Punching Holes In The Marlboro Man
For generations the Marlboro Man has been an icon, the epitome of American masculinity. A rugged cowboy, he exudes independence, toughness, capability, and self-sufficiency. The Marlboro Man reigned supreme in cigarette advertising from his 1954 introduction to the demise of the brand on the American scene in 1999. Historically, Marlboro cigarettes, first introduced to the market in 1924, were intended as a smoke for women. It was reinvented in 1954 as a man’s cigarette aiming for post adolescent males just beginning to smoke. What better way for adolescents to declare independence from their parents than to start smoking Marlboros? Of the seven Marlboro Men who appeared over the course of the years, three died of lung cancer.
Without question this mythical merger of John Wayne and Harrison Ford, the Marlboro Man, has contributed to the cultural bias that to be male is to be taciturn, a loner, emotionally distant, needing no one. He’s the prototype for Men Are From Mars, Women From Venus—the stereotype that boys and men are emotionally illiterate, stoic, and totally independent. And who would argue with John Wayne or Harrison Ford?
Well, one who will argue is Dr. Niobe Way, Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. With a Harvard Ed. D. and multiple prizes and awards, Dr. Way is the President of the Society For Research On Adolescence. She based her recent book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection on more than two decades of observation and hundreds of interviews of adolescents in the United States and in China. She says the stereotype doesn’t describe the boys in her studies.
Dr. Way first became interested in the adolescent relationships of boys by observing her own younger brother who was heart broken when he had a terminal falling out with his best friend who lived across the street. Then, as a school counselor she noted the discrepancy between the stereotype and what she heard from adolescent boys. She writes, “They openly expressed to us their love of their friends and emphasized that sharing ‘deep secrets’ was the most important part of their closest male friendships.”
Regrettably, Dr. Way noted in in an interview in the New Yorker/Books Online, “...these patterns among boys have been ignored by the larger culture because such expressions are considered by this culture as girlish or gay. Thus, to admit that boys have or want emotionally intimate male friendships, or to reveal their emotional sensitivity, is to implicitly accuse them of being gay.”
I had to brush away years of cobwebs, of forgetting or repressing, to remember close male relationships of my adolescence. But they were there—a couple of guys I could share anything with and whose company I cherished. But as Dr. Way observes there’s an expectation that eventually a boy has to choose between a boy friend or a girl friend. She says boys’ need for intimate friendship is as potent as it is for girls but as boys grow older they fear being seen as “too girly, or even gay.”
“Indeed, the shutting down of those relationships is part of what turns boys into taciturn, emotionally disconnected men,” Dr. Way points out. A Greenwich Village soccer mom with an 11 year old son and an eight year old daughter, she has four best friends —three female, one male. Women have the luxury of maintaining same sex relationships, of having “girl friends” even when married. Men do not. The threat of being seen as gay is just as potent for adult males as it is for adolescent males.
As an adult, out, gay male, one of the things I’ve experienced is that in mixed company of male, female, straight and gay—only men who are totally comfortable in their own sexuality are comfortable relating to me. There is an implicit threat to many straight men, not that my sexuality is contagious, but rather that prolonged association with a gay man might imply something about them. For many straight men there are unresolved feelings and issues going back to late adolescence, to the shutting down of male relationships, as Dr. Way points out—to the time when they had to choose.
The Marlboro Man may be deceased, literally and figuratively. But his companion Virginia Slims sails on —perhaps that should be sells on. Virginia’s catch phrase, “You’ve come a long way baby,” has become a part of the modern American lexicon. In some ways it’s an appropriate slogan for many forms of the feminist movement. But reading Deep Secrets was a reminder to me that we haven’t come far enough. We still have a long way to go.
When the threat of being gay is a major impetus for boys and men to shut down their deep desire for same sex friendships—when gay equates to being girly or feminine, it’s a marker of how far we still have to go.
When will women be seen as equal to men and totally competent? When will being girly be a descriptor, not a denunciation? When will being gay simply be a statement of fact and not a threat to boys and men? When will the Marlboro Man realize there are more rewarding friendships than with a horse?
John Siegfried, a former Rehoboth resident, lives in Ft. Lauderdale. Email John Siegfried