keep their promises, and thus the ultimate Promise Keepers. Promise Keepers
and speakers are said to “speak to men’s hearts and give them a vision for living a life
after the ultimate Man of all men: Jesus Christ” (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, and
Richardson, 2005, p. 11). Following Christ and engaging in committed worship are said

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to lead to “a life of power” as men who worship become “filled with the mightiness of
Jesus” (Hayford, 1999, p. 9). At the Awakening conference, Bob Reccord challenged the
men in the audience to commit to Christ and show him “what a man on a mission does”
(Field Notes). At the same conference, emcee Reggie Daubs issued an alter call, as those
attending were encouraged to go down to the front of the arena and proclaim their faith in
Jesus. To goad them into coming down, Reggie challenged the audience to be “real men”
and come down to dedicate or rededicate themselves to Christ. A traditionally
hegemonic challenge to masculinity – for men to stop acting feminine and instead
become “real men” – is here reframed. The courage and aggression usually associated
with machismo is directed towards a committed faith in Christ.
What men need to do, then, is navigate the ambiguity and uncertainty of
contemporary times with a committed faith in Christ. Christ functions as a model for
ideal masculine performance, ensuring that men act in ways that are also in line with
what God has intended. And in giving themselves over to Christ, men do not only
solidify their faith and place in God’s kingdom; they also take strides to “reclaim” their
masculinity. This idea of reclamation is important, as it is a strategy which works to
contain the advances of feminism. As discussed in Chapter 3, while some of the more
vitriolic texts and speakers may rant and rail against feminism, the large majority of PK
discourse is ambiguously positive or neutral about it. Femininity in the guise of women’s
greater status and feminism’s influence is located as the source of men “giving up” their
role in the home, family, and society. Men are said to have left their role open, leaving a
spiritual void in culture and the home, a void that is said to have opened concomitantly

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with the greater success and opportunity of women in the workplace and society. Facing
such a void then requires but one thing of men: to understand their women’s new found
success, and then lead the family because of that success. The spiritual void left in the
home and culture is to be filled by men, thereby also filling the hole within men’s souls.
The location of the rise of women’s agency in a narrative of masculine failing
through abdicating leadership in the home works to contain feminism as it creates a
rhetorical space for men to challenge the gains of feminism as a way to secure their
masculinity. Gary Smalley and John Trent (1992) dramatize this possibility in writing
about how men can live up to the expectations of their wives and best meet their needs
through demonstrating independence and self-confidence, two things that wives “depend
on their husbands” for and which are the “critical in the basic building block of the family
known as marriage” (p. 61). Smalley and Trent continue by telling the story of a man
who acted to passive at home and at work, and let his wife rule his life.
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This man
needed to be assertive, and reclaim his role in the home. They conclude their essay by
noting that in taking these proper steps to show independence and confidence, men will
have that confidence transfer over to their wives, and “help her feel a similar self
confidence. In turn, it also gives her the security to allow her husband to lead the family”
(p. 68, emphasis added). In taking back their role, and showing masculine self-
confidence, men can ease the minds of the women in their lives so that those women no

106
Here is an example of feminism not being directly identified, but implied. The woman in the story is not political,
nor is she said to be a feminist. However, the overaggressive wife who leaves her husband weak and downtrodden is
reminiscent of cultural stereotypes of the “ball busting feminists” and is in line with some of the more outspoken
evangelical authors, such as Cole, who say this is precisely what results if we let feminism go unchecked.

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longer feel the pressure to lead the family and can allow their husbands to do it for
them.
107

Chapter 3 discussed the articulation of the crisis in the family to national crisis, as a
lack of proper masculine leadership in the home has put the whole country in danger, as
America is “sick and dying” (Boone, 1999, p. 12) because men do not have an
understanding of the “great power within them” (ibid, p. 17). Men are implicated not
only in the lack of proper masculine guidance in the home and culture at large, but also in
its resolution. Hayford (1999) implores men to take leadership roles, to respond to God’s
call to lead as Moses did and to know God because families “need a husband and dad
who is regularly being imbued with God’s love, understanding, and gentleness” (p. 7).
Much as the ideology of liberalism prevalent in American mythology focuses on the
ability of the rugged individual able to succeed against dramatic odds, the narrative of the
properly Christian American male is able to revive their country through individual
action. If, as discussed before, following Christ and engaging in committed worship is
properly masculine behavior, then the wider cultural crisis is resolved through the action
of individuals acting in concert.
Here, there is a blending of the public and private spheres, as the strict separation
between the two is blurred as untenable if men are to revive a culture and a masculinity in
crisis. One strategy of Promise Keepers to re-affirm masculine power that is lost in the
public sphere is to frame that loss as a deficiency in the private sphere, providing the

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This is a subtle strategy which contains feminine power – women are presented as not wanting to lead the home, but
having their hand forced by men not living up to their masculine duties – in acting more dominant, men are said to be
doing women a favor and meeting their needs. Apologists of the Promise Keepers frequently point out that the group
encourages men to submit to their wives and treat them well. This is one such place where that tendency could be read
as anti-feminist, as treating women well is situated as taking away the gains secured by the feminist movement.

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rhetorical space to reassert power and control within the private realm. Individual actions
such as prayer and spreading the Word of Christ taken in the private sphere are said to be
able to rectify cultural deficiencies in society at large, the most common of which are said
to be teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, abortion, drug addiction, and pornography
(Boone, 1992, 1999; McCartney 1992a; Palau, 1999; Seaborn 2005), and the renewal of
the United States as a nation. The home/private sphere is defined as critical to accessing
the public sphere in a Godly way. Men are to take control of the “hearts” in the home,
pursuing the wife to make her feel value and keep her heart in the service of the Lord,
and nurturing children to keep them on the right path as well (Seaborn, 2005). Bishop
Phillip Porter (1998), former chairman of the Promise Keepers, reminds men of the need
for such individual action in the home and their communities. He informs his readers:
America is facing huge social problems, and we can’t look to the government for
solutions. Instead, we need to seek a spiritual solution to this everyday problem.
Let’s face it men: We have not protected our homes and guarded them properly.
Because men have not honored their wedding vows to love, cherish, and protect
their wives, many communities have fallen apart (p. 76).

Compare this to McCartney’s (1992b) earlier discussion of the “unique opportunity”
facing men, as they are to “recapture the spiritual climate in our own homes, and cultivate
a heart for other men…we can’t just worry about our own homes. We’ve got to foster
regard and concern for the homes around us,” a concern that helps those men “all over
our nation” who are suffering because the Adversary has them feeling defeated (p. 11).
Boone (1999) indicates that there must be a change in the lives of the men of America to
see “personal, family, and national revival” (p. 15). Renewal of individual men, as well
as the family, spreads out to communities and the nation at large. Gary Oliver (1992b)

255
claims that “our entire nation is facing a period of moral bankruptcy” (p. 176), which can
only be reversed if men take individual responsibility, and begin to work to solve the
problem. Despite the enormity of the problem, faith in God allows men to “make a
meaningful contribution to the solution” (p. 179). To redeem the nation, men of the
Promise Keepers must “believe in Him with a repentant heart” and “stand and…proclaim
his gospel in all its purity” (Palau, 1999, p. 225), as that is not just what the individual
men need, but what “America…needs” (p. 226). The faith in Christ, with its attendant
prayer and worship, initially positioned as critical to proper masculine action now has a
specific purpose. Men are responsible for the public and the private spheres, the home
and the nation, as the proper change in the lives of American men, as it is men who need
to take up the mantle of responsibility to save themselves, their families, and the nation.

Reframing Masculinity

The discourses of masculinity and femininity, and their attendant rhetorical
strategies, act to reframe masculinity for a contemporary crisis. As the older vestiges of
masculinity have failed to provide the stability needed to resolve crisis, masculinity must
be re-imagined, using the past as a resource, so that it resonates more closely with the
experiences of Promise Keeper men, and the culture in which they find themselves.
Though Satan is said to be the impetus for the crisis, and a constant threat to unseat the
stability in the lives of Christians, Satan himself, as is repeatedly noted, does not appear
in only one form, or in one sphere of life. As such, representations of masculinity and
femininity serve to provide men with a sense of where to look for temptation from the

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adversary, and reframes masculine gender identity to provide men with the means to
resist that temptation. It is the ever-present and thus eternally vague nature of the
Adversary’s threat and the potential for crisis that opens such a rhetorical space, as the
abstractly defined contours of gender provide a malleable resource to adapt to a variety of
situations.
Chapter 3 discussed how men within culture generally, and the Promise Keepers
in particular, are situated within an untenable double bind – the need to be tough,
aggressive, and strong while also being sensitive, caring, and nurturing – in which men
are criticized for not striking the perfect balance of the two. In particular, the Promise
Keepers often work to flip the nature/culture dichotomy on its head. With nature
traditionally being a feminine and raced preserve, a burden, an unrefined essence that
needs the work of culture to make its value manifest, PK speakers and texts frequently
equate men with their “natural desire,” belonging to nature and corrupted by the
influences of culture. The double bind of American masculinity described by Bordo
allows a subversion of the traditional nature/culture binary. Locating male sexuality as
primal and natural in wider culture provides a space for the Promise Keepers to reframe
men as aligned with nature and women with culture. According to the Promise Keepers,
men are instructed by the wider culture to be ladies men, to seek sexual fulfillment as a
means of proving their masculinity. Think here of Eldredge’s locating the search for a
woman as the “deadliest place” a man can go. John Yates (1992) warns that the ladies’
man constantly seeks Eros, or sexual fulfillment, moving him away from God. Men’s
desire for women is natural, as proper heterosexual relationships are ordained by God. It

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is the seductive lure of feminine culture that is the problem, as it exploits men’s basic
nature. The Promise Keepers provides a way out of this dilemma by reframing
masculinity in the image of Christ, and thus a rejection of this temptation, instead of
submitting to it, is what defines a true man. But, at the same time, PK also asks men to
participate in this double bind as they are constantly told to be aggressive and dominant,
but not too aggressive and dominant. Men are to lead their households, but as servant
leaders. Men are to be (at times) a man’s man but not to give in to the temptation to
demonstrate their masculinity through sexual conquest or focusing more on himself than
God.
Men, then, are encouraged to civilize their nature while acting on it. They are to
embrace some aspects of a civilized culture, such as restraint and patience, to tame the
beast while disavowing others, the decadence, and the lack of control of modern culture.
Perhaps, then, this observation is most relevant in what Heather Hendershot (2004)
indicates is one of the central dilemmas of evangelical communities: the dictum to be “in
culture, but not of it.” In order to save those that have not yet committed themselves to
Christ, evangelicals must be a part of the broader culture, as locking themselves away
prevents contact with those that need them most. However, wading in to that culture
produces the risk of “secular contamination” (Hendershot, 2004, p. 8), and a devaluing of
Christian principles. The frame of being at war with and within culture set up by the
Promise Keepers dramatizes this conflict and helps to create such a double bind, as PK
gender ideology makes recourse to the certainty of essentialist performance, while
actually acting to re-imagine that performance. The rhetorical effect is to mask the ways

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in which culture and nature are being re-imagined while claiming to hold to an essential
and unchanging gender ideology. The compassion and emotion which were previously
feminine, located, of the body and thus denigrated are reframed as masculine traits when
properly civilized; the problematic aspects of femininity are located in culture, while the
beneficial aspects of masculinity are appropriated and located in nature. The home and
the family, conceptualized as feminine space since the advent of the Cult of Domesticity
(Bordo, 2003), are reimagined by the Promise Keepers as a masculine preserve.
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Christ Himself is further associated with nature, or at the very least the natural, as
what makes a man like he “naturally is” is his status as created by God. Men are
encouraged to live up to a Christ-like masculinity, one which is and should be natural as
that is how God designed men. It is up to men to “awaken to” or realize that design
through Promise Keepers as the contingent and historically malleable is rendered
concrete and eternal by the rhetoric of identification. The authentic, natural man is
accessed through the recourse to nostalgic tropes of masculinity which act to identify
what the “natural” masculinity was like before the perverted influences of culture. If
traditional gendered binaries locate nature as passive, and thus feminine, as it requires the
work of culture/masculinity to bring its full use and splendor to fruition, then the work of
nostalgic masculinity within Promise Keepers works to resituate historical notions of
culture and nature into a unique dynamic. The split is not as clear as culture/nature;

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This is a tension men’s movements have had to manage before. Recall from Chapter 1 that at the turn of the 19
th

century, men worried about the influence of an overly feminine culture on the natural masculinity of boys and young
men. At the same time, it was the natural qualities of women and femininity that made them unsuitable for training
young men, and the wildness of the boys had to be expressed safely and tamed with organizations such as the Boy
Scouts. The Men and Religion Forward movement similarly dealt with changing notions of spheres as business and
politics were initially set off from the “female” sphere of religion and morality, a distinction with MRFM worked to
collapse in masculinizing the Church.

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rather, the passivity of women is mapped on to culture, and the action of culture mapped
on to men’s nature. Both the feminizing seductive influences of culture, and the passivity
and inaction of femininity are derided as the impetus to masculinity crisis, and that which
must be overcome to be proper, godly men.
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In this way, nostalgic masculinity works
to appropriate what are seen as beneficial aspects of femininity; the privileges that
women are said to have but denied men in a modern culture. At the same time,
femininity is still denigrated as both threatening and inferior to masculinity, such that
men receive the benefits of certain feminine traits, but none of the attendant costs of
being identified with femininity.
Additionally, Bordo (2003) argues that the feminine body that is situated as sexual
temptress is raced as well, as racist ideology locates “non-European ‘races’ as ‘primitive,’
‘savage,’ sexually animalistic, and indeed more bodily than the white ‘races’” (p. 9,
emphasis in original). If the historical equivalent of aggressive sexuality, animality, and
physicality of the raced Other was linked to nature, a nature that needed civilizing by the
culture of the White man, then this rhetorical flip which locates masculinity with nature
and femininity/Otherness in culture maintains the universalizing call of white rationality
as that which is needed to tame the “Jezebel” of culture. The temptation of culture
contains within it the threat of the raced Other which can intrude upon a white
masculinity’s peaceful commune with God. Such a rhetorical move that resituates not
just masculinity within nature, but a white masculinity constructs the tempered, White
ethos of Promise Keepers as universally applicable to all men. If the Promise Keepers

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The example of Eldredge’s framing of the story of the banishment from the Garden of Eden earlier in this chapter
provides an apt example of this tendency.

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are explicitly admonished to work to cross racial barriers, and individual accountability is
the key to rejecting the sin of racism, then it is a white aesthetic that is held up as the
solution as, presumably, men of color do not need to work against being accountable for
racism against themselves.
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While appearing race neutral in its presentation, and race
consciousness in attempts at racial reconciliation, PK encourages the elimination of the
difference, savagery, otherness, and sexual aggressiveness of culture through the
civilizing tone of a man’s natural tendencies. This is the same drive for civilization and
objective rationality that characterized White culture’s subjection of people of color
throughout American history, as it was the “culture” of White men that was meant to
civilize those who did not meet European standards of civility. Only now, it is the
recourse to the “naturalness” of a White masculinity that works to challenge the
temptation and deviance of a feminine culture. Given that we cannot escape the raced or
gendered implications of the culture/nature dichotomy, the resistance to feminine desire
in culture that threatens to overwhelm Christian piety is also a resistance to the overly
active raced or sexualized desire threatening masculine purity.
Perhaps the most problematic portion of the Promise Keepers’ discussion of race is
how they envision the success of such racial reconciliation. McCartney (1999) argues
that a unified Church may be able to accomplish is, in part, some resolution to the lack of
“educational and employment opportunities for certain segments of society” (p. 155).
While initially a positive aim, this sentiment is immediately preceded by his faith in the

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This is not meant to insinuate that men of color cannot be racist against each other. Rather, as will be explained in
greater detail later in this section, the rhetoric of the Promise Keepers presumes that those who need to challenge
racism are White, and address their audience as if they need to challenge racism in their own lives, yet indicate that
their prescriptions for Christ-like masculinity are for all men, regardless of race. Thus, the men in the audience are all
situated as White even as PK makes an effort to challenge racism.

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Church’s ability to resolve “the gang problem in our country” and work to meet “the need
for young people in single-parent homes to have positive role models” (p. 155).
McCartney here identifies two of the primary concerns of evangelical culture with
American society – the lack of marriage/two parent homes, and inner city violence – and
indicates that by making men of color the same as white men, we could solve gang
violence and teen pregnancy, effectively laying the burden of such problems not only on
minority communities and effacing the large number of white young people in the same
situation, but also makes structural disadvantages in education, employment, and access
to social situations an individual problem and not a structural problem. If only people of
color had God in their hearts, McCartney seems to say, there wouldn’t be so many
problems with “certain segments of society.”
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McCartney is careful to not preach total
assimilation. He explicitly indicates that he is not suggesting that “all cultural
differences…should disappear” (p. 156). However, he is equally as clear in his desire to
“call each other brother instead of emphasizing our differences” (p. 156). This presents
all men as not only separated from a Christ-like masculinity for the same reasons,
regardless of their social position, but also that all men have the same resources and
opportunity to reclaim that masculinity.
The need to challenge the structural conditions that may cause similar experiences of
oppression is replaced by the individual need to get to know one’s fellow men better to
challenge misconceived individual stereotypes. Though the personal narratives initially
seek to identify the unique experiences of men of different ethnicities, the solution

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An ideology further reinforced by McCartney’s choice of words. He does claim that we need a non-racist society,
merely a non-racist Church.

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offered by the Promise Keepers serves to normalize white experience; the resolution to
the misunderstanding caused by different cultural backgrounds is to work towards
understanding that your “minority friend” has had different experiences in the past, but
that these experiences of racism can be resolved though common cause in a better future
with Christ. The Promise Keepers ask men to take personal accountability for racism –
which is a good thing – but again locate racism as an individual need for men to reach out
which will solve racism, not economic or cultural apparatuses which normalize racism
and white dominance as natural.
Individual action and personal accountability are rendered as the responsibility and
duty of modern men. To reclaim the lost masculinity and preserve masculine space, men
are encouraged to identify femininity as the cause, and combat that femininity through re-
establishing masculine leadership in the self, the home, and the broader culture. The
superiority that needs to be re-established is not explicitly men over women, but
masculinity over femininity. This masculinity is positioned as achievable by men
regardless of race, as it is the individual actions of prayer and Christ-like devotion that
will resolve masculinity crisis. As noted before, the injunction to be caring and
supportive is far more explicit and oft repeated than the commands to be domineering
patriarchs. What becomes critical is noting how the vagueness of the discourse of PK
masculinity can be articulated in a variety of ways to particular policies and products to
discipline the behavior of men. The privileging of masculine over feminine traits can be
read as men being superior to women. But what is more problematic is what is
articulated as masculine and feminine, as that is how men are encouraged to actualize

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their masculinity: where the vagueness of “support” and “integrity” is made concrete in
practice.

Nostalgia as Rhetorical Strategy

Promise Keepers conferences are described as momentous events by pre-
conference advertising, attendee testimony, accompanying texts, and event speakers. Co-
founder Dave Wardell (2006) describes his experience at a 2003 conferences as one that
“literally changed my life and the way I look at my own personal relationships with men”
(p1), and Troy, a new Promise Keeper from Orlando says that at the Awakening
conference he attended he “was really overwhelmed at the worship and praise to our
Father that PK instilled in us” (Forston, 2005). The accompanying text to the Awakening
conference mentions repeatedly throughout that realizing all that men had learned at the
conference was going to be a process, one that could take a lot of time. Recall from
Chapter 2 that Pickering and Keightley (2006) argue that the temporal essence of
modernity leaves people feeling unmoored in the present time as the forward march of
progress interrupts the ability to meaningfully deal with the present. As a result,
nostalgia becomes a fit response as it presents the space with which to engage the past.
Further, David Morley (2000) claimed that the advance of modernity created a feeling of
“homelessness” in contemporary times, again rendering nostalgia as a means to regain a
sense of stability to regain the cultural anxiety produced by modernity. The Promise
Keepers take such anxieties into account in providing men with a roadmap for resolution
of masculinity crisis. In fact, after reviewing all of the things men were to have learned

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at the conference, the authors claim that few men “suspend their activities long enough in
our fast-paced culture to contemplate their design, their life person, and the implications
for who they are and what they should do with the time God grants them” (Velasquez,
Rasor, Hinkle, & Richardson, 2005, p. 3). The assessment of modernity as producing an
inability to contemplate their current situation through its “fast paced culture” opens the
door for nostalgic masculinity to provide the sought after certainty.
Nostalgia functions as a useful rhetorical device to provide resources for
successful masculine performance. The trappings of contemporary culture have
provoked a crisis in masculinity, and the relentless focus on the future has prevented men
from properly dealing with that crisis. In using an eternal narrative of Christ and a more
ephemeral narrative of personal experience, the response to the feminization of the
culture is concretized while being framed as plausible and familiar. References to a
biblical masculinity in holding Jesus up as the paragon of masculinity are necessarily
nostalgic. The cornerstone evangelical belief of the inerrancy of the bible gives times,
places, events, and people described in scripture the scientific status of history. The
models of masculinity in the bible such as Moses, Joseph, and Jesus are historically
concrete role models, and the times in which they lived presented as time to which PK
itself could return, a timeless essence of masculinity that can serve as templates to
reinvigorate a Christ-like masculinity in the present.
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. The Promise Keepers make

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Even the fundamental Christian narrative of repentance and redemption through Christ is nostalgic as it seeks a
return to a time prior to the Original Sin and Fall of Adam and Eve, a time in which humanity lived in paradise before
the corrupting influence of the tree of knowledge. Repentance asks believers to look deep into their hearts and souls to
discover what they have done wrong in the past and atone for it to make the present and future better. Even when this
past is troubled, and in need of repentance, those problematic histories are used to contrast with what was good in the
past to construct a new vision of the redeemed sinner

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frequent use of this temporal displacement to motivate and contextualize the performance
of a Christ-like masculinity. The appeal to the past takes those experiences that men
don’t want to access from their past and replaces them with the simplicity of biblical
certainty and childhood innocence.
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This dual nostalgic appeal, to both biblical and
personal/cultural history, aims to secure stability in cultural anxiety and a sense of home
in the homelessness of modernity.
The Awakening conference and accompanying text disavow the past while
attempting to access it. At the very beginning of the conference Reggie Daubs explicitly
told the men in the audience that we needed to “accept where we are now” because we
“can’t change the past; we can only change the future” (Field Notes), an observation
which immediately produced a resounding response of cheers and clapping from the men
assembled. In his essay in The Awakening Experience, Daubs (2005) expands on this
idea by noting that thinking about the past can make us depressed; instead, men should
focus on what God wants us to do “now and in the future” so that Christ can free us from
our past (pp. 80-81). In particular, The Awakening text is said to help men find the
purpose God has “written on the heart” (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, & Richardson, 2005,
p. 10), and to help men get “perspective and awareness of the man God created you to be
and what he created you for” (p. 27).
Here we see a key rhetorical move. Using a metaphor of a story written by God
to explain men’s lives, the resolution of masculinity crisis and what it means to be a man
are located in God and not the ideology of those who have crafted metaphors. If the story

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While childhood is not the only vessel of personal experience plundered for masculine certainty, it is very often
used as a way to frame the past as a simpler, more stable time.

