FORWARD

Intro

Situated in the West, Son of A Bitch, evaluates the chaos of masculinity in the red, setting sun of martyrdom. Son of a Bitch is the prop room of a spaghetti western that will never unfold and the graveyard of Her fabricated frontier in the collapse of traditional masculinity.

1

Bailey Anderson always wanted to be a cowboy.

On her uncle’s ranch, She is eight years old. They hand Her the .22, and tell Her to level the gun and fire. The bullets ricochet through the empty bottles of Budweiser and out into space. They hand Her the 12 gauge shotgun and tell Her to level the gun, and fire. The kickback from the great long gargantuan thing launches Her body, sending it ricocheting through space. Echoing the Budweiser glass, she is lost in chaotic suspension ‘til Her body finds the ground.

Through ritual, She joins them. She is like the men – fathers and grandfathers. They tower over Her as she stirs from the hard pale earth. They laughed with a pride so great that it was not them who fell for this trick, but the new inductee to the Anderson line of masculine men. She is robbed of her naivety. That horrid phallic thing threw her to the ground. She is now one of them, absorbed in their camaraderie, tied together by the tricks of their fathers and grandfathers through being flattened by that 12 gauge.

2

She always wanted to be a cowboy.

Riding horses and squinting in the sun. She watched all the movies and yearned for adventure and accompanying lawlessness. When She watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly She recognized herself in Blondie, and hoped that she also could one day be something abandoned by God and man, just like him. She wanted to be tied to the fate of fatelessness that promised Her any expansiveness she could design, devoid of morality^[1]. And maybe one day, she could settle on something so far away from the passions of Her government and the horribly erect.

She fantasizes of retribution and revenge. Clawing and scratching at scabs that are reminders of revenge on the man that hurt Her most (But not in the scorned woman way, in the epic arch nemesis way – because she wanted to be a cowboy).

She imagined that she would be a bad cowboy, terrified of the unknown and also devoid of apathy. She is preemptively robbed of defining legacy and fate. The men – fathers and grandfathers – see her as weighty as the dust. They know something that they pretend they don't: permanence is contingent on the potency of one’s legacy, being lost in translation through time.

She realizes that it wasn’t about being a cowboy, but escaping the clutches of something wild and evil and gnarled and twisted. Chasing the red setting sun as fast as the earth could turn, facing great impossibilities that are so improbable that God and the Devil shiver.

3

She wanted to be a cowboy, kind of how Her grandfather probably wanted to be one. She comes from a long line of men who left their wives for a chance at freedom.

Her grandfather (John, forbids his grand daughters from calling him Grandpa, it makes him feel old) was born in a tent on an open field in Farmington, New Mexico. John tells Her a story about the time that the Apache men shared their home and food with him in the 1940s in Unincorporated Maricopa County, Arizona. He was a cowboy, building a dam in Tempe, Arizona, looking across the river, he shivers in fear. He describes the people he sees as terrifying, sweaty, and barbaric. Seeking shelter from the sweltering heat, grandfather and great-grandfather stranded in the desert. The kindness of the indigenous people does not reflect the cadence of John’s story, soaking in gasoline and ready to burst. He describes their massive forms, and cannot see that they are made of the same material, despite having compassion for strangers. They all slept together side by side, him with his father and the indigenous men together in rest.

John lived his life as an inspector of sorts building monsters in the valley that became Las Vegas. The monstrous, gargantuan beasts that dominate the sky in the backdrop of dust still suspended. The man created monsters, and became one.

My grandma tells a story about the drive back to Phoenix, Arizona, after their elopement in Las Vegas. He pulls over on the side of the road. In the passenger seat, she shivers as she looks at him in the heat of the blazing sun. She is riddled with shame and terror at the gleam in his eye, decidedly threatening that it was time to consummate their marriage.

4

She wanted to be a cowboy.

Her father talks about a time when his grandfather fought for his country, for a cause larger than him to protect his freedoms and mine. The Purple Heart earned in the Pacific Theater in World War 2. The submarine chasers. She wonders if people in various parts of the world tell similar stories, or if they are soaked in Agent Orange and lighter fluid and napalm only to describe having to defend themselves from monsters originating from great American valleys.

