I’m not particularly patriotic. Nonetheless, I was moved by the eloquence with which Barack Obama articulated the American creed at the march at Selma over the weekend. Likely one of the speeches that will highlight his presidency.
For the blow by blow analysis, see Fallows. (Always see Fallows for wisdom…)
The always-interesting Virginia Postrel writes about metrosexual and retrosexual men in America. Normally the two are contrasted as opposites; Virginia groups them together as both rejecting the sloppy casual fashion sense distinctive of many American men.
She first quotes William Loeffler who proclaims the end of the Metrosexual:
The man's man is back. And he's had enough of unisex salons, simpering emo music and the emasculating kryptonite of the Oprahsphere.
Or so say a spate of ads, books and websites that hail the emergence of the retrosexual, whose attitude and style hearken back to the strong, silent type of the '50s and early '60s.
The retrosexual keeps things simple. He does not own more hair and skin care products than his wife or girlfriend. He does not "accessorize."
Think Don Draper, the dapper, jut-jawed executive played by Jon Hamm in the AMC series "Mad Men." He may be a philanderer, but you won't find a pink shirt in his wardrobe. Like the dark hero characters of ex-spy Michael Westen in "Burn Notice" and U.S. Marshal Raylon Givens in "Justified," "Mad Men" presents alpha males who live unapologetically by their own code.
To which Virginia responds:
The real contrast isn't between these guys and overgroomed Metrosexuals but between both groups, with their grown-up polish, and the beer-bellied American male in comfy shorts and untucked oversized shirt. On my recent trip to research glamour in Shanghai (more on that later), I talked with author and marketing consultant Paul French who, among many other interesting things, commented on why, with a few exceptions, American apparel lines haven't been terribly successful in Shanghai. U.S. companies are too attuned to the sloppy casualness of the American market, and Shanghainese like to look sharp. They want Banana Republic, he said, not The Gap–something that apparently escapes the parent company of both. (Instead of BR, there's a local knockoff called Urban Renewal.)
(Hat tip to Cardiff Garcia's sixteen favorite blog posts of 2010.)
Nike has come out with a brilliant new video featuring LeBron James, an athlete whose personal brand and popularity plunged after the media spectacle he created when he announced his decision to join the Miami Heat. He confronts his critics by looking into the camera and asking a simple question: "What should I do?" As Grant McCracken says his in excellent analysis, Nike turns to the bedrock American value of individualism to make the point that LeBron has the right to forge his own path no matter what other people say:
What's clever about the spot is that it drives us towards an answer for this question. We end up thinking, "Well, James should do has the right to do whatever he wants to do. Fans have the right to be unhappy. But finally, we don't have the right to say where he plays or finally who he is."
And this means the ad turns, almost inaudibly, on the cry of individualism. This is one of the bedrock convictions of our culture: that the individual has the right of self-determination, of self definition. It's not for elites to tell us who we are. It's not for ethnic groups, local communities or corporations. It's not for parents. Nor for teachers. And it's not, James is pointing out, for fans.
The marketing lesson here is that you must understand the culture you're operating in. Nike very much understands American culture, ever since they made "Just do it" the company's slogan. I don't think Nike would run this sort of ad in Asia or Latin America.
Grant McCracken covers these themes in more depth in his excellent book Chief Culture Officer.
Earlier this week in Indonesia, before I went up to give a speech, I was introduced to the audience exactly three times. Three different Important People of the sponsoring organization went to the podium and read the same bio to the same audience. Three. Times. In a row.
In addition to re-introducing me, each Important Person re-thanked other important people in the room, one-by-one, using their full titles, and then riffed yet again on the goals of the event. There were various other formalities related to these Important People like photographs and staged handshakes. It went beyond typical, lovely Asian hospitality: as the audience sat captive, the Important People were making sure everyone in the room knew they were important.
My worldly Indonesian interpreter told me these time-wasting rituals are left over from the Suharto regime. Interesting! Dictators are in the business of keeping the masses subservient. Beyond killing dissenters, I’d imagine a savvy dictator would try to psychologically disarm the people through the careful manipulation of social situations. Since explicit power plays can be self-defeating, dictators (and entrenched interests in general) might cultivate obedience by introducing small customs that subtly reinforce the power of those who hold it.