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was written by God Himself, then the Promise Keepers are providing a theological, not
an ideological, perspective on masculinity. Reggie Daubs (2005) explains the nature of
God’s story to men in his essay “Discovering Your Unique Design.” Reggie tells his
readers a narrative of how God plans a special place for all men. Daubs imagines that at
some point in the past, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were
making something (p. 85-6). When His Angels asked what He was making, God replied
he was making a little boy, one that would one day be Reggie. When asked what this
Reggie would do, God further explained that he had written all of what Reggie would do
in a book, an interpretation supported by a bible verse, Psalm 139:15: “All the days
ordained for me were written in your book” (p. 86). God had created a story about
Reggie in the past which the Reggie of the future/present now has to live up to. So even
though Reggie claims that he is “future oriented” in how he will act, he acts in particular
ways to live up to a previous or past understanding of who he is.
In locating the resolution to crisis in the certainty of God’s plan, nostalgia is
displaced across a wider span of time. The most recent past is frequently cited as a space
of contempt. The large majority of speakers at The Awakening conference told stories of
pain, darkness, and ungodly behavior in their personal lives. However, the dissatisfaction
is actually with the present, and not the past. It is how the men at the conference are
presently living their lives that is said to be the problem, much as it was the current state
of affairs that motivated the speakers when they had their revelation and realized the need
to turn their lives over to God. Even the men who have attended PK events before and
who are already on the path towards Godly masculinity are to reaffirm their commitment

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to Christ because Jesus came down to save humanity from our sins and so we need to
repent and return to the love of God; faithful service to Christ will exonerate the recent
past of sin in a return to the eternal past in God’s love. Repentance acts to resituate men
in the narrative of God’s grace that was written before they were born, bringing together
Christian guilt and redemption in a nostalgic narrative. Discussion of time rhetorically
situates men and frames and limits the options seen as available for masculine
performance, while distracting from the constructed nature of that performance.
Masculinity is presented as part of a story already told by God and written on the hearts
of men, as they don’t need to invent the truth or follow the transient “truths” of cultural
expectations of masculinity; they just need to find the truth that has already been written
An interesting crossover of these dual narratives occurs in the articulation of
masculinity to Christianity. The nostalgia is a combination of the historical fiction that
Coontz (1997, 2000) describes as pervading discussions of family, and I argue discourses
of masculinity, in which a time earlier in American history is merged with a nostalgia for
a much earlier time (the time of Christ and biblical men) and thus the biblical fact of such
masculinities. The dual narratives are harnessed together in the description of ideal
Christian masculinity in PK rhetoric. Frequently, the immediate past is the source of
discontent, as men need to “turn away” from that past in a new future, the past that is
accessed is the biblical past of Christ. However, the models for how that Christ-like
masculinity is realized are drawn from the more recent past. The lessons of masculinity
are drawn from personal experience, very often childhood or references to it. Often, it is
the most recent past that is located as symptomatic of crisis, but times before those sins as

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peaceful and desirable, both in scripture and men’s personal history. In fact, at one point
the 1950s and 60s are held up as the idealized time of stability. Gary Oliver (1999)
indicates that “Thirty-five years ago our country followed the Judeo-Christian ethic. Few
people questioned that chastity was a good thing, that hard work was the duty of every
responsible man, that homosexual conduct was wrong, and that it was never right to lie,
cheat, steal, or commit adultery” (p. 66). The experience of personal history as a time of
crisis can be resolved through a biblical history of appropriate behavior and a cultural
benchmark of stability against which the present can be measured and an acceptable
future judged.
The past is used as an active resource for constructing identity in the present,
which is what Boym (2001) describes as reflective nostalgia. Promise Keeper men are
not supposed to recreate that past (which would be purely restorative), or to become
children again, but to use positive memories and life altering events as models of what
behaviors to emulate and recreate, and those of negative events to avoid in working
towards the godly masculinity proffered by the gender ideology of the larger
organization. Speakers at the conference and throughout PK texts tell stories of their own
childhoods, ask men to remember when they were young, and recount the innocence of
childhood as an idyllic time in contrast to the present. Even when not providing direct
advice of what to do, frequent remarks about children and childhood help create the
nostalgic mood by inviting comparisons to a more favorable past. And given that the
majority of men in the Promise Keepers in the 1990s and early 2000s were 35-45, the

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time of childhood coincides with the period identified earlier as a time of stability in
America’s cultural history.
Here, and throughout Promise Keeper texts, PK rhetoric works to divert attention
from the past to the present and future while still relying on romantic notions of biblical
and cultural history to frame proper masculine action. An overly nostalgic focus may
remind men of their personal failures and override the sense of possibility in PK
discourse. However, the past is selectively used, not in a fully restorative move to
completely recapture that past, but to use the lessons, trials, and benefits of that past and
the biblical models of masculinity, to create a new masculinity in the present. Even
when that past is seen in a negative light, as what the men are said to be moving away
from, the past is to be used a resource, and not a source of shame. Men are to compare
that past, where they might have failed, with an even more distant past, those times in
their lives when they experienced success, or when they were children and still faced the
world with a sense of possibility and opportunity.
The juxtaposition is used to create perspective by incongruity, what Burke (1935)
terms a rebirth, as the these memories “combine at once the qualities of strangeness and
intimacy” a period of rebirth, a “new angle of vision whereby so much that he had forgot
suddenly becomes useful or relevant, hence grows vivid again in his memory” (p. 154, fn
1). The new angle of vision reminds men that if they undergo a rebirth in Christ, if they
rededicate their lives to Jesus, then the future can look like the present that was
envisioned in the past. The future of open and infinite possibility that was available as a
child is now open to the grown man as he can remake his life in God’s image. Burke

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even goes so far as to say that this new perspective, this new rebirth, is a conversion of
the religious kind. In the Promise Keepers, the new perspective is intimately tied to the
religious, and thus authorized not only by their personal history, but also by the history
and future envisioned for them by God. The use of time as a metaphor is an effective
rhetorical strategy as it distracts from the present as well as the actual lived experience of
the past, instead using it to establish a place in the future that is irrespective of that
history. The history of masculine privilege recently upset is replaced by a new vision of
stable masculinity, one in which being a properly masculine figure is once again an
option. The particular, threatened experience of white masculinity that is framed as a
universal masculinity for all men involved in PK draws them together in common cause,
erasing historical differences in access to the stability of masculinity in favor of a new
vision of Christ-like masculinity.
Indeed, metaphor is an apt rhetorical strategy for the Promise Keepers, and is its
dominant trope. For Burke (1969) metaphors are devices “for seeing something in terms
of something else” (p. 503, emphasis in original), as a metaphor brings out the “thisness
of a that, or the thatness of a this.” Further, metaphor is a way of bringing perspective to
bare on an issue, as the consideration of something in terms of something initially seen as
distinct is a tool by which we “establish a character’s reality” (p. 504), and thus deploy
our comparisons for heuristic purposes to better understand the nature of human
motivation. Metaphors don’t merely add to our descriptive vocabulary for Burke; rather,
they form “the social textures, the local psychoses, the institutional structures, the
purposes and practices which lie behind these words” (1935, p. 232), as metaphors act to

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shape attitudes (p. 335) and shape “new pieties of living” (p. 345). Burke concludes that
“it is precisely through metaphor that our perspectives, or analogical extensions are
made—a world without metaphor would be a world without purpose” (1935, p. 246-7).
The metaphors of time and a story “already written” by God so far discussed
attempt to reframe men’s understanding of masculinity crisis through God’s eternal
vision, and thus to see things from God’s perspective. Men only need to remember and
return to their role in God’s story. But as noted earlier, the despite the numerous lists of
things men can do, the primary injunction for reclaiming masculinity is to follow Christ,
and act properly masculine. Masculinity is reframed to provide men with more emotional
outlets and greater control over the spiritual and material guidance of the home as a
means of saving their families and nation, and men are assured of their ability to
accomplish these tasks, but the particular actions that need to be taken are often left to the
individual men to take stock of their own lives and realize what they themselves have to
do to resolve their own unique situation. It is here that metaphor assumes its primary
significance in PK rhetoric. As explained in Chapter 3, the primary metaphors within
Promise Keeper writing and speaking are those of war and sports. Robert Stewart (2000)
discusses the use of identification in Promise Keeper rhetoric, and argues that two of the
primary means of identification are between the sacred and the secular, and the familiar
and the unfamiliar, as the everyday contexts of men’s lives are used to “add to the
potency and persuasiveness of the Promise Keepers message” (p. 105). Such familiarity
works to concretize the abstract edicts of the Promise Keepers, and the metaphors of
sport and war further encourage a new perspective on masculinity.

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The metaphor is elastic, and covers a variety of the gendered ideologies of the
Promise Keepers. Men’s relationship with culture in the late 20
th
century is seen as one
of war, battle, and conflict, and such a war demands properly masculine action. War is a
state of crisis, as what was once peaceful is made chaotic, much like American culture
and masculinity are described throughout PK. The risk of failure is high, as losing in
war, especially as an individual, means death; the failure to win in this “war” means the
death of men’s masculinity, with previously articulated consequences for the family and
nation. War is competitive; there are two sides, enemy and ally. And the only way to
win a war, when using a militaristic metaphor, is to fight back. Though cunning may
factor in military defeats, it is the overwhelming aggressive force of the victor that is
usually championed. Military commanders, like PK men, must be decisive leaders ready
to attack at a moment’s notice. Men must be able to lead when necessary, and follow
orders when commanded by a recognized superior authority figure. PK men are said to
have an inner warrior, already possessing these traits; they merely need to let him out.
The metaphor of battle is used not only in descriptions of fictional battles (such as the
men in the office) or contemporary conflicts (such as the War on Terror), but also in
describing the contemporary masculinity crisis and its relationship to the eternal conflict
with Satan. Once again, reclaiming masculinity and winning the war is not just an issue
of individual identity, but also of cultural responsibility and Christian duty.
The metaphors of war and sport often appeared together, as demonstrated in
Smalley and Trent’s (1992a) exemplars of men who were true promise keepers instead of
promise breakers. In order, these men are said to be Douglas MacArthur, Babe Ruth, and

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Christ (p. 15). Sport, war, and faith here all bound together through iconic images and
metaphorical equivalence. That these three are found in such proximity shouldn’t
surprise us according to Balmer (2000), given their historical linkage in Christian
metaphors for spirituality and their structural affinity. Football in particular and sports in
general are often organized around the central premise of battle; there are opponents and
teammates, an offense and a defense, and brutal physical contact nearly always a routine
portion of the contest. The prevalence of sports metaphors and imagery has been well
documented (Balmer, 2000; Bartkowski, 2004; Beal, 2000) and does not need to be
repeated here; it will suffice to say that the conference I attended (at the Anaheim Pond,
the home of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks hockey franchise) was well in line with previous
research. This research has revealed that such metaphors provide a homosocial space for
male bonding (Balmer, 2000; Bartkowski 2004), and work to champion behaviors coded
as masculine over those coded as feminine, such as aggression, violence, submission to
appropriate authority (such as a commanding officer or coach), male superiority,
commitment, self-control, and rugged individualism (Beal, 2000). Thus, metaphors of
war and sport both work to privilege a hegemonic masculinity while also “providing
dramatic symbolic proof of the ‘natural superiority’ of men over women” (Messner,
1988, p. 68).
Further, both operate to make masculine action concrete and vague. If war and
sports are about battle and conflict, competition and victory, then it provides a roadmap
to masculinity in familiar masculine terms as these metaphors generate even further
access to historical models of masculinity in the heroes of wars past (MacArthur) and

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sporting icons (Ruth). Men are given no additional direction, but a certainty of purpose
in their need to be victorious in their struggle for a Christ-like masculinity. This
vagueness becomes particular important when considered in light of the reframing of
masculinity and femininity, and is part of the conflict between the apologists and
detractors of the Promise Keepers. It is easy to point to Brad Stine, John Eldredge and
Tony Evans as the champions of misogyny and say “The Promise Keepers are about
hating women and reestablishing patriarchy.” And while it is important to point out these
instances and the sexism they represent, as well as the calls for men to save their families
and win back the country, this is not the most problematic aspect of PK rhetoric. Rather,
it is the rhetorical positioning of the weakness that men need to combat which is more
significant. The explicitly articulated actions, for the most part, are on the surface benign
and even desired; listening to one’s wife, spending time with one’s children, and being
accountable for one’s mistakes are certainly admirable qualities. On the other hand, the
way in which these actions are encouraged - the violent metaphors of sports and war
which privilege a hegemonic masculinity, the injunction to reclaim leadership – are what
make the rhetoric of PK so problematic. In the absence of concrete suggestions, men are
instead disciplined to devalue femininity, and reframe masculine centers of authority.
Men are not encouraged to respect the women in their lives because they deserve equality
and are demanding of respect. Instead, men are to respect their wives because it is the
“masculine” thing to do. And thus what it means to be masculine once again assumes
primary importance. An initially positive injunction is a self-serving resolution to
personal crisis. Patriarchy sneaks in under cover of benevolence.

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Masculine Popular Culture

Whereas the Promise Keepers utilize God as their God term, as it is a Christ-like
masculinity that is the ultimate PK ideal, masculine popular culture does away with the
notion of metaphorical equivalence all together. Instead, for MPC the God-term is
masculinity. The Promise Keepers work to situate masculinity in relation to Christ, with
the ultimate purpose for PK men being masculine devotion to the Lord. For masculine
popular culture, the ultimate purpose is a devout masculinity in service to oneself.
Perhaps the best illustration of this switch is the emcee from the first season of The Man
Show: The Fox. The Fox, whose real name is William Wallace Foster, is an organist who
besides playing and singing dirty songs, has a remarkable talent for drinking two entire
pints of beer in less than 5 seconds. The Fox welcomes viewers at the start of the show
and after each commercial break (often with the aforementioned dirty songs), and leads
the audience in a beer chant of “Ziggy Sokky, Ziggy Sokky, Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!” to end the
show, as the camera switches over to footage of women jumping on trampolines. His act
reminiscent of frat house atmosphere or bachelor party beer toasts and antics, The Fox
may have been an older gentleman (he died in 2000 at age 68 of prostate cancer), but
resonated with younger audiences. Jimmy Kimmel once remarked “The Fox embodied
The Man Show” (“Comedy Central’s”, 2000, paragraph 8). In episode 105, there is a
segment dedicated to The Fox titled “Men Who Changed the World.” The segment
begins by noting “Once in a while, men come along who change the way you look at the

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world.”
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Our first two examples are religious figures: Jesus Christ and Mohammed.
These are not just any religious figures, but the iconic heads of Christianity and Islam.
The next manly hero, The Fox, who is the subject of the segment, is said to be “even
better” than both of them, a legend who towers over all men. .And what makes The Fox
so legendary? His ability to drink beer really fast (sometimes while standing on his head)
and sing filthy songs.
Situating The Fox in relation to religious heroes provides a glimpse into the
ideological fervor of the show. Masculinity is positioned above religion, as religious
leaders may have made great, moral strides, but The Fox is even better. Combined with
The Fox’s unique talents, we now have the makings of a masculine religion. Devotion to
masculinity is here linked with a religious quality, complete with commandments to
remain pious to gender. The great man who changed the world did not help the poor,
make a major discovery, or devote his life to the service of others. Rather, this great man
set a new standard for alcohol consumption and sexual gratification, and changed the
world for it. Throughout both Maxim and “The Man Show, acting “like a man” is
presented as an end unto itself. The audience is assumed to want to act like men, and to
desire “manly” things, which is why they have tuned in or picked up the magazine in the
first place. There is no greater purpose, no divine reward. Ultimately, men are to act
masculine because that is, quite simply, what men do.

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Note that the viewer is not told that there are people who changed the world, merely men. Women are not
significant historical figures in the show except when they are undermined for achievements of blamed for disaster in
the “What Really Happened” sketches before commercial, such as a woman who lights a cigarette and destroys the
Hindenburg, or Amelia Earheart who crashes while applying makeup.

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As described earlier in this chapter, the titles themselves are instructive as Maxim
is a set of “general truths” on masculinity, SpikeTV is the first network for men, and The
Man Show is a place for men to come together. In fact, the theme song for TMS comes
in the form of several instructions: Grab a beer and drop your pants, send the wife and
kids to France; quit your job and light a fart, yank your favorite private part; look at the
cans on this chick named Heather. Multiple edicts of masculinity appear before the show
has even begun as men should ogle women, consume alcohol, dislike marital
responsibility and work, enjoy childish pranks involving bodily functions, and
masturbate. The visual style of the opening segment as well as the general show calls
attention to the show as didactic, as the characters in the opening credits, the dancers at
various points in the program, and the hosts all look and point directly to the imagined
audience as they give their directions. Though they use an informal style of address akin
to that of the close pal, there is still a clear line of authority maintained throughout MPC.
Maxim speaks with an authoritarian voice, as it knows more than its readers. While it
speaks in friendly inviting tones, it still tells the reader “how things really are” in terms of
women, fashion, gadgets, and other things men want. McHugh’s initial “Editor’s Letter”
reveals this contradiction in both noting that men don’t need to be told what to do by the
other snooty men’s magazines at the same time as saying the magazine is to provide “lots
of useful information.” A constant berating and teasing of the reader are a part of this
address. Such banter positions Maxim as more of a fraternity brother than the brother in
Christ of the PK, as the put-downs serve to establish a clear line of authority between
reader and text, as well as set up this form of competition, banter, and insulting as typical

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masculine behavior.
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Similarly, The Man Show hosts Jimmy and Adam frequently
insult each other and the audience, as well as other men on the program. Masculinity is
here realized in action and speech, desire and discourse. “Masculine” communication
styles are privileged and demonstrated, as the monikers of masculine centered popular
culture and their style of address connote authority and instructional knowledge to be
passed down to the audience.

Reaffirming and Reframing Masculinity

The gender discourse of masculine popular culture works in two ways. First, it
acts to reaffirm masculinity in its celebration of a traditional hegemonic masculinity:
masculinity as tough, instrumental, rational, and defined in relation to superiority over
women and subordinate masculinities. However, such a hegemonic masculinity is not
completely tenable within the atmosphere of masculinity crisis; if it were, there would be
no crisis. To deal with contemporary conditions of masculinity, as in the Promise
Keepers, masculinity needs to be reframed to account for threats to successful masculine
performance. What follows is an investigation of both the reaffirming of masculinity,
and its rearticulation. Initially, as with the Promise Keepers, there is not one static gender
ideology that runs through all of masculine popular culture. However, unlike the Promise
Keepers, the variance in that presentation of gender is substantially less. Analysis reveals

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Further, MPC does not tolerate dissent. Readers’ letters in Maxim and audience comments in TMS which contradict
the magazine/hosts are made fun of and summarily dismissed, leaving the authority of the initial comments intact. This
dismissal of criticism also functions as a way of controlling and containing those narratives and representations that
would call the general narrative of the show or the magazine into question. The representations of masculinity that
occur in MPC are presented as authentic, objective, normalized fact. The lack of criticism by the audience is
representative of a larger containment of other forms of criticism, such as agitation by feminists and gay rights activists,
which will be discussed in greater detail later in the chapter.

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that within particular artifacts, gender ideology remained remarkably constant.
Throughout the sample of Maxim, a span covering seven years, little changed in the
descriptions of masculinity, with a notable exception being an increase in nationalistic
fervor and patriotic sentiment after September 11, 2001. The same is true for virtually
the entire run of The Man Show, again with a notable exception happening in 2003, the
fifth season, when the show’s hosts changed.
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The variance occurred between Maxim
and TMS, but is primarily one of style and not one of gender ideology. The Man Show
more often than not focuses on self-deprecating humor that emphasized the failure of
male sexuality and men’s proclivity to enjoy bodily functions, while Maxim focused
more on mocking culture in general and enjoying a wide array of things masculine.
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Both, however, present a remarkable similar (re)articulation of hegemonic masculinity.
This is not a traditionally hegemonic masculinity. Masculine popular culture
frequently overemphasizes masculinity almost to the point of parody. The presentation is
done in the spirit of ironic humor, a comedic interpretation of masculinity that does so
with a wink and a nod to the audience that these actions are in “good fun” and not meant
to be taken seriously. Often jokes are “over the top” and excessively focus on masculine
tropes to the point of absurdity. In fact, the general manager and chief programmer of the
Comedy Central Network emphasized the playful intent in describing The Man Show
when he said that there was “nothing serious about the show” (McKay, 2000). While the

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The difference between hosts is fairly stark. The new hosts, Fear Factor host Joe Rogan and comedian Dan
Stanhope, were described by many as less funny and less approachable than Jimmy and Adam. The complaint most
often leveled on websites such as www.jumptheshark.com is that the show became entirely focused on sex, going over
the top in all of their skits on discussions of male sexuality and “dick and fart jokes.” While the humor of The Man
Show was never what one would call high brow, reader response indicates that the new hosts removed whatever
element of tongue in cheek satire remained in the show.

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This is not to afford Maxim a high-brow status: rather, the humor of The Man Show is often more of a crude and
rudimentary nature, whereas Maxim acts to maintain some cleverness in its irreverence.

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masculinity that it presents is certainly hegemonic, expressed in domination over others,
valuing rationality over emotion, nostalgic masculinity is not imbued with all of its
traditional dominant assertiveness.
The instructive nature of masculine popular culture clues us in to the sense of
anxiety revealed by the loser trope. Again, one of the crucial ways to affirm masculinity
is to consume in masculine ways. Selection of programming, choice of literature,
clothing brand, and year, make, and model of a car are all potentially fraught choices for
the modern man, as the wrong choice signals a lack of manhood. Again, the particular
relationship between consumption and masculinity will be detailed in Chapter 5. Here,
however, it is important to note that a primary function of the loser trope is to create an
idealized lifestyle. This lifestyle is not designed to create a whole new person, as this
would contradict the ethos of authenticity centered around men being just “regular guys.”
This improvement is to make men just a “little bit” better, for guys who “wouldn’t mind
knowing” a few more things from a publication that is “smart, useful, and fun” (McHugh,
1997, p. 16). After all, if it were supermen who read the magazine, there would be no
need for such improvement. Instead, it is assumed that the reader is average, and thus
needs the additional assistance. Maxim provides practice advice for everyday situations,
such as getting a job, making a good first impression, or organizing a closet, broken down
into easy steps. The advice columns are not addressed to men who are the boss or the
big man at the bar, but the men who want to be. The “How To” sections address an
anxiety about being lost or unsure in the world by providing an outlet for men to get
advice without having to publicly ask for it and thus be humiliated by a lack of basic

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“masculine knowledge” These hints are often juxtaposed with inane suggestions such as
how to walk through a minefield, both encapsulating a masculine topic matter in
discussing weapons and things that explode, as well as providing comic relief so that the
entire section is not telling men how to be better. As noted earlier, men are assumed to
be loath to receive (let alone ask for) advice as it signals weakness and ignorance. The
humorous nature of some of the advice articles helps lighten the mood and reestablish a
masculine presence in the dramatic absurdity of some advice articles in comparison to the
other, more practical suggestions.
The Man Show, in contrast, offers little if any practical or useful advice for its
audience. Instructional sketches come in two varieties. The first is entirely humorous
such as the Strip Club Dos and Don’ts (a piece that includes the advice to “sleep with
every stripper in the place”) or a recurring feature of “Household Hints from Adult Film
Stars” (which provides nothing more than an excuse to focus on the breasts of an adult
film star while she discusses making the bed). Before commercial breaks in the first
season there would be occasional short cartoon “How To” sketches where the
disembodied Man Show logo “Uncle Phil” would give tips on things like “How To
Explain Impotence.”
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The other is misogynistic sketches with a “masculine view” of
history (such as the “What Really Happened” sketch that reveals women causing
historical disasters such as the crash of the Hindenburg) or science (most notably the
recurring “Man-O-Vations” designed to enhance masculinity, including an “automated
affection phone” to simulate emotional conversation with wives and girlfriends). Even
though The Man Show does not offer advice that is practical on face, it, like Maxim,

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The solutions were, in order, fake a groin pull, claim it never happened before, and blame her.

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situates what behaviors are properly masculine in what men are instructed to do, and how
they are instructed to do it. The instructional/informational segments detailed here act to
reify the gendered ideologies that are presented in greater detail throughout the remainder
of this chapter.
R.W. Connell (1987) emphasizes that hegemonic masculinity not only works to
establish dominance over women, but also over other men, including gay men and
subordinated heterosexual masculinities. Masculinity throughout masculine popular
culture is motivated by hierarchy, as some forms of masculinity are seen as inferior to
others. Even though the “precariousness of individual men’s masculine status is offset by
the safety of the male group” (Messner and Montez de Oca, 2005, p. 1887), the
“emotional safety of male friendships” is bound up in men’s supposedly “natural”
competitive nature. Even in their relationships with other men who are as much “losers”
as they are, men are encouraged to maintain a playfully confrontational style of
communication as masculinity is affirmed through competition. As noted before, both
Maxim and TMS mock its audience in a playful manner, and Adam and Jimmy constantly
make fun of each other on the show. The entirety of Episode 109 of The Man Show is
devoted to “tormenting and degrading friends,” through bets and pranks. In this episode,
a man from the audience, Frank, out-shouts all of the other audience members (his first
competitive victory) for the privilege of eating a stick of butter for $100. Frank is
encouraged by repeated chants of “Frank,” by the men, as well as smiles and yells of
encouragement by the female dancers. Once complete, Frank is both a hero, as he is
greeted by thundering applause when he finishes the butter, and a loser, as he is made fun

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of for his weight (Frank is a large man) and told to put the $100 towards his first bypass.
One’s manly prowess is demonstrated not only in having the best prank on one’s friend,
but also the ingenuity of subjecting your friends to particular types of torment, and the
status achieved from successfully winning such a bet.
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Beyond one’s friends, masculinity is secured by competing against other,
potentially equal men. Competition with these men is zero-sum, as the success of one
man necessitates the failure of another. Competition is overt, as in discussion of how to
be a better lover than her last boyfriend, how to best others at work, or in asserting
masculine toughness through a lack of sensitivity that makes men weak. The Man Show
constantly plays pranks on unsuspecting strangers for their own amusement, such as
when Jimmy and Adam wander LAX dressed as drunken airline pilots (Episode 304), and
Maxim devises pranks to be pulled on “losers” and “schmucks.” A running segment in
the first three years of Maxim pits two cultural referents against each other, both fictional
and real, such as “Count Dracula” versus “Count Chocula,” or Harry Potter versus
Colonel Potter from the television show M.A.S.H.
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Losing can even be physically
painful. In Issue 34, an interview with Mike Piazza, at the time a catcher for the New
York Mets, dramatizes what is involved in these competitions when he notes that the
sound of a home run is great when you hit it, but when a home run is hit against your

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The featured guest of this episode is a man named Ryan Zembic, described as a “man’s man” who likes gambling,
women, and “the whole bit,” who accepted a $100,000 bet to have breast implants for an entire year. He is both praised
and reviled by the hosts. Zembec is praised as definitely a “man” for accepting the bet in the first place, as well as his
success in any number of other ridiculous bets (such as staying the bathroom for a month). He is also mocked by the
hosts throughout the interview for being twisted and strange, is said to be the most insane person anyone in the
audience has ever known, and a potential source of shame for his parents. The segment ends when Jimmy asks the
dancers to “dance them out” of this horrible nightmare.

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The segment in the first issue didn’t even require people: it was Dan Marino versus San Marino. Dan won by a
score of 5-4, edging his victory in a tie-breaker in which his 352 career touchdown passes was more significant than
Mt. Titano’s altitude of 2,421 feet.