He describes what the world would look like if people didn’t fight for their country. A place that is lawless, chaotic, and evil, a world that is described to him and translated through terrified boyhood ears. War on ideas – cyclically reinventing itself. Children hiding under desks from nuclear weapons and communism. Meanwhile, the next great new evil changes its name, and its scales, and builds its bombs.

5

In a silent war, another martyr dies face down in a pool. The black water laps the side of the shallow end, caressing the form that used to wrangle for ownership of her own body. This isn’t a cartoon. This isn’t a Western. His victim-wife lay face down in the water, strewn on the side of the pool. There will be no dust when they remove her body, no pebbles or leaves pressed into her cold skin, only the ring of water on the concrete left by her clothes, that will disappear in just a few moments.

Grandma’s eyes well with a single tear when I show her the waterline at Lone Rock, and now how you can nearly walk out to touch it. Its form emerges from the water as an enormous phallus, growing larger and more improbable every year. She considers how much more time she has to watch it grow until the mystery of its depth is revealed. She cries with Grandma, because She also fears how great that thing has grown. Strangled by the enormous gargantuan shadow of legacy – on the brink of permanence. Fate mimics the lapping water in the shallow end and the disappearing lake.

Her body falls through space and lands on the pale earth; She lay so still that she could feel the earth turn. The lake is drying and the monsoon approaches. It’s an odd thing to arrive at the definition of American freedom, being prescribed by parameters that have a comorbidity with the suffering of others. The blue water laps on the red clay shore of the lake. Tales of Lone Rock at Lake Powell and where Dad broke his nose waterskiing. She was always secretly afraid of the plants in the water, and the sticks and reeds poking up from the clay. As the lake recedes and the pale rock is exposed without remorse every year, more foliage emerges from the water. The shrubbery becomes a tumbleweed. The shore of the lake echoes of the previous water line, fractions of inches of where it was the night before. Those fractions of inches don’t return.

6

In heat, cast metal abandons form. From that car crash, it melts off the car, reincarnated in the backyard foundry. With whatever previous chemical or spiritual compound that fused with it, produces a sparking blue and purple flame. It reminds Her of the time she found purple flowers on Her uncle’s ranch. She remembers Her childhood, when she was told that purple is rare in nature.

She is made of the same substance as the metal that the furnace boils, and all of Her atoms have existed on this planet just as long as the shell casings, water from the pool, and sand from the lake. Maybe one day Her bones will become the foundations of something else – all of the molecules in Her body might eventually untangle and disorganize and turn into slag similar to metal as it changes form cyclically. She envies its permanence and the ability to exist on this earth for longer than one lifetime.

She always wanted to be a cowboy.

Instead of falling to the pale earth, she lands on sealed cement. And when she stands up, there is no dirt on Her back. No sand, leaves, or pebbles pressed into skin. The only proof she was ever there is possibly the outline of Her sweat that will disappear in a few moments. There are no men chortling with satisfaction that She fell for the same shotgun explosion they did, or the ones their wives fell for. There’s no one there at all. Rising like some monstrous gargantuan thing, She emerges to see Grandma crying – there is no more water.

7

She wanted to be a cowboy, like Paul (Grandpa Moochie, named after his cat). Her early summers were filled with loud gunfire, originating from the small TV in the corner of the room in his beautiful double-wide in Golden Valley, Arizona. Clips of John Wayne in El Dorado at full volume weave into Her memory, grappling against the barren backdrop of the middle of nowhere. The gunfire is so loud you would guess you are standing motionless in the middle of it. That’s how he was for the last decades of his life. He escaped to the desert and found love to arrive at the end with. That trailer was heaven incarnate. He and Sadie living in peace together in the void until it was their turn to expire.

They arrived at the silence on the frontier, away from the passions of their government and the horribly erect. That legacy was the silent draining of the lake. One day that doublewide will be swept away in a great flash flood, returning the earth to its unadulterated state.

8

She always wanted to be a cowboy.

