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harlie LeDuff wrote a book with his balls. Depending on whom you ask, it’s called Us Guys or US Guys. In it, he embarks on what could be seen as a cultural temperature-taking of the American male. An award-winning New York Times reporter, LeDuff has covered a range of tough-guy subcultures, from the rap scene that inspired Eminem’s 8 Mile to the FDNY in post-9/11 New York. In Us Guys, LeDuff spends eleven chapters immersing himself in eleven different male subcultures. He brawls with bikers, tries out for an arena-league football team, struts a catwalk with Manhattan fashionistas, takes drugs with Burning Man freaks, becomes a clown in one of America’s last traveling circuses, rides a steer at a gay rodeo, butts ideological horns with a revival-tent preacher, gets killed nine times over at a Civil War re-enactment and pals around with septuagenarian handicappers at a Miami racetrack. Craig Davidson, dick-swinging author of two testosterone-saturated novels, debates his feminist polymathic friend, Erin Tigchelaar, on the book’s merits.
Craig: So, Charlie LeDuff. US Guys. I was thrown by the title. Us Guys, a compendium of essays specifically geared towards guys? Or US Guys, a survey of the American male? As a Canadian male, I felt that it spoke to my life, too.
Erin: And if it is Us Guys, is he expecting an exclusively male audience? Or in the case of US Guys, a (North) American one? As a married suburbanite and new mother, I felt locked out of LeDuff’s clubhouse in many sections of the book. Apparently my lifestyle is hollow and my husband has died inside. When you’re dismissed in this way, it’s hard not
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to feel some triumph over the declining virility, ambition and competence of the American man.
Craig: Is the American male in decline? LeDuff thinks so, but that could be a function of the five-time losers he tends to focus on. I’m not sure the American male is in decline so much as in a shifting phase: country to city, blue-collar to white. Yeah, the shift’s been going on for decades, but there is this sense that the toughness and resiliency is being leeched out of modern men. Too many lawyers. Too many pencil-pushers and pencil-necked geeks. Too many metrosexuals. Too many critics. Over half of my buddies have never been in a fight, never worked a joe job, can’t change the oil in their SUV, or build anything more complex than an Ikea bookshelf. My father, my father’s father, they came into those experiences as a matter of course. Many baby boomers now have the means to prevent their kids from ever having to do these things. They wish to shelter us from the hard times they went through, a natural protective parenting urge. But who’s to say those trials didn’t shape our fathers and grandfathers into the sort of men they are? And without those trials, what does that make modern men? A bunch of marshmallows, frequently. I’m on board with that appraisal myself — speaking as a man who moisturized his face with Nivea not an hour ago. Not much mention of women in here. I guess womankind is doing fine?
Erin: The women LeDuff focuses on are mostly lesbians, prostitutes and groupies, or abandoned wives and mothers. That’s a very limited set of roles. Of course, there’s bad news for the men, too: from itinerant Native carnies through the brothers and fathers of LeDuff’s own complicated family, many of them cut-and-run from their responsibilities and give in to violence, poverty or addictions. But at least they get to have a sense of camaraderie with each other! In the preface, LeDuff includes a very tired description of women as a hierarchy of clucking hens, pecking at each other and fighting for men. Misters over sisters again.
Craig: Unlike LeDuff, I make a tendency of being serially honest regarding my many bedroom shortcomings. I lay it all out beforehand, like a law document — Subsection 2: Craig’s fingers have been described as
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LeDuff thinks we’re all just finger-fuckers at heart. It’s all just probing or being probed.
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“belonging to a long-dead mummy.” Take the last woman I went down on — think I must’ve been tickling her because she kept vice-ing her thighs together, trying to crack my skull like a Brazil nut. I’m lying there prying her legs apart so I could do my manly chore, but she’d clamped them round my neck, crimping the fat vein running up my throat until I was set to pass out from lack of blood to the brain, and I said to myself, “To hell with it. I’m not even a fan of this whole procedure, I was just trying to do the upstanding thing here.” All to say I’ve no real clue how to satisfy a woman. It’s scratch and sniff, honestly. But most of my buddies are like LeDuff — they seem to believe their dicks are the equivalent of lockpick tools with which they can crack any woman’s lockbox.