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team, “it’s almost as bad as the sound of your cup cracking in half” (p. 102), articulating
losing with genital pain and a sense of emasculation. This focus on competition goes
beyond simple one-upmanship, and encourages men to express dominance, often through
violence, as being superior, netter, more powerful, or more in control than the opponent
or adversary is a motivation for action as well as a justification for using some techniques
over others.
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There is also a clear distinction between fellow “losers” who are a part of a man’s
accepted social circle, and “real losers” who occupy a marginalized masculine position.
Even though the audience of masculine popular culture is not a collection of supermen,
they are still better than science fiction “dorks,” and jocks are still better than computer
nerds. Adam and Jimmy feature these “Star Wars dorks” as the subject of an entire
feature, as those camped out for the latest Star Wars movie are not playfully made fun of
like Adam and Jimmy do with each other; instead they are ignored, belittled and treated
as irrelevant. What are said to be particularly annoying are men that are still trying to be
what they are not, those who are “posing” instead of acting authentically masculine.
Episode 312 of TMS features a recurring segment on “The Museum of Annoying Guys,”
who all are portrayed as trying to be what they are not, or who are trying “too hard” to be
cool. These include men who dance in public, white men who idolize hip-hop culture,

121
While at times violence and dominance merely share the same premises, at others the recourse to violence is
explicitly linked to masculinity, most notably in Maxim, as explicit violence is largely missing from The Man Show and
usually only appears as a part of sanctioned male programming. Within Maxim, war is a frequent discussion, including
one in-depth article about the greatest military victories of all time and the men who secured them through brute force.
Adam and Jimmy usually just celebrate veterans as heroes and leave it at that. Sports is a common theme in both, often
because of the violence it contains. The first issue features an article wondering if the Mike Tyson Evander Holyfield
boxing rematch will be violent enough to live up to the hype. Issue 21 of Maxim features an interview with a pro-
football player whose job is to “break legs” and presented as cool because of it. There are frequent articles on how to
properly fight or throw a punch. Often, those who will not do violence to themselves in sport and play while hurt are
not playing the game properly. Aggression is represented as occasionally necessary, but natural and expected of men,
something that will secure the admiration of others and a sense of personal satisfaction.

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guys who try to be overly clever in bars, and those that are too good looking and don’t
wear a shirt as a result, the dreaded “Needus Attention Showum Nipplus.” Jimmy ends
the segment by shooting all of these masculine pretenders, symbolically slaying
inauthentic masculinity based in trends and trying to impress, and returns to his normal,
average buddy Adam.
Chapter 3 discussed how the construction of race within masculine popular
culture situates white men as uniquely in crisis through its dramatization of white anxiety.
In the successful performance of masculinity, one that works to resolve the anxiety, race
is closely tied to nationalism. If it is American masculinity that is under threat, and that
masculinity is normalized as white, then whiteness becomes intimately articulated with
citizenship and the nation in particular ways. Maxim is relentless patriotic to the verge of
xenophobia, though it gets more pronounced as the issues continue, with the period after
September 11 witnessing the sharpest increase in nationalistic sentiment. This
nationalism is not directed as particular countries, though France and Canada take a fair
amount of grief, but other countries in general and “foreigners” in particular. The Man
Show often explicitly links race with nationalism. The most frequent occurrence of
people of color on the show (who are not black), including the only other recurring
minority character, are Mexican immigrants. The “Fashion Show for Real Men”
(Episode 303) has the “Mexican Guy who Doesn’t Know What he is Wearing,” as his
inability to speak English leads him to wear a mish-mash of slogans on his clothing that
are incongruent and act to make him look “ridiculous.” In another segment, Adam finds
a collection of manual laborers, and takes three of them in a limo ride for the day, where

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they drank champagne, smoked cigars, received massages, and ate at Chuck E Cheese’s.
The episode concludes with a epilogue in which Adam reveals he was unable to tell them
apart. The experience of Mexican immigrants, positioned as relevant due to their
masculinity (the work of the laborers, the dress of the fashion show model), but also as
distinct and different from that of the white American who speaks English, and has
“legitimate” employment.
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Whiteness is here linked to citizenship, as those who are not
white are also represented as foreigners, identifying white masculinity with American
nationalism.
Maxim similarly situates nationalism within masculinity, stressing the masculine
character of the United States. All 50 of America’s top heroes in the December 2001
issue are men, including the passengers of flight #93, the airline that crashed into a field
on September 11. After noting that we don’t know what actually happened on the flight,
they proceed to describe all of the people that introduced the terrorists to the “horse-
dicked sodomy ring of hell” (p. 124) as male: a rugby jock, a high school quarterback,
and a judo champ.
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To defend the nation, or to be a good American, is more than a
patriotic duty, it is a masculine duty. The physical space of the nation is represented as
feminine: the homeland with its associations of domesticity, lady liberty, and its need for
protection. However, the operation of the nation, through performance, government, and
military action, is described in masculine terms. Uncle Sam is said to go forth to battle

122
The pilot episode has Jimmy and Adam exploiting a language barrier to get an Asian woman to sign a petition to
reverse the 14
th
Amendment, as the hosts want to “end the suffrage of women.” Language barriers are a frequent
source of comedic value on the show.

123
While it is possible for all three of these athletes to have been women, wherever female athletes are discussed in the
magazine, there is always the qualifier of women attached to their names i.e.: woman’s tennis champion, or best female
swimmer in the world. The lack of a qualifier indicates masculinity. What is additionally interesting is that the “rugby
jock” was gay, making the “sodomy ring of hell” an ironic choice of terminology. The article unknowingly celebrates
a gay hero while making a homophobic remark to celebrate his heroism.

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the world, America is said to be a world overlord and we are told that America kicks
other countries’ asses (and women are never allowed to kick some ass in masculine
popular culture). As almost an afterthought, the magazine does include America’s
greatest heroines (not surprisingly there are only five), but they are immediately
sexualized. The caption over the sidebar is “Sugar and Spice,” and the reader is told that
although not all of the following women were hotties, they “all make us horny in her own
special way.”
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The Man Show portrays the US’s first female president as a “crazy
bitch” who starts a war at the start of every menstrual cycle (most recently against
Switzerland for being a backstabbing bitch), and is shown as weak, whiny, and disliked
by men and women alike (Episode 211). Women are thus only secondary contributors to
the country’s greatness, signaling the primacy of masculine patriotism. Engaging in
patriotic acts serve as masculine performances, as the discourse of patriotism continually
affirms, and compels, such acts.

Nostalgia and Irony as Rhetorical Strategies

While the Promise Keepers explicitly uses time as a strategy in encouraging
redemption, nostalgia in masculine popular culture is more of a generalized feeling, one
which celebrates historical exemplars of hegemonic masculinity to dramatize their
absence in the present. The Man Show is populated with nostalgic imagery in pictures of
“old school” bikers on Harleys on the wall, and the desire to “turn the tide of

124
Further, the women either have a sexual innuendo made about them (“Amelia Earhart nearly went all the
way…around the world” – an interesting parallel to The Man Show which says that Earhart crashed because she was
trying to apply her makeup) or are used to delegitimize other women (Mae West is said to be the first and last woman
with a sense of humor).

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feminization” threatening masculinity, signaling a desire to return to a time before the
waters began to rise. The hosts of the show indicate that they are attempting to recreate
television as a place of Charlie and his angels, Hogan and his heroes, Starsky and his
hutch (Episode 101). The show’s icon is a cartoon that recalls images of the fifties in its
style and black and white coloring. Maxim and The Man Show alike use frequent
reminiscing of childhood as an idyllic space, as well as continual references to masculine
icons of popular culture from the past. American heroes of the past (all men) are
celebrated for their courage and determination in making the country what it is today.
Current popular culture, technology, and behaviors, whether positively or negatively
evaluated, are constantly compared to their previous iterations. Masculine figures of the
past, historical achievements, and epic events are situated as role models for comparison
to the present, romanticizing a certainty in the past that is missing in the present.
This nostalgia serves not only to lament the present with its new standards for
masculine prowess and evolving relationship with feminine agency, but also sets up the
magazine and the show as a location in themselves that are outside of the current time.
The advice and features in Maxim take place in common locations, such as the
workplace, the bar, and the home. The theme song to The Man Show describes the
program as a “place where men come together,” rendering it more than mere
entertainment through spatial metaphor. Turning on the television or opening an issue of
Maxim brings respite, however brief, from the pressures of a fractured masculinity in a
contemporary space, as men can “loosen those blue jeans” and enjoy a “chauvinistic
celebration of all things male” (Stone Stanley Distributions, 2003, back cover). The

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spatialization of culture through nostalgic practice makes the consumption of masculine
popular culture a performance of masculine identity. If Maxim takes place where men
want to be, and discusses what men want to discuss; if the show is a place where men
come together, then the act of reading or watching the show functions as masculine
performance, as the viewer is interpellated, and responds, as male.
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Though another
man or a woman may challenge masculinity in the future, masculine popular culture
provides a temporary escape into masculine certainty. Nostalgia further reinforces the
dissatisfaction with the current state of masculinity and dramatizes a return to a time of
safe male hegemony.
When the glorious past is held up as a point of comparison to the (potentially)
disappointing present, it initially appears to be a wholehearted endorsement of history,
and the privileges it provided. In the second season of The Man Show, a new recurring
character is introduced: The Man Show Boy (TMSB), an overweight teenager named
Aaron Hamill. Aaron was 12 when he debuted on the show and remained a consistent
character until the fourth season. The basic premise was to send Aaron out on the street
to engage in male rites of passage for comedic relief, due in large measure to Aaron’s
quick wit and dirty mind. TMSB was sent on such errands as “picking up college girls,”
purchasing alcohol with a fake ID, selling beer on the street for a quarter a cup, and even
dressing up as a Girl Scout to sell cookies. Luring people in with his innocent demeanor,
Aaron would proceed to insult, trick, and generally harass strangers in public for the
amusement of the studio audience. The primary appeal of the Man Show Boy appears to

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The theoretical implications of this spatialization of popular culture and its consumption will be treated in greater
depth in Chapter 5.

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be his imperviousness to retribution from his victims: no one wants to beat up a kid. He
is able to be outwardly brash, rude, sexist, racist, and demeaning to perfect strangers
without retribution.
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These skits locate Aaron specifically as a child, a boy, and thus as
the repository of authentic masculinity; he is able to say what the hosts would like but no
longer care due to social mores and the threat of physical retribution. It is tempting to
take humor such as that of “The Man Show Boy” at face value. Indeed, as David
Gauntlett (2002) notes, cultural critics and pro-feminist writers have been particularly
virulent in their denouncement of the humor of Maxim and other men’s magazines of the
same ilk as sophomoric, juvenile, and sexist.
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And it frequently is. However, the
humor within masculine popular culture is profoundly ironic, and to take this humor at
face value is to oversimplify the complex ways that irony functions rhetorically.
Whereas The Promise Keepers and other men’s movements attempt to give direct
voice to their feelings of alienation and inadequacy, using metaphor as a way to gain
perspective on masculinity crisis, in masculine popular culture it is irony that is the
master trope, using ironic distance as a means of confronting the position of men in
“ornamental” culture without identifying with a broader social or national crisis.
128
The
joking tone of Maxim and The Man Show are presented as a nod and a wink by the hosts
and writers to their audiences that seem to be saying “We are making these ridiculous

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The immunity from retribution was taken to the extreme in his final appearance, titled “The Man Show Boy
Apologizes” (Episode 405), where a woman posing as his mother forces Aaron to apologize to people he had insulted
when they were unaware in a store. Predictably, Aaron uses this moment of reconciliation to mock people further.
127
While Gauntlett is specifically speaking about men’s magazines, I will be using his discussion of irony in the
context of the Man Show as well, as it is essentially the same type of humor.

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Though the opening words to The Man Show may suggest that there is a wider concern with turning “tide of
feminization” threatening the country, and Maxim’s Manifesto assumes there is a broad cultural repression of
“guyness,” it is merely an issue of threatened masculinity and not linked to a broader social, political, or moral crisis as
it is in the Promise Keepers.

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claims about men, but we all know deep down inside we are different.” It is this move to
irony, one in which the sex-crazed Neanderthal is parodied as the emblem of modern
masculinity, that distracts from the way masculinity is reframed to take into account, and
properly manage, the increased power of women and their relation to masculine identity.
. Burke (1969) describes irony as the counterpart to dialectic. The human role,
for Burke, involves both those properties that are intrinsic to people as agents, as well as
those that are extrinsic, such as scene (setting) and the interaction with other agents.
Humans use a variety of ideas to “sum up” and make sense of their role in the human
drama, developing perspectives in which meaning is made in relation to other agents and
perspectives. Irony is the “perspective on perspectives,” the trope that encompasses the
more limited perspectives of metonymy, metaphor, and synecdoche (the other three
tropes) as irony deals with the whole in relation to the whole, as opposed to individual
parts or perspectives (1969, pp. 511-512). The virtue of irony is its ability to bring terms
not just in opposition to another term, but with all other terms; an ironic observer sees
things from the standpoint of all participants, “rather than from the standpoint of any one
participant” (Burke, 1969, p. 513). No particular perspectives or “sub-certainties” are
considered as true or false, but contributory to all perspectives.
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It is through “true
irony” that we gain an understanding of our overall situation, and our relationships to
others.

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Burke provides the example of the relationship between a cure and a disease, or a hero and a villain. He indicates
that when all perspectives are all “voices, or personalities, or positions, integrally affecting one another. When the
dialectic is properly formed, they are the number of characters needed to produce the total development.” As such, we
can ironically note “the function of the disease in ‘perfecting’ the cure, or the function of the cure in ‘perpetuating’ the
influences of the disease. Or we should note that only through an internal and external experiencing of folly could we
possess…sufficient ‘characters’ for some measure of development beyond folly” (1969, p. 512).

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The irony in Maxim and The Man Show functions as their response to the cultural
conditions of masculinity crisis, a way of sizing up men as a whole, and their relationship
to uncertain relations of gender, dramatizing what is often seen as the failings of modern
man as humorous response to cultural changes. For Gauntlet (2002), irony helps to
“provides a ‘protective layer,’ then, between lifestyle information and the readers, so that
men don’t have to feel patronized or inadequate” (Gauntlett, 2002, p. 168). Men who
lack a sense of certainty turn to MPC for that stability they desire in their own lives.
Burke (1973) indicates this internal conflict between desiring to alter a seemingly
inevitable course or events (male crisis) and the understanding that aids or inhibits that
action; it is this awareness of a breach between one’s desires and one’s understanding,
this is ironic (p. 419)
Readers do not construct ironic perspective in isolation; rather, irony is a function
between the reader/audience, the author, and the “ironic victim” who is the subject of
ironic jest. The creation of and participation in ironic meaning functions as a method of
identification “by involving the reader in the construction of meaning” and reinforcing
“the bond between writer and reader” (Walker, 1990, p. 26). Identification is further
encouraged in situations of crisis when the author identifies the observer and themselves
as both participating in the same period of instability, and potentially sharing a common
resolution to that instability (Moore, 1996, p 26), as irony “becomes the means of
complicity between writer and reader” (Walker, 1990, p. 27). Dialectic irony, what
Burke terms “true irony” recognizes the place of the author and reader as being the same;
the author is not superior to the reader in their “true” knowledge of a situation which

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sparks the ironic comment, but instead is involved in the drama with the observer (ibid, p.
35, fn10). Further, true irony recognizes the interrelatedness of all parts in the ironic
drama - victim, observer, and author – and “is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship
with the enemy, as one needs him [sic]…is not merely outside him [sic]…being
consubstantial with him [sic]” (Burke, 1969, p. 514). The interplay between the “reality”
of a situation, and the ironic rendering of it, the situating of those who are “outsiders”
looking in and those who are on the inside and “get it,” create an overall drama that
locates individual perspectives in relation to each other, helping to generate their
meaning.
Masculine popular culture situates itself in a language of dialectic irony, as all
three parts of an ironic drama (victim, observer, and audience) are the same. The writing
of Maxim and The Man Show is done primary by men (observer/author), addressing an
audience of men, and making light of the position of men. The men who create MPC –
such as Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla – are at once the observers of this culture, but
make themselves consubstantial with the men in their audience in their familiar tone and
address, while making fun of themselves specifically and men generally, the ironic
victims.
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Maxim editors tell their readers that there is no way men are going to “score”
with the cover model, but further indicate that the writers themselves will fail as well.
Gauntlett (2002) contends that men’s magazines such as Maxim are “all about the social
construction of masculinity” (p. 170, emphasis in original), as previously men weren’t in
need of lifestyle magazines because “it was obvious what a man as, and what a man

130
This relationship is also true when women are the producers of content, as they too are on the “inside” as the voice
of Maxim or The Man Show. I will reiterate, however, that the vast majority of Maxim and nearly all of The Man
Show’s writers and producers are men.

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should do,” emphasizing that it is only in a modern context, “in which we are aware of
the many choices available to us, and are also aware of the feminist critique of traditional
masculinity, and the fact that gender roles can and do change, that men have started to
need magazines about how to be a man today” (ibid). The “loser” of masculine popular
culture is a loser precisely for his inability to live up to traditional conceptions of
hegemonic masculinity that are no longer seen as socially valid; the ironic tone parodies a
mish-mash of masculine traits, often speaking as/to a powerful, aggressive, sex obsessed
individual that is now seen as unacceptable. Irony works to dramatize the “double-bind
of masculinity” that Bordo talks about while seeking a way to resolve the tension in
individual men’s lives.
Men are located as in crisis, in part, because cultural commentators have
challenged the dominant position of men in society, situating men as needing to change
to be more politically correct, and less hegemonic and domineering. Nancy Walker
(1990) argues that irony “is a mask that the reader is invited to see as a mask in order to
view simultaneously the reality underneath it” (p. 27). The humorous mask is at times
over the top in its assertion of masculinity as a mask to hide the insecurity and instability
of masculinity beneath. Such a presentation allows men to laugh at the follies of
contemporary masculinity, to project some of their own personalities and histories into
the sketches and articles without overidentifying with either the loser or Neanderthal
presented as models of modern men. The “ironic” enemy is often hegemonic notions of
traditional masculinity, super heroes such as James Bond or the Terminator, that, while
idolized as paragons of a nostalgic masculinity, are at once the subject of criticism by

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society, and the model that it becomes impossible to live up to. Men are ironically
separate from and consubstantial with this enemy in being identified with them on the
basis of their gender, yet also being represented as losers. The opening Letter from the
Editor of the June 2004 issue of Maxim, predominantly focused on technology, helps
illustrate this point:
It is given to men to manipulate the technology of daily life. If the axle snaps
while you’re doing donuts in a parking lot, nobody’s going to fix it and get the
babysitter home but you. Whatever the tech challenge, you are expected to be
James Bond, sizing up the unfamiliar doomsday machine and clipping just the
right wire. Problem is, gadgets pile up faster with every generation. Grandpa
could clean and gut a fish…Dad also had to rebuild carburetors…You, young
grasshopper, must hang shades and fix doorbells, clear fax paper jams, sync palm
devices…and master whatever else has been invented since this magazine went to
print. We here at Maxim take gender training very seriously. And we’re here to
help (Blanchard, p. 10).

The passage dramatizes the cultural terrain modern men find themselves in: men are
supposed to be technically savvy and masters of all things machine; men act childish
when given the chance (turning donuts in the parking lots) that can lead to destruction
(breaking the axle) and shirking of responsibility (taking the babysitter home); men in
their personal past (dad and grandpa) were able to fix the technological problems of their
day with no problem; not only are men supposed to be good with machines, but are
compared to James Bond, a masculine icon. There are multiple constructions of
masculinity in the same passage: family man, frat-boy goofball, technical wizard,
international womanizing spy. No one man can be all of these at once, though an
individual man may try. Men are located as the masters of all things with moving parts,
yet it betrays an assumed insecurity in the reader. The magazine presumes that men will
not be up to the more modern challenges and thus need help as they are not James Bond

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even though they are expected to be. It is presumed that they will act immaturely and fail
to live up to the model set by their fathers and grandfathers.
Upon closer examination, a variety of the representations of masculinity betray
this same insecurity. Aaron, the Man Show Boy, is both the loser and the hero. He is
overweight, but is immune to the failures of masculinity. His childhood status means that
he won’t be upstaged or threatened by other men who are “cooler,” stronger, or more
knowledgeable than he as not much is expected out of an actual child, as opposed to the
man acting like a child. Aaron is also unable to be embarrassed by women (hotties or
bitches); he can’t be rejected because, as a twelve-year old, he is never truly available in
the first place. The ironic tone within MPC makes manifest the contradictory direction
men seem to be pulled in, isolating the impossibility of fulfilling all of these
characteristics at once. In overdramatizing the sex-crazed nature of men, irony can
question the received wisdom of men as pigs as men are not “really” like that, but are
merely indulging in the fantasy of chauvinism as a “protective shield” to compensate for
the insecurity produced by attractive women.
The irony in not being able to get “the hottie” is that men are expected to do so to
demonstrate their masculinity (like James Bond), yet are presented as never being able to
do so. To secure the woman is to be manly, but to do so requires the risk of
embarrassment and failure. Men are supposed to challenge the chauvinism of the past by
being sensitive new age guys, but it is the sensitive man who is treated either as “just a
friend” or, as in the clothing store sketch on The Man Show, is the loser who is used by
the more attractive woman; the type of men that challenge chauvinism are not presented

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as men who attract women. The potential for embarrassment is also the condition of
possibility for the realization of a heteronormative masculinity, leaving men in the
position of either being hegemonic and sex-crazed or sensitive and lonely.
In discussing the use of irony in the contemporary novel by women, Nancy
Walker (1990 argues that irony as a narrative device can challenge “the authority of
conventional values and systems” and represents a “recognition that the structures that
cause and perpetuate women's oppression are arbitrary and therefore subject to change”
(p. 27-28). Irony can “call into question assumptions about identity, gender, relationships
and women’s potential achievements…by point to a contrast between conventional
surface reality and the possibility of another set of truths” (p. 37). Irony can similarly
function to challenge dominant conceptions of hegemonic masculinity in masculine
popular culture. Gauntlett (2002) contends that men’s media can incorporate feminist
criticisms of masculinity, “raising questions about the different ways in which men can
present an acceptable face today” (p. 170). For Gauntlett, the humor of the articles mean
that men can enjoy a laugh while reading, but are at the same time “quietly curious to
pick up information about relationships and sex, and what is considered good or bad
practice in those areas” (p. 168), as the articles provoke “nervous concern” about proper
masculine behavior and that ultimately can work to create “the kind of man that feminists
would surely prefer to have around” (p. 169).
This idealized form of ironic address could work to “call into question”
assumptions about masculinity and open up a new set of truths for modern men. Burke
(1969) prefers the “humility” of true irony precisely because it affords the opportunity for

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transcendence and creates a cooperative atmosphere in consubstantiality (p. 512).
However, the irony of masculine popular culture is not the dialectic that Burke prefers, or
that Gauntlett sees as possible. While the difficulty of living up to traditional masculinity
is highlighted at various points in the magazine, it is still celebrated. More importantly,
despite the difficulty in living up to such standards, hegemonic masculinity or media
images of men are not located as the cause of masculine crisis, and thus the “ironic
enemy”; rather, it is femininity and feminism, in the guise of “bitches” and “hotties” that
is the true enemy of the ironic tone. The consubstantiality that is produced is not with
women, which would lead men to see the part that men and women play in the overall
social drama, spurring the cooperation Burke sees as possible. Rather, ironic distance
works with nostalgic longing in that the consubstantiality with the present loser tropes
motivates a longing for a previous time when the loser was not the dominant figure of
masculinity.
Burke (1969) contrasts “true” or “dialectic” irony with “romantic” irony.
Romantic irony foregrounds dissociation over cooperation, adopting a position of
superiority instead of humility. This is the type of irony we see in masculine popular
culture. It is the ways in which the irony is deployed that is problematic. The articles
which discuss how to please a girlfriend or wife (the man Gauntlett says feminists would
want to have around), or how to pick up women, do preach sensitivity and listening to
women’s concerns. The motivation for these actions, however, is unabashedly
instrumental. Men are not encouraged to listen to their significant others because they
should genuinely care about what they say, but rather because that is the best way to

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ensure sexual intercourse. Recall the discussion about how to get “points” with your
partner, in which sexual release while driving – a pubescent male fantasy – ultimately
outclasses a meaningful emotional relationship. Even the articles about how to become a
better lover, which initially appear to be motivated by a concern that the partner also
enjoys the experience, are eventually rationalized that the woman will then think that the
man is a “god” in bed, will get her to forget her old boyfriend, or can make up for lost
points for insinuating that she is overweight. The concerns are not motivated by the
happiness of a partner, but to stoke the masculine ego. While intended to be “just a
joke,” the joke is on destructive standards of beauty that produce insecurity in women’s
body image, the potential for female sexual agency to undercut masculine authority, or
the need for emotional connection. Men are positioned as only needing to act with care
and concern towards the women in their lives when it affirms their own masculinity.
Gauntlett (2002) counters by arguing that criticism of this irony often misses the
point, because men “know” sexism is out of place in a modern context, and the advice is
nuanced to encourage men to be better men. Again, he has a point. The irony betrays
insecurity more than it does dominance. However, the resolution of that insecurity is
what is of concern. Given the social context in which such culture arises (the rise of post,
anti, and commodity feminism, shock jock syndication, and persistent social inequalities),
it is hardly self-evident that women are equal to men. Walker (1990) indicates that the
challenging of reality that comes with irony can be risky, as it can lead to unintended
challenges that misunderstand the initial intent. Additionally, the marginalization of
women that happens beneath the irony is constant and pervasive. None of the 50 greatest

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heroes of American history are women, feminism is constantly ridiculed as hurting both
men and women, the location of masculine performance in male genitalia, the nearly
nude women adorning even articles that are not about women, and sexist jokes all work
against the recognition of the “truth” of outdated sexism, as well as the equality of
women, and situate the gains that women have made as grudgingly given. Finally,
Messner and Montez de Oca (2005) argue that labeling such degrading representations as
merely comic relief allows dominant groups to define themselves as victims, and further
reinforce hegemonic masculinity. While the irony may be a spoonful of sugar that makes
the pill of improvement go down, it is ultimately bad sugar.
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Irony as rhetorical strategy works towards resolution of the rhetorical exigence by
providing the solution to reconcile the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual
revealed by irony. In “providing a place for men to come together,” in locating the
magazine as a call to be “a bit more honest” as Maxim takes gender training seriously and
is “here to help,” masculine popular culture uses irony as a way to set up nostalgic
masculinity as the cure for the contemporary masculinity crisis. The comparison between
those changes that “aren’t much liked” as revealed by the lack of historical images of
masculinity in the present with a new paradigm of masculinity that opens up a space to
reconcile masculinity crisis works to reconcile that discrepancy by (re)making a

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In fairness to Gauntlett, he does not claim that these magazines are always read in a similar way, and in fact
bemoans the fact that many men probably do read these magazines in a sexist fashion. He is also careful to note that
the American version of Maxim is more homophobic than its UK counterpart and other magazines in the genre.
However, in his desire to make a nuanced reading of the magazines, he neglects to examine how the irony is deployed.
This is revealed to some degree when he quotes two men from a focus group in responding to claims about the
magazine being sexist. One indicates that such men would be losers, while another says that there is power in women
making men go weak in the knees. Both of these responses, meant to showcase the lack of a sexist interpretation, still
fit in with the general them of contemporary men being “losers” and at risk by beautiful women who hold power over
them, exactly the type of representations that are problematic in redefining masculinity.