But the tension of the rope suspending the trap is slipping through the clove hitch. She realizes that she is not the cowboy, but rather Wile. E Coyote. Splayed on canyon walls and catapulted off cliffs and mezzanines, residing at both ends of the gun.

The Spaghetti Western Cowboy as the Absent Father

Introduction

A tale told fireside in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian describes a relationship between a man and his son. The story includes the father, a traveler, being murdered on his journey. As a result, he never meets his son. The man telling the tale as death and war personified, the judge, explains the effects of an absent father:

Now this son whose father’s existence in this world is speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life carries before him an idol of perfection he can never attain. The father’s death has euchred the son out of his patrimony… he will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is before a frozen god and he will never find his way.^[2]

The judge explains that the son will never see his father’s shortcomings and challenges, and this will result in a loss of context for men within masculinity. With the model for manhood redacted from existence, they are left to collage combinations of media, falsehoods, and fireside tales to determine the definition of masculinity.

Palaniuk claims that “If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God,”^[3] and presents a series of complications for those with absent fathers. The Cowboy deriving from the film genre of Westerns has become the model of an absent father for American men. By pointing to a deeply nostalgic period for the United States, it is still perceived as a masculine icon. As the Cowboy fades further into history, conservative politics are reminding the country of a simpler time, when white men had control.^[4] Through nostalgia for the West, truths of 20th-century masculinity become evident and expose themselves through media and literature. As we evaluate evolving masculinities through media, it is important to see “the male body as fully gendered”^[5] and consider their histories and motivations similarly to how we analyze other genders. By avoiding setting masculinity as the standard, we gain a clearer picture of how they are socialized and able to see them as, “fully embodied beings - not as disembodied intellects.”^[6]

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”^[7] 

The Cowboy

In 20th-century media, the West was a backdrop for American men to exercise their freedoms. It was repeatedly depicted as a lawless land that was unmonitored by the American government due to its scale and unfamiliar lands from a physical and cultural perspective. It was also a place that those who were not sophisticated could retreat to, offering “a space for men whose masculinity was questioned because of their wealth, education, and place of birth… to prove their manhood, and thus recreate their base of power even as they faced opposition from those middle-class men who were no longer championing the manly values of the Victorians.”^[8] The West was nostalgic. In a time of mass commercialization and evolving capitalism, the 1950s-70s was a time when men wished for a different reality. The West was representative of freedom as far as the eye could see. Anything was his as long as he could wrestle it out of another man’s hand.

The American cowboy as an icon was born in the genre of the Western. His function was a symbol more than a fact. It was an expectation for performative masculinity, a ghost archetype of a man created by the media, becoming a fantasy of masculinity. It constructed an ideal for “real men [who] embody the primitive, unadorned, self-evident, natural truths of this world.”^[9]

The Cowboy as a symbol rose to popularity at a time when the world began moving faster and faster. War, technology, and society was changing so fast that men began to wish for a simpler time. With identity crises, war run by technology, and masculine domestication plagued the minds of American men, they yearned to be set free in the chaos of the American West embodying the Cowboy.

The Cowboy was often riddled with bleary tales of terrible evils done unto them, and sentenced to wander the landscape in the tension between solitude and freedom. They usually looked the same in the media and shared similar backstories, featuring conventionally handsome white men with an affinity for stoicism and being standoffish. This version of manhood complemented the political climate in the 19th century, constructing masculinity based on what it was not: “European masculinity, effeminate men, women, and people of color.”^[10]

The sub-genre of the Spaghetti Western is distinguished by its country of creation, Italy, and sometimes filmed in Spain. “Partially enabled through the restrictive influence of Spanish censorship,”^[11] the subgenre may have been a form of protest in the face of censorship and grappling for control in European society. After World War II, overlapping pressure from losing the war and mass oppression in their respective countries, Spaghetti Westerns rose in popularity. Men in Italy and Spain were having a mass masculinity crisis, finding comfort in the cowboys who were “struggling to make sense of their unprocessed trauma, and the hyper-cool and disaffected loners who manage violence —rather than be managed by it— [striking] a chord with a huge audience in the postwar years in Spain and Italy.”^[12] 