Erin: What classy phrasing. I think this is a good time to bring up that LeDuff writes, “Do women still need men? Yes. Men are still necessary.” He doesn’t sell me on that, though. The woman he professes to hold the most admiration for is a lesbian bull rider who takes up the tough, willful, uncomplaining persona of the cowboy, a “good ol’ girl.” For that woman, men are necessary only as ideas. Most of the heterosexual women in the collection are too damaged — molested, poor, obese, addicted — to need men as anything other than a pole to impale their self-loathing on. The biker groupies LeDuff chronicles, for example, have become dependant on continuing the patterns of abuse in their lives with “some length of cock for a certain length of time.” For me, the interest of these essays is that they raise the question of how ingrained the romantic mythology of the individual is in American culture. How much do we really still invest in the legendary ideal of the strong, silent type — the one riding off into the sunset alone, the self-sufficient outsider who is, at bottom, pure heart or will to survive, and should therefore be celebrated despite his flaws?
Craig: I believe in that! You saying it’s a myth?
Erin: It’s what Joan Didion diagnosed as “the dream we no longer admit” — needing only yourself. Maybe that’s why there’s so much focus in LeDuff’s collection on antisocial sex. He thinks we’re all finger-fuckers at heart. It’s all just probing or being probed.
Craig: I’d hoped women needed the confused, self-flagellating type, because that’s the banner I’ve been running up the flagpole. The funny thing is, I feel LeDuff and I are alike in a lot of ways. I’ve made my piecemeal living writing about macho subjects: boxing, dogfighting, loveless sex, the tragic nobility of tarnished manhood, etc. And the truth is, I’m almost totally winging it. I’ve stepped into some pretty rough worlds. I got in a boxing match to promote a book and took a boatload of steroids as a research technique for that same book. But all of those journeys were embarked upon with the understanding that it was not my life. So I agree that this book, its episodes, are designed to appeal to the modern male’s ideas of a bygone era, the tests and trials and proving stages that are no longer available to men like myself. Maybe LeDuff is unconsciously calculated: this is a myth, and LeDuff and I and a lot of modern men have been conditioned to believe and honor this myth of malehood, spurred by the John Waynes and Clint Eastwoods and Hunter S. Thompsons whose hard-drinking, hard-living, serio-masochistic ways stand as a token of a lost manhood that appeals to generations of men — LeDuff’s, my own, the ones to follow I’m sure — who half-castigate themselves for living cushy, frivolous lives while secretly offering up prayers to the gods of suburbia for blessing them with problems no more severe than finding the right oil-to-gas ratio for their Lawn-Boys. The alternative is looking at the “new” masculinity, as typified by the effeminate manboys LeDuff bunks in with in his male modeling essay — moisturized, manicured mimbos riding the crest of the ongoing Orlando Bloomization of ideal maleness. Humbug!
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The need to test one’s self as a male — not always to prevail, just to push the elasticity of our own limits, see if there’s much snap to it — will never go away.
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Erin: And yet according to LeDuff’s models, it’s “homos and old ladies” who demand the increasingly effeminate fellow in the ad campaigns. I hope no young players are out there calling me Grandma yet, but I confess I’m turned on by the vulnerable, waifish male with pretty hair and tinted moisturizer — I just need the tough guy back for when it’s time to really get down to business. I was profoundly uncomfortable with the sexually ambiguous antics of the sweetest guy I ever dated. Is that social conditioning or biological imperative? I can see why men might be confused and angry about being cast in two conflicting roles, but they can’t expect women to weep over it; centuries of catering to the Madonna/whore complex have made us less capable of that kind of sympathy. I don’t see myself marching with placards in the streets: Save our Male Myths!
