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5 Manly Things That Are Going Away Forever
Dudes who complain that "manliness" and "masculinity" are going away are usually douchebags. Typically it's guys complaining that they can't get away with as much sexual harassment and degrading jokes as they could back in the "good old days." So what they seem to be missing isn't a time when "men could be men," but rather a time when men could safely be assholes.
But they're also not wrong. There are some staples of "manliness" that are absolutely going bye-bye, never to return. I don't know how soon (people who write about future trends are not in fact claiming to be time-traveling wizards), but they are going away. I'm talking about things like ...
#5. Car Culture
When I was 16, I had this poster on my wall:
I actually don't know if it was that exact one, but it heavily featured a Lamborghini Countach and butts. And I don't know if it's readily apparent to people who aren't experts in dissecting symbolic imagery, but that poster subtly suggests a connection between automobiles and sex. So at age 16 I knew only one thing: If you didn't have a car, no woman would ever touch your dick. Where I was from, that was both the age at which you could get a driver's license and the age at which you could legally hold a part-time job. The only reason to get a job was to get your own car, and it sure as hell wasn't so I could help Mom with the grocery shopping.
And even though there are presumably an equal number of male and female drivers in America, car culture -- the love of cars, and the worshiping of them -- was always about manliness. Race car drivers are male, mechanics are male, and car ads portray females as merely one of the accessories that come with a nice one. I don't know exactly why our means of transportation was always seen as a male-dominated thing (it was the same when we were getting around on horses, right?), but it's so ingrained that we don't even question it.
But Soon ...
It would have been unthinkable when I was a teen, but the hot new trend among kids these days is to not bother getting a driver's license at all. Back in my day, around 90 percent of 18-year-olds had a driver's license; now it's down to 70 percent and falling rapidly. There's a bunch of reasons for this, part of which is simply that more people live in cities now, where life is actually more difficult with a flame-painted El Camino than without one. But these are just the early rumblings before the collapse.
The world has simply changed -- the entry fee for being a cool, sexually active male no longer includes owning a badass muscle car that guzzles gasoline and belches exhaust with a roar that can wake the neighbors. Even if they get a car, they're probably not getting that car. Thanks to global warming, the era of gasoline is simply ending -- more than half of the new cars will be electric or hybrids by 2040, and while there are certainly hybrid cars that are worthy of having bikini-flossed butts draped over the hood ...
... the next trend will hit soon after: Cars that drive themselves. The era of driving your own car will be over by 2050. It doesn't matter how much you like driving or how important your Trans Am pussy magnet is to your masculine identity -- there are 1.24 million car accident deaths a year worldwide, and car accidents in the U.S. alone costs us an astounding $300 billion a year. Society is simply sick of bearing those costs when the technology exists to make them go away.
And at that point, everything that made cars appealing as a form of mechanized penis augmentation -- the power, the sound, the adrenaline rush -- will be gone. And some day in 2063 a kid will sit down and watch an old movie called The Fast and the Furious and he'll either wistfully long for those days when males ran on a mix of testosterone and gasoline, or he'll think it's the most ridiculous, bombastic shit he's ever seen in his life.
Dudes who complain that "manliness" and "masculinity" are going away are usually douchebags. Typically it's guys complaining that they can't get away with as much sexual harassment and degrading jokes as they could back in the "good old days." So what they seem to be missing isn't a time when "men could be men," but rather a time when men could safely be assholes.
But they're also not wrong. There are some staples of "manliness" that are absolutely going bye-bye, never to return. I don't know how soon (people who write about future trends are not in fact claiming to be time-traveling wizards), but they are going away. I'm talking about things like ...
#5. Car Culture
When I was 16, I had this poster on my wall:
I actually don't know if it was that exact one, but it heavily featured a Lamborghini Countach and butts. And I don't know if it's readily apparent to people who aren't experts in dissecting symbolic imagery, but that poster subtly suggests a connection between automobiles and sex. So at age 16 I knew only one thing: If you didn't have a car, no woman would ever touch your dick. Where I was from, that was both the age at which you could get a driver's license and the age at which you could legally hold a part-time job. The only reason to get a job was to get your own car, and it sure as hell wasn't so I could help Mom with the grocery shopping.
And even though there are presumably an equal number of male and female drivers in America, car culture -- the love of cars, and the worshiping of them -- was always about manliness. Race car drivers are male, mechanics are male, and car ads portray females as merely one of the accessories that come with a nice one. I don't know exactly why our means of transportation was always seen as a male-dominated thing (it was the same when we were getting around on horses, right?), but it's so ingrained that we don't even question it.
But Soon ...
It would have been unthinkable when I was a teen, but the hot new trend among kids these days is to not bother getting a driver's license at all. Back in my day, around 90 percent of 18-year-olds had a driver's license; now it's down to 70 percent and falling rapidly. There's a bunch of reasons for this, part of which is simply that more people live in cities now, where life is actually more difficult with a flame-painted El Camino than without one. But these are just the early rumblings before the collapse.
The world has simply changed -- the entry fee for being a cool, sexually active male no longer includes owning a badass muscle car that guzzles gasoline and belches exhaust with a roar that can wake the neighbors. Even if they get a car, they're probably not getting that car. Thanks to global warming, the era of gasoline is simply ending -- more than half of the new cars will be electric or hybrids by 2040, and while there are certainly hybrid cars that are worthy of having bikini-flossed butts draped over the hood ...
... the next trend will hit soon after: Cars that drive themselves. The era of driving your own car will be over by 2050. It doesn't matter how much you like driving or how important your Trans Am pussy magnet is to your masculine identity -- there are 1.24 million car accident deaths a year worldwide, and car accidents in the U.S. alone costs us an astounding $300 billion a year. Society is simply sick of bearing those costs when the technology exists to make them go away.
And at that point, everything that made cars appealing as a form of mechanized penis augmentation -- the power, the sound, the adrenaline rush -- will be gone. And some day in 2063 a kid will sit down and watch an old movie called The Fast and the Furious and he'll either wistfully long for those days when males ran on a mix of testosterone and gasoline, or he'll think it's the most ridiculous, bombastic shit he's ever seen in his life.
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