Additionally having been filmed in Spain, it brought recognition and commerce to the country. Supported by the Francoist dictatorship, certain films borrowed military equipment and personnel to create the films, in turn enabling them to pass under the nose of the censorship restrictions resulting in great popularity.^[13] The creative function of some Spaghetti Westerns is to represent the trauma of Italian men. Hartson explains the “male protagonists struggle to come to terms with, and/or avenge some formative violent event in their past,”^[14] alluding to the traumatic event that the cowboys are running from, which was symbolically the trauma of World War II for Italian men. She continues, “The source of the trauma is generally related to some past event of which the protagonist can barely speak. Though not stated to be due to war, I contend that wartime trauma is the secret that cannot be spoken in these films.”^[15]

There are many complicated nuances in creating media about the American West in the 19th century. It’s important to consider that these films were not about America, but merely utilized popular imagery to communicate the complications of the political climate of Italy after World War II. While “ostensibly representative of the American West in the late 1800s, many of these films can be read as manifestations of latent post-war trauma,”^[16] the functions of the film in Europe are likely to be blamed for the lack of accuracy in the films. Because they serve a different purpose, they do not accurately portray the lives of American cowboys, or any surrounding populations, including Indigenous people.

The symbology of the traumatized cowboy also included motives for revenge. If the trauma of the cowboys was allegorical for the feelings of Italian men after the war, revenge is a quality in the Cowboy that was also translated to the perspectives of the population. They are described as being affected by “war and its aftermath, in both Italy and Spain, [inspiring]... the psychological backdrop for the withdrawn, violent heroes of these films who seek revenge for past wrongs, seemingly haunted by the “ghosts” of death and destruction.”^[17] 

McCarthy explains the tension between soldiers and non-soldiers in an era of war losing popularity, which became very relevant in America later in the century. He explains the pain of soldiers understanding the terror of war, but the outsiders failing to understand the incommunicable violence that some were forced to participate in. With some countries drafting young men to participate in this violence, they experience adversity upon returning home to realize that their suffering and crimes were all in vain:

As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancer’s false dancers… Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance… All others are destined for an eternal night and without name.^[18] 

Considering tales of American heroism, war, and violence, the specific American landscape is skewed in the Spaghetti Western, with a focus on interpreted guesstimations of life in the 18th century on the American frontier. This subgenre doesn’t include specific nuances about American history, which created a level of fantasy upon the films’ arrival in the United States. The subgenre had many reasons for popularity but was partially responsible for the design of the American Cowboy. The Spaghetti Western Cowboy has variations from the American cowboys, with one of their differences being their repressed sexualities by differing factors including, “Love, in any romantic sense, is notable by its absence in the Italian Western. Its protagonists are loners, desperadoes, or avenging angels, for whom women are either whores or (dead) ex-lovers and for whom familial relations merely represent an impediment to the pursuit of wealth.”^[19]

Some of the Spaghetti Western Cowboys were avoidant to sexual encounters due to the pursuit of money or riches. Interactions resulting in love or romantic companionship were pointless and a hindrance to the pursuit of wealth:

Although there were exceptions to this, the Spaghetti Western was markedly different in presenting romantic love, and the relationships that characterize its ultimate fulfillment, as problematic or as being notable by their absence. Instead, it is replaced by a relentless drive to accumulate wealth, even if it is unclear for what ultimate purpose that money is being collected^[20]

If their sexualities were not repressed by financial gain, it was also suppressed through emasculation or trauma. Carrying the affiliation of a country that lost the war, the men carried, “the burden of defeat is missing masculine power, is left non-sexual, and deprived of gaze.”^[21] The Cowboy is noted for his masculinity and hypothetical sexual prowess, it was rarely demonstrated in the direction of a love interest. Virility was something that is built into his character, but, “is rarely, if ever, directed towards sexual let alone romantic entanglements.”^[22]

