I was listening to Rain in my Heart by Frank Sinatra the other day, when suddenly it struck me how crazy it is to think that not so long ago, there was a time when a guy like him could perform a song like that, that expresses such raw emotion from a male perspective, and be held not just in good standing, but become extremely famous too. I don't think anyone in Sinatra's time would have dared to suggest that he's a "nice guy" or an "incel dogwhistle" only "pretending to be romantic in order to garner sympathy from women"--the sorts of things you often hear from feminists nowadays. In fact, saying such things about him would probably have even made one a social pariah back then. Everything I have seen about him suggests that people in his time thought of him as a masculine example of a man, and that he was wildly successful with women.

Then I think back even further in history, when romantic-era poets and other artist intellectuals were considered the sex symbols of their time. One among them, Lord Byron, was even so influential that a legendary character archetype modeled after him--the byronic hero--not only persists to this day, but forms a cornerstone of modern storytelling. Without him we would not have extremely famous and foundational characters like Batman, for example.

Like Byron himself, Byronic characters are seldom depicted (even today) with the derisive brush strokes that are often used to depict real men who express what is arbitrarily deemed an unacceptable amount of emotions. Yes, they may be tormented and flawed, but the audience is ultimately supposed to identify with, like, and even sympathize with them.

But what I find strange is that, nowadays, the standard of masculinity not only in fiction but also for real-life celebrities is totally different. Sex symbols today are bad boys: for example, rappers that glorify crime, violence, and misogyny. Or male characters in things like 50 Shades, for example, that I already talked about in my other post, so I won't reiterate those ideas here.

It seems to me that the idea of a high-status man has gone from a sophisticated and gold-hearted gentleman who arouses more cerebral desires to a more thug-like man who appeals to more primitive and superficial definitions of masculinity: physical strength, raw social dominance, etc.

Even I feel cringy just for typing something like "sophisticated gentleman"--a phrase which means nothing bad in and of itself when your really stop to think about it. Yet such phrases have become notorious due to the actions of psychopaths like Elliot Roger (the so called 'supreme gentleman'), but it is also evidence of how much modern discourse on gender politics has wormed its way into our brains. We've been bombarded with insults like "neckbeard", and we've over-represented a small minority of bad men that hide behind fake niceness, to the point we've internalized this gut reaction.

But I actually think there is something quite powerful and profound about being able to admit one's own emotions, as a man. That it is actually one of the most masculine things you can do, because you're saying "I know people might make fun of me for this, but I don't care". It seems to me that in eras past, people understood this. Everyone is always talking about how toxic masculinity is, but if anything, this idea that a man is perfectly stoic and emotionless seems quite modern to me.

Or am I just oversimplifying this? I certainly don't mean to glorify past eras in some kind of blind conservative sense (they had their own problems, I'm well aware), but at the same time, it doesn't have to be black and white. We can acknowledge good things about the past that people got right, even if there were some things they didn't.