Are You Becoming Barack Obama? Details
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:14PM 
The nation spoke loud and clear, but did we—or at least the 54 percent of the electorate that didn't vote for John McCain—really mean to vote for the Obamafication of the American male? We watch the occupant of the Oval Office more than any other living male, and yet the effect he has on our notions of manhood, our sense of ourselves as American men, largely escapes attention.
In Obama's case, sometimes he lives up to the male ideal and sometimes he doesn't (let's overlook those boxy, too-wide-in-the-shoulder suits and his dorky dad jeans, shall we?). But it might not matter all that much, because in voting for a radically different avatar of American masculinity, we were, in a way, voting for Barack Obama to change us. Which is exactly what he's doing.
For some, it's what's not there that matters. Byron Hurt, a New York–area filmmaker who last fall produced a documentary titled Barack & Curtis, sees Obama's ascent as the rejection of "defiant, in-your-face manhood." Hurt's film drew a parallel between George W.'s masculine identity and that of 50 Cent—a.k.a. Curtis Jackson—reminding us that Fitty once admiringly called Dubya "gangsta." ("I wanna meet George Bush," he said. "Just shake his hand and tell him how much of me I see in him.") "Barack Obama doesn't have to front like he's hard," Hurt says. "It's a deeply secure presentation of masculinity." more
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