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masculinity for the future that safely interact with femininity through containing feminine
agency.
The irony of MPC masquerades as dialectic but is actually romantic. The position
of consubstantiality between audience, observer, and victim appears to rely on men not
acting manly enough – which is why they need to come together, to act like men in order
to resolve crisis. But it rhetorically situates men as superior to femininity, if not women,
and thus identifies an external cause that needs to be vanquished instead of the
transformation of the self. Mark Moore (2003) indicates that romantic irony allows
contributors to simplify the problem and escape responsibility through scapegoating. (p.
90). Much like the Promise Keepers initially appears to suggest mortification to men to
resolve crisis but ultimately scapegoats femininity, masculine popular culture projects
vicarious atonement onto the man made loser by political correctness and feminism,
while challenging femininity’s role in affirming masculinity.

Nostalgic Longing, Masculinity, and a Rhetoric of Victimhood

Though the actions men are to take to resolve crisis are divergent between
masculine popular culture and the Promise Keepers, they are actually opposite ends of the
same spectrum, a spectrum that works to contain feminine power as accidental and the
position of women as ancillary to masculinity. While PK presents women as important
because of their role in the proper functioning of the family unit, it is men who need to
lead that family. Women have their role, but are at best passive supporters of masculinity
or at worst active obstacles to the proper fulfillment of masculine identity. Promise

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Keepers works to make the family and culture the purview of men again. The servant
leadership espoused by the group, while it is a focus on being a better family man, subtly
devalues femininity as instead of being in charge of the bread that is won for the
household, men are put in charge of something “more important” - spirituality. Thus, the
authority that women have must not only be taken back in the potentially more benign
way of paternal responsibility, but the advances they have made reframed as not as
important to the running and maintenance of the household – a traditionally feminine
space. When women have economic and consumer power, men are encouraged to take
over the domestic and a “more important” or “more valuable” type of work.
Masculine popular culture also situates women in the nostalgic masculine
narrative, either as an image of heterosexual desire (the “hottie” that can’t be possessed),
or a body to experience sexual intercourse with (the “bitch” that men can access but who
may subvert their desire). .In both cases, women are not strictly necessary for the
enactment of masculinity, as it is consuming and interacting with the world in properly
masculine ways that defines masculinity, with women again either being a passive
supporter or an active obstacle. When women are seen as the domestic nuisance, the
elusive sex object, or the feminist caricature – the bitch or the hottie - men are
encouraged to devalue that authority/assertiveness and to ignore it in favor of reveling in
their own superior “rationality”, and to affirm masculinity by treating women as sex
objects. Women are not to be respected because they are powerful, nor have they risen
to positions of power and authority because of their talents or abilities. Rather, it was the
inaction of men that leads to feminine advance, locating even the feminist movement

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within the terrain of masculinity. While PK elevates and revalues men’s contributions to
traditionally feminine areas, MPC devalues women’s role as subject because of an
infringement on masculine areas. The men in Promise Keepers are encouraged to listen
to, care for, and submit to their wives. However, this ethic of care is not done because of
the intrinsic value of women, or the basic humanity of others. Rather, this care is
motivated by the drive to proper masculine performance. It is a “real man” who listens to
his wife, and thus showing concern for the women in one’s life is a way of properly
performing masculinity. It is also said to be critical for the revitalization of the family
and the nation, thus reasserting the ability of men to be the proper head of household, and
reclaim feminine authority and power. Masculine popular culture can be read, as
Gauntlett does, to create “a kind of man that feminists want to have around” in its
innovative way to allow men to realize sexism as silly. Yet, the motivation for these
actions is also unabashedly instrumental, as men are not encouraged to listen to the
women in their lives because they generally care about what they say, but as a way to
realize the masculinity that is threatened by feminine power in the first place. Feminine
power is contained either as a threat to masculinity, or as a side effect of proper
masculine action. Either way, increased feminine power is recentered/reframed as inferior
to the new masculine cultural space
Nostalgic masculinity works to cement this devaluation of feminine agency in its
appropriation of feminine characteristics and rhetorical strategies. Ferber (2000) argues
that rhetorics that locate men as victims make use of traditionally feminist strategies of
feminine empowerment to revitalize white masculinity. Such appropriation functions as

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a way to “reform masculinity…while still being able to hold on to some part of the
patriarchal dividend” (Messner et al, 2004 p. 139). The appropriation of the language of
oppressed groups and the use of marginal strategies signals the deeper identification with
those groups. When viewing themselves as oppressed, men use the same strategies that
marginal groups do to challenge and subvert the dominant discourses, in this case,
cultural discourses which present men as hegemonic and chauvinistic. As a political
strategy, such moves recognize the untenable nature of hegemonic masculinity and act to
appropriate some aspects of feminine power while disavowing the attendant costs of
femininity (decreased social status and a lack of institutional power). This disavowal
leaves masculine privilege as natural, and thus unchallenged. The Promise Keepers
appropriates feminine characteristics – such as emotive behavior and stewardship of the
private sphere – creating a “soft-boiled, reformed masculinity” that is only “made
possible by ignoring the structural conditions that empower men and provide payoffs
based on claims to manhood” (Heath, 2003, p. 441). Men can then maintain a position of
institutional power while reframing masculinity to make use of some feminine
characteristics at the exclusion of others. Interviews by Heath (2003) and Healy (2000)
seem to confirm this erasure, as the men studied saw the need for egalitarian relationships
in the home, but distanced those relationships from a recognition of the structural
conditions that produce imbalance in the first place.
MPC situates feminine characteristics as a threat to proper masculine
performance, and disavows the costs of feminine subjectivity through assignment of a
problematic agency, and erasure of the institutional privilege still afforded men. This is

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primarily done through the use of humor and irony. The “parody of guyness” of Maxim
and The Man Show makes use of cultural notions of “men as neandrathal” as a point of
comedic departure, challenging a dominant understanding of masculinity. Nancy Walker
(1990) illustrates how “pointing to the absurdity of the official language of a culture is a
method used commonly by members of oppressed groups; humor negates the power of
hegemonic discourse quite simply by refusing to take that power seriously. (p. 44). In
invoking the “loser trope,” men can “define themselves as victims” and thus renounce the
power that is still afforded men throughout American culture (Messner and Montez de
Oca, 2005, p. 1905-1906). While feminist cultural critics, academics, and social
commentators may point to masculine popular culture as obviously “sexist” and
“misogynistic,” this overlooks the ways that the audience of such culture is imagined, and
how they are situated in response to the “crisis” at hand. It is not merely that sexism is
being portrayed as an acceptable or even desirable response to increased feminine
agency. The function of irony is to remove that association, to, as Gauntlett (2002)
argues, provide a “defensive shield” that “sweetens the pill” of advice, and reinforce the
idea that the men who produce and consume MPC realize that sexism is out of place in a
modern context. In “knowing” that The Man Show is just “a joke” and nothing to get
upset about, the misogyny is played off as humor, covering the ideological underpinnings
of that irony and the solution to which it points. Much like homosexuals are not overtly
insulted or demonized in MPC, but rather treated as material for humor, to make straight
people uncomfortable, misogyny is made light of as fodder for jokes about the barbaric
nature of men. In either situation, though, misogyny and homosexuality become light

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hearted affairs, not to be taken seriously. And not valuing sexual preference as a
legitimate concern is of the same ideological danger as thinking that there is nothing
wrong with sexism as long as it is funny.
Finally, the rhetorical strategies of irony and metaphor act to make a rhetoric of
masculine victimhood effective and resonant in the lives of men. If the synecdoche of
penis stands in for men, as the penis is the marker of masculine identity and phallic
power identified by feminists, then there is a disjuncture between the synecdochic
representation that feminists champion as true, and that men experience as lacking. Thus
irony as rhetorical strategy opens up a space to reconcile masculinity crisis through
dramatizing the lack in the present in comparison to historical images of masculinity to
remake a masculinity for the future that safely interacts with femininity without that
femininity threatening masculine power. The variety of ways that white, straight male
power are affirmed in everyday life are made invisible when one area of breakage is
revealed. The lack of some power, the presence of less authority instead of total or all
authority is what enables the feeling of resentment and dispossession in culture, and thus
overrides the evaluation of cultural conditions. Much like nostalgia glosses over parts of
the past in creating the ideal, in forgetting some of the good in the present and some of
the bad in the past, so too does using irony in MPC enable feelings of dispossession.
Irony and nostalgia go together as each works to create a distance with the present
through comparison. For metaphor, comparisons also elide similarity and difference, as
in any rhetorical use of metaphor, not all similarity is intended, and not all difference is
noted. Men are presented as the invaded army or the underdog team in PK metaphors,

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metaphors of battle or sport which situate men as under attack, and needing to attack
back, but ignore the figurative “high ground” or the “reach advantage” implicit in white
masculinity.
The metaphors of PK are ultimately ironic. It is the lack of masculinity, acting
like men of integrity, which has produced a crisis of masculinity. Moore (1996) in
writing about Carter’s run for the presidency, discusses how Carter uses the irony of a
government separated from its people as an instance of moral decay, and that reversing
the ironic situation, making people again in control of the government, resolves the crisis;
if “the irony…can characterize the essential problem, then a ‘reversal’ of the irony might
provide a solution” (p. 26). The metaphors of battle, sport, and sleep, which situate men
as at war, in the game of their lives, or asleep, reveal that men started the war by
succumbing to the influences of femininity, failed to step up to the plate to win the game,
and put themselves to sleep. This too is a dialectic irony, like the one found in MPC, in
that it is men themselves who are located as the source of failure.
However, while both cultural forms appear to utilize a dialectic irony to suggest
that men are all in the situation together, are consubstantial in their loser status, and
responsible for what has happened, it is ultimately a romantic irony in that femininity is
identified as the cause of anguish, as feminine temptation or suppression of the authentic
masculine character produced the crisis, a femininity that men are ultimately superior to,
and thus must overcome. Much as scapegoating masquerades as mortification, romantic
irony masquerades as dialectic; men appear to be saying that they themselves are the
cause of their anguish when they are situating femininity in particular ways as the

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impetus for masculinity crisis. Much as the need for transcendence of moral crisis
resonated with voters during the 1976 and 1980 electoral campaigns of Carter and Regan
(Moore, 1996), where irony was used to situate the recent past as a problematic time that
could be resolved through rebirth of historical principles of trust in government to remake
the future, the need for reclamation of an authentic masculine past is championed through
ironic comparison with the status quo. This is uniquely dangerous to the women in men’s
lives. Messner and Montez de Oca (2005) argue that locating women as scapegoat for
male anguish can lead to violence towards those women as they are seen as the source of
masculine discontent. Further, emphasizing the violence of the sports and war metaphors
can also lead to aggression and hostility in real life, even after the imagery has faded
(Scharrer, 2001). The ideologies presented in popular and religious culture are made
salient in much the same ways that political discourse is, emphasizing that what happens
in the terrain of popular culture is not trivial, but can provide a culture of support for
reactionary political objectives, and lay the groundwork for such appeals to be effective
in political campaigns as it resonates with the lived experiences of men’s lives in which
they are not expecting to be subjected to such ideologies.

Conclusion

In calling for men to be servant leaders (Promise Keepers) or to be “real men” that “resist
the tidal wave of estrogen” threatening to drown America (The Man Show), nostalgic
masculinity attempts to coach a new attitude in those who are subject to its appeal; to
move from a frame of rejection (impiety, crisis) to a new frame of acceptance (order,

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stability). Burke (1966) argues that terministic screens are strategies of naming and
description that function either as terms that bring things together, or pull them apart (pp.
44-45). By encouraging the men who consume masculine popular culture and those in
the Promise Keepers to name feminism and femininity in the same way, to equate culture
and de-masculinization, and to take actions to symbolically slay the threats to an
authentic masculinity, such cultural forms open a space for a new masculine culture– and
of course this new culture comes with an array of consumer goods to purchase. Once the
rhetorical space is opened for a solution easily resolved in a commodity market, nostalgia
itself can then function as a trope and a particular commercial strategy. It includes both
representing masculinity in popular culture and as a marketing device to commodify
masculine insecurity. Here nostalgic masculinity is situated within an economic context
in which therapeutic consumption of masculinity and “the past” through purchasing
products and consuming culture creates a sense of stability in the present. This is not to
imply that market desires are enforced in a hierarchal, top-down structure imposed on
particular men. Rather, if consumption is “good for thinking” as Nestor Garcia Canclini
(2001) has argued, then these products are also a way for men to use consumption to
make sense of their gendered identity. The commodity culture and the market for such
products discussed in Chapter 5 is enabled, and in part made possible, through a rhetoric
that constructs it as necessary. Given that men have been unable to resolve their crisis on
their own, the purveyors of nostalgic masculinity provide the consumptive behavior
necessary to accompany and solidify the redemption achieved through proper victimage.

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Chapter 5:
The Masculinity Marketplace
Nostalgic Masculinity as Commercial Strategy

There’s a war going on for your mind. Media mavens mount surgical strikes from trapper
keeper collages and online magazine racks. Cover girl cutouts throw up pop-up ads
Infecting victims with silicone shrapnel…Post-production debutantes pursue you in
NASCAR chariots. They construct ransom letters from biblical passages and bleed
mascara into the holy water supplies. There’s a war going on for your mind

- The Flobots, “There’s a War Going on For Your Mind”

On pages 10 and 11 of the first issue of Maxim Magazine, just after the table of
contents is an advertisement for Beefeater Gin. A red border forms an uninterrupted
rectangle across the two pages, framing a solid black background. The ad is dominated
by a photograph in yellowed sepia tones of a bar where five attractive women are
standing, laughing, and drinking martinis. A male bartender leans over the bar, a wide
smile on his face, and lights the cigar of the woman on the left-most edge of the
photograph. Two of her friends are already puffing on cigars and all four remaining
women watch anxiously, smiling, enthralled by this process. On the far right of the ad is
a picture of a bottle of the gin in question, in brilliant color, standing tall next to a freshly
poured martini, two olives, with the brand name in yellow with red shadow underneath
and the slogan “Live a little.” Most interesting is the text that dominates the right page.
A solid red rectangular box sits near the top of the page, just above the head of the
bartender and one of the women with a cigar in her teeth. In this box are two simple
sentences in yellow text: “There was a decade called the Roaring Twenties. What will
yours be called?” As one turns the page, we find the second page of the table of contents,

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listing departments and features. This page is dominated by a long black and white
photograph taking up the right half of the page. It is a picture of a baseball pitcher in mid
wind-up, eyes trained forward on his target, his right leg high in the air, left foot planted
ready to push the hurler towards the mound, his right arm dangling at his side, appearing
to holster a two-seam fastball. And his pants have a rather large tear in the crotch,
directly in the center of the picture. The accompanying text reads “Rr-r-r-ripping sports’
greatest moments, page 86.”
The juxtaposition of these two images encapsulates the nostalgic masculinity of
Maxim in particular, but of masculine popular culture more broadly. The baseball picture
is used to advertise the 100 greatest moments in 20
th
century sports
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a nostalgic look
back on the history of modern athletics. The black and white photograph evinces a sense
of history while the tear in the pitcher’s pants highlights the potential for masculine
embarrassment, even in greatness. It is immediately preceded by an ad for alcohol, one
which situates the Roaring Twenties as an ideal model for behavior in the present, as the
ad seems to challenge its readers to live up to the decade’s expectations, taking some of
the carefree atmosphere associated with the time and updating it for the 1990s. The
picture uses its coloring to suggest age and a nostalgic, classic feel, and situates its reader

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Only eight of which had happened in the 1990s, three of those listed as some of the darkest moments in sports. The
vast majority of great moments happened at least 10 years prior, as were nearly all of the photographs. The focus of the
article was largely on the glorious past of sports. Perhaps representative of the nationalistic and white centered address
discussed in previous chapters, the second greatest moment was Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier.
While certainly a nod to race in having it situated so high, the greatest moment in sports was said to be the “Miracle on
Ice,” when the US Olympic Hockey team, which was all white, upset the Soviet team in the semi-finals of the 1980
Olympics. Maxim informs us that the message was clear-as-ice: “Communism is doomed.”
The article may have been a tad early, given that the next year, 1998, saw Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire’s
homerun race, where both men beat Roger Maris’ 37 year old record. Kirk Gibson’s homerun in the 1988 World
Series, in which the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Oakland A’s with the first come from behind game winning
homerun in Series history, hit off one of the most successful relief pitchers in history, and while Gibson was severely
injured, inexplicably does not make the list, despite seeming to epitomize the discourse of a body sacrificed to team
success essential to a hegemonic masculinity.

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in a familiar masculine haunt: at a bar, looking at women. Indeed it often becomes
difficult to separate the advertisements from the features. But one of many examples is
the ad for milk opposite a page of the greatest sports moments, featuring Alex Rodriguez,
the New York Yankees’ star third baseman. The rest of the magazine follows this theme:
historical pickup lines and (in a separate article) standards of etiquette updated for the
modern man, a feature on classic cars, an article on being a good boss using James Kirk
from television’s Star Trek as a model, and a slew of nostalgic images populate the first
issue.
The men to whom the magazine (and presumably the Beefeater advertisement) is
targeted are encouraged to make their consumption choices, both their reading material
and their alcohol, using this nostalgia as a resource, as the past is a wealth of icons,
images, and ideologies that can be updated at the close of the 20
th
century. Here we see
the two ways in which nostalgic masculinity is discussed as a commercial strategy in this
chapter. The first is the way that products are marketed. Men are encouraged to
consume particular products that are created either especially for them, or with a “real
man” in mind. This can be seen in the Promise Keeper texts, all of which are produced
explicitly for men attending conferences or participating in accountability groups, as well
as Maxim brand products, from clothing and hair care products to furniture. Promise
Keepers and Maxim are a brand identity as much as they are a men’s movement and a
magazine, respectively.
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Beyond the particular products that are sold as “official”

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Though The Man Show doesn’t market products available in a commercial marketplace, it does brand itself in
relation to consumer goods. Segments such as “Man-o-Vations” are centered on products that would be available if
Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel were in charge. Such items include the “Automated Affection Phone,” a device men
can attach to their phones in case they are surrounded by friends when speaking to a spouse or girlfriend. At the push
of a button, the phone plays “I love you too,” “I am listening,” “inane baby chatter” and “I’m sorry” so that the men

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Maxim or PK merchandise, both also provide lessons in how to consume in masculine
ways. As will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, MPC and PK link the
consumption choices that men make to proper or improper gender performance, such that
watching the “correct” or “incorrect” program is presented as an indication of whether or
not one is a man.
Second, the attendance at a conference, the watching of The Man Show, and the
reading of PK texts or Maxim are not mere commercial products. The consumption of
these media is also about consuming masculinity itself. The abstract nature of Promise
Keepers’ suggestions for living a Christ-like masculinity allows an articulation of
participation in the group and the consumption choices the men make in their daily lives
to properly gendered behavior, such that the abstract suggestions are concretized in
consumptive practice. The representation of women as “hotties” in masculine popular
culture reframes masculinity such that women are positioned as objects to be consumed.
But it is not the women themselves; rather, it is the image of an emphasized femininity
that is presented as the ideal interaction with these women, thus working to contain
feminine agency and resolve crisis through heading off the challenge to masculinity
before men can be embarrassed as “losers.” The Man Show is described as a “place”
where men can come together, and Maxim takes place, as does the Beefeater ad, in
familiar, traditionally masculine spaces such as the workplace and the local pub;
similarly, Promise Keepers conferences explicitly situate themselves as a place/space for
men to truly realize their potential, and use the single-sex environment as well as the

don’t have to say these things themselves, and thus risk “getting in trouble” with their significant others, or looking
inferior to the women in their lives either to their friends or to themselves.

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body’s physicality (through interacting with other men, raising arms during songs, call
and response with the speakers) to construct a masculine atmosphere.
As a commercial strategy, my elaboration of nostalgic masculinity relies on
Nestor Garcia Canclini’s (2001) claim that consumption is “good for thinking”. Canclini
looks to problematize the claim that consumption is an activity that acts “as a mere
setting for useless expenditures and irrational impulses” (p. 5), and instead sees
consumption in late capitalist, globally integrated societies as a fundamental process
through which we make sense of the world around us, how we “define what we consider
publicly valuable, the ways we integrate and distinguish ourselves in society, and the
ways to combine pragmatism with pleasure” (p. 20). Instead of being a superfluous
activity, consumption in a postmodern context is a critical way to establish, maintain, and
at times challenge identities that are “transterritorial and multilinguisitc” (emphasis in
original) and that are “structured less by the logic of the state than by that of markets” (p.
29). For Canclini, we no longer make sense of our identities in oral and written
communication that are produced and consumed within personalized spaces and local
interaction; rather, postmodern identities “take shape in relation to industrial production
of culture, its communications technologies, and the differentiated and segmented
consumption of commodities” (ibid). As a result, he urges that we conceive of identity as
tied more to cities than nations; the multiple nationalities present in a globalized world
and the constant access to multinational media and products means that the “juridico-
political coordinates of the nation thus lose force, formed as they were in an age when
identity took shape exclusively in relation to the territory of its inhabitants” (ibid). A

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reliance on notions of a national culture or imagined community defined by the limits of
state sovereignty are out of place in a postmodern context, as globalization situates the
citizen as a global, not a local, consumer; identity is not marked based on a homogeneity
of “sameness” but on “heterogeneous form[s] of belonging” whose networks emerge
within the interconnected circuits of consumption.
A particularly useful insight is that consumption is not simply a public or private
matter; consumption often acts as a bridge between the two, where primary participation
in politics and global citizenship often happens through commercial products, media
consumption, and enumeration of political and social rights located in the market and
one’s ability to participate in that market. Indeed, at several points both the Promise
Keepers and masculine popular culture blur the line between public in private in
suggesting consumptive practices that both serve as a private lifestyle choice as well as
an affirmation of public morality as well as a public masculinity. The Promise Keepers
and Maxim magazine, and to a slightly lesser extent The Man Show, are all globalized
properties. The Promise Keepers has held conferences in 6 countries including the
United States; Maxim, though it dominated the American men’s lifestyle category on its
release, was initially a British import and has publishes in 25 countries; The Man Show
was broadcast via satellite to those who desired American media and has its DVDs sold
internationally. PK and Maxim currently have an active web presence, further expanding
their global reach, as did The Man Show prior to its cancellation (and one can still watch
episodes of the program on G4TV.com). The ideologies and representations which
sustain these various texts are in no way contained to the borders of the United States.

