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Jul. 27th, 2006 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricWhy Ugly Men are getting a chance
What's behind the newly-exalted status for the unorthodox-looking actor in Hollywood? One factor is the evolving opinion on what constitutes masculinity in popular culture.
Take, for example, the slow but steady rise of "geek culture", which began with the dotcom boom in the 1990s.
Suddenly, geekdom equalled power owing to the sheer number of so-called geeks who were getting rich because they possessed the kind of knowledge that the average person couldn't be bothered with. When the geek became mainstream, so did their interests...
With the geek's ascendance, ideas of masculinity have become much less rigid: To be tough, athletic and chiselled was no longer the be-all and end-all of manhood.
Becoming the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs wasn't such a bad deal after all.
Or one could simply be a little bit of both, like British cult author Neil Gaiman, a self-confessed nerd who looks quite at home in a leather jacket.
In fact, to be a testosterone-charged Alpha Male may even seem rather outdated. This is, after all, the era of the metrosexual, retrosexual, pomosexual (as in postmodern-sexual) and everything else in between.
In other words, there is a place for everyone, from old-school handsome Brandon Routh in Superman Returns to hound dog-looking Nicolas Cage in the upcoming World Trade Center to Johnny Depp, who inhabits an under-populated grey area of stars who are good-looking in real life but questionable-looking in films.
TESS! are we appalled and alarmed????
anyway. article is amusing, and i suspect that it's skating over a lot of insightful stuff which could be said about the Geek Ascendant and gender roles...
Most people these days could concieve that someone who can kill computer bugs is more useful than Brave Cockroach Hunter, even if their personal taste doesn't run that way. Improvement for men, not tying them down to an ideal of physical prowess and all that. And theoretically a much more gender-neutral ideal- i'd be willing to bet that a fair few more women could learn to code computers than could run down sabre tooth tigers.
Makes you wonder why they don't... Why is it that ten or fifteen years ago, when computerdom was the domain of the most uncool and unmanly men you could concieve, and it would take a leap of prophecy to call it a bastion of masculine power, weren't there more uncool women taking an interest?
Why, when sci-fi/fantasy has some of the most active, even dominant, female characters around, is it presumed to be a man's genre? (are all these geeky men having fantasies about sword-weilding women who can keep the sabre tooth off while they get the high-speed broadband connected, perhaps?)
What's behind the newly-exalted status for the unorthodox-looking actor in Hollywood? One factor is the evolving opinion on what constitutes masculinity in popular culture.
Take, for example, the slow but steady rise of "geek culture", which began with the dotcom boom in the 1990s.
Suddenly, geekdom equalled power owing to the sheer number of so-called geeks who were getting rich because they possessed the kind of knowledge that the average person couldn't be bothered with. When the geek became mainstream, so did their interests...
With the geek's ascendance, ideas of masculinity have become much less rigid: To be tough, athletic and chiselled was no longer the be-all and end-all of manhood.
Becoming the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs wasn't such a bad deal after all.
Or one could simply be a little bit of both, like British cult author Neil Gaiman, a self-confessed nerd who looks quite at home in a leather jacket.
In fact, to be a testosterone-charged Alpha Male may even seem rather outdated. This is, after all, the era of the metrosexual, retrosexual, pomosexual (as in postmodern-sexual) and everything else in between.
In other words, there is a place for everyone, from old-school handsome Brandon Routh in Superman Returns to hound dog-looking Nicolas Cage in the upcoming World Trade Center to Johnny Depp, who inhabits an under-populated grey area of stars who are good-looking in real life but questionable-looking in films.
TESS! are we appalled and alarmed????
anyway. article is amusing, and i suspect that it's skating over a lot of insightful stuff which could be said about the Geek Ascendant and gender roles...
Most people these days could concieve that someone who can kill computer bugs is more useful than Brave Cockroach Hunter, even if their personal taste doesn't run that way. Improvement for men, not tying them down to an ideal of physical prowess and all that. And theoretically a much more gender-neutral ideal- i'd be willing to bet that a fair few more women could learn to code computers than could run down sabre tooth tigers.
Makes you wonder why they don't... Why is it that ten or fifteen years ago, when computerdom was the domain of the most uncool and unmanly men you could concieve, and it would take a leap of prophecy to call it a bastion of masculine power, weren't there more uncool women taking an interest?
Why, when sci-fi/fantasy has some of the most active, even dominant, female characters around, is it presumed to be a man's genre? (are all these geeky men having fantasies about sword-weilding women who can keep the sabre tooth off while they get the high-speed broadband connected, perhaps?)