Book review.

Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" and Benjamin Percy's "The Wilding" offer interesting takes on the role of "rough" masculinity in our culture.


There’s an unfortunate tendency, when discussing contemporary masculinity (one that even my last review for this magazine displayed), to hold up the gentler side of the modern “good” man -- his sensitive, intellectual, soul-searching side -- as his most important trait.
In this way of looking at things, the rougher side of masculinity -- the kind expressed in violent sports, lusty objectification of women, and outdoorsy, rifle-toting, one-with-nature-ism -- tends to get disparaged, tagged with some embarrassment as the way our fathers used to act, an old-fashioned set of values to be as thoroughly as possible papered over. Indeed, the struggle to become a good man is often simplified, unfairly, into the struggle of our civilized, modern sensitivity over “the thugs of millennia past.”


Is There Room for Rough, Tough Men? | Sex & Relationships | AlterNet