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There is a continual circuit of production and reception as texts circulate in a global
marketplace, both as primary texts/products for purchase as well as a virtual landscape.
However, to recognize that the nation-state is losing ground as the sole
determinant of political, cultural, or even national identity, we must be careful with the
claim that the “coordinates of the nation lose force” and only function as antiquated
models of identity. While multinational corporations and the products they produce
certainly play a substantial role in identity formation, we must not lose sight of the
rhetorical import of invoking the nation, in particular as it regards consumption. The
American version of Maxim, as noted in earlier chapters, is relentlessly patriotic to the
verge of xenophobia. Though Dennis Publishing is based in the UK, the Promise
Keepers and The Man Show were both conceived and produced initially within the States,
and both explicitly highlight the nature of American men, not just men generally. The
Promise Keepers welcomes men of all races, but situates them all as part of the American
melting pot, all equal as men in the eyes of the Lord. The Man Show often uses non-
citizens as comic fodder. The nation-state is constantly invoked as a primary marker of
masculinity within all of the texts I examined, as well as at the conference I attended.
Consumption is situated within a global context, and makes use of world-wide media
technologies and foreign advertisers to provide revenue, yet consumption in these
contexts is good for thinking not just about personal identity, but specifically about
national identity located in the juridico-political coordinates of the United States that
Canclini suggests are no longer viable as the critical determinants of identity in a

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postmodern world.
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Even if relying on the nation as a primary site of meaning-making
is antiquated in a globalized economy, the certainty of national boundaries and the unique
“American” character of men that reside within those boundaries is invoked as a means
of resolving American masculinity crisis.
Liz Cohen (2003) argues that the identities of Americans have been bound up in
both discourses of citizenship and consumption since the 1930s, increasing in intensity
after the Second World War. She warns against focusing purely on the Cold War as a
defining aspect of American life in the 20
th
century, as well as on locating citizenship and
consumption in opposition from one another. While the Cold War had clear ideological
and material consequences on the formation of national and gendered identity, identifying
it as the sole determinant of American identity in the second half of the last century
obscures other important developments, including the way in which citizenship was
articulated to national security in ways that supported and enabled Cold War symbolism
(p. 8). Instead, Cohen urges that we recognize how consumption has been articulated as
both a public and private act within the United States historically, as “citizen and
consumer were ever-shifting categories that sometimes overlapped, often were in tension,
but always reflected the permeability of the political and economic spheres” (ibid).

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Canclini is careful to note that old forms of identity do not disappear entirely. In fact, he is explicit about the
multiple circuits of culture which circulate, one of which is the “historico-territorial circuit” that relies on shared
histories and cultures based on “ethnic, regional, and national territories” and that this circuit is likely to be used in
conditions of “historical patrimony and traditional popular culture” (p. 30). He is also careful to note that a more
“globalized” or “fragmented” sense of identity is more likely in younger generations, and that the recombination of
identities happens based on participation in a given circuit. The point here, then, is two-fold. The first is to point out
invoking imagined communities or national boundaries can be a powerful way to encourage consumption in its
resolution of anxiety produced by feelings of “crisis.” The second is to indicate that nostalgic masculinity often makes
use of mass communications (another of Canlcini’s circuits) to situate men within a firmly national – or historico-
territorial – circuit.

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Cohen is referring specifically to ways that the act of consumption was articulated
to the performance of citizenship, such that citizens went through various stages of
consumption as an important area of individual rights as consumers’ market power was
mobilized politically, to consuming to provide economic support to the United States and
use personal gratification in the service of the nation, culminating in a more recent
phenomenon of citizens viewing government policies as market transactions. In
describing nostalgic masculinity as a commercial strategy, I too want to emphasize the
permeable boundary between public and private, as well as the role of consumption in
enacting citizenship, race, gender and sexuality. However, the consumption championed
within masculine popular culture and the Promise Keepers is not articulated to national
renewal in the same way that Cohen describes. Rather than explicitly linking the
performance of citizenship with the act of consumption, participation in the consumption
of media, commercial products, Promise Keeper texts, and conferences is identified as a
resolution to masculinity crisis. Not merely abiding by the suggestions within such
media, but the very act of consumption itself is championed as an in-road to Christ-like or
authentic masculinity. Yet, at the same time, the relentless identification of American
identity with masculinity serves to make consuming not only particular products, but
consuming them in ways befitting a “real man” a simultaneous performance of national
identity.
Toby Miller (2007) notes the United States has always been “subject to fissures,
because of its origins as a simultaneously immigrant and individualistic, Calvinist and
consumerist nation, and the fact that collectivity and heritage continue their duel with

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choice and futurity” (pp. 25-26). These seeming oppositions form the crux of this
chapter, and inform the dissertation more broadly. What Miller has observed is that far
from being mutually exclusive, these tensions interact in a variety of ways, both
consistent and contradictory with one another. The “duel” between collectivity/heritage
and choice/futurity is resolved by recourse to nostalgia, as the invocation of a collective
history is used to resolve crisis in the present through appropriation of that past to make a
new choice for future action. The religious roots of the United States and evangelical
culture are often seen as in tension with consumer culture; but as this chapter will discuss,
the two actually work symbiotically as an affirmation of faith and the exploration of new
markets. Both the use of products to affirm a Christ-like masculinity in the Promise
Keepers, and the marketing of a religious devotion to masculinity in masculine popular
culture provide resources for consumers to use commodities in dominant and
oppositional ways as a means of identity formation while both stimulating and resolving
feelings of crisis through consumptions of goods, services, and media.
Julie Bettie (2003) argues “[t]he expression of self through one’s relationship to
and creative use of commodities is a central practice in capitalist societies” (p. 44). The
reading of the magazine, watching the show, or participating at the conference are all
performances in masculinity through consumption of and participation in an explicitly
masculine culture, as the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture create symbolic
sites from which individuals can draw to make sense of the world and their place in it.
Looking at how the self is expressed and encouraged to be expressed allows a way to
examine how ideologies become normalized through the use of such symbolic sites. In

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these ways, it is both the masculinity that is nostalgic, and the use of nostalgia as a
marketing strategy and representational trope. The masculinity men are to consume and
aspire to is located as nostalgic through discourses of authenticity or recourse to historical
models of masculinity, as discussed in Chapter 3; nostalgia is further used in conjunction
with advertising appeals, in images, language, and design to create a particular “feel” to
the products and media. It is both the masculinity that is nostalgic, and the use of
nostalgia as a marketing strategy and representational trope. The masculinity being
“sold” is nostalgic in its appeal to historical images of masculinity and recourse to a
discourse of certainty, as discussed in earlier chapters. What is the focus of this chapter
is how that masculinity is sold. While sold differently in both contexts, both use a
masculinity that is nostalgic as a code to sell themselves and their attendant products.
Further, the use of representational tropes – of articles on historically great figures,
nostalgic cartoons, references to childhood, discussions of the nation’s glorious past –
that encourages a nostalgic feeling, an affective connection to childhood, and thus a
powerful access to history and the “wistful yearning” that is also a “painful longing” to
stimulate consumer desire for the products using nostalgia as a trope. One way in which
nostalgia is made operative as a strategy is in this use as a marketing strategy and a trope.
Finally, we cannot understand how nostalgic masculinity functions as a commercial
strategy without first engaging the contexts in which that strategy is situated, as well as
engaging the material practice of consumption itself. Both sets of texts rely not merely
on the encouragement of consumption, but also on particular configurations of space and
use of the body in the fulfillment of consumptive desire. The postmodern, fragmented,

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and recycled style of PK conferences and of The Man Show and Maxim Magazine as well
as their varied use of media products discourage sustained critical reflection, further
naturalizing and normalizing their ideological undercurrents. The physicality of the
Promise Keepers conference experience as well as the contexts of consumption and
invocations of spatial delineations in masculine popular culture further frame their
appeals to a nostalgic masculinity and concretize their nostalgic appeal. The remainder of
this chapter is devoted to first examining the particular consumptive contexts in which
nostalgic masculinity is strategically deployed – those of the Promise Keepers and
masculine popular culture – and second to identifying important areas of overlap between
the two.

Promise Keepers

As discussed in Chapter 1, both the Promise Keepers and masculine popular
culture evolve out of market contexts that are produced by economic, social, cultural, and
ideological factors. The redefinition of spheres and the move away from the Self-Made
Man of the 19
th
century was crucial for the development of evangelical men’s
movements, separate men’s fraternal lodges, sports, and their attendant redefinitions of
masculinity. The transition of the United States economy to one dependent on
consumption after the Second World War and the legacy of the Scopes Trial provided the
impetus for the development of parallel evangelical culture, as the increasing
secularization of American culture and devotion to market principles left evangelicals
seeking cultural and religious spaces that could remain sacred against the profane

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influences of commercial culture. Evangelical culture doesn’t have an inherently
inimical relationship to commercialism, however. Rather, the interplay between
evangelical, Protestant Christian theology has evinced a complicated relationship with the
commercial market over the course of the 20
th
century. Muscular Christianity broadly,
and the Men in Religion Forward Movement in particular, attempted to stimulate
masculine interest in the Church through bringing metaphors and ideologies of commerce
and business to Prostestantism, further working to collapse (or at least blur) the separate
of spheres that had feminized the Church (Bederman, 1996, pp. 124-125). The Christian
Coalition and later the Religious Right made use of mass media technologies in the
service of conservative politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Hendershot, 2004).
Further, Focus on the Family and other conservative evangelical foundations sustain a
multi-million dollar market for evangelical media and commercial merchandise (ibid).
The difficulty in resolving Christian piety with potential market contamination is
evinced within the Promise Keepers texts. Erwin McManus, PK author, conference
speaker, and pastor rails against treating the Church with a consumer mindset in the
companion text to the Awakening conference, as he decries looking for market value and
benefits in selecting a church and practicing faith (2005, p. 195), a marked contrast from
the approach of MRFM. Elsewhere in the same text, the collective authors indicate that
“[o]ver the years an artificial gulf has developed that seems to separate…ministry and the
marketplace” (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, & Richardson, 2005, p. 171) in noting the
connection between work activities and the ministry in an attempt to educate men that it
is not just the pastors or the missionaries that help with Christ’s message, but that men

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can do it everyday. They explicitly compare the duty of evangelicals to preach to the
uninitiated to a marketplace in discussing how “Jesus…went to the marketplace and
called twelve working men,” concluding that “God has called us to the workplace to help
change the world right where we are” (p. 172). Men are not to treat the Church with the
mindset of the consumer; yet they are to view themselves as part of an ideological or
theological marketplace, in which they need to “sell” the message of Christ in their daily
lives. Faith should be genuine, but the economic context in which PK men find
themselves lends itself to the metaphors of commerce.
The resolution of this contradiction can be seen in the unique tenets of evangelical
Christianity, and how those tenets have been adopted to an increasingly commercial,
postmodern world. One critical distinction between fundamentalist Christians and
evangelicals is their approach to the wider secular culture. While fundamentalists seek a
retreat from the immorality of the secular public sphere to the certainty and purity of
biblical verse, evangelicals take it as a central tenet of their identity to proselytize to those
who have not yet been shown the wonder and glory of God and Christ the savior
(Hendershot, 2004). Given that it would be quite difficult to convert non-believers
without venturing out to the wider culture to find and save them, evangelical theology
relies on a careful balancing act and engagement with culture. Evangelicals must engage
the culture they wish to change, but with a position of detachment and skepticism, lest
immersion lead to temptation and sin. This contradiction is revealed in the dictum to be
“in” the word but not “of” it, a reminder to the faithful to temper their engagement with
wider secular culture.

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Though there are a variety of Christian denominations which are evangelical, as it
is not a discrete denomination per se in and of itself, evangelical theology is largely
drawn from Protestant ranks that focus on individual acceptance of Jesus as savior.
Heather Hendershot (2004) explains that those who identify as born again Christians
“place religion at the center of daily life, believing that one can serve the Lord through
the most mundane acts,” and that expressions of faith in popular culture or through things
such as fashion are taken as “a potent symbol of missionary commitment to the Gospel.
Everyday cultural products such as Christian music and magazines can also help trigger
and maintain this kind of commitment” as with the advent of “Christian lifestyle
products, the consumption of mass-produced goods can now be justified as serving a holy
purpose” (p. 4). Even mass produced items such as bumper stickers help “spread the
good news” (p. 6, photo caption). Dick Hebdige (1981), in his examination of British
subcultures, argues that the signifying practices of clothes, jewelry and style are all
means of “meaning-making” for members of those subcultures. Indeed, everyday
cultural practices such as fashion, musical choice, reading material, and television
viewing often involve some form of display as part of performing one’s identity. Within
evangelical culture, this same process occurs, though in a slightly different way. If part
of evangelical dogma is the notion of spreading the word of God, in addition to living as
his example in daily practice, then the consumption of particular goods, investment
strategies, singing along to music, and the display of clothes all serve as part of this
witness-bearing, the public declamation of faith in Jesus as savior. For Hendershot, the
thriving market for Christian cultural products demonstrates a permeable boundary

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between the secular and the sacred is evidence that “evangelicals continue to spread their
messages using ‘the newest thing,’ be it film, video, or ‘the Web’”, functioning not as
“evidence of the ‘secularization’ of evangelical culture but rather of the complicated
osmosis” in the engagement with the wider secular society (p. 6).
The Promise Keepers has its own commercial market, replete with a dizzying
array of products available for purchase at conferences and through the PK website. Not
only are there tee shirts, hats, and sweatshirts for the individual conferences, but also
more general shirts proclaiming the affiliation with PK. Beyond clothing, there are
coffee mugs, pens, bumper stickers, key chains, and a range of other kitschy products
emblazoned with the PK logo. One can even purchase a conference specific rubber
bracelet, in the style made popular by the Livestrong campaign, as well as a Promise
Keepers bookmark, complete with the Seven Promises as a constant reminder of the
edicts of a Godly man. Further, there are a range of Promise Keepers texts for sale, from
the companion text to the conference, perennial bestsellers such as Seven Promises of a
Promise Keeper, and the texts of the various conference speakers. Each conference,
beginning in1995, also has an accompanying c.d. which includes songs for “worship”
that were played at conferences. Christian music takes on a unique significance in
evangelical culture broadly and the Promise Keepers in particular. It is both a
recreational past time to be listened to as a leisure activity as well as a form of bearing
witness. The songs which proclaim faith in Christ serve both as pleasurable enjoyment
and spiritual commitment, as listening to the music (in forms as varied as rock and roll,
reggae, hip hop and heavy metal) serves as a reminder of the listener’s devotion to Jesus.

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Susan Faludi (1999) makes the interesting observation that at PK conferences
gender roles seem to be reversed: men are lined up to purchase products as consumers
while women volunteers staff the cash registers at the various points of purchase.
Commercialism is indeed ubiquitous at PK events, nearly inescapable and constantly
urging men to spend their hard earned money in various ways. Each conference has a
“product tent” that has the multitude of items on display, but that is hardly the end of the
inducement to buy. The concourse at the Anaheim Pond was ringed with a seemingly
endless collection of stands. Some of these stands were devoted to Promise Keepers
merchandise, others to the products of the speakers appearing at the conference, and still
others to various charitable organizations (such as Gospel for Asia which works to
provide bibles and other goods to impoverished Asian children) associated with the
Promise Keepers. And lest they be left out of the boom in internet commerce, PK
worship albums are available as MP3s through Amazon.com’s music service.
The presence of marketers besides the Promise Keepers clues us in to one of the
central ways that nostalgic masculinity functions as a commercial strategy. While these
products are rarely, if ever, nostalgic in and of themselves the articulation with nostalgic
masculinity provides access to the men of Promise Keepers as consumers of the various
products on display. When the men of PK are encouraged to act in Godly ways, in line
with a nostalgic masculinity, and these products by virtue of their very presence at PK
events associate themselves with that message, then the purchase of the attendant
products. Often, the message of conference speakers was indistinguishable from their
attendant products. A couple of particularly salient examples will suffice here. The first

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is the comedian Brad Stine, discussed in Chapter 4. Stine had his own booth at the
Anaheim conference that not only sold his comedy DVDs and C.D.s, but also tee-shirts
with some of his more popular catch phrases, all of which had religious overtones.
135

Additionally, near the beginning of the first day of the conference we watched a preview
of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” C.S. Lewis’ children’s tale which is also, in
part, an allegory for the story of Christ’s crucifixion and redemption. The preview
describes the movie as an “exciting adventure,” a description that the emcee Reggie
Daubs then repeats and uses as a metaphor for the conference, describing it as an
“unpredictable adventure.” The movie preview was both a way of framing the next day
and a half for men, as well as a clever viral marketing campaign to a stadium full of
mostly parents. Finally, the pamphlet that accompanied the conference, and provided
helpful exercises and reminders of conference themes, was interspersed with a variety of
advertisements for PK merchandise, texts, and “Christian-friendly” products.
The consumption of products which act as a marker of faith in Christ is one such
way that situating Promise Keeper men as consumers is used to resolve masculinity
crisis. If the pronouncements to act as Christ-like men are frequently vague, and the
evangelical market can be used to display a Christian-identity, then the purchase and use
of these products is a concrete way to realize the amorphous pronouncements of PK
masculinity. In this way, Promise Keeper men can engage the secular, tempting public
sphere armed with the protection of their declared faith in Christ; private morality is
publicly displayed. The use of Christian products is not the only way in which the

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The bestseller from my observation was a black crew neck tee shirt with the message “The Supreme Court is not
Supreme” across the front in white type, a message I will devote more attention to later in this chapter.

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Promise Keepers mobilized consumption in the service of nostalgic masculinity. This
interaction between the public and the private, in which the lines are carefully blurred to
allow evangelical men to be of the world but not in it also factors into the politicization of
consumption within PK culture.
Linda Kintz (1997), in discussing evangelicals’ relationship with commercial
culture, reminds us that it is important to recognize how the Promise Keepers honor “the
seriousness and anxieties of men,” (p. 113) which the group addresses in a variety of
ways. She continues by arguing that as part of engaging this relationship, we must also
take into account “the way those needs are exploited in the interests of…their hegemonic
effect” (ibid). Part of this concern for Kintz, and for a variety of others who write about
the Promise Keepers is the potential political implications of the conservative message of
PK and its substantial infrastructure, and claims that PK is “part of a well-financed,
sophisticated coalition of evangelical groups bent on influencing public policy” (ibid),
though she concedes that they have relative financial autonomy from these groups in
using their own products as a means of generating revenue. Others, such as Michael
Kimmel (1997) argue that the Promise Keepers connections with groups from the
Religious Right such as the Campus Crusade for Christ, the Christian Coalition, and
Focus on the Family indicates a decisively political bent. Michael Messner (1997)
characterizes the group as having “clear political aims” (p. 31) and functions as
“organized and highly politicized antifeminist and antigay backlash” (p. 35). Jean
Hardisky (1999) claims that the Promise Keepers, while not officially affiliated with
particular groups on the Religious Right, serve a vital political function in terms of

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“recruitment” for the Religious Right’s agenda.
136
This concern is not unfounded. James
Dobson, CEO and founder of Focus on the Family not only helped to publish the initial
PK texts, but is a frequent author and speaker at conferences. Though he never addressed
PK conferences, Jerry Falwell was often quoted as being in support of the group.
Founder Bill McCartney notoriously launched a campaign aggressively supporting
legislation in Colorado to restrict the rights of sexual minorities. The concern is that the
private behavior and spirituality, the sense of internal crisis, is brought into the public
sphere as a public morality, as the religious interior of PK men is commodified as a
means of generating resources from the ranks of the Promise Keepers both in terms of
monetary donations, volunteering, and votes.
Brian Donovan (1998) discusses the tendency of research on social and religious
movements to adopt a rigid binary between “public” and “private” in terms of goals,
aims, and strategies, and calls such binaries into question. He continues by noting that
the demarcation in mutually exclusive terms of the public/private distinction is carried
over to state/civil society and politics/culture (p. 821). John Bartkowski (2004) admits
that the relationship between a social movement like the Promise Keepers and politics is
indeed a complicated one, but concludes that PK is interpreted as a political group, but
finds claims of their status as a political entity “less than compelling” (p. 163, fn. 2.
Italics in original). Sean Everton (2001) indicates that the Promise Keepers are decidedly
less political than the Religious Right, contrary to the beliefs of most commentators.
Andrew Quicke and Karen Robinson (2000) argue that seeing Promise Keepers as a

136
See Bartkowski (2000) and Everton (2001) for a further discussion of this debate, including debates taking place in
the popular press.

330
political organization would be a mistake, one that occurs often as the group is confused
with or located as a branch of the Christian Coalition. Instead, they indicate that we
should view PK as a “socio-religious” or “pre-political” organization that is based
primarily in religious, rather than political values. Similarly, Michael Chrasta (2000)
traces the religious roots of the Promise Keepers to demonstrate their focus on spirituality
and religion over politics, while Bryan Brickner (1999; 2000) contends that while the
leaders of the Promise Keepers may endorse political causes, the organization itself is to
“of a social, rather than a personal or political quality” (p. 212), as it focuses on changing
civil society and moral standards through prayer, conversion, and personal accountability
as a way to resolve social crisis
While espousing a wide range of opinions as to the political intent and efficacy of
the Promise Keepers, all of the above analyses seek to situate them as either political or
apolitical. Frequently, these discussions occur in the context of the difference between
the beliefs of the leaders of the Promise Keepers (such as founder Bill McCartney) and
the explicit public pronouncements of the organization. Regardless, the primary
assumption, as Donovan (1998) indicates is common in social movement literature in
general, is to assume that the Promise Keepers is either political, or not; commentators
may concede that they are not definitively a political organization, or that the perception
of PK as political makes sense, but both situate the group as either focused on politics or
culture, wider society, or individual accountability. The split between political/cultural,
individual/social, and public/private are misleading and problematic in the context of PK.
Donovan continues by arguing that such an either/or logic “creates problems for

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conceptualizing how moral reform movements embed political strategy in their cultural
work” (p. 822). The leaders of Promise Keepers rarely, if ever, make explicit reference
to their politics at conferences or in PK texts, but instead encourage men to invest and
consume in “godly” ways that do not contribute to un-Christian practices in wider
society. In particular, at the conference I attended, there were no calls to vote in
particular ways, support specific candidates in local or national elections, or
encouragement to mobilize around any one pressing social issue.
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This is not to say that the group is entirely apolitical. Earlier, I discussed the ways
that consuming Christian clothing and products functions as a display of evangelical
identity, one in which living a Christ-like masculinity can be realized in the consumption
and use of commodity goods that bear witness. This association of Godliness with
consumer activity is mobilized in other places in the service of particular ideologies and
politics. Once members are encouraged to consume products that act as a declaration of
faith in their use, then the groundwork is already laid to tap into this market in a variety
of other ways, as the very act of consumption is politicized as a way to live a Godly
masculinity. This happens not just in the products consumed, but in the approach to
consumption. Rather than separating the cultural from the political, the Promise Keepers
often situate the two as mutually constitutive, as consuming in particular ways, and not
merely particular products, is critical to realizing a Christ-like masculinity.

137
The absence of particular political positions, organizing, or endorsements at Promise Keepers events is also
documented repeatedly in ethnographical work on the group. See, for example, Bartkowski, 2004, Brickner, 1999 and
2000, Faludi, 1999, Kintz, 1997, and Lindskow, 2002, for individual texts. The collections on the Promise Keepers by
Dana Claussen (1999a, 1999b, 2000) also bear repeated testimony of the absence of specific political activity at
Promise Keepers events, often to the surprise of the authors.

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Initially, the variety of organizations and texts available at the conference or
through the website that are not a direct part of PK are able to capitalize on their
association with the Promise Keepers. Gospel for Asia represents a traditional call to
Christian action, as donating to charity is a central Christian principle. Promise Keeper
mailings frequently locate the donation of funds to the organization as an act of Christ-
like masculinity, as men’s donations make them a “life-long partner” in the Promise
Keepers, and help support expanding the ministry to those who are “most in need,” often
couched in terms of men who would like to hear the saving message of PK but can’t
afford it.
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The accumulation of wealth is often denigrated (as is the accumulation of
debt) in favor of giving as much as possible to further the reach of the Gospel.
McCartney himself stopped taking a salary, and left a multi-million dollar contract at the
University of Colorado to devote himself full-time to the PK ministry (the Promise
Keepers provides him a modest stipend to live on), a tale often told in conjunction with
the need for self-sacrifice.
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Ron Blue (1999) urges PK men to stop spending so much
on their credit cards, and instead take what would be debt and give it to Christ. PK men
are told (though the hypothetical narrative of a man working through the PK process) that
the money made here on Earth is not theirs, but God’s, and so that money should be

138
One may be tempted here to comment that if expansion of the ministry is so important, then the Promise Keepers
should reduce their costs or stop charging admission. Interestingly enough, they did – admission to the 1997 set of
conferences was free of charge, an experiment which nearly collapsed the organization as conference attendance
accounts for 80% of its revenue. Instead, PK has attempted to resolve this dilemma through providing scholarships to
those who are not financially able to attend the conferences, subsidized through member donation. In this way, PK is
able to maintain a revenue stream, and articulate donation of money to the organization as a Christian duty and
performance of Godly masculinity.

139
A story that is at least a little disingenuous. While it is true that McCartney did leave his well paying gig at UC, he
also exercised an escape clause that provided a large buyout of his remaining contract, in addition to the money he
makes in public appearances as a motivational speaker, and the royalties from his multiple bestselling books.
McCartney is certainly dedicated to the Promise Keepers, just as certainly as he is not living on poverty wages.

