Searching for the Perfect Man

In a recent column, Matt Feeney complains about how macho movies like 300 come under fire for being, of all things, “homoerotic.”

Feeney goes on at length about how sad the gay-calling is, but he doesn’t really ask why it happens. Here are my thoughts. These movies hark back to a heroic tradition that has, in modern times, become somewhat confused. It was Aristotle who first catalogued the “tragic hero’s” traits. The tragic hero was strong, intelligent and, under the right circumstances, emotive. His life had a pattern and purpose. He couldn’t just get run over by a truck. He was always the golden boy, the sensitive strong man who took enemy fire to save the life of a friend, or who rescued some helpless woman from rape and dismemberment by cannibals – only to be fried up and eaten himself. He got scant reward. He was brought low by his own physical and mental perfection. He was better than the rest of us.

The tragic hero reflects the Greek philosophers’ obsession with the “perfect man.” The Greek ideal of the perfect man was aesthetic as well as psychological – to be fair, the Greeks were big believers in premarital homosexuality. They weren’t alone. The perfect man became the David of Michelangelo’s sculpture, the Vitruvian man in da Vinci’s sketches. (Both of these artists, incidentally, were gay.)

However, over the years, the archetypal male hero has lost his way. With the onset of equality, we’ve separated certain qualities and assigned them to one or the other of the sexes. Men got physical strength, spatial reasoning, and calm in situations of crisis. Women, on the other hand, got good looks, tenderness, sensitivity and emotion. Nowadays, we tend to think of the ideal body as feminine. Men are just a walking aesthetic disaster.

The problem with the Greek martial hero in this context is that he was a physical ideal, and society has trouble separating physical beauty from sexual attraction. In the more permissive environment of prehistoric Athens, this conflict was no problem. Nowadays, in order to appreciate beautiful men, you have to be gay. In order to appreciate beautiful women, you just need to have eyes.

But even more problematically, the tragic hero was often brought low by his high-minded respect for higher-order feelings. He prominently displayed some of the emotions we nowadays assign solely to women. I have often thought, perhaps incorrectly, that as a society we have evolved to the point where we respect everyone’s emotions, “everyone” being defined as all woman and occasional gay men. To be an emotional straight man is just plain gay.

I’m guilty of this labeling myself. I remember once meeting some guy who made the mistake of confiding to me – perhaps because I seemed more mature than I was – that he really liked certain country love songs. I hiccupped uncomfortably and told him to “be a man.” Also, that I was more of a Leonard Cohen girl myself, Leonard Cohen whose lyrics tend towards the cynical “Shit, I’m fucked up and getting blown by a stranger” theme more than the “Thank God, I love my wife” theme. If I could do this encounter over, I would probably do it differently.

The ultimate point, however, is that the perfect man didn’t need a woman to be complete. And therein lay the problem. What did he need? If he found his match only in other men, and he wasn’t gay, then what was he? An egalitarian, modern civil society has no ready answer to this question.