In my experience, what happened in Indonesia happens in almost every part of the world. I’ve personally witnessed such over-the-top obsession with titles and power at events in Latin America and Asia. I’m told Africa is the same.
It’s not as intense in Europe it seems, though there is still an emphasis on formal status and on highlighting the differences between people even if those differences are irrelevant to the topic at hand. I remember listening to Martin Wolf being introduced in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and hearing first about his degree from LSE 40 years ago instead of his rich journalistic career. I also remember looking at my friend’s EU passport on that trip and, to my astonishment, seeing that it listed his advanced degrees (PhD, J.D.) next to his name on the main passport ID page, as if academic degrees were as important as gender when crossing a border.
These customs reveal certain underlying values in a society.
In an older post I discussed the cultural ethos of Formality vs. Casualness. Casualness — in attire, in manner of speaking, in the way names are presented on paper — maximizes commonality among people. Formality maximizes difference. A related dichotomy is Past vs. Future. Past emphasizes past accomplishments and titles, your family and cultural history, and gives great deference to elders. Future emphasizes what you are doing today and who you aspire to be tomorrow. Future-oriented cultures, for better or worse, favor the energy of youth over the wisdom of elders. America is a decidedly casual, future-oriented culture, and this is partly what makes it unique.
In any case, it’s interesting that cultural values of this sort can appear so visibly in how events are staged and speakers introduced.
A couple months ago, at a group dinner, one non-American gentleman at the table said, "I have had sex with other women, but I have never cheated on my wife of 20 years." This was surprising coming from a man. Usually men consider infidelity the sole physical act; women tend to emphasize emotional betrayal. When I probed the guy on his answer, he just said that Americans are too obsessed with sexual monogamy. "What matters," he said, "is that you still love your partner."
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, the authors of the new book "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality," would agree. In their fascinating interview on Salon, they explain their ideas, the central one being that monogamy is against our nature. Excerpts, emphases mine:
Marriage in the West isn’t doing very well because it’s in direct confrontation with the evolved reality of our species. What we argue in the book is that the best way to increase marital stability, which in the modern world is an important part of social stability, is to develop a more tolerant and realistic understanding of human sexuality and how human sexuality is being distorted by our modern conception of marriage.
Does this mean that humans didn't form couples before the advent of agriculture?
Because human groups at the time knew each other so well and spent their lives together and were all interrelated and depended upon each other for everything, they really knew each other much better than most of us know our sexual partners today. We don’t argue that people didn’t form very special relationships — you can see this even in chimps and bonobos and other primates, but that bond doesn’t necessarily extend to sexual exclusivity. People have said that we’re arguing against love — but we're just saying that this insistence that love and sex always go together is erroneous.
I think from a cultural standpoint the idea of strict monogamy has far less currency within the gay male world than it does within the straight world. I’m a gay man, and I think probably about half the gay male couples I know are in open relationships. Why do you think that is?
First of all, they’re both men, so they both know what it’s like to be a man. They both know from experience that love and sex are two very different things, and it seems that for women the experience of sexuality is much more embedded in narrative, in emotion, in emotional intimacy…..
I’ve been living off and on for almost 20 years here in Barcelona, and from outside, the United States looks very adolescent, in a positive and negative sense. There's its adolescent energy — its idealism — but there’s also an immaturity and intolerance toward the ambiguity of life and the complexity of relationships. The American sense of relationships and sexuality tends to be very informed by Hollywood: It’s all about the love story. But the love story ends at the wedding and doesn't go into the 40 years that comes after that….the American insistence on mixing love and sex and expecting passion to last forever is leading to great suffering that we think is tragic and unnecessary.
Here's my old post on whether you would still trust someone in the boardroom if you knew s/he was cheating on her/his partner. Here's a dense essay about how lesbians have the least sex of anyone. If all this is too depressing, here's an uplifting video of soldiers returning home and surprising their families.
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