Assignment 1-3 Journal Article Analysis

Monster Masculinity: Honey I'll Be in the Garage Reasserting My Manhood

I was expecting this article to be about a macho man asserting his manhood. I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was not. It was an article about how gender roles have changed in the last few decades and about how the author uses two popular TV shows to satisfy his wanderlust and keep his man desires.

Tragos (2009) starts out by saying “I’m the comic victim of two American myths,” which are his desire to be both a settled down person and a person who travels the road to different places. He has a family and a tenured teaching position. His traveling the road is mostly to Home Depot as opposed to the open road. He reconciles his two desires by building a hot rod in his garage and watching his two favorite shows – Monster Garage and American Chopper.

New contemporary gender roles require women to be strong and beautiful and men to be strong and sensitive. The new roles are creating a double burden for men and women because it still requires them to keep their traditional roles while adding some of the characteristics of the opposite gender. Merging some of these gender expectations may lead to the feminization of the masculine culture. The popularity of “lad mags” like Maxim and Stuff, the TV shows Monster Garage and American Chopper, music videos, and lyric sheets are showing signs of chauvinism and retrograde sexism (Tragos, 2009).

Years ago, women were expected to be beautiful and sexy, and some of that was based on their appearance and social standing. Men were forced to think about their own identities as women became more strong and independent. A woman today is strong and beautiful; her femininity is expressed through her dress, speech, dependency, and sensitivity to others. As feminism increased, some thought it made women masculine. Men learned to accept the new women as long as they still satisfied man’s beauty requirements (Tragos, 2009).

The video game about Lara Croft satisfies today’s image of a woman being strong and beautiful. Smart, independent, and with a great figure, she is cast as the picture of contemporary femininity. TV sitcom has changed over the years from showing the perfect mother images of June Cleaver and Donna Reed to mothers such as Roseanne Conner, Jill Taylor, Deborah Romano, Clare Huxtable, and Lois Wilkerson. The 1950s and 1960s mothers were always dressed nicely with aprons and were subservient. The more modern sitcom mothers wore jeans, took power from their husbands, and worked. This shift led to TV fathers as being less authoritative, less masculine, and being fearful of their wives (Tragos, 2009).

The man today is very different from the man of your father’s time. There is a code of conduct that men should have certain postures and attitudes at all times. Some believe that there is a set of characteristics that include aggression, dominance, and competitiveness. On the other hand, the new man needs to be both strong and sensitive. The new man embraces his feminine side without losing his masculinity (Tragos, 2009).

There is a new term called metrosexual. The most popular definition is that of a straight, urban male, who shows his feminine side, indulges in expensive haircuts, designer suits, and face creams. In the past, men were well groomed but did not spend a lot of time being concerned with their appearance. There are quite a few men’s magazines that help men with fashion, fitness, trends, and beauty products. The popular TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was devoted to helping ordinary men become the metrosexual. Hypermasculinity attempts to teach a man how to be a man. Through the pop culture of magazine covers, pop music lyrics, music videos and the TV show The Man Show, chauvinism was and is being promoted (Tragos, 2009).

Two reality shows have given men a new way to bond and to generate their masculine role. Monster Garage and American Chopper are shows generated from the ideas of men returning from World War II. These men used their skills and need for speed leftover from the war to search junkyards for parts and jalopies to build hot rods and recreate supercharged imitations of machines they operated during the war. The initial building of these creations was not to impress women but to impress other men. These hobby led to magazines, bike and car clubs, and to NASCAR. Monster Garage and American Chopper satisfy a traditional notion of masculinity (Tragos, 2009).

Monster Garage is about bike builder Jesse James who has lots of tattoos. The format of this show is that Jesse and his crew take something ordinary and turn it into a monster creation such as a Ford Mustang hot rod lawnmower or a Mini Cooper snowmobile. With a limited amount of money and time, the team builds something and on the last day they have a race. American Chopper features the Teutul family of father and two sons who also have tattoos. Building expensive themed bikes is this show’s format. Part of the draw of this show is how the family interacts. This show features a lot of technical talk and could serve as instructions on how to build bikes. But most importantly, both shows allow men to enjoy time in the garages with men doing men stuff away from women (Tragos, 2009).

I must admit that I found this article hard to follow at times. Overall, it was an entertaining article about how men and women’s roles have changes over the last few decades. I do not think that the author minds the changes at all. I think men still desire some alone men time to enjoy traditional men stuff. The garage satisfies this desire and allows them creativity. The two popular shows on the Discovery Channel indulges the author’s wanderlust and restores his masculinity.


References
Tragos, P. (2009). Monster masculinity: honey, I’ll be in the garage reasserting my manhood. Journal of Popular Culture, 42(3), 541-553. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from http://0-journals.ohiolink.edu.olinkserver.franklin.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/TRAGOS_PETER.pdf?issn=00223840&issue=v42i0003&article=541_mmhibitgrmm.