FERRELL has spent his career riffing on macho stereotypes, including NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby in "Talladega Nights" and TV news anchor Ron Burgundy in "Anchorman." In the upcoming "Semi-Pro," he plays a professional basketball player/coach/team owner in a 1970s-era American Basketball Assn. who refuses to acknowledge that his wife is sleeping with the entire league.
"He sort of embodies the false solution, but he does it with a nudge and a wink, ever since he was the male cheerleader on 'Saturday Night Live,' " said "Manhood in America" author Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook. "He plays the feckless ne'er-do-well who can't quite get it together. Then he becomes hyper-masculine and aggressive, and that's even more ridiculous. And finally he finds some balance in the middle."
Filmmakers and actors depicting these scenes say the punch line isn't rooted in the gay man -- it's the straight American male struggling with intimacy and emotion while stuck in some retro notion of manliness.
"I still think that we're very much dealing with the whole macho thing," said Ferrell. "That's why I think it's so easy to make fun of. I don't think we're really that evolved."
If audience reactions can be believed, there's nothing more laughable or downright discomfiting than watching "manly" men cringe and squirm after an encounter with their soft side. And the examples grow more ridiculous by the moment. They wrestle nude ("Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan") or rub backsides and sing about "Guy Love" (NBC's "Scrubs") or accidentally kiss (Super Bowl Snickers ad) or snuggle up on an air mattress ("Wild Hogs").
All this comes in the aftermath of the women's movement, which so discombobulated men that for a time, great hordes of them escaped to the woods to beat their chests and share their feelings. Today, two straight men can't even share a bottle of wine at a restaurant alone without the act itself being declared some sort of Zeitgeist. Straight men! Dining as a pair! But then, masculine identity has been in transition for a while now -- since the Industrial Revolution, according to some historians.
"Homophobia is to straight men in America what sexism was to us 20 years ago," said author Kimmel. "It's the thing we're bumping up against everywhere we look. We've gotten used to women in the soccer field, in the press room, in the locker room, every profession. Now it's kind of made us look at why we want to be around each other so much. I think something's up."