333
given back to Him or invested appropriately (Velasquez, Rasor, Hinkle, & Richardson,
2005, p. 40). Men are told how to consume culture in Christian friendly ways as well as
how to spend their money in Christian ways, making the consumption of culture a
political act.
This same association with using money in ways that would please God is
endlessly articulated to groups, organizations, and individuals who are not non-profit,
philanthropic organizations. While there were no political positions explicitly espoused
by speakers at the conference I attended, booths set up in the walkways of the Pond, as
well as texts on sale at official PK booths, encouraged men to use investment firms that
would put their money into ventures that did not condone sinful activities such as
abortion or gay marriage. None of the speakers made political arguments, but the
comedian at the event, Brad Stine, made multiple references chastising an activist
Supreme Court, supporting prayer in schools and denouncing those who spoke against it,
and bemoaning a lack of morality and accountability in civic government. Stine received
substantial applause when saying that he had to take his family and move to “a red state”
so that he could raise his children and lead his family in a Godly way, explicitly linking
the performance of masculinity to political ideology
Stein himself was used as a rallying point for the demonstration of the consumer
power of the Christian market. Reggie Daubs, the emcee, explicitly urged the men of PK
at the Anaheim conference to “flex the muscle of the Christian market” by purchasing
Brad Stine’s DVD. Apparently, Stine was having problems getting mass distribution
because there was not enough perception of a viable market. Reggie implored the men at

334
the conference to use consumer power to buy Stine’s DVD and “show secular companies
that there are still enough Christians who believe and will buy Christian products”
(emphasis added). Here, we see the confluence of the use of consumption used as an
affirmation of faith, as a repudiation of secular culture, and a marketing technique. When
books, investment firms, comedians, speakers, and PK mailers for donations bill
themselves as properly Christian, then their consumption is an individual affirmation of
Christ, allowing consumption to function as the individual action need for salvation,
which Hendershot indicated was a integral component to Evangelical theology. The
public sphere in the United States is articulated to market economics when it is described
as a “marketplace of ideas,” where free and uninterrupted speech are critical to the
realization of democracy and rational deliberation. The Promise Keepers often make use
of an evangelical tactic of situating themselves as acting within that marketplace of ideas
(Kintz, 1997; Lundskow, 2002). This is one aspect of the rhetorical function of the
abstract notions of living life as servant leader and Godly man, as consumption is a way
for the men of the Promise Keepers to not only concretize the abstract pronouncements,
but also to introduce evangelical theology into the marketplace of ideas, and hopefully
gaining currency within that market as a way to reform and stabilize a culture in crisis.
Further, Chapter 3 detailed how the Promise Keepers frequently elide the distinction
between public and private as the maintenance and salvation of the home was critical to
resolving the larger, national crisis of American culture. Thus, consuming Christian
products and purchasing in Godly ways is not merely crucial to the Promise Keepers, but
to the very health of the nation.

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Finally, the importance of the Promise Keepers conference as a site of
consumption cannot be understated. The conference itself is not only a recruitment tool
and introductory step to get men into the smaller accountability groups; it is also a
ritualized gathering for men to affirm their masculinity and faith in Christ. A purely
textual analysis of PK misses the materiality of the organizations rhetoric. There is a
resonance that is created through bodily participation in the activities of the conference,
what Bartkowski (2004) refers to as the “sensate” dimensions of PK; literally, the way
the body is located in a particular space and encouraged to respond is rhetorical as the
combination of sensation and emotion influence how members of the group relate to the
rhetorical appeal (pp. 42-44). There is an overwhelming pathos of being present, as
conference attendees are physically brought into the message through the encouragement
to hug and high five other men, the use of music, the raising of arms during worship, all
of which are critical elements in the presentation of ideology and appropriate masculine
behavior.
I say the pathos is overwhelming because the engagement with the physical
dimension of the conference, the bodily participation bound up with the emotional release
and the suggested steps and actions of the speakers provides the appearance of being
immediately successful. After a fire and brimstone sermon in which the assembled men
of PK were asked to take accountability for their own failings as men and as Christians,
and the speakers provided a simple set of steps with which to resolve that failure (again
“simple steps couched in broad platitudes such as “respect your family”), men were then
a part of an emotionally charged song or skit which encouraged a direct emotional

336
connection with the symbolic inducement of the speaker. Regardless of the efficacy of
the strategies in the personal and particular lives of the men involved, the universalized
masculinity was made personal the use of sensate connection. This was the most difficult
portion of the conference for me to remain “objective” or “detached” as an observer, and
where the always tenuous divide between participant and observer was most blurred. I
personally was caught up in the rush of song and emotion on a number of occasions
despite having an explicitly critical eye towards what was happening. If nostalgia is said
to be so powerful precisely because of its location within an emotional and idealized past
(Pickering and Keightley, 2006), as it is the affective dimension of nostalgia that anchors
it so firmly in our consciousness, and our conceptions of self and history, then the
articulation of nostalgia with such raw bodily performance and participation is a powerful
device.
As an alter server and later a lector in my church, I was drawn back to
adolescence at the same moment that uplifting strands of Christian rock washed over me
while surrounded by thousands of men said to be in the same position I was. It was a
powerful moment, one in which I lost my critical distance and was caught up in
everything that was going on around me. And, as a jaded Catholic, that was no small
feat. Nor was I the only one. Burke (1966, 1970) argues that an inducement of a sense
of corporate guilt, or the recognition that something is not right in the social order, is a
fundamental step in a ritual of purification. While Burke is referring to guilt in a more
secular sense, the feeling of personal guilt and responsibility is one way to generate
recognition of impiety or lack in the current social situation. I became aware that my

337
experience of being caught up in the moment was not unique when after a particularly
moving speech on the second day of the conference by Joey Callington titled “My Role
in the Epic Story,” and followed by a powerful song titled “Jesus is King,” a song about
the redemptive power of Christ to triumph over adversity and free us all. After the song
finished, and there was a break called, the gentleman sitting next to my right turned to
me, and wholly unprovoked said “Wasn’t that great?” Before I had a chance to respond
he continued:
You know, I am disappointed I missed last night. It is always good. I got off of
work and didn’t want to make the drive all the way down here. I feel guilty about
missing it because the guy died on the cross for me and I can’t drive 3 hours for
him. But I’ll do better.

Whether he felt guilty the entire time, or only after the song claiming Jesus is King I do
not know. However, the rush of emotion, connected to recourse to a historical trope of
masculine faith provoked a stranger to open up and be accountable to another total
stranger, the precise action that the Promise Keepers says is critical to personal renewal.
Participants are not only encouraged symbolically to participate in a healing through
faith; they live the experience of faith through the event itself.
Thus, nostalgic masculinity as a commercial strategy manifests itself in a variety
of ways throughout Promise Keepers texts, practices, and events. The space of the
conference itself is uniquely important as in provides a site to consume the message of
the Promise Keepers, the attendant products which reveal a committed faith in Christ, and
the chance to materially live a Christian, saved life through physical participation and
appropriate motives and objects of consumption. The lines between public and private
are further blurred as the cultural and the political are not discrete categories, but often

338
overlap and inform one another. This not only dramatizes the “complicated osmosis”
discussed by Hendershot, but indicates that “consumers use Christian media not [merely]
as tools of salvation but as safeguards against secular contamination…In short, such
media both reflect and construct evangelical understandings of the sacred and the
profane, of the saved individual and his or her place in the wider world” (Hendershot,
2004, p. 8).
Masculine Popular Culture

Much like the changing market economics and cultural understandings of
masculinity in the 19
th
century paved the way for the emergence of evangelical men’s
movements in the 20
th
century, so too did those same developments open a space for
popular culture aimed particularly at men. The redefinition of spheres and the move
away from the Self-Made Man that produced a desire to remasculinze the Church and
create separate all male enclaves, those same changes were crucial for the legitimation of
leisure for men and the evolution of men’s mass market periodicals. The transition to an
economy dependant on consumption after the Second World War which had a
contributing hand in the development of evangelical culture also provided an impetus for
the development of, Esquire, GQ, and Playboy periodicals which relied on the gender
norms of their times – the 1930s and 1950s respectively – to provide a foil against which
the fashion conscious male and the playboy ethos could be measured. Similarly, public
entertainment saw a redefinition of audiences in the latter half of the 19
th
century. The
notion of masculine popular culture in the 1800s and early 1900s made little sense. Early
theatres in the republic and pre-Civil War periods of American history were rowdy,

339
masculine spaces that women rarely visited if they wanted to be considered “respectable”
(Butsch, 2000). Much as market dynamics in addition to changing ideologies of gender
had effects on the development of mass-market periodicals, similar forces had an affect
on public culture. As marketers and advertisers began targeting women as consumers in
the second half of the 19
th
century, theatre owners followed suit, seeing the
encouragement of a female audience as a valuable market opportunity. With the
domestication of the theatre, men increasing turned to other, often more physical outlets
for entertainment, such as sporting events. Indeed, men had a variety of opportunities for
leisure entertainment, as the “remarkable proliferation of male entertainments gave
theatre managers even more reason to seek women as a market” (ibid, p. 78). As such,
nearly all “popular” culture and entertainment were geared for a male audience at the turn
of the century, leaving women to be the focus for those wishing to generate additional
revenue.
This is a trend which continues throughout the development of media
technologies in the 20
th
century United States. Early radio was initially a device for
technically savvy men, a savvy that required leisure time unavailable to women due to
domestic constraints, and a way to not only demonstrate masculine competence, but as a
form of father-son bonding (Douglas, 2000). The commercialization of radio saw it
evolve into more of a family medium, as while men were still the primary producers,
creators, and distributors of technology and content, women emerged as the primary
audience (Spigel, 1992). Television soon followed suit, as the radio companies expanded
their hold on the airwaves. TV was more explicitly targeted to women, with

340
programming arranged around housework schedules and advertisers aggressively
marketed to women as consumers of new household products. While women were seen
as the primary economic support of the medium as a result of their consumption habits,
men controlled the content, form, and distribution of entertainment and communications
media.
140

Men were not absent from the radar of advertisers during the development of
leisure entertainment in the 20
th
century, they just weren’t the primary focus of those
advertisers. Pendergrast (2000) argues that magazines are always, and have always been
about consumption, and so the most successful magazines were the ones that encouraged
a consuming lifestyle, and to some degree a consumption of masculinity (pp. 3-4).
Esquire, GQ, and Playboy were unique in their development precisely because they
challenged conceptions of men as consumers though their focus on fashion and lifestyle.
The men’s market remained largely stagnant through the late 1970s, as these three
maintained market dominance in their respective categories. It was the upheaval in the
men’s periodical market and the subsequent redefinition of that market that opened the
space for masculine popular culture’s particular brand of consumption at the end of the
20
th
century.
In providing men with a range of products, movements, and media just for them,
masculine popular culture joined a trend begun in the 1980s in marketing to men as men.
While this seems intuitive and obvious at first, such marketing strategies evince a

140
This is not to say that women were passive receivers of these forms of media. Spigel argues that such readings of
media history are simplistic at best and grossly inaccurate at worst, and that women engaged in an active dialogue with
television and other forms of entertainment culture. Rather, men were initially not conceived of as the primary targets
of advertisers, and enjoyed the privilege of content production.

341
profound cultural shift. Until the gains of the feminist, gay liberation, and civil rights
movements, white, middle class, straight men had enjoyed a presumption of cultural
centrality: they did not need to be marketed to because they were the unspoken consumer,
and women were marked as the special case in television and print advertising. Though
products such as Guns N Ammo or Road and Track were targeted at a male demographic,
they announced themselves as being for gun owners or automobile enthusiasts. Men
were the implied audience, as masculinity was left unmarked in the appeal to a universal
consumer. In situating Maxim as a magazine for men, or The Man Show as, well, a show
for men, masculinity becomes marked, differentiated, and identified as different, a
position that masculinity had not found itself in within a commercial market. Clearly,
products for men have been around for a number of years, and, as Chapter 1 detailed,
there have been products explicitly for men since the early part of the 20
th
century.
However, there are two crucial distinctions between marketing for men and products
aimed at men historically and in the late 20
th
century.
First, products marketed to men in the late 19
th
and throughout the 20
th
century
focused not on their fashion appeal or their relationship to male sexuality; instead, the
focus was most often on their functionality and usefulness, either in efficiency in their
design or their ability to help men succeed in masculine arenas such as competitive
commerce (Bordo, 1999, p. 203).
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Playboy and Esquire, especially the former, relied
on upward mobility, the ability to acquire taste and style, even if not actual products, in

141
This is not meant to imply that there was but one masculinity from the turn of the 19
th
to the turn of the 20
th
century.
Bordo, and others, document the changing masculinities of the pre and post war period, the 1970s, etc. What it is
meant to suggest is that marketing products to men was done in particular ways, and, especially after World War II,
products were predominantly focused not on male beautification, but male improvement, efficiency, and success.

342
knowing how to consume. The consumption was instrumental; Playboy was a manual for
growing class, a way to start with knowledge, taste, and style, and then follow with
modest acquisitions (Nadel, 1995, p. 135). Consumption was a signifier of class, and
having the right clothes or knowing the right music was a way for men to learn about new
products, and choose the best ones, located in an ethos of “pleasure seeking” and
fulfillment, rather than resolution of anxiety (ibid). Second, masculine popular culture
appeals to men not as masculine consumers, but as men. Masculinity is highlighted in a
new way in the informal tone, wide range of features and articles, and editorial content as
men are hailed by their gender first, and the products they consume second.
142
In
producing culture aimed at men as men, to borrow a phrase from Frank Mort (1988), the
creators of such products broke open “masculinity’s best-kept secret” and forced men “to
look at themselves self-consciously…rather than the norm which defines everything else”
(p. 195).
Scholarship on the British “New Man” and changing representations of
masculinity in advertising in the mid eighties to early nineties, and of the
commodification of masculinity generally, have discussed the period as one which saw a
fetishization of the male body (See, for example, Chapman and Rutherford, 1988; Nixon,
1996). The New Man was characterized as “more caring, nurturing and sensitive – or,
alternatively, more narcissistic, passive and introspective” (Edwards, 1997, p. 39). Also
referred to as the “sensitive nineties man” in American media accounts, this new

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For example, Esquire began as a way to better sell clothing to a male demographic – retailers liked the idea of
catalogues and encouraged Esquire founders Smart and Weintraub to produce a booklet to go with the latest fashions.
Men were clothing consumers first and men second. In Maxim, though products are marketed to men, they are situated
as men before they are addressed as consumers.

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masculinity was born of a context of feminism in which new models of masculinity were
created to emphasize a less aggressive, hostile, more empathetic masculinity. Previously,
selling fashion to American men was seen as a strategy that worked especially well if
one’s goal was complete failure. At best, marketing fashion to men was done tentatively
in general appeal, mass market campaigns, as it was believed impossible to “hit a home
run” by targeting men with fashion appeals (Gladwell, 1997). In this new era of
marketing savvy, not only were men being marketed to as never before, but the male
body was becoming a object of desire, one which could be sexualized and represented
much the same way women’s bodies had been for quite some time (Bordo, 1999; Mort,
1988; Edwards, 1997). Masculinity was being used in new ways precisely because it was
selling products. Instead of marketing to men based on a product’s functionality, men
were targeted as consumers of fashion as a way to access a greater sexuality and
attractiveness. The epitome of such ads are the Calvin Klein ads for men’s underwear,
featuring a muscular, attractive young man, eyes gazing downward, clothed only in his
Calvin Kleins, and sporting a pronounced bulge in his pants. Male sexuality was
“conjured up through the commodity” (Mort, 1988, p. 201, emphasis in original), as a
variety of products beyond fashion began to use tropes of masculinity to sell products to
men.
Of course, this was not the only way that men have been marketed to. Haggar and
Dockers, two companies producing pants for men that saw dramatic increases in sales in
the late eighties and early nineties, responded to the aggressive sexuality of Calvin Klein
and his ilk with a countermeasure of a detached, often ironic parody of masculine

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insecurity (Bordo, 1999; Gladwell, 1997). With increased attention on men to be as
fashionable as women, Dockers et al. used a strategy of speaking to men in “their own
language” in producing commercials where men wore clothing because it was natural,
comfortable, yet still stylish. As both Bordo and Gladwell document, the strategy of
these commercials was to show men going about their business, relaxing in everyday
locals wearing clothing that suited them because they were uncomplicated, and almost
accidental style: a non-fashion fashion. In this way, it became okay to shop because it
was done not to impress (even though it was), but rather because if men needed clothes,
they might as well get clothes that were simple, comfortable, and easy to put together.
While initially appearing different, and certainly using different aesthetics and dialogue
to sell their products, this strategy relied on the same market logic. Men were no longer
exempt from the pressures of looking good, and so had better begin shopping
appropriately to live up to new masculine standards of beauty. Though quite similar to
the functionality emphasized in the early part of the century, now the functionality was
about the style that was projected, and not merely using the product in its intended
fashion.
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Much as magazines had become increasingly specialized in their appeal to men as
consumers, changes in television marketing also helped open a space for the development
of masculine oriented popular culture. Adam Bryant (1993), in describing the early rise
of Comedy Central, points out that while television had “long understood the value of
plugging products during broadcast time” with corporate sponsorship of programs in the
1950s giving way to commercial broadcasting in the 1960s and 70s, Comedy Central

143
Pun intended.

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began to achieve notoriety precisely because of its ability to give advertisers “some
unique product plugs” such as the use of Mentos candy as a repeated prop during
coverage of the 1992 election (NYT.com). However, as detailed in Chapter 1, it was
only after the success of South Park identified an eager audience of male consumers that
advertisers, and thus the network, were willing to take a chance on a program such as The
Man Show.
Tim Edwards (1997) argues the eighties era of Reganomics and Thatcherism
promoted an excessive individualism that provided a fertile breeding ground for a
commercialism that emphasized narcissistic focus on the male body. In a nineties context
of deindustrialization, economic stress, and a greater focus on an ornamental masculinity,
in conjunction with targeted niche marketing, cable news outlets, and greater advertiser
willingness to take a chance on the male demographic, Maxim and The Man Show are the
next logical step in the marketing of masculinity. While Calvin Klein eroticized the male
body as a way to commodify masculinity and sell products, and Haggar/Dockers
parodied men’s self-consciousness about fashion to sell products, Maxim and The Man
Show market masculinity in order to sell masculinity itself. Though masculinity is
certainly used to sell a variety of products, and the codes of eroticized or simplified and
parodied masculinity exist throughout the ads in Maxim and in the commercials
accompanying The Man Show, the magazine and the television program use masculinity
as a signifier to sell themselves, and thus to get men to pay attention to the
advertisements which keep them in print and on the air. In commodifying male

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insecurity and crisis, masculinity is used as a code to both define masculine popular
culture and the products which sustain it.
Earlier in this chapter, it was important to note the variety of products branded by
and in conjunction with the Promise Keepers as an interesting market dynamic
emphasizing the tensions of evangelical and consumer culture. While it is certainly
relevant that Maxim has become a global brand, with international editions, clothing,
furniture, personal care products, a Sirius satellite radio station, and a host of other
consumer goods, the particular products that are marketed to men are not by themselves
relevant to an understanding of nostalgic masculinity in the context of masculine popular
culture. To be sure, the products sold in the pages of Maxim and at the commercial
breaks of The Man Show contribute to their marking and encouragement of proper
masculine behavior. Ads for clothing, newly reframed as important for men, appear
alongside traditional “masculine” fare such as electronics, sports cars, and liquor to make
up the majority of advertisements. What becomes interesting is the articulation of the
consumption of these products with the consumption of masculinity. Alcohol provides
an apt introductory example.
Alcohol, its purchase, and consumption are repeatedly situated as a central and
defining masculine enterprise, a relationship emphasized by the repeated discussions of
drinking and hangover cures on the pages of Maxim and the various skits of The Man
Show including having the men in The Man Show audience in addition to the hosts
drinking free beer throughout the episode. Indeed, the consumption of alcohol is often
situated as a way for men to escape, or rectify, their “loser” status (Messner and Montez

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de Oca, 2005). This articulation is backed up with the frequent advertisements for
alcohol throughout Maxim Magazine and at commercial break. Michael Messner and
Jeffrey Montez de Oca (2005) in discussing beer and liquor advertisements, argue that the
intertextual relationship between the ad texts and the non-ad texts “invite the reader to
draw connections between the erotically charged ads and non-ad texts” in connecting the
pleasurable feelings of the advertisements with the underlying gender ideology of the
surrounding texts, and further serves to call attention to ads that casual readers/viewers
may skip over (pp. 1897-98). What this relationship reveals is that while the particular
products on display are important, what is equally important is how the relationship
between the ads and the media texts is structured such that consumption of both becomes
a consumption of and performance in masculinity. Much like the anxiety of not living up
to Godly standards of masculinity can be resolved through consuming in ways
appropriate to a Christian identity, so too can the potential for men to become losers or
victims of contemporary culture be reconciled through consumption of masculinity, and
masculine consumption.
While masculine anxiety about cultural crisis is portrayed throughout MPC in a
variety of ways, usually by signaling men who fail to act properly masculine (and thus act
feminine) or by describing acts that will cause an evisceration of masculine identity, a
central method of locating masculine anxiety and vulnerability is representation of the
penis. The male sexual organ frequently figures as synecdoche for masculinity, as the
part becomes representative for the whole (Burke, 1969, 1973): the “part” of men that
most signals their masculinity, their genitalia, stands in for the whole of masculine

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identity. The use of the penis as synecdoche for masculinity itself allows masculine
popular culture to induce, champion, or disparage various behaviors and modes of
consumption by use of symbolic castration or penis enlargement. Dyer (1993) relates
how this synecdoche figures prominently in media representations of male sexuality:
“Penises are not shown, but the evocation of male sexuality is almost always an
evocation of the penis. Male sexuality is repeatedly equated with the penis; men’s sexual
feelings are rendered as somehow being ‘in’ the penis” (p. 112).
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He continues by
discussing how imagery of the penis is frequently violent and hard, seemingly to
compensate for its inherently “fragile, soft, delicate” nature (ibid). This compensation
resonates with the overall discourse of masculine popular culture, where masculinity is
always fragile and in danger of being undermined. Injury to the penis, or its outright
removal, frequently symbolizes not just loss or injury of male sexuality, but masculinity
itself. A wide variety of products are sold to men on the basis of this assumption. Not
having the right technology means you are inadequate. Consumer purchases serve as a
way to reclaim lost masculinity, to provide more form and substance and render
masculinity less fragile and more table and concrete.
The penis serves this dual function of concretizing and threatening masculinity in
its articulation to masculine performance. Notions of performativity pervade MPC as
certain types of performances are disciplined and compelled from its audience, despite
the seeming naturalness of gender. While by virtue of having a penis men are said to be

144
Bordo (1999) also discusses the tendency to locate male sexuality within the penis, thus serving as a framework for
understanding male sexuality as somehow beyond men’s control, and thus often a defense for sexual assault. The penis
as stand in for masculinity is also, for Bordo, always a potential source of shame as an erection at an inappropriate time
or lack of an erection at the appropriate time can undermine masculinity in its lack of control over the primary signifier
of masculinity. Instead, the penis functions as a necessary evil, an accident of evolution that defines masculinity, but
that men would rather do without (pp. 18-25).

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men, they need to perform masculine identity in ways consistent with their biology, or
else they are no longer men. A non-masculine performance is marked by symbolically
removing the organ which proclaims the naturalized masculine identity in the first place;
the removal of the part stands in for the removal of the whole. In Episode 410 Jimmy
interviews men on the street to find out what they have named their penis, situated as a
key marker of masculine identity. Men are queried as to how they picked that name and
its relationship to their personality, and the lack of a penis name is met with shock and
the need to immediately name it. It would seem the lack of a definite identity for the
penis also signaled a lack of definite identity for the man. In Issue 21 of Maxim (Souter,
1999), a man asks his wife if he can bring his penis somewhere cause all the other guys
get to do it (p. 89), the television program Family Law is said to be a “castration fest”
strategically placed opposite Monday Night Football (page 113), and issue 64
(Blanchard, 2003) features a segment on “how to avoid getting your balls taken away by
your woman” (p. 157). Thus, certain actions function as a performance of feminine
identity, symbolized by the lack of, removal, or injury to male genitalia (recall Piazza’s
lament from Chapter 4 about the sound of the opposing team’s home run being equivalent
to genital pain).
Symbolic castration, the removal of the representation of masculinity itself, is on
one level threatening because it prevents the fulfillment of sexual desire. Sex, its
desirability, and its acquisition are frequent topics throughout masculine popular culture.
Yet, paradoxically, it is the frustration of men’s (presumed) heterosexual desire that is

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used as a strategy of reframing masculinity and resolving crisis.
145
The attractive women
on The Man Show and within the pages of Maxim are not presented as available for men
as ideal females of the “hottie” variety are not seen as in reach of the consumers of
masculine popular culture. They are, quite simply, out of the average man’s league. The
Man Show’s hosts, Jimmy and Adam, frequently mention how they love having their
show because they get to hang out with the dancers, and recommend that men get their
own show to do the same – the implication being that without their own show, men don’t
stand a chance.
146
The writers and editors of Maxim express desire that can’t be fulfilled,
not only their own as they situate the actresses and singers they are interviewing as too
famous for the writer to date, but also those of the audience. Asides are made throughout
the text about the inability of the reader to date these women, and writers remark “we
can’t wait to see” the new movie, the sexy role, the new album, or the photo shoot,
implying a distance between audience and text. The men are positioned as only able to
consume the product, the image, and not the women themselves.
It is this switch in the object of male desire, from the woman themselves to their
image, which is significant. Laurel Davis (1997), in her examination of the Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue, argues that producers of photo shoots use a variety of
techniques to evoke particular readings of the models. Specifically, she notes that posing,

145
Edwards (1997) remarks that the brazen display of the feminine form is one way that men’s magazines compensate
for a focus on fashion; the display of women makes it okay to read about fashion, preventing male readership from
reading the magazines as targetd to a gay audiene.

146
Episode 118, the Holiday episode from the first season, reveals that even when men are on familiar terms with these
women there is still potential for embarrassment. Jimmy and Adam go shopping with the dancers to find things for the
women in their lives. After the dancers suggest they look at lingerie, Jimmy and Adam are hardly able to contain
themselves they are so excited. As the dancers are changing clothes they become completely unable to contain
themselves as they jump up and down and “fist pump” the air triumphantly when the women are out of the room, and
return to their “relaxed and cool” demeanor when the women return.

