More Manly Stuff That's No Longer Manly

Hummers

Hummers were bad-fucking-ass to see on the street back when they were rare. Before they actually began to sell well, their gratuitous size made the act of seeing one worthy of telling your friends about. They were huge. They were attention-grabbing. They were gigantic, mechanized penises on four wheels.

No longer.

Since Hummers have become reasonably popular against the white, upper-class, poorly endowed demographic, seeing a Hummer tends to elicit more concern and anger nowadays than gimmicky awe. Thanks to Al Gore, the mere sight of a Hummer sends our minds racing about the environmental consequences of driving such a fuel-inefficient vehicle;  we think about all the seagulls and otters and Arabs who died to power the gas-guzzling tyrant, simply so its owner could compensate for the fact that he cannot satisfy his mindless, whorish wife.

If we could go back to a time when Hummers were as rare as Corvettes or Mustangs, their manliness might be salvaged; sadly, however, I fear Hummers have become far too ubiquitous amongst the idiot crowd and their genuine man-itude shall be lost to time forever.

Superman

Superman used to be an icon of truth, justice, and strength. He used to be a hero to millions, a character almost as recognizable as Mickey Mouse who taught people all over the world about the virtues of honesty and over-the-top physical violence. He used to represent all things virile and heroic about masculinity.

Then Frank Miller came along.

In The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Frank “I helped direct Sin City but Grindhouse flopped so bad I can’t make the sequel for another five years” Miller exposed the simplistic hypocrisy inherent in the Man of Steel’s superpowers and attitude. He showed what a fascist, arrogant, downright stupid asshole Clark Kent was, simply by virtue of the fact that he was born with nearly infinite superpowers.

Thanks to Frank Miller, the Last Son of Krypton managed to get his ass positively handed to him not once, but twice, by the Dark Knight. Miller showed that a great deal of ingenuity, planning and intelligence can overcome moral simplicity and brute force any day of the week. And thus was Superman’s title as King Superhero Badass overthrown.

If anything, Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, while not an outright awful movie, proved to modern comic fans just how pointless and dull and effortless a character Superman is. He has no real personality to speak of, he solves all his problems with the simple application of mindless force, and his invulnerability means he’s never in any real danger.

In other words, he’s the exact opposite of what a man should be. It’s not that time has changed Superman from manliness to unmanliness; it’s simply that people like Miller or Singer helped us realize what a pansy-ass the guy was all along.

Penises

It used to be perfectly admissible to take your dick out and wave it around at somebody you liked. People did it all the time. It was a legitimate means of courting (see: Porky’s).

Yet, when I pull my penis out nowadays, everybody gets all bitchy. “Put it away,” they yell. “Somebody call the cops,” they scream. What the fuck ever happened to the good old days?

Cowboys

No, I’m not going to make a Brokeback Mountain joke here.

I alluded to this in the pussification of cowboy boots, but it bears repeating: whatever few aesthetic remnants of the cowboy legends remain in our pop culture subconscious have all lost their meaning. There are a few real cowboys left, but none of us will ever meet them, because they’re out on the range being motherfucking cowboys. These true badasses only comprise about .04% of the group who claim to be cowboys.

Far more numerous are the cowboy fakers: douchebag country/western singers, douchebag oil tycoons, and basically anyone who has lived in Texas for any amount of time and maybe saw a farm from a distance once or twice.

To most of America, the cowboy is dead and buried and resurrected and forced to dress up in funny clothes and play shitty music and drop all the stoicism and coolness that true cowboys were made of.

I mean, quick: think of someone who you might define as a real cowboy. Not some guy who wears a Stetson hat and complains about minorities, but a real, legitimate cowboy. If you came up with anyone other than Tommy Lee Jones, I’d be incredibly surprised – it has been scientifically proven* that Tommy Lee Jones is officially the last famous cowboy in America. When he goes, the whole legend goes with him.

Martial Arts

Kung Fu used to be a more or less exclusively male thing. Bruce Lee, Gordon Liu, Sonny Chiba, and David Carradine were the masters of the domain, and some would say rightfully so – brutal, unforgivable violence is generally a man’s forte.

With the new millennium, however, we’ve seen an increase in ass-kicking kung fu hotties. From Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels to Uma in Kill Bill to the lead in Machine Girl (see above), martial arts is no longer a man’s world.

Of all the things to be no longer manly, I’d argue that martial arts are probably the least painful thing to go; ass-kicking chicks are undeniably hot, and while the martial arts themselves are no longer masculine, the act of watching and having sexual fantasies of female martial artists most certainly is.

*No it hasn’t