Craig: But I do find something terribly redeeming and honorable about the myth, because at one point it wasn’t a myth. There’s this idea of tarnished manhood that I cling to: a sense that, yeah we’re confused, yeah we’re fearful, yeah we often do the wrong thing when the right thing is within our grasp, but in the end, we carry on, often because carrying on is the sole option left to us. The need to test one’s self as a male — not always to prevail, just to push the elasticity of our own limits, see if there’s much snap to it — will never go away. Nowadays this yearning manifests itself in more foolish, somehow pathetic ways. I think of a mother answering her door during World War II to a melancholy corporal telling her that her boy has died charging a machine-gun nest. Skip ahead to present day, a mother answering her door to have some dork in a spangly flightsuit saying her son perished jumping out of a plane with a snowboard lashed to his feet.
Erin: I try to believe in the nobility of the daily slog: a job, raising children, loving your partner and honoring your friends. It isn’t sexy, but it’s been around a long time too, and I don’t think I’m alone in still celebrating it. LeDuff may think he needs more, but he still goes home to his wife and new daughter.
Craig: So how do you feel about the idea of this book standing as an accurate assessment of the state of the American male? Personally, while I find LeDuff’s journalistic eye astute and heartfelt, it was also just that: a selective journalistic eye. To say this collection of roustabouts, fourth-tier athletes and Civil War re-enactors is a fair cross-section of America is more a publicist’s wet dream than a reflection of the true state of affairs.
Erin: There’s something revealing — and alternately annoying and touching — about the way LeDuff portrays himself as well: he always manages to be the hero of his own anecdote, the self-aware guy who understands the masculine “code,” and how to "belong" in every situation. His stories don’t have that funny, self-sacrificing honesty found in, say, a Frederick Exley confession, or the fiction of Evan S. Connell (a writer LeDuff thanks in his acknowledgments). Instead, he tries to act out the truth in the here-and-now. Like you, LeDuff claims not to understand women, yet he reacts hotly when he’s photographed for the newspaper at a gay rodeo in drag: “I’m straight as an arrow. Nobody bothered to ask. If the editors needed any proof of my sexual orientation, they could have easily sent me their unhappy wives and girlfriends and I would return them home with a smile.” It’s such a classic demonstration of compensating for sexual insecurity, I can’t be sure he didn’t fabricate it to make a point.
Craig: That was something I wondered while reading this: the whole possibility of rampant James Frey-ism. I found myself empathizing with LeDuff, but I remain unsure whether I completely believe him. While at no point did I feel I was being blatantly lied
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That’s part of this whole development into modern manhood: honing your embellishments.
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to, I did get the sense every episode held a heightened sense of drama: LeDuff’s always just tough enough, just intelligent enough, his manliness is always up to the test of whatever he’s up against. And even in this, I let him off the hook. That’s part of this whole development into modern manhood: honing your embellishments. Take a seat next to any guy on a barstool, you’ll hear embellishments. We aren’t quite satisfied with the circumstances of our lives, but instead of addressing our shortcomings, we often prefer to lie about our merits. And since everyone is lying to one another, nobody can call anyone else out. The perfect system! And hey, I’m as much a culprit of this as anyone. Final question: what’s your general sense of the book?
Erin: Regardless of how plausible I think the individual incidents are, I believe LeDuff captures the mood of men of his generation, the grief over what they perceive as a dying tradition of manhood. I question how much wailing and rending of garments is necessary, but I can’t fault his portrait.
Craig: Agreed. As much as I’ve hacked on LeDuff, I did enjoy this book. I believe in his abiding wish to understand and chronicle the men he encounters, and never with a sneer, never from the scornful upper balconies. He lives and works and plays and fights with them, shares their fears, puts his guts on the line with theirs, and his book is truer for that sacrifice. Rarely does a book have the power to make a person feel bonded to the greater population he lives amongst — the testosterone-bearing portion, in any case.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: | |
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Erin Tigchelaar is a mother and an ex-librarian. She has written on the fragrance industry for several beauty magazines. |