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framing, and background are all constructed to draw attention to the body of the model,
and to emphasize feminine beauty. The women are said to look away from the camera,
inviting a “guiltless gaze” from the male spectators, and photographs are touched up to
remove blemishes, slenderness prevails, and the accompanying captions attribute motives
and emotion to the models that reinforce these views (pp. 26-28). Scholarship on “the
male gaze” compliments Davis’ work, describing images of women in media being
constructed for men, positioning all viewers alike as masculine, regardless of gender.
These images portray vulnerability and passivity as the women are not afforded any
power in these images, either through their posing, positioning, or point of view (Mulvey,
1975; Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, pp. 76-93). Examination of the photo spreads
within Maxim, as well as the way that the dancers are positioned in relation to The Man
Show’s audience, reveal a complicated relationship, one which modifies these notions of
the male gaze.
As in Davis’ work, Maxim cover models are always attractive, a popular
entertainer (often an actress, occasionally a singer or model) who is wearing very little
clothing. Various suggestive poses are used on the cover, some aggressive, some passive
and innocent: but all of them suggest sex. The woman is either laying with her arms over
her head, usually out of the shot, with a look of pleasure on her face signifying
vulnerability and willingness, or in a crouched pose, with one arm or hip thrusting
towards the camera in a “come hither” pose. The position of the women focuses attention
on the body; if the woman’s hands are not above her head, they are resting suggestively
on one part of her body, pulling down her shorts, covering her bare breasts, or pulling

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open her shirt. However, the women in Maxim are not the passive objects of desire that
Davis and others have written about. The cover model always looks intently into the
camera, creating a direct connection with the reader as if looking them in the eye, not
averting their gaze off-camera. The poses are frequently aggressive, initiating contact
with the spectator instead of passively waiting. The captions that accompany the pictures
similarly evidence this complex relationship. While the captions always sexualize the
cover model, they too speak of a sexual assertiveness, implying that the model is the one
who will take control, not the viewer. For example, the October 1998 issue features
Rebecca Gayheart with an open blouse and a caption that tells the reader she has “had her
way” with the Maxim staff (Golin, 1998), as she is crouched against a wall, staring
intently at the camera. Jamie Pressley’s December 2001 cover proclaims “She Wants
You!” as she points at the camera with one hand and covers her breasts with the other
(Blanchard, 2001).
The women pictured are actresses, models, athletes, and entertainers with
independent wealth, prestige, and publicity. The repeated comments throughout the
magazine to how the reader cannot hope to attain the women pictured reveals the
mitigation of male power in these images, as it is only the image that the spectator has
control over. In effect, this lack of contact with the object of the picture dramatizes the
lack of power spectators have in their real life, much like it is only Adam and Jimmy who
could potentially have a relationship with the dancers on The Man Show. Sturken and
Cartwright (2001) contend that an “objectifying gaze can be deflected in an image” if the
object of the gaze does not acknowledge it as such, either by turning away or confronting

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the image in defiance (p. 88). The defiant look and confident interaction with men turns
traditional norms of male courtship on its head as the women engage the male viewer and
“initiate” the romantic exchange. However, this power still comes not in the form of the
worth of the particular woman of the shot, but in her beauty; she is desired not merely
because she is both famous and good looking, but because she is pretty enough to be the
cover model or deserving of her own article and photo spread.
The potential threat of hotties is first revealed and then contained by reducing
them to an object of desire, not a potential sexual partner. In fact, the attempt at
“possessing” these women’s physical bodies is explicitly linked with disappointment and
failure. If it is the mere image that is consumed, and not the physical body of the woman,
then the embarrassment of rejection is eliminated as a potential challenge to masculinity.
The desirable women in masculine popular culture are not presented as caring intelligent
women with whom men should strike up a conversation, but only as objects of sexual
desire. This relationship is evidenced in the pilot episode of The Man Show, as when
relating how they were pressed by Comedy Central to increase the presence of women,
the hosts contend that the dancers are “more than sufficient” (Episode 101).
Women’s voices are not usually heard as the writers and producers of Maxim and
The Man Show are primarily men. The dancers on The Man Show are only rarely given
names, variously referred to as “juggies,” “juggy girls,” “juggy dancers,” or “the juggy
dance squad.” The dancers never speak except to cheer on the men of the show, be they
the hosts or audience members doing stunts. When women get to speak in the pages of
Maxim it is either in articles about women and sex, where they speak self-deprecatingly

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about the unnecessary emotional needs of women, or as sexual informants about the
“real” women in men’s every day lives. This silent anonymity constructs the “hottie”
women as objects of pure voyeuristic desire as opposed to those who men could engage
in loving, committed relationships. Images reduce women to their body parts, focusing on
breasts, legs, lips, and buttocks, and the names of dancers on The Man Show are a
reference to their breasts. Masculine popular culture reduces hotties to their physical
attributes, as without names or a voice the primary marker of their identity is their body.
Nevertheless, this identity is not primarily as women, though that is important. Rather,
breasts (and other body parts) act as synecdoche for sexual desire.
If this desire is not to be realized in the form of the idealized women, then it begs
the question: what is the point of sexualizing women in the first place? Messner and
Montez de Oca (2005) argue that it is to create a brand identity in which consumption of
particular products, in their case alcohol, can serve as masculine bonding and stand in for
possessing the women as anything but symbol, as the white male loser can be “ironic
about his loser status, and is always at the ready to engage in voyeurism with sexy
fantasy women” (p. 1882), and “settle for what he can have,” alcohol (p. 1900). While it
is certainly about products, it is also about how to safely consume femininity. Women
are objectified in new ways – as unnecessary beyond their image. Sexual gratification is
nice, but not necessary for women to fulfill their function in men’s lives.
The frequent focus on masturbation in both Maxim and The Man Show reinforces
this construction of femininity. Pornography is an oft repeated theme, an arena of self-
gratification, as men who do not succeed in getting women can turn on, tune in, and get

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off. The Man Show hosts not only mention how much men masturbate, but also that if
given breasts that is all they would do.
147
Even the opening credits mentions
masturbation, as the arrival of The Man Show signals that it is time to “yank your favorite
private part.” This may be the most interesting loser trope of masculine popular culture.
On the one hand, masturbating seems to indicate some sort of failure, as men have not
succeeded in their objective of possessing a woman and having sex with her; if you are
playing with yourself it is because you are not playing with anyone else. However,
masturbation also symbolizes independence or self-sustaining action. Women are set as
objects of the gaze, a symbolic possession and control, but not an actual possession as
men can get off by themselves, and thus the possibility for rejection and emasculation is
minimized. The idealized feminine object is intended to be one of voyeuristic desire,
symbolizing sex, and not providing it.
Interestingly, the images of women on the cover of Maxim, and often throughout
the magazine, dramatize the rise in feminine agency produced by feminism. Much as
women gained increased social status and access to economic markets (further evidenced
in the economic success of the magazine’s women as pop culture icons), so too do the
images on the cover of Maxim betray an aggression and power previously unavailable to
women due to the construction of a passive, willing femininity. When feminine power
becomes reduced to an image on the cover of, and frequently within the pages of, Maxim,
and men are encouraged to consume the image and not the woman themselves, feminine
power and agency is managed through containment in the image. Instead of being a real

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A claim made disturbingly vivid in the Zembic episode, when after Zembic reveals he uses his implants to “pick up
chicks,” Adam asks “Why do you need to pick up chicks? You have breasts and a right hand!”

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object with real power, women are reduced to an image, and thus the “realness” of
feminine power is similarly contained as is the image of the woman herself. Both are
articulated together as a commodity object, to be viewed, and enjoyed, but not to be taken
seriously as a potential threat to masculine security in the “real world.”
This is not to say that men are to avoid having sex with women. Far from it.
After all, one of the main items in the throughline of Maxim that indicate what men’s
interests are is sex, the magazine’s slogan is “The best thing to happen to men since
women,” and sexual desire, though repeatedly frustrated, is a primary site of bonding in
The Man Show. Rather, the efforts of men are to be focused on the “bitches” in their
everyday lives, their wives and girlfriends, who may not be as attractive as the “hotties,”
but are, at the very least, accessible. Their availability in the lives of men does not signal
that these are women that men should develop committed relationships with. The
ultimate goal of any interaction with a woman who is not a member of the
viewer/reader’s immediate family is to have sex with her. Trying to be a ladies’ man is a
precarious position, as it may lead to men being tricked into marriage. Instead, no
romantic attachment is ever to be desired, only feigned. An entire episode of The Man
Show titled “Weddings” (Episode 107) is essentially a half hour diatribe against marriage
and commitment, as men are said to give up their freedom by entering the prison of their
wedding vows. Married men are rarely portrayed as happy in Maxim, as wives and
girlfriends are represented as needy women who prevent men from having emotion-free
relationships based on casual sex, and whose main goal is to lock men down in
commitment and thus castrate them. Wives and girlfriends can threaten masculinity

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through limiting masculine activities, and so are not assigned any intrinsic value of their
own.
Rather, the worth of “regular” women is counted in sex. Instructional articles are
prominent features of Maxim, and are often written on “Lies women want to believe,”
how to “score” on the first date, and how to sleep with older women. One way Maxim
structures discourse around relationships is that achieving commitment with a woman or
winning her heart are seen as desirable goals, but only as long as the commitment is
fleeting, the emotions not genuine, and the ultimate goal is sex. Men are taught to lie and
manipulate women as a means of getting in their pants, to make them think that guys
really care, but to only be faking it. Men are represented as not naturally needing,
wanting, or being able to sustain commitment, and since their true nature will most likely
come through and mess up the great sex they are having, they need to act differently and
convince women of their sincerity. This point is most forcefully made in an article in
issue 34, “The Game of Wife.” The contents announce this article as discovering the
secrets to “really score” with one’s wife by earning points before hitting her up for
“sexual favors or bail money” (p. 15). The authors of the article submit that they have
quantified female behavior, and present a series of things men can do to “score points” to
be traded in later. Such actions are to “cope with her psycho family’s visit,” “spot her an
orgasm” or “charm her pet,” each done not out of genuine concern or their intrinsic value
in making women happy, but because they secure a reward. These points can be traded
in for such prizes as an hour of nag free football. The next best prize, costing 500,000

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points is a woman’s undying love and devotion, as well as ownership of her mind, body,
and soul. What costs the most points (one million), however, is a blowjob while driving.
Men are not encouraged to listen to the women in their lives out of genuine
concern for their emotional, physical, or sexual well being. Treating women nicely is
done for instrumental purposes; according to the Maxim point scale fellatio outclasses
undying love and devotion. Even the articles about becoming a better lover are not
motivated by a concern that the partner enjoys the experience, but as a way to stoke the
husband or boyfriend’s ego. The power that women take away through increased agency
or the possibility of embarrassment by ideal women is a power that that masculine
popular culture hopes to restore though teaching its male spectators how to dress to
impress, talk to women, or know enough about what women want to seduce them in their
real life, and possess their bodies as opposed to their image. Increased agency of women
is contained as sexual agency for the pleasure of men. If sex is not directly available,
men can symbolically possess women, secure in the knowledge that they are not
threatened by a mere image. Interviews with consumers of men’s magazines seem to
back up this assertion. Though some detail how feminism is said to have involved a
“kicking of men,” one reader commented on the images in the magazines by saying:
Does she look like a fucking victim to you? She scares the shit out of me. You
know what I mean? Going up to her in a bar and asking her for a date, you know,
it would take a brave man … These are fucking strong, intelligent women …
Fucking sexy women … powerful as well (Stevenson, Jackson, & Brooks, 2000,
p. 199).
148

148
Of course this one excerpt is not definitive proof that this is the dominant reading of the magazine. Indeed, the men
interviewed by Stevenson et al were British, thus possessing a different experience of masculinity and approach to the
magazines, and had a range or responses, some even claiming that they never pay serious attention to the magazine.
However, the vivid detail in which strong, aggressive women are seen as potentially threatening to masculinity
provides at least some anecdotal evidence that the agency of women can be threatening to a fragile masculinity, and
that women can be read primarily in terms of their image. Other reader responses indicated men appreciated the

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In presenting women as objects of sexual desire, or everyday nuisances to be dealt
with, women are removed from the conditions of masculinity, as providing for the family,
or being a hard worker as the markers of being a man are substituted with the ability to
consume appropriately masculine products and revel in leisure pursuits with one’s
friends. Where the Promise Keepers moves to grant some measure of masculine certainty
to men through protecting women and the family, masculine popular culture removes the
approval of women as a means of ontological certainty. The danger here is not that
masculine popular culture appeals to every man, but that it could appeal to any man.
Promise Keepers sees men as troubled by culture, leaving men feeling like losers;
masculine popular culture celebrates the loser ethos as authentically masculine.
Finally, both Maxim and The Man Show make novel use of metaphors and
representations of space in their commercialization of masculine anxiety. Nick
Stevenson, Peter Jackson, and Kate Brooks (2000) in their study of British men’s lifestyle
magazines, argue that the “new issues” covered in men’s magazines – health,
relationships, bodily display – were not necessarily new for individual men. Instead,
what was novel was the “sense of an emerging public discourse on men's health where a
series of spaces have ‘opened up’ in which men can acquire the kind of practical and
discursive competencies they may previously have lacked” (p. 198). Much as men were
marked as consumers as they hadn’t been previously, the emergence of that consumer
market also foregrounded insecurities that were previously private matters. Further the

magazines’ honesty, and that the texts provided information that wasn’t readily available before, information that men
don’t believe they can talk to their friends about (p. 196-197). The men further confirmed that some of their anxieties
were resolved in the suggestions of which consumer goods to purchase, and legitimizing certain behaviors (p. 199).
Future elaborations of this dissertation will include interviews conducted myself to determine if there is more
widespread applicability of these claims.

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history of American popular culture evinces a repeated cycle of certain public spaces and
technologies (the theatre, the radio, television) as being initially conceived of in
masculine terms, and later opened up to female consumers, feminizing those spaces only
after they have been devalued as arenas of masculinity. In the context of late capitalism
and the advancement of feminism, as well as increased rights for racial and sexual
minorities, men’s space is threatened while still valued by men themselves. The
workplace is no longer a sanctuary for men, as the decentering of white, straight male
privilege provides increased economic opportunities for those previously marginalized.
Even the traditional masculine spaces of the local pub and the sports arena are threatened
by women, as demonstrated by the Maxim article on “Women Behaving Manly”
discussed in Chapter 3. The uncomfortable, public display of masculine anxiety in
combination with the sense of a loss of masculine space, compounds felt experiences, and
the rhetorical appeal of, crisis.
Masculine popular culture, like the Promise Keepers, utilizes space as a way of
resolving these insecurities through consumption. In particular, Maxim and The Man
Show use metaphors and representations of concrete spaces to construct themselves as
locations themselves, as opposed to bound media products. The Man Show’s opening
theme says it is a “place where men can come together,” and the pilot episode describes
the program as a dam to resist feminization, as well as a “place to urinate off of when
really drunk.” The show uses the idea of place both metaphorically and realistically;
while it symbolically resists feminization of culture (and by extension feminism), it
situates itself as a place of male bonding and adolescent, drunken hijinks. Both Maxim

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and The Man Show focus repeatedly on specific places traditionally defined as masculine;
the set of The Man Show alternately becomes a bar (with fully functional beer taps) or a
den decked out with beer signs, comfy arm chairs, and assorted games such as billiards or
foosball; Maxim details barroom etiquette, office politics, strip club protocol, and sports
trivia, locating its advice not merely in the lives of men, but in specific locations within
their lives. This spatialization is often combined with nostalgia, as men envision taking
back these spaces that were once masculine preserves, or situate the reclamation of
masculinity in the ability to use these places in properly masculine ways – namely,
outside of the interference of women. The spatialization of masculine popular culture
locates it as a more than mere entertainment, but a place that men can occupy outside of
the current time of crisis. In constructing this mediascape as a masculine enclave,
masculine popular culture serves to not only to provide a way of situating itself as
providing a space for consumption of masculine products, as it locates the performance of
masculinity as happening in specific sites.
149
This use of place as a central
representational strategy also and perhaps more significantly, situates the show or the
magazine as a safe space to be masculine. If the show or magazine is a place where men
come together, then the consumption of the magazine and/or the program are a
consumption of masculinity itself.
150
The intertextual nature of the advertisements and

149
The Man Show takes this spatialization even farther, as men and women almost never interact on the program. The
exceptions, of course, are when the men (mostly the hosts) interact with the dancers to have them fulfill their requests,
or with women coded as “bitches” as a pretext to ridiculing them for comic relief.

150
Messner and Montez de Oca (2005) make a similar argument in their examination of liquor ads. Utilizing Mikhail
Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope – the fusion of time and space in literature to “create meaningful structures
separate from the text and its representations” – they indicate that alcohol advertisements move beyond mere name
recognition of brands to instead create lifestyle branding that actually create “desirable and believable worlds in which
consumers are beckoned to place themselves” (pp. 1882-83). These worlds then provide a temporary “respite” from
the problems of the real world in the creation of idyllic spaces where “desire can be explored” and “symbolic

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content further this association, as the consumption of appropriately masculine media and
commodities works to reinforce the sense of masculine identification. The construction
of the audience as masculine consumers (as opposed to mere consumers who happen to
be men) utilizes consumption and engagement with “masculine” products as a way to
access a stable masculine identity.

Conclusion

In situating men as not merely consuming subjects but masculine consuming subjects,
nostalgic masculinity as a commercial strategy makes all men equal in the eyes of the
market and thus equally able to access the promises of the capitalism to resolve
masculinity crisis. However, much as the rhetoric of crisis and victimhood erases the
differential positioning of men at the close of the 20
th
century, so to does the
establishment of men as consuming subjects obscure important differences in access to
masculine stability, and the very ways in which men find themselves in crisis. While
calling attention to whiteness and crisis as a way to engage a rhetoric of victimhood and
imagine stability for masculinity, the rhetoric of liberal individualism inherent in
nostalgic masculinity obscures the differences in race, class, and sexuality by rendering
men as not only equally situated as in crisis, but further serves to naturalize and
normalize white privilege in situating men as equivalent in their access to that stability

boundaries can simultaneous be transgressed and reinscribed in the social world” (ibid). I do not use it here largely
because their formulation relies on the absence of work within the advertisements they analyze, whereas masculine
popular culture frequently invokes the specter of the working world, both in ways to escape its drudgery through pranks
and procrastination, and to maximize its effectiveness through strategies of dress, interaction, time management, and
managerial prowess. Though the creation of lifestyle branding is very much similar, masculine popular culture often
works especially hard to situate itself within men’s real lives. The ads within this popular culture, however, frequently
make use of the representational practices they detail.

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through consumption. A primary way in which liberal individualism is manifest in both
the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture is in the way they both make a
“classless” appeal to their audience, much in the same way that race is framed as not an
issue as they appeal to all men as in crisis the same, regardless of race. However, its
white, middle class focus is revealed not only in the topics covered and products sold, but
in the very language of the texts.
The themes of improvement and success through measured steps are based in an
ideology of upward mobility, in which enough hard work and dedication is rewarded
through increased status and access to economic opportunities. The Promise Keepers
focus on men who, for the most part, have steady employment (or who have wives that
do), and need some additional security to navigate their daily struggles. The focus on
individual accountability, besides being a stable of Evangelical Protestantism is also
colored by class, as it betrays a historically privileged access to social services and
economic opportunities, in which equal competition among white, straight, middle class
men sustained an ideology of meritocracy as the means of social advancement. It also
helps explain the acceptance and propagation of an individual responsibility to resolve
racism, as opposed to a structural solution. The anxiety of men in crisis is born not of a
lack of access to social services and economic opportunity, but of having that historical
privilege formerly protected by exclusion of those who could compete for it threatened in
a globalized context that sees increased competition not only from traditionally
marginalized American communities, but also foreign nationals and highly skilled
immigrants. .

364
Similarly, the whiteness of Maxim and The Man Show reify the discourse of
individual agency in their appeal to consumer goods as the pathway to masculine
improvement, and failure a personal and not a structural issue. In a contrast to the
Promise Keepers, Maxim, presume a more stable masculine consumer, as revealed by the
current editor’s pitch to potential advertisers in which he describe the average reader as
one who wants “to know what's in and what's not and they have money to spend on doing
it and buying it, whether it's the latest fashion, travel break, sports kit, cars or gadgets”
(Donlevy, n.d., paragraph 1).
151
Either way, despite the variance in potential job security,
both focus on the ability to change one’s position in life through consumption of the
proper products, in select locations, and in the correct manner.
The discussions of work itself situate the men of PK and MPC as middle-class
subjects, albeit in different ways. In the examples of how to live an “Awakened Life” at
work or in describing a man’s relationship to his work, Promise Keeper texts use
examples of “talking around the water cooler,” approaching a manager, or discussing
things over in a friend’s office. Maxim and The Man Show similarly discuss the “office
Olympics” as an escape from the routine drudgery of the workday, the proper way to
dress on casual Friday, or how to be an effective manager to one’s coworkers. What is
absent here are discussions of “the job site,” proper work “gear,” or any mention of
talking to a foreman; in short, anything identifying the audience as potentially working
class or blue collar. The very language used to describe work implies a white-collar,
office position, not a calloused, hands-on outdoor construction site or custodial position.

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While The Man Show never makes as bold a claim, at least that I could find, to see the show one has to be able to
afford cable or a DVD and have internet access, and Comedy Central boasts a middle class demographic for its
programs, as noted in Chapter 1.

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While the Promise Keepers present work as one way to fulfill a manly duty and a path to
security for one’s family and masculine popular culture often laments the job as a
temporary distraction from hedonism and consumption, both identify a man’s
employment as a central feature of his masculinity, both presume a particular working
subject in their address, and both ultimately offer advice on how to succeed in a
corporate, white-collar world.
Further, the recourse to consumption as a means of resolving masculinity crisis
provides a variety of steps that all men have access to regardless of social location, and
relies on a liberal economic logic of the free market in which different subjects have
equal access to the symbolic and material goods available for consumption/purchase.
The suggestions for mobilizing consumer power depend on equal access to disposable
income. The investment strategies available at the conference as well as the ability to
manipulate evangelical markets for Brad Stine’s comedy DVD are available to
demonstrate a Christ-like masculinity and resolve masculinity crisis through
manipulation and use of capital. The helpful hints in Maxim’s “how-to” section or the
clothing in its advertisements help all men be “just a little bit better,” despite some men
being in better position to take advantage of the fashion advice for landing that big
promotion. The women on the pages of Maxim or the dancers of The Man Show are
global objects of desire for the presumed masculine audience, equally available to all who
read the magazine or turn on the program. This is one place that nostalgic masculinity
functions as a strategy. Despite the privileges of masculinity and the differential access
to those privileges, nostalgic masculinity constructs a rhetoric of crisis and victim status

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which creates a market based in those anxieties, obscuring the structural disadvantages of
being marked as a raced or improperly gendered body. Whiteness and masculinity are
both used a position from which to challenge men’s supposed “disenfranchisement” or
marginalization of the masculine identity in crisis as well as rendered invisible in a
rhetoric of equal market access.
This universalizing appeal to the curative powers of the market are also bound up
in discourses of citizenship and nationhood, as both implicitly and explicitly link this
consumption to proper performance of national identity. The Promise Keepers indicate
that acting as a Godly man is not only critical to saving the family, but also for
rejuvenating a nation in crisis. The reader of Maxim or the viewer of The Man Show is
repeatedly and forcefully interpellated as an American man, with masculinity and
national belonging constantly articulated together in the description for proper masculine
action. Participation in “masculine” culture is also participation in American citizenship,
and the consumption of the appropriate media and consumer goods a primary means of
establishing such participation. The focus on a liberal ideology of individualism and
meritocracy as the standard for masculinity, and nationalism as a prerequisite for that
masculinity, enable nostalgic masculinity to continue a possessive investment in
heterosexist whiteness in its universalizing appeal to an “authentic” or nostalgic
masculine ideal. Much like ostensibly race neutral housing regulations and anti-
discrimination law obscured the lack of enforcement provisions or the differential access
given to services (Lipsitz, 2006), the race-neutral focus of masculine popular culture and
the individualist solution to racism of the Promise Keepers elides the structural privileges

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accorded to white straight middle class men in the desire to resolve masculinity crisis.
All men are encouraged to “invest in whiteness and remain true to an identity” that
provides white men “with resources, power, and opportunity” (ibid, p. vii).
Compounding this relationship to the American national imagination is the
integration with multinational capitalism and foreign markets which allow for the export
of these cultural products to continue US hegemony worldwide. Of course audiences
around the word are not passive and have the ability to reinterpret these images and
dictates in a variety of ways. But the global reach of Maxim is fairly impressive with it
being published with 12 international editions, with both a domestic and a foreign web
presence; satellite television and DVD sales, in addition to internet television aid the
circulation of The Man Show despite its cancellation; the Promise Keepers message has
the unique potential to be problematic given the somewhat universalizing discourse of
Christianity that their espousals are based on, and the global reach of PK conferences
worldwide. Export of problematic cultural products maintains binaries of racist
patriarchy on an international scale.
Part of what makes these specific and located advantages seem natural and
universal is the very structure the messages within the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture and the style of their delivery. Both encourage a particular type of
consumption, uniquely situated to a postmodern anxiety and nostalgic media context, and
one which discourages critical reflection. Besides the constant recycling of popular
culture, both in terms of nostalgic and contemporary intertextual reference (i.e. the use of
the Chronicles of Narnia preview), the Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture

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utilize a fragmented, fast-paced visual style. The chapters of PK texts are rapid, and
never very long, and the reader is encouraged to take time to complete the process,
encouraging a fragmented and disjointed reading. The conferences make use of the large
Jumbo-Tron, both to show pre-recorded videos and to display and magnify the speakers
on stage.
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The physical space of the sports arena is celebrated in traditional sports
activities such as hitting a beach ball and firing tee shirts into the crowd, while reworking
traditional rivalry chants to fit the Christian revival; of particular popularity at the
Anaheim conference was “We’ve love Jesus, yes we do, We love Jesus, how bout you!”
alternating between different sides of the arena. The structure of Maxim and The Man
Show also discourage sustained reflection as articles are jammed with random bits of
information, skits are interspersed with audience participation and the hosts/ commentary,
and side bars explaining some aspects of the story in detail or discussing something
tangentially related abound. Various small images and cartoons are scattered across the
magazine, not to mention every other page is an advertisement. The sensory overload
encouraged by this pastiche style encourages a light-read, as viewers and readers “flick
through” the texts and not take it too seriously (Jackson et al., 2000).
The combination of nostalgic images to frame and rhetorically situate men with
the disjointed, fractured visual and textual style is also one way, to answer Pickering and
Keightly’s query, that nostalgia becomes operative. The affective component is
heightened as rapid fire images, terms, pictures, and actions invariably bearing some

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At one point at the Anaheim conference, the comedian Bran Stine called attention to the fragmented sense of
attention and meaning making in a postmodern visual environment. While speaking to the audience, he noticed one
teenager who was sitting fairly close, but still watching the Jumbo-Tron. When Stine was trying to get his attention,
the kid kept glancing up at the screen, seemingly unable to focus on the “real” comedian in front of him, and instead
focusing on his magnified media representation.

