We Hunted The Mammoth
By David Futrelle
Yesterday, we looked at the “fellas, is it gay” meme — specifically, the way it highlights some of the preposterous (but real) beliefs that some men have about masculinity and gayness, finding examples of “gay panic” tied to everyday activities that are decidedly not related in any way to sexual orientation, like washing between your ass cheeks or ordering dessert in a restaurant.
By David Futrelle
Mr. Rogers, who passed away in 2003, is having a strange but heartwarming posthumous comeback. A kindly father figure for generations of preschoolers, Rogers was recently the subject of a documentary that made grownups weep. Tom Hanks is playing him in a forthcoming feature film. He was even hailed as something of a bisexual icon after old comments of his acknowledging he was attracted to men as well as women resurfaced.
So as the dude behind this blog I get a fairly steady stream of communications from, well, dudes who are not such big fans of the blog. Alongside the veiled threats and not-so-veiled threats and fat jokes and intimations of cuckoldry and predictions of an imminent “beta uprising” I also get emails from guys who profess to be just so confused as to why I even have such a blog, do I hate men or something? I’m not sure if any of them are asking sincerely; most seem to think their little notes will somehow shame me into quitting.
So I’m kind of obsessed with the images of burly men in peril that you find on the covers of vintage men’s magazines. One of the things that makes these old covers so charming, aside from the completely ridiculous animal attacks depicted on them, is that the cover art doesn’t always match the headlines that appear on top of it.
So New York magazine’s Jesse Singal — GamerGate bete noire and one of the central figures in Candace Owens‘ crackpot conspiracy theories — has written a really quite fascinating piece on the history of the alpha male. Or at least on the history of the idea of the alpha male, from its humble origins in primatology to its current obsessional ubiquity amongst pickup artists and Red Pillers and cuck-calling Anime Nazi Trump fans.
I‘ve long been obsessed with the bizarrely over-the-top cover art for 1950s men’s “adventure” magazines, in which muscular, often shirtless men face off against an assortment of unlikely animal enemies — from armies of “giant turtles” to squads of flying squirrels. (You can find an assortment of notable covers here.)
More recently, I’ve become obsessed with Google’s Deep Dream software, which can turn any picture you toss at it into a creepy acid nightmare filled with strange Dogslug creatures and a strange surplus of eyes.
And now that I’ve found a handy web interface for the Deep Dream software, I decided to combine these two obsessions into one. The results were, well, interesting.
