Why Are Today’s Manly Men so Afraid of Cities?

Too many foreigners, too many poor people, too many gays—the specific foreigners and the hair colors may change, but the essential complaints remain the same. The cities are godless, unamerican, and non-white. “Urban” has been a byword for “Black” for years, with the “metro” in “metrosexual” performing basically the same function for gayness (or at least, for anything not quite hetero). The purple-haired political correctness of yesterday has become the blue-haired wokeness of today.

There’s nothing wrong with preferring open spaces to cities, nature to concrete, or even not having to confront society’s angry dispossessed on the way to work (we make a lot political hay over whether the preferred response to the the homeless and mentally ill on the street should be anger, fear, pity, or indifference). “Settled and populated” can easily become associated with despoiled and corrupted. To some extent, we’re a nation founded on such ideas. “There’s no such thing as American history, there’s only a frontier!” bellows Don Draper in the midst of an epiphany on Mad Men.

If you don’t like something, just run away! The myth of the cowboy, the settler, or the frontiersman who gazes boldly at the horizon and sees opportunity remains so ingrained even now that a president can base his entire campaign on echoing an earlier fake cowboy president (there’s probably a metaphor for the state of pop-country music in there as well—the third-hand odes to characters we forgot were fiction). The politics of colonialism aside, there is something admirable about boldly venturing into the unfamiliar (hopefully without being an asshole when you get there). So why now are the startup CEOs, the country singers, the professional fighters—today’s models of the intrepid manly man—seemingly so allergic to exactly that? Their language may occasionally draw on the Davy Crockett mythos, but what they’re really saying is “these new experiences are scary to me.”

Even worse, they tend to take a bragging tone—a kind of crybullying. They preface rants about urban anarchy with “I don’t care if this is offensive,” or qualify them with preemptive defenses on the grounds of speaking one’s truth. Days after his fireworks kerfuffle, Prasad retweeted a post that read, “wow, it turns out, if you write vulnerably on the internet, some people will actually be evil and try to prey on you.”

Even the most stridently anti-woke seem to invoke therapy-speak whenever convenient. “You can’t yell at me if I’m already crying” is how Felix Beiderman of Chapo Trap House once summed up the unspoken mantra of the modern American male.

And the boogie men are no longer restricted to coastal cities: the Blowhard Softboi now sees nefarious others even in the shadows of “God’s Country.” Maybe you’ve seen the viral TikTok in which a man, strolling with his carefree female companion, tactically assesses the threats around him like a suburban Robocop. In this post (seemingly now deleted), he makes walking down some everyday street seem like Rambo slipping into enemy territory. That is, perhaps, the rub: that the guys who once kept Soldier of Fortune magazine next to the toilet are now fantasizing not about infiltrating a secret Vietcong prison camp or taking down a Mexican drug lord, but rather dreaming up reasons to unleash their fury and YouTube weapons training on the mean streets of Lincoln, Nebraska.

The modern tough guy takes political polarization to its logical extreme, targeting not just foreign enemies or gays or minorities, but, in a classic case of mission creep, all of America’s city dwellers. And while it’s tempting (and let’s be honest, fun) to dunk on macho men trying to rebrand fear as virility, it also brings to mind Gore Vidal’s old quote about Teddy Roosevelt: “Give a sissy a gun and he’ll shoot everything in sight.”