Allusion to Illusion

He wears a tool belt and is handy around the house. He does all the heavy lifting. He is required to be the breadwinner and supporter of the family. He must be strong and able to protect. He must be a spiritual leader, an example of righteousness and tact. He is a dope, a moron willing to cope with the emotional complications of his significant other, with the anticipation that it will be chased by a few well-earned minutes of sex, or at least some televised sports. In Chad Kultgen’s The Average American Male (2007), an unnamed male narrator puts this construction of masculinity to the test, either to refute this feminist-centric stereotype of the masculine position, or simply to mock the feminine Performative.

“Casey has a fat ass. She’s a pretty cute brunette…just with a big fat ass attached. She knows it’s fat and got a membership to my gym so she could go with me…She even toyed with the idea of getting a personal trainer and she bought an exercise book called The Daily Butt Regimen…I tried to get her to do squats with me, leg presses…any fucking thing having even the most remote influence on the movement of muscles in her lower body, and she always says, ‘I think I’ll just do some curls.’..That night, after suffering through a TiVoed three-episode Real World marathon, I’m rewarded by her letting me fuck her doggie style. As I look down as her fat ass, I wonder if fucking her hard enough will have any kind of slimming or toning effect. Couldn’t hurt.” Within these words is the summation of just what Kultgen claims in his title to have mastered, The Average American Male, not simply by his standards, but by the standards of the feminist agenda. In direct response to feminism claiming to be founded on the basis that women (by gender, not by biological sex) are treated generally unequally in comparison to men, masculism is defined in some spheres (especially in the opinions of modern feminism) to be synonymous with male chauvinism or misogyny, as evidenced by the above excerpt from Kultgen’s novel. The unnamed narrator is extreme, brutal, selfish, emotionally abusive, sex-centered, and most predominantly, shallow--not exactly befitting the stereotypical predisposition of masculine ideals, but the epitome of masculism through the eyes of the extreme modern feminist.

Most evinced in this passage is the undeniable implication of the feminist view of masculinity, centered on the ceaseless desire for sex, which Kultgen seems to perpetuate, but refutes in actuality. The unnamed male despises all that is superficial in any of his relationships at any point in the novel; for example: dating, engagement, dinner with parents, talk of children, shopping, etc. He lives in a narrow world that consists only of video games, food, his male friends, and sex, and placing him in such a world is the author’s way of personally redefining the terms of masculine gender in artificially realistic (not idealistic) terms. The male protagonist is pornographic in his thought and speech, vulgar, internally violent, and eternally sexually aroused, a character description which borders on the sociopathic. Rather than portray the knight-in-shining-armor image of masculinity as a means to his ends, Kultgen allows the feminist definition of masculinity to become a sort of comic relief for the hard-to-swallow underlying truth in his words—that perhaps there are some men who unfortunately do adhere to the misogynist masculine guidelines, but in truth, the feminist definition of masculinity, in Kultgen’s opinion, is preposterous; no average man could truly be that shallow.

Weakness, however, a characteristic atypical of masculinity, is also part of Kultgen’s redefinition. The narrator’s personal weakness is not absolutely overt until the very end of the plot, when he proposes not to his overweight, unpleasant girlfriend, but to a thin, beautiful, idealized woman who loves sex and video games as much as he does. What is striking about his surrender in proposition is that he states a realization: “There is nothing better. There is no fucking escape.” Rather than live his single life of polygamy, the narrator chooses to allow himself to be consumed by the umbrella of all that which is female, to be defined not by his own life, personality, success, goals, or desires, but by the singular desire of his mate to be married to him. In this, Kultgen makes one last implication: not only does it seem as if the entire masculine position is contrived on the basis of feminist beliefs, but it also appears that the concepts of romantic love and marriage are contrived by the feminine Performative in order to assist in the definition of masculinity.

Whether the reader interprets The Average American Male as a simple firsthand account of a masculine confederate in the battle of the sexes, or as the caricature that is is, certainly the satire within it is undeniable. By exaggerating the masculine stereotype through his unnamed narrator, Kultgen implies that the complete masculine picture is a farce. Kultgen has constructed a parody, not as an example of masculinity, but as a glimpse at what women, specifically feminists, think they know about masculinity. This allusion to illusion serves as a microcosm for the entire debate between feminism and masculism, in which Kultgen implies bluntly: feminism was established on imaginary grounds, and masculism was established on the foundation of feminism.