Real men don’t worry about man dates

At a group dinner last night, a male friend who shall remain anonymous said that the first thing he read in the Sunday New York Times was the Style Section. In the Drezner household, that section generally falls under Erika’s purview — much like our division of labor with regard to the Book Review. However, I will often look at an article that my lovely wife recommends. The point is, this declaration from a close heterosexual friend neither surprised nor particularly preturbed me. Today, however, the front-pager for the Style Section was a Jennifer 8. Lee story about the “man date”. Some highlights:

The delicate posturing began with the phone call. The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation. “He explicitly said, ‘I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,’ ” said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College. The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. “We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately,” recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time. “We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did.” Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion – two guys looking at art together – they headed directly to a bar…. Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not. “Sideways,” the Oscar-winning film about two buddies touring the central California wine country on the eve of the wedding of one of them, is one long and boozy man date. Although “man date” is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20’s to their 50’s, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don’ts. Depending on the activity and on the two men involved, an undercurrent of homoeroticism that may be present determines what feels comfortable or not on a man date, as Mr. Speiser and Mr. Putman discovered in their squeamishness at the Modern.

As someone who has gone on the occasional man date, I suspect Ms. Lee might be exaggerating the awkwardness of this particular social institution. Heterosexual men who are unafraid of saying that they read the Sunday Styles section first — and the men who befriend them — don’t really care what other people think about two men sharing a meal, a movie, or an art gallery. Next week in the Style Section, I want to read about trendy reporters who use numbers for middle initials. UPDATE: to be fair, Mr. Lee changed her name before she became a reporter and did so for reasons having little to do with trendiness. Plus I’ve been assured by many that she is a very nice person. This doesn’t change the fact that the article is a crock of s&#t, however.