An additional defining characteristic of the Spaghetti Western Cowboy is his desire to be alone, whether in search of redemption or denial of social norms. By avoiding the stability of family and domesticity, he is free of the requirements to sustain them, being free to live outside of society.^[23] Russ explains, “This rejection of familial ties and traditional, romantic relationships often means therefore that ‘[m]ale characters are represented as operating at the margins of society, rejecting religious dictates of obedience, respect for authority, women and children, owing loyalty only to themselves.”^[24] 

Sergio Leone’s main characters were generally labeled with simple names. If a main character in his film had a name, they likely would have no last name, particularly removing that character from his affiliation with his father. Cowboys that are labeled by their first name in the films have a “lack of connection with the “name of the Father,” … further detaching them from the social order is the fact that they do not marry or have children, nor do they become embedded in any social group”^[25]. Hartson continues by explaining:

Defeated masculinity is positioned on the margins of the symbolic order or outside it;

the order is undermined, devoid of the name of the Father or law; pre-trauma, the male subject is perceived as the preferred agent for representing the social order, while post-traumatic cinema is unique in constructing this affiliation as replete with tension and exposing the male identity as unstable.^[26] 

Spaghetti Westerns and the West were also characterized by their hyperviolence. By building hyperviolent personas, they were less likely to be the subject of another man’s violence. In turn, this created a cyclical system where men were performing senseless violence to ward off the possibility of appearing weak enough to be subjected to violence. Sergio Leone researched the horrors of the war when creating his films, quoted by Hartson, “[He] gives us an idea when he says this about a particularly violent historical incident about a man named Jack Slade who cut off a man’s ears, using one as a watch fob: “a sadist? a madman? not at all. A man just like any other, who was dominated by fear… the ear signified, for all to see, ‘careful, leave me alone, I am dangerous.”^[27]

By engaging in hyperviolence, he creates some distance between himself and the threat of the other. It also speaks to a different level of depravity, exposing mankind to intentions of inciting violence to assert power over the intangible other. In eliminating the thing that they cannot understand, they maintain control of a patriarchal system that serves a nationalist agenda, without having to endure shifting power dynamics.  

While they were very avoidant of long-term social relationships, cowboys in film did maintain levels of collaboration, usually in short bursts and with incentive. Usually socializing with strict constraints of needing each other temporarily to succeed, this trope often manifests in the main plotline as a quest for financial gain. Other situations can include a reluctant hero allowing a sidekick to join a revenge quest for financial gain, or vice versa. Camaraderie, specifically social platonic relationships between men, only serves functions in these films. Speaking more towards teamwork rather than community, it didn’t set a positive example for vulnerability between men characters. In Arthur Miller’s Misfits, an American Western, the ending of the story is not resolved but leaves the main character “only slightly comforted by the knowledge that his friend Perce is going to stick out the rugged life with him a while longer.”^[28] This relationship between characters demonstrates a fear of loneliness more so than the desire to be in an actual friendship. However, in Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, the main characters collect wealth for ambiguous reasons, not made clear to the viewer. Not only are they conditional companions, but they also avoid the company of women, “Leone’s protagonists show little or no interest in acquiring wealth so that they can ‘settle down and get a few acres dug’ but, rather, reject female company as a potential site of conflict, instead seeing the value of homosocial relationships in helping to facilitate financial gain.”^[29]

God’s Middle Children

Two works of fiction written after the archetype of The Cowboy are Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. While Blood Meridian is a historical fiction based on the Glanton gang around 1850, I consider both works as a response to Spaghetti Western masculinity.. Both books demonstrate complex views about fatherhood, violence, and camaraderie, as well as offer a more contemporary perspective on masculinity on either end of the ending of the cold war. Separated by a decade, both works discuss homosocial environments, gender, and the decay of capitalism and its relationship to masculinity.

Palahniuk begins his final chapter of Fight Club with, “In my father’s house are many mansions.”^[30] The father in this work of fiction is symbolically untouchable, all-knowing, omnipotent, and absent. The father is not considered in the context of his flaws, or recognized with them. The renegade and distant father represents an invisible standard that a son could never see as fact. Without seeing the father affiliated with their flaws and mistakes, the fictional character in this story strives to achieve a perfect masculinity that may not exist.

