I’m not joking at all, Danithew. I’m just waiting to make sure that no one i know reads this blog before I write the thing.

I was flipping channels and VH1 happened to be showing footage of Ken Jennings at the time. I simply found it amusing that they were showing a cleancut college-bowl caucasian Mormon guy and playing hip-hop music as the backdrop.

Sometimes I do enjoy music videos. It just depends what music is being played and how well the video was done. I liked MTV when it came out just like I enjoyed listening to rock-and-roll on the radio. My complaint (unlike yours) about MTV these days is that it doesn’t play all that much music.

Regarding VH1; Can you really watch that stuff? I remember my first exposure to music video TV was after a roadshow some family hosted a post-roadshow party. Someone turned on the TV and a bunch of music videos were playing. I thought, “This show will end soon, and we can do something fun.” But the music videos just went on and on and on and on. At some point I broke down and asked how much longer this TV show with music videos was going to last. I was absolutely dumbfounded to learn that this was a new channel called MTV, and all it showed was music videos. Everyone seemed to think this was exciting. I thought to myself, “Surely, this cannot last.” Alas, it has.

Now it’s confession time. I was just watching VH1 and they were doing one of their overviews of people who made the news this past year. One portion was referred to “some dudes” who normally aren’t celebrities but were in the news. These “dudes” they were talking about were the two guys who married Britney Spears (in one year), the father of Julia Roberts’s twins and finally “some dude” who won on Jeopardy. You know … that guy. :)

And when they showed the images of Ken Jennings, what music were they playing in the background? They were playing the chorus from Salt ‘N Pepa’s song “What A Man” over and over again.

So forget all your warriors, soldiers, farmers and other burly aggressive guys. THE image of Mormon masculinity is Ken Jennings. What a man. :)

I agree with you here.

Rob Briggs The masculinity I was considering was locker-room jockstrap masculinity: laugh. scratch, cuss and throw back some brews with the guys; high priority on trophy females… If that’s your idea of the masculine, Mormon guys tend toward the feminine.

To some degree, yes. Perhaps I’m just projecting, but I think you’re giving Mormon men too much credit (assuming that one takes what you describe is a bad thing—which I don’t). In my experience, Mormon men use surrogates for the types of things you mention. I’ve suffered through too many elders quorum lessons where men try to justify why they think it’s OK to choose which women they date based on whether they’re pretty (I’m sure that this occurs less now than it did when I was first an elder, because the elimination of local Quorums of Seventy means that the average age in the elders quorum is now higher). Mormon men love to exchange outrageous missionary stories and they often play top-that-sin. The discussion over at Nate Oman’s “My Only Real Regret” post has a lot of Mormon guys talking about ladies’ underwear, which is probably something like the Mormon equivalent to locker-room humor (and, not surprisingly, our own Rosalynde Welch found it creepy). And then there’s the inevitable behavioral drift…

That was my point of departure and starting with that idea of masculinity it’s pretty clear the Mormon guys, by and large, don’t have those attributes. By that definition, Mormon guys aren’t masculine. If that’s your idea of the masculine, Mormon guys tend toward the feminine.

There are a lot of counter-arguments to what I’ll call Drifter masculinity, starting with the simplest counter: that it is an irresponsible, ersatz masculinity. But for my comments I was accepting for the sake of argument Drifter masculinity. So I introduced the equivocation into the thread.

Me bad.