I’m about the same age as President Obama (he’s actually just a few months older than me). Like him I’m a relatively cerebral guy whose hands are more or less free from calluses. He’s a lawyer while I’m a banker, but most people would put those two jobs into equivalent categories. And since I’m also 6 foot 1 and 180 pounds, I’m even built like the President. So I have to admit, it bothers me a little to see someone with whom I have so much in common physically, looking like such a total pansy.
To my knowledge no one has ever accused me of being too feminine. But as father of a 10 year old girl I do many of the same things in my ‘normal’ life that Obama does while on vacation. I can often be seen tooling around Monmouth County’s various parks on bikes with my daughter. If I were being followed by the Whitehouse press corps they’d see me buying cherries and frozen shrimp, and doing precisely the things that they just got done watching Obama do in Cape Cod. So how is it exactly that when I do those things it says basically nothing at all about my masculinity, but when he does it he looks like such a girl?
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not accusing him of being a homosexual; I’m not even implying it as a joke. I think his heterosexuality is perfectly clear and I don’t dispute it in any way. Besides, I’ve had lots of friends over the years that are homosexuals and in my experience; homosexuality and femininity don’t necessarily correlate. What I’m talking about is not his sexual preference but his sexual appearance.
Of course, all this is a symptom of our culture. My friend John Derbyshire went on about it at some length in his book “We Are Doomed” (which you can preorder here in paperback edition - just in time for that Holiday gift giving season… you’re welcome John.) but the bulk of his complaint is more that society seems to have little use for real men, and less about the triumph of newly feminized man:
While it is foolish to attempt to predict the future in any detail, there are signs that the world we are heading into, with its unprecedented demographic changes and momentous advances in the biological sciences, may be a woman's world. Those qualities we are accustomed to think of as "masculine", that have been brought forward more or less intact from our origins as hunter-gatherers in the Old Stone Age, are now surplus to requirements. Masculinity, as it has been understood from the beginning of our species, is now at last obsolete.
And proof positive of this is the fact that we have, as a people, elected someone who has managed to get by totally without them. It is a triumph of femininization of some sort that America has elected as its commander in chief, a man with all the masculinity and machismo of your average 13 year old girl. Just look at the man ‘trying’ to throw a baseball as compared to George Bush doing the same and you’ll see what I mean.
The truth is, it isn't what Obama does which makes him seem feminine, but but the feminine way that he does it. And there are still plenty of important differences between him and me, in spite of our physical similarity. I was raised by tough men who were 'tough' for a living. Fighting was a profession for most of them, and a hobby for the rest. And they raised me, my younger brother, and all my male cousins to be tough too. In fact, it’s only through self discipline and years of practice 'toning it down' that I’m able to successfully navigate the newly feminized world I live in without offending everyone I know.
In the meantime, Obama was raised by women, for women. And if you ask me, it doesn’t look like he knows any other way.
Still, he and I are so similar that there remains in me this tiny nagging doubt. It’s like when you hear your own recorded voice. Part of you hopes you don’t really sound that way but in your heart you know you really do. I’m looking at Obama as feminized as he is, and hoping to god that not all tall thin professional men in their mid 40’s look that way. I know they don't... but still.
I’m told by people close to me that I shouldn’t be concerned. And I don’t mean my wife, who I know is comfortable with my level of masculinity. I mean my friends, who to be completely frank, are likely to tell me I’m acting like a ‘little girl’ just on principle. But instead what they’re saying is that compared to President Obama I look like I just stepped out of a Marlboro ad. And they say this even when I'm not carrying a firearm. I suppose that’s enough to make me feel better.
But either way, at this point I am what I am. And at my age I’m finally getting completely comfortable with that. Obama is what he is too I suppose, and since we’re so close in age he’s probably feeling a similar way about it. That’s probably a good thing. But if I were a political leader with more proven masculinity than him, like Vladamir Putin or Bibi Netenyahu, (or maybe even Angela Merkel) after this last bit of image management I would be more ready to kick sand in Obama’s face than ever. Hopefully he’ll let someone else handle all the international negotiating. Someone more masculine than him, like Hillary.
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