[LINK] "Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents"

[rfmcdonald]

The Atlantic's Willa Brown looks at the image of the lumberjack as a contemporary fashion statement. It turns out that when that first occupation first became a major pop-culture issue a century ago in North America, it meant much the same as it did now.

The lumberjack seems like a startlingly apt symbol for hipsters to appropriate. On one level, it’s just a neat metaphor for gentrification: Lumberjacks were, after all, an ad-hoc army of Caucasians, invading regions they imagined to be empty, sucking up the local resources, and leaving vast, bland spaces in their wake. But there’s much more to the lumberjack symbol than another glib comment on urban white culture. This particular brand of bearded flannel-wearer is a modern take on the deeply-rooted historical image of Paul Bunyan, the ax-wielding but amiable giant, whose stomping grounds were the North Woods of the upper Midwest. Paul and his brethren emerged as icons in American pop culture a little over a century ago. What links the mythic lumberjack to his modern-day incarnations is a pervasive sense—in his time and ours—that masculinity is “in crisis.”

From slaveholders fearing rebellion to patriarchs threatened by suffragettes, much of the scholarship on American masculinity focuses on men in crisis. White men are often portrayed as continuously jittery, always teetering on the edge of losing their birthright. But there are moments when this anxiety reaches a fever pitch, when the media and cultural critics turn their attention sharply to the plight of men. One such moment was at the turn of the last century, during a period of rapid urbanization and stark economic inequality.

Americans are currently enduring another prolonged bout of unease, stretching back at least six years. Since the Great Recession began, there has been a general handwringing in the media about the state of men—even the End of Men. The economic downturn disproportionately affected men, and it is clearer than ever that the single-breadwinner family is finally dead. The "traditional" role of the man as the primary provider is now firmly out of reach for most Americans. Which is why it seems particularly apt that (mostly) white, young, urban, middle-class men have once again picked up a symbol invented in the early twentieth century by men very much like themselves, a symbol that has long been gathering dust.