This is, as you might suspect, the work of a magazine just making wild generalizations about American manhood with bold assertion and zero research. Men may have favored McCain last November, "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." (Italics theirs.)
Then we’re subjected to the idea that Obama has arrived to overcome the "overcompensating masculine drag" of the Bush-Cheney era:
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."
It's also an entirely different one. Cintra Wilson, author of Caligula for President, an apocalyptic fantasia that takes Dick Cheney's construction of an imperial presidency to its logical conclusion, shudders at the memory of Bush's "whole 'Mission Accomplished' codpiece thing"—the crotchtastic flight suit on the aircraft carrier: "Obama would sooner go out in front of the American people in a dress than in that overcompensating masculine drag."
Bush and Clinton were disasters from men, and then came Obama to the rescue:
Obama sticks to a less-is-more script with a smarty-pants subtext: the knowledge that blustery masculinity doesn't fool anyone anymore. Especially Obama himself. He's got enough self-awareness to know just how ridiculous he'd look in the sheriff's hat. And if that inspires the rest of us to drop the cartoonish manhood act, well, God bless America.