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trace of personal or collective memory fly past, leaving us with the emotional response to
those images even as we have moved on to the next picture, skit, or chapter. The
intertextuality of advertisements, products, and advice blur together, as the nostalgic
affect blends with the rhetorical appeal, heightening one’s connection of the past to the
present in processing the advice about how to live for, and consume in, the future.
Michel Foucault (1977), in describing the function of power in modern societies
emphasizes that we must engage the mechanisms of power not from an abstract position
or a focus on transhistorical principles that assume the same position of primacy in
various eras. Instead, he urges us to consider how historical situations, particular needs,
and specific contingencies contribute to how power is deployed, and the manner in which
it seeks to operationalize subjects and frame what is and is not possible. Confluences of
economic factors, social arrangements, local histories, and even geography all become
relevant in understanding the exercise of power within a particular discourse or collection
of discourses. Foucault argues that the operation of power works to make bodies
“docile” in the sense that individuals can be made “useful” to power, as the techniques of
power “produces; it produces realities, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.
The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him [sic] belong to this
production” (1977, p. 194). The body is made useful when it conforms to the needs of
power within a given period, as it may be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved”
(ibid, p. 136). This disciplining of bodies to make them useful is not done abstractly or
ahistorically; rather, the various ways of controlling the body historically were on
“almost every occasion…adopted in response to particular needs” (p. 138). As such, the

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regimes of discipline which emerge in response to the postfeminist and postmodern
context of the current crisis will function differently than historical recourses to stability
to resolve that anxiety.
Nostalgic masculinity disciplines men to be good consumers not only of products
that are articulated to that masculinity, but also the proper ways to enact masculinity
through consumption. The Promise Keepers tell men what to wear, what to buy, and how
to invest their hard earned money in order to truly realize a Christ-like masculinity. At
conferences and in PK texts the very movements of the body are regulated; men are to
stand when told, to high five their fellow men, to sing along, to raise their hands in glory
to God, and to embrace one another as a sign of heterosexual masculine affection.
Behavior is to be self-policed, as men resist the temptation of Satan through constant
monitoring and reference to the standard of Christ as masculine model. Maxim and The
Man Show also tell their audience how “real” men dress, both in the fashion tips offered
by Maxim and in the identification of certain fashion trends on The Man Show as
evidence of men trying to hard or betraying their racial positioning in trying to “act
black.” Further, the movement of a man’s physical form is an essential marker of straight
or abnormal masculinity. Men are told not only what to wear, but how to wear it; the cut
of a suit, the forward or backward placement of a hat, proper matching and accessorizing.
Men are told they project masculine confidence in the way they hold their head in
shoulders, how they sit at a bar, how close they stand to others when talking to them and
even in how they relieve themselves, as an illustration in Maxim informs men that when
using urinals, men are never to stand next to each other if it is possible to leave one stall

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empty between them. Not only what media is consumed – television programs, books,
movies, etc – but knowledge of those products must be policed, as being too familiar with
one media product or not familiar with another betrays a masculine constitution and
identity. While individual men may use consumption as a way of displaying, creating, or
celebrating their masculinity, discourses of acceptable display, creation, and celebration
abound throughout both sets of texts.
This discipline continues in the marketing of masculinity itself. In order to
articulate a product, activity, or sentiment to a properly authentic or Godly masculinity,
PK and MPC need only to access a nostalgically masculine code, and the previous
assertions of masculine certainty and identity do the rest. It is not necessarily about
addressing men as individual consumers, but addressing masculinity itself, about
representing men, simulating them, creating the fictive unity that Butler discusses as a
model for and resource of successful masculine performance. The appeal to nostalgic
masculinity is able to be casuistically stretched and articulated to a variety of behaviors or
products, “objects of discipline.” In disciplining gender along the lines of an authentic,
nostalgic masculinity, both masculine popular culture and the Promise Keepers create
masculinity as codes, signals; to be a man, authentic, Christ-like, or otherwise, one must
consume things in a manly way. When products signal themselves as masculine or for
men, they are already articulated with the message of the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture.
To say it is not about individuals does not mean that the recourse to masculinity
as a commercial strategy is not specific. Rather, the reader/viewer/attendee is encouraged

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to see themselves reflected in the variety of consumer choice offered, and then to
discipline themselves in consuming in ways appropriate to a given representation of
masculinity. Playboy initially does this in constructing the “Playboy ethos” as a model
for men to aspire. Nostalgic masculinity similarly provides an array of subject positions
that men can identify with in their consumption choices, and resolve their masculine
insecurity: a Promise Keeper, a Maxim Man, a Man Show devotee, a Tyler Durton.
While both may encourage “manly” fair like football, women, aggression, speed, power
(albeit in different ways) its also about recognizing products and media as “for guys.”
This recognition finds its way into advertising and appeals to PK or MPC men, and is a
ready cultural code and inducement to consumption. The branding is able to be moved
across various levels and into a variety of contexts due to its ubiquitous articulation and
availability in cultural codes and commercial products. To that end, consuming nostalgic
masculinity, or masculinity nostalgically, is also about the consumption of certainty. The
Promise Keepers makes recourse to the Bible and Maxim and The Man Show to how men
“really are” deep down away from the influence of feminizing culture. The use of place
and the positioning of the body, in addition to both the abstract and definite dictums of
masculinity allow a consumption of stable codes of masculinity in a world in which they
are being undermined.

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Conclusion:
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will

There is a war going on for your mind.
If you are thinking, you are winning.
Resistance is victory.
Defeat is impossible.
Your weapons are already in hand.
Reach within you and find the means by which to gain your freedom.
Fight with tools.
Your fate, and that of everyone you know
Depends on it.

- The Flobots, “We Are Wining”

The Promise Keepers and masculine popular culture appear as widely divergent as
cultural forms can be. Initially, one would note the differences in the forms of address.
The Promise Keepers urge men to be servant leaders; popular culture encourages men to
adopt the position of the independent loser. The Promise Keepers focus on the need for
sexual purity from its members, enshrining it as one of the seven promises; masculine
popular culture is replete with incitement to sexual promiscuity. PK situates family and
marital commitment as not only valued, but as central components of a Christ-like
masculinity; family and commitment are but an inevitable trap in the world of the modern
Maxim man. Promise Keepers explicitly focuses on racial reconciliation; Masculine
popular culture largely ignores race and its relationship to masculinity. Promise Keepers
situates its members in a dual narrative of crisis, the eternal and the contemporary; men
only face the crisis of inauthentic masculinity within The Man Show and Maxim. The
Promise Keepers use metaphor and personal narratives as their primary means of

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conveying proper masculine behavior; MPC prefers the distance of a jaded irony. The
Promise Keepers seek a devout masculinity worthy of God’s glory and centered in His
will; Maxim and The Man Show proffer a devotion to masculinity worthy of barroom
glory and centered only in the indulgence of personal whims. These differences become
important because they also frame the different ways masculinity is presented in each of
the artifacts. The competition of MPC is critical to the ironic tone, and the development
of the loser motif that no longer needs women to justify masculinity through sexual
conquest. The cooperation of PK is critical to establishing social bonds with other men,
and the unification and cooperation to reclaim the role in the home so that women are no
longer needed to protect the home as men can reclaim the role.
Despite the apparent disparity, the rhetorical appeals of both the Promise Keepers
and masculine popular culture share a great deal in common. While there is some
divergence in the particular address, and the master tropes used, PK and MPC come back
together in their desire to “help” the men in question to deal with these new cultural
conditions, and to situate them as men on their way out of crisis – a way out that can be
purchased for the low price of a magazine subscription, a Promise Keepers’ text, the right
clothes, or admittance to a conference event. Regardless of the ultimate aims and
purpose of masculinity espoused in these cultural products, they both situate men as in
some way at odds with or threatened by their current situations within a society that no
longer places the same types of value on masculinity, and in which the position of
masculinity itself is in peril. Consider the following three passages, discussed
independently in previous chapters, all emphasis in original.

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First, the “Maxim Manifesto” from the inaugural issue of Maxim urging men to “come
out” as “guys”:
It’s time to stop living the lie…take your destiny into your own hands and admit,
in public, what society has been trying to suppress for too long…You are guy…If
you’re involved with a woman…breaking the news won’t be easy…Sit her down
and calmly tell her you want – no, you need – to watch every single second of the
Daytona 500. Make no mistake: Women are sick and tired of weepy, turtlenecked
boys in touch with their feminine sides (p. 170)

Second, the infamous quote from Tony Evans advising men on how to be good Christian
men and prepare their wives for the change a renewed faith will effect:
Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve given you my role. I gave up leading
this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not suggesting that you ask for
your role back, I’m urging you to take it back

Finally, the first words spoken by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla before a live studio
audience in the pilot episode of The Man Show (Kimmel and Rosenblatt, 1999):
Adam: Enough is enough, the Oprahization of America needs to stop. We are
here today to reclaim the airwaves to take back the medium we invented
Jimmy: Hey who invented the TV, a man or a woman? [crowd responds “A
man!”] That’s right. And he didn’t invent it for Oprah and Rosie or Ally
McBullshit
Adam: He invented it for Charlie and his angels, Hogan and his heroes, Starsky
and his hutch. Those were shows men could enjoy
Jimmy: We want to return to that era, and that is what this show will be – a
joyous celebration of chauvinism

The placement of all three is significant – in the pilot of The Man Show, the initial
issue of Maxim, and an instructional text of the Promise Keepers – as all three situate
their accompanying texts as a response to culture, as instructional to the men themselves,
and as a definitive statement on the condition of modern men. Maxim simulates the
coming out narrative of gay men to locate men as under a similar form of oppression in

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contemporary crisis that marginalizes their ability to be men, and tells them it is time to
stop hiding their natural “guyness”; Tony Evans tells PK men that they are at fault, and
urges men to “reclaim” their natural position of leaders; The Man Show sees men as
awash in a culture that no longer values their accomplishments, and wants to recreate that
lost time of masculine value through celebrating what others are now denigrating. They
all situate masculinity as always already in peril, as the latest challenge to living a
properly masculine life can be just around the corner, whether it is a scene in an R-rated
movie tempting a Promise Keeper or new television programming that can undermine the
masculinity of Maxim men merely by viewing it. In short, the precarious position of
modern masculinity locates modern men as victims of a culture which devalues the
masculine characteristics that had previously provided such certainty, and identifies their
respective texts as what men need to work against their marginalization as men. And all
three situate all men as in the same crisis, universalizing the experience of masculinity
and obscuring differences between white men, men of color, lower class men, sexual
minorities, and their various intersections.
This is one reason why the presence of other men in both PK and MPC is so
important; it establishes a common group identity to respond to feelings of crisis and
inadequacy. The accountability groups of the Promise Keepers and the “wingman” from
The Man Show may initially seem to have different intentions, but ultimately serve the
same purpose. Men are framed as at the mercy of their current conditions, people who
lack a proper time and place for the enactment of masculinity. This wasn’t always the
case, as the nostalgia pervading both remembers and longs for a time when masculinity

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was easy, a time that needs to be reclaimed in the present to enable a better future. The
blustery machismo of masculine popular culture and the packed stadiums of the Promise
Keepers are a thin veil to cover the insecurity and alienation experienced by men at the
end of the 20
th
century. And it is precisely this disconnect, the tension between the
feelings of insecurity and alienation and their resolution through an aggressive reassertion
of masculinity, that demands more intensive examination.
That masculinity crisis leaves men in a state of uncertainty and confusion is well
documented by cultural critics, yet still evinces surprise and disbelief from those
analyzing the crisis, and, often, the general public. Though lambasted as enclaves of
male privilege and “backlash” against feminism, the Promise Keepers and masculine
popular culture are just as much about the expression of deep-seated anxieties. This
anxiety stems, in part, from attempting to live up to the double-binds of masculinity; to
be sensitive, emotional, and caring at the same time as being tough, macho, and able to
protect loved ones. This difficulty is compounded with the “denigration” of traditional
masculinity in popular and political cultures of the 1990s. Don Deardorff (2000)
indicates that popular culture and social discourse leave men in a place where traditional
modes of masculine achievement through rugged individuality and the objectification of
women is devalued, leaving men without clear models of masculinity. While reframing
masculinity away from blatant sexism is clearly a good thing, Deardorff argues, it
produces a feeling of alienation when men are left looking either backwards and like a
sex-crazed Neanderthal when using traditional standards of masculinity or confused and
out of place when they try to negotiate more sensitive masculine behaviors. Similarly,

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Susan Faludi (1999) contends that the 1990s sees rampant images of “troubled
masculinity,” such as gangsters, violent school shootings, the Tailhook scandal among
others, which blames men up as evil, deviant, and irresponsible by nature of their gender
(p. 6). She sums up this dilemma by asking “How can men be oppressed when the
culture has already identified them as the oppressors, and when they see themselves that
way?” (p. 604). In elaborating on the “pussification” of the American man for the 5 year
anniversary of Details magazine, Jeff Gordinier (2005) boasts that Details has “owned
and chronicled” a masculine anxiety that is typical of the late 20
th
and early 21
st
centuries,
an anxiety described as grown men hiding beneath the covers as there is a disconnect
between the man he is and the man that he thinks he is supposed to be” (p. 99).
The argument goes that men are presented as the aggressors in society, are blamed
for a wide variety of social ills, and are confused as a result (Deardorff, 2005),
rhetorically situating men as victims. While Dawne Moon (Messner, Moon, Ray, &
Thorne, 2004) is correct to point out that one impetus for this crisis is that white
masculinity is threatened when it lacks an “Other” to define itself against (p. 129),
looking at how this threat is framed and managed is of critical important to those
interested in the struggle for greater gender equality. If men are situated as victims, and
if they can identify with that construction, then the problematic gender ideologies that are
used to assuage that fear and resolve alienation are constructed as necessary and soothing
to men, and not problematic for everyone else. A variety of work on the Promise
Keepers has evidenced that when interviewing men of the group, there seems to be a
genuine concern to help the women in their lives, and not reclaim patriarchal authority

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(Bartkowski, 2005; Deardorff, 2000; Faludi, 1999; Healey, 2000; Heath, 2005; See also
Claussen 1999a, 2000 for a selection of such work). Melanie Heath (2005) indicates “PK
men embrace an expressive masculinity that is frowned on by the dominant culture” (p.
441) as a response to the devaluation of “hard-boiled masculinity.” Bartkowski (2004)
traces the development of multiple masculinities within PK, and notes one claim of PK is
“the stress and anxiety produced by the traditional masculine stereotype has exacted a toll
not only on men's psyches but on their bodies as well—through, for example, higher rates
of life-threatening physical illnesses and an average lifespan shorter than that of women”
(Bartkowski 2004, p. 51). Similarly, while masculine popular culture may at times seem
over the top in their condemnation of feminist inspired women committing “gender
theft,” affecting the “most vulnerable members of society,” men, its editors and upper
management counter that such a tone is critical to reaching men. The president of Dennis
Publishing, Stephen Colvin (“What do men want”, 2000) claims that it is not the women
that sell Maxim, as “girl magazines” are readily available; rather, Colvin argues that it is
the humor of the magazine, said to be “parodying guyness” in a celebratory uplifting
manner that makes it so successful (p. 36). David Souter, Maxim’s second editor, seems
to agree. He claims that at the end of the day, men only want one thing, and it’s not what
you think: “Guys want to be the funniest in the bar” (McKinley, 1999, p. 3). Men don’t
want to be the sex-crazed “type of clueless Neanderthal parodied in beer commercials”
(“Women behaving manly”, n.d.), these folks argue, as they know that such images are
parody. Men just want to relax and be able to be funny without being insecure or under
attack. Recognizing this vulnerability is critical, as white, middle class men have

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experienced economic dislocation in addition to a psychological alienation. Further, we
must also take note of the attendant costs of masculinity, such as shorter life spans, poor
health, emotionally shallow relationships, and less time spent with loved ones in an
attempt to live up to the expectations of hegemonic masculinity (Messner, 1997, p. 6)
Yes, alienation is a result of a loss of institutional privilege, and it is true that this
privilege still remains by and large despite the gains of feminists and others advocating
for change. However, it is vital to not dismiss the sense of anxiety and crisis felt by the
men under investigation, as it is more effective to recognize this sense of social
dislocation, and work to channel it towards more meaningful and positive understandings
of masculinity. Otherwise, magazines like Maxim and groups like the Promise Keepers
can easily appeal to this sense of loss, but for far more nefarious ends.
This is perhaps the greatest source of contention between those who are vehement
critics of Maxim, The Man Show, and the Promise Keepers and those who see redeeming
qualities. Critics merely see the desire to “reclaim” masculinity in sexist and patriarchal
language, while apologists focus on the position of threat that mark men as alienated and
confused. One sees only the ideology behind claims of male dominance; the other
focuses the lived experience of men who find themselves in crisis. Critics of the Promise
Keepers, for example, are often hard pressed to find more than Evans’ famous quote
above to prove the patriarchal designs of the Promise Keepers, and multiple feminists
argue that having men more devoted to their wives is a good thing. Those who find
Maxim and The Man Show problematic are rebuffed with the indication of dramatic irony
in the tone of the magazine betraying uncertainty and a lack of confidence. To resolve

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this dilemma, we have to examine the strategies used to communicate ideology, to get a
sense of the ointment used to treat the wounds of masculinity.
It is the consumption of certainty, the ways that the agency of women, sexual
minorities, and people of color are contained that make these “ironic” “playful” solutions
to masculinity crisis potentially dangerous. If men are disciplined as properly masculine
subjects through their consumption patterns, the redefinition of masculinity as not in need
of femininity, and as a solidly middle class phenomenon, then the interruption of that
consumption, or the frustration of realizing masculinity through control of space can
potentially result in the feelings of anxiety, impotence, and being a loser being redirected
in anger and hostility towards those perceived as frustrating that desire. Messner and
Montez de Oca (2005) argue that the loser ethos and the attendant consumption to resolve
masculine anxiety may be redirected in a moment of pseudo-empowerment through
mocking or insulting women, in a “best case” scenario, or giving credence to male rape
fantasies as a more devastating possibility (pp. 1902-1903). Bordo (1999) argues that the
location of male sexuality in the penis often leads to an assumption that men cannot
control their sexual desires, laying the blame on the women who stimulated that desire in
the first place. Beyond the socially destructive consequences of devaluing feminine
agency or support for the rights of sexual minorities, disabled individuals, or people of
color in broad social policy, the frustration of desire in both the image of the “hottie” and
the encroachment of “bitches” in everyday life can work to stimulate hatred for not
merely the image, but women themselves. Gay men who are perceived as “hitting on”
straight men, regardless of intention, can become targets of masculine violence to reassert

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a fractured heterosexuality. If men are to be servant leaders in the household, then the
challenge to masculine dominance in the private sphere can lead to similar violence.
When the fate of the family is tied to the fate of the nation, regressive social policies
which limit the rights of those marked as different and outside of the nation gain political
support, as do assertions of vigilante violence against immigrants threatening economic
prosperity or those identified as “terrorists” to national security. Finally, if the appeal of
nostalgic masculinity is situated as being for all men, but really provide primary access to
the exclusion of the working class, then those men left out of economic advancement can
magnify the feelings of economic and gendered anxiety, and the potential attending
violence.
These potential consequences of this latest resolution of masculinity crisis point to
the importance of continued scholarly engagement with those cultural forms that arise to
provide a sense of stability. Michel Foucault (1982) eloquently describes the role of the
intellectual in working to challenge these destructive consequences. He explains:
My role—and that is too emphatic a word—is to show people that they are much
freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which
have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called
evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of
people—that's the role of an intellectual. (p. 10)

Studying masculinity and the cultural responses to a hegemonic masculinity as positioned
in crisis is critical to establishing a lasting sexual politics that can change cultural
conditions for the better. In remarking on historical incidents of such change, Segal
(1993) argues:
…the extent and direction of change has not been arbitrary. For heterosexual men,
change has occurred when and where the social as well as the individual possibilities

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for it have been greatest, and in particular where women’s power to demand change
in men has been greatest (p. 630, emphasis in original).

Further, Messner (1990) contends that the fundamental question to ask when analyzing
contemporary masculinity in general and these types of social movements in particular is
“to what extent their actual or potential political impact will impede or advance
movements for social justice” (p., 14). If the newest masculinity crisis takes center stage
and the disproportionate power of women and minorities are not revealed, it removes a
broad cultural justification for making the types of changes that feminists seek. When
rhetorics of white male victimization and abuse are widely circulated and uncontested, it
prevents those men who respond to such an appeal from truly joining in solidarity with
minorities. hooks (1992) notes that this shared victimization as men marginalizes men of
color and erases/hides white supremacy in a rhetoric of shared victimhood (p. 13). While
she is specifically discussing this in the context of getting whites to see how they are
victimized by racism too, her argument holds just as much force in the context of
masculinity crisis. If solidarity is built amongst men based on their shared victimhood as
men by the larger culture (a strategy found both in the Promise Keepers and male-
centered popular culture), it obscures those things that put them in uniquely different
positions, channels their political choices in ways away from resolving racism and
hetero-sexism, and retains white supremacist patriarchy as cultural norm to which people
of color need to adjust. Messner (2004) argues in relation to male-centered advertising in
popular culture that the presentation of men as “victims” or “losers” presents a unique
opportunity for men to “rise above their victimization” and reactivate their hegemony.

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This moment of crisis can instead be used more positively. Instability in the gender
regime could be better turned toward resolving such tendencies in more proactive ways.
Though the period under investigation is roughly delimited as the first half decade of
the 21
st
century, the revitalization of patriarchy and misogyny by no means ended there.
What began as cultural forms which “came out of nowhere” in the mid to late 1990s have
evolved into much wider cultural phenomena. The Man Show was so brazen and
offensive precisely because of its uniqueness; as of 2004, MTV had no less than six
programs (Jackass, Viva la Bam, Wildboyz, Homewrecker, Dr. Steve-O and Blastizoid)
devoted to men acting like half-crazed apes, performing violent and dangerous stunts for
the amusement of viewers. The success of Maxim in the United States not only saw the
cross over of Britain’s FHM, a magazine decidedly similar to Maxim, but a whole host of
imitators. Initial supporters of the Promise Keepers, including comedian Brad Stine and
author Steve Cole, have branched out to create men’s religious groups that do away with
the sensitivity and care of the Promise Keepers in favor of a macho, aggressive
masculinity in the GodMen movement which, while modeling the large conference style
atmosphere of PK eschew accountability groups and touching narratives for video
screens featuring “he-man videos like martial arts displays and car-chases” (Berkowitz,
2007, para 13). The antipathy towards feminine agency can surely be seen in Senator
Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign to be the Democratic party’s nominee for president, as
she was alternately vilified as “too masculine” in pantsuits and aggressive campaigning,
or too feminine in her showing of emotion when she made the political mistake of crying
in response to a question on the demands of the campaign trail. With the expansion of

385
not only the market for these products and the commodification of a “Jackass” style
masculinity in popular and religious cultures, but the reassertion of the ideologies behind
them in politics demonstrates that these phenomena have not gone away, but, if anything,
have been bolstered by early market successes.
This dissertation is not a definitive cultural history of the late 20
th
century, but
instead is an examination of two seemingly divergent, yet intricately related cultural
phenomena which arose at the dawn of the 21
st
century. It sheds light on ways in which
new media technology and market economies adapt and react to shifting cultural
ideologies, working to commodify the anxiety produced by the instabilities of late
capitalism and increased public participation. It remains for future work to see which
other discourses informed this period, and the cultural forms that came after. It is my
hope that this work sheds some light on the latest American masculinity crisis, and that
my intellectual curiosity has stimulated the desire in others to better understand how we
conceive of ourselves and our place in it. After all, as Foucault noted, it is only through
such engagement with culture that we can begin to challenge the nexuses of power which
threaten the ability of all people to live peaceful, content, and fulfilling lives. It is only
through such constant challenge that we can hope to create a world that is more livable
for all.

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Bibliography