McCarthy writes his protagonist initially as a young man named, the kid, born into this world “pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”^[31] This echoes the impermeability and invisibility of the father throughout the novel. Reiterated by Palahniuk, his protagonist describes an interaction with his father:

My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn’t know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said, get married. I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need. ^[32]

In Fight Club, the main character is constructed on the component of being fatherless. He is designed to wander without guidance. Tyler Durden, the imagined and idealized figure of the main character’s desired abilities represents a man that the main character wishes he could be. Tyler is described as never knowing his father, and in turn advocates for self-destruction as protest, resulting in their designed fight club.^[33] The main character explains that this fight club is “a generation of men raised by women.”^[34] Often the fighting was not to achieve any purpose at all, just an exercise of mindless violence: “Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered… Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring at the one star that came through the street lights, I asked Tyler what he’d been fighting. Tyler said, his father. Maybe we didn’t need a father to complete ourselves.^[35]

Nearing the end of the book, Tyler Durden becomes more elusive, the main character begins to wonder if the idealized version of him has abandoned him just like his father: “I am Joe’s Broken Heart because Tyler’s dumped me. Because my father dumped me.”^[36] Aligning his main social companion as an equivalent for his father, he is essentially losing another idealized version of manhood, projected onto the man next closest to him. Being abandoned by this idealized version of manhood reiterates that this fictional character may not be suitable for traditional man types that were never clearly outlined to him.  

In these works of fiction, there is also a discussion of fate and violence. The camaraderie of men having encountered evil versions of themselves or evil personified is evident in both tales. The main character in Fight Club describes Tyler as existing for a long time before having met him.^[37] Similarly in Blood Meridian, everyone claims to have met the judge in some other place before having joined the company with him.^[38] These invisible deity-like figures are representations of evil and chaos, and both authors write these characters as unavoidable and inevitable. By describing them this way, the authors develop a sense of fated chaos for the protagonists, blaming their actions on something bigger than them and impossible to escape.

Palahniuk describes the men of the fight club as “God’s middle children… with no special place in history and no special attention,” all who are seeking “God’s attention, [having] no hope for damnation or redemption… It’s not enough to be numbered with the grains in the sand or the stars in the sky.”^[39] The men in this book are riddled with spite, battling extreme insecurities and inflated egos to protect the feelings of great fear under the surface, tied together by the camaraderie of mindless violence. When the main character realizes that he is Tyler Durden, he grapples with the huge disparities between who he thinks he is and who everyone else perceives him as. After building up this persona of hyperviolence, he recognizes that people see him as “The Great and Powerful. God and father.”^[40] 

Inversely, the men of Blood Meridian sit around the campfire and discuss the evils of the West, and the complications of being bred for no other reason than to incite violence. Most joined the company to acquire wealth, banding together to work as a team. However, the money is never enough to justify stopping their murder for hire. Similarly to the men of Fight Club, they also were tied together by their mindless violence, but uniquely incentivized by financial gain. The judge asks them, “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?”^[41] arguing that there is no governing force to stop them from enacting their nonsensical plundering: no fathers, no gods, and no laws.  

The Organization Man

As a result of the West, there are many responses to an evolving masculinity post-American-frontier-propaganda. As suburbia became a popular place for the nuclear family to settle down, there was pressure to conform to societal expectations. There was also pressure to avoid conforming to these standards through imagery of the Cowboy:

Nonetheless, the cowboys’ labor, described in detail, still displays many of the attributes of what might be called traditional masculinity—physical bravery and strength, independence, and determination—qualities of the self-made cowboy. Americans embraced the image of the cowboy in popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s because it provided an antidote for the perceived feminization of the suburbs and corporate America.^[42]

 There was a new fear among American men, equating the loss of individualism with communism. This was one of the forces driving the popularity of the Cowboy in the media whilst grappling with cultural anxiety about the fate of the country.^[43] In the 1950’s, failed men were “associated with Communists, homosexuals, and juvenile delinquents.”^[44] 

