The National Post (Canada) ran a cover story last week on the “Menaissance“:

Guys don’t seem to be complaining about the demise of manhood anymore; they’re glad to just get on with being guys and maybe laugh at themselves along the way.

Stephen Harper jokes about not being able to seduce even his own wife. Justin Timberlake mocks his boy band past.

A few years ago, when the metrosexual trend was at its peak, it looked as if the very idea of manhood was dissolving in a prepedicure footbath.

But look around now at pop culture or politics and there is a sense that guys are being guys again, this time buoyed by the kind of playful self-mockery that so often attends self confidence.

A series of articles mixes the practical (”In Canada, more men complain of workplace discrimination than women”), the playful (”ubersexual” is the new “metrosexual” in advertising circles and, guess what, men can and do cook) and the personal (Allen Abel questions whether he is a “real man“).

While it claims to be an honest exploration of what “being a man today means,” a whiff of essentialism pervades all of the disparate articles. They all work from the premise, in other words, that men are essentially different from women. Certainly men are changing (opening themselves up to their “feminine” sides) and valuing different things (like shopping and cooking), but they make all of those explorations knowing that they maintain a core masculine identity.

No one seems to question that our very categories of “masculine” and “feminine” are ridiculous — and that they are reason why we keep needing to write these, however well-meaning, “backlash” pieces that revel in the return of the “real man.” Unless we accept that in the great majority of ways gender is something we construct/perform/make up in order to structure our world — for reasons of power and comfort, among other things — we will keep returning to this idea of a gender crisis.

Take, for example, Kirstin Downey’s recent Washington Post real estate piece on “man caves” — increasingly popular dedicated spaces within the home where men can escape and “be themselves.” For the most part, the article feels like an episode of MTV’s “Cribs” — a unquestioning celebration of these male-oriented spaces. But, as it progresses, the article decides to dabble in some cultural analysis:

Why are so many men now seeking a room of their own? Some armchair sociologists speculate that it’s part of a continuing backlash against women’s entry into the public sphere, that as women claim top spots in places that were once all-male preserves, such as universities, golf courses and Capitol Hill, men are seeking space in their own homes. Others wonder whether some men are reacting to a sense that women are too dominant in their home lives, with their puttering and decorating and desire to slap a doily, knickknack or family photo onto every inch of open tabletop.

Putting aside the insidious appropriation of Virginia Woolf’s foundational feminist idea that a woman needs a “room of one’s own,” the real problem here is that the article itself is participating in very “backlash” it is noting — a reactionary stance that validates the idea that men are under attack and must fear and flee from any feminizing influences.

Downey does provide an out-of-place quote from well-known linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, but she does nothing to criticize these spaces for what they actually do. Ultimately, they allow men to infantilize themselves, to retreat into their safe, gender-differentiated “boys-will-be-boys” world from childhood (or their college dorm) — where a sexist joke, an objectifying comment, or the right poster was an easy way to re-solidify gender boundaries and gender identity.

Not much of a “menaissance,” if you ask me.