MEN DON'T HIDE IN IVORY TOWERS:

A room with a brew: a review of Where Men Hide By James B. Twitchell, photographs by Ken Ross (John W. Nelson, October 16, 2006, Enter Stage Right)

In Where Men Hide, Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, sets out with photographer Ken Ross to investigate the male sanctuary, those places where men go to "safely tinker and fool around, refectory spaces made inhospitable to women not because of any overt antagonism but just because the male seems to need do-nothing time."

Amen, brother. Still swaggering after having just read Harvey Mansfield's Manliness, I opened Twitchell's book expecting to find a like-minded celebration of the unneutered male (albeit one more jocular and journalistic than philosophical.) This would be no apologetic for aloofness but a spirited and playful defense of our testosterone-fueled sloth and seclusion.

Well, Where Men Hide is certainly light-hearted enough if not downright frivolous in places. (How else to describe Twitchell's characterization of Abu Ghraib as a "sprawling 280-acre gulag"?) But confidence in my guide was shaken just three pages into this exploration of the "man cave" when Twitchell reveals that he teaches Romantic poetry and has his hair cut at a unisex styling boutique – not a unisex salon, mind you, but a styling boutique. That's when I first had the feeling that I wasn't dealing with a fellow gorilla here but with Dian Fossey.

That feeling no doubt owes a lot to my own narrowly circumscribed construction of masculinity (to put it in the academese flung at me across the seminar table by more than one enraged feminist), but it's reinforced when Twitchell writes of his work as a "commercial ethnography" and of Ross' images as a "topography of space"; when he suggests that it might be tempting to see the male preference for dark, subterranean places as a "womb-like regression" (luckily for the reader, Twitchell leaves it at that since he's "not convinced that it's sexual"); or when he describes the contemporary version of the snuggery as a case of "ethnological ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny." Hulk no understand.

To be fair, Twitchell seems far from the pretentious academic, and it's with a certain degree of mischief that he occasionally couches his explanations of male behavior in what he recognizes to be "academic cant." As further evidence of Regular Guy status, he admits that he couldn't bring himself to attend a local men-only consciousness-raising group – even in the interests of research – out of the understandable fear that he'd have been forced to read works by French philosophers. It's not full-fledged Francophobia, but it's a start.

It's actually pretty amusing to watch Mr. Twitchell respond one way to masculinity in his gut--with approval, even longing--and another in his head--with a politically correct voice that's as obviously phony as General Garca doing ventriloquism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 16, 2006 8:29 AM