Gender and Desire in Polo Ralph Lauren, continued...

Masculinity, therefore, was in part defined by a man's relationship with nature, that is, his affinity with it. But masculinity was also defined by sexual desire, specifically, by a man's heterosexuality. A man was masculine, and this masculinity was natural, because his sexual desire for women was presumed as innate and biological. In the West, no real man, no natural man, would desire another man. As R.W. Connell notes,

True masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men's bodies - to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body. Either the body drives and directs action (e.g., men are naturally more aggressive than women; rape results from uncontrollable lust or an innate urge to violence), or the body sets limits to action (e.g., men naturally do not take care of infants; homosexuality is unnatural and therefore confined to a perverse minority) [emphasis added].(3)

Indeed, Wister alludes to this "perversity" at another point in his essay. Corroborating Connell's assertions about the mythopoetic men's movement (of which Wister can be regarded as a forefather), Wister asserts that the West is no place for homosexuals or "impure," "hybrid" races:

No rood of modern ground is more debased and mongrel with its hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce, who degrade our commonwealth from a nation into something half pawn-shop, half broker's office. But to survive in the clean cattle country requires spirit of adventure, courage, and self-sufficiency; you will not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews in that district; but the Anglo-Saxon is still forever homesick for out-of-doors.(4)

Masturbation, Neurasthenia and the Crisis of Masculinity

But digging a little deeper, one finds that the "true" masculinity to which Wister and others aspired was a façade, a concept created from the ether as part of a reaction to what many perceived was the decline and contamination of a pure breed of men. The Man of the West as the embodiment of "true masculinity" is thus a misleading one and one that reveals a larger anxiety present in the late nineteenth century about industrialization and an increasingly elusive "Virgin Land." Susan Lee Johnson writes,

[. . .T]he relationship between what is western and what is male is overdetermined[.] That relationship, though it reaches back over the centuries of Anglo-American westward expansion on the North American continent, tightened into an almost impermeable bond by the end of the nineteenth century. The American West as a conceptual region, then, did not become such a stubbornly, almost belligerently, male preserve until, however ironically, as a demographic region it was ceasing to be disproportionately male. The construction of a masculine West was part of a larger late-nineteenth-century 'crisis of manliness' in the United States—a crisis in which older definitions of white, middle-class manhood that emphasized restraint and respectability (manly men) gave way to newer meanings that focused on vigor and raw virility (masculine men)[.] (5)

According to some, this "crisis" had physical, bodily manifestations. One of the symptoms of this crisis was a condition known as neurasthenia, which was believed to have afflicted many men living in the late nineteenth century. The "disease" was first discovered by George M. Beard in 1881. According to Gail Bederman, author of Manliness & Civilization,

Beard defined 'neurasthenia' as 'nervelessness—a lack of nerve force.['] Neurasthenia resulted when a highly evolved person seriously overtaxes his body's finite supply of nerve force—the same force which masturbation squandered. Neurasthenia was thus not a mental illness. It was a neurological illness, a malfunction of bodily physics[.] [. . .] Beard's explanations of neurasthenia paralleled Victorian explanations of masturbatory illness. Both diseases resulted from excessive expenditures of the body's limited supplies of nervous force. Just as masturbation would rob a body of its masculinity and male force by draining it of its nervous force, so neurasthenics who overtaxed their bodies would become weak and sickly, likewise drained of their nervous force. (6)

One of the supposed cures for this disease was a trip to the West. Silas Weir Mitchell, a late nineteenth century "nerve doctor," wrote, "'The surest remedy for the ills of civilized life is to be found in some form of return to barbarism.'" (7)

In many western films from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, one finds those who have presumably received the cure and those who are still withering under neurasthenia's feminizing weight. In these movies, Wister's feminized "hybrids" and "mongrels" play an important role. (8)  Their "perversity" provided the perfect backdrop against which to position a "pure," heterosexual masculinity, embodied in the figure of the cowboy. The characters were easily identifiable to filmgoers. The "effeminate," urbane aesthete was usually identified by his small, frail stature and city clothes. (9)  The cowboy, by contrast, was tall, athletic and often wore denim, chaps, and a neck-kerchief. Regarding the dress of the cowboy and his city-bred opposite in Western films, Martin Pumphrey writes, "Crucially theirs is a particular kind of cleanliness. They [cowboys] are neither fastidious nor fussy—unlike the townsmen whose carefully manicured cleanliness and pressed clothes signal incompetence and probable dishonesty." (10)  This false dichotomy of masculinities—in particular, a brawny heterosexual positioned against a brainy, frail homosexual serves a special purpose in fiction and film about the West. As Judith Butler notes, "[H]omosexuality emerges as a desire which must be produced in order to remain repressed. In other words, for heterosexuality to remain intact as a distinct social form, it requires an intelligible conception of homosexuality and also requires the prohibition of that conception in rendering it culturally unintelligible." (11)   Ultimately, what this dichotomy reveals is the very instability of the category of "masculine." While at the same time highlighting the cowboy's masculine power, this binary positioning also diminishes his ostensibly essential nature. Thus, the cowboy is only as masculine as his antithesis (his frail, city-bred opposite) is feminine. (12)  Masculinity is revealed not as a fixed, essential category, but rather as something that is temporal, malleable, and defined only by its shadow, by what it is not.

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