Man Medium Rare: Sex, Guns, and Other Perversions of Masculinity - Softcover

Brown, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452274494 ISBN 13: 9780452274495

Publisher: Plume, 1995

Synopsis

A popular journalist, whose wife has shockingly announced her desire to have a baby, roams America talking to men and women about the terrors of responsibility and commitment and what it means to be a man. 15,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A frenzied attempt to define manhood in an increasingly complicated society. Journalist Brown panics when his wife, who is never mentioned by name, decides that they are ready to have a child. Blind terror, confusion, and a sense of self-betrayal at the prospect of becoming a father prompt him to research the state of manhood in contemporary America. Brown's desperate need to understand the part of himself that will be lost when he becomes a parent leads him to interview hundreds of men. His subjects range widely--from surfer dudes to Wall Street brokers, from a Tantric men's group leader teaching classes in masturbation to deep-sea fishermen, from pickup artists working in the shadowlands between scoring and date rape to sadomasochistic homosexuals cruising the bars for hot sex while watching their best friends die from AIDS. The variety of Brown's subjects appears staggering on the surface, but one eventually realizes that for all of their bizarre differences, their similarities are more apparent: Virtually all of these men are selfish, territorial, predatory, and incapable of communicating with the women in their lives. Brown has collected a sideshow of extreme stereotypical masculinity that embodies the part of his soul that he fears will be lost when he settles into the responsibilities of fatherhood. In lamentation, at times pretentious, of his ``adventurer, conquering hero'' side, Brown guides us through a definition of manhood that begins somewhere around the porn star and ends somewhere around the cowboy. Man Medium Rare is much more about ``sex, guns and other perversions of masculinity'' than it is about a general notion of what it is to be a man. A trite elegy to the wanton side of Brown's own masculinity as he is dragged kicking and screaming into the adult world of ``shitty diapers,'' committment, and responsibility. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Despite the flip title, this is a worthy mix of entertainment and introspection. Brown, a newsman who moved from Toronto to Los Angeles to follow his wife's journalism career, panics when she wants to have a baby. He fears both a marriage without shared purpose and also "the complete colonization of my mind" that a child could bring. He decides to face his fears, and his stopgap solution, at age 39, is a two-year tour of the country in a pickup truck to seek the varieties of manhood; he interviews some 200 men. His motley trail makes a sometimes disjointed narrative, but his descriptions are deft and his eye all-encompassing: a California "men's weekend" leads him to conclude that confessions are hastened not by intimacy but anonymity; a trip to the set of a pornographic film makes him feel both free and "less than I was"; a gun-wielding Dallas friend's triumphant standoff with hoodlums reminds him of the limits of "the moral sanctity of self-defense." Midway through his saga, Brown's wife becomes pregnant, and his thoughts about childbirth take him from AIDS and gay sex to Lamaze classes, "baby-sitting for adults during the most stressful weeks of their lives." Brown's odyssey, it seems, has prepared him to recognize that manhood is a definition "I still learn every hour of the day."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0452274494
• ISBN 13: 9780452274495
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288