Aligning themselves with the imagery of the cowboy and the frontier, politicians used imagery and language to push Americans to yearn for simpler times and politics based in nationalism. For example, President Bush was seen wearing cowboy hats and boots, connecting him to an imagined American West, as well as presidents before him including “Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Ronald Reagan who used the rhetoric of the frontier as a means to govern and to shape American male identities."^[45] Additionally, political strategies were implemented to attract male voters to convince them that their politicians were manly;  one strategy employed to highlight the idea of expansion incorporated rhetoric about, “expanding the continental nation and then later imperial policies were enacted.”^[46] This resulted in contemporary discussions of imperialism and nationalism inspired by the “discussions of the values of the American West.”^[47]

There was great concern about the future of white American men, having expectations that were conflicting and rigid. While needing American men to conform, there was also great pressure on their individualism:

There was widespread cultural fear that white American men were at risk of becoming an indistinguishable mass of gray-suited conformists. The perceived loss of rugged individualism contributed to the anxiety that midcentury American white men were experiencing, and images of white cowboys taming the wild frontier gave reassurance to white men at midcentury that they were the clear recipients of this legacy, however far removed their suburban lives seemed from the Wild West^[48] 

The archetype born adjacently to the Cowboy was the Organization Man. As a result of capitalism and communism both pushing men into and away from conformity, there was severe cultural anxiety and gendered insecurity, coming from multiple directions:

[Some] analysts have argued that those anxieties were triggered by such developments as the replacement of the hardy entrepreneur by the faceless “organization man”; the rise of effeminate beats” and other rebels who raised the threatening (to the established culture) specter of homosexuality; the increasing technologization of work; entry of women into the workplace, which shattered men’s identities as breadwinners; and the technologization of war and the indecisiveness of the Cold War, both of which lessened men’s equally crucial identities as warriors.^[49] 

Working for corporations and buying an array of consumer goods became a symbol of American success. The never-ending cyclical cowboy quest for wealth became tangible in modern society through the pursuit of purchasing objects. To be a part of successful American psychology, men were expected to assimilate to expectations of corporate workspaces, valuing “conformity and obedience over individual distinctiveness.”^[50]

As an attempt to resolve the loss of individualism through corporate work, men were encouraged to display their individuality through products that additionally supported idealized capitalism, a truly American approach to being a man. These behaviors upheld an ideology of pseudo-freedom, while being unable to roam the West on a horse, men were allowed to buy cars, watches, and suits that labeled them as worthy of respect in the mid-late 20th century. Tying masculinity to their ability to earn an income and use that income to acquire goods promises an upward trajectory for “ever-expanding markets, [and] turned the male body from a site of production to a site of consumption.” ^[51]

This rhetoric continues when approaching the 21st century, present in Palahniuk’s work of fiction. When the main character loses all of his favorite objects in an arson apartment fire, he mockingly explains to the officer, “That was my whole life. Everything, the lamps, the chairs, the rugs were me. The dishes in the cabinets were me. The plants were me. The television was me. Couldn’t he see that?”^[52] As a result of this new approach to consumerism, men were defining their masculinities by the things they owned rather than their behaviors. Theoretically, this could result in a confused definition of masculinity if men were not allowed to consult their objects during this time. If they didn’t have their employment or purchases, they would be “men stumbling through a postwar world where traditional masculine ideals had been replaced by a capitalism-driven ethos.”^[53] This idea poses questions about the unsustainability of previous decades’  masculinity, especially considering if it is ever possible to be masculine enough. Palahniuk describes the main character realizing his possessions don’t hold any permanence, only that they are tangible proof of being, “trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.^[54] 

While masculinity experiences an altering definition, there is a great struggle to find one that stands the test of time or something that avoids encapsulating a set of variables. Through the media, there are responses to shifting masculinity that were never prescribed a definition. In the 20th century, there was great anxiety about, “the erosion of masculine virility.”^[55] Today, masculinity is facing serious polarization, as well as liberation with contemporary views on gender.

While some men are adjusting to having women as equals and adopting anti-racist ideologies, others still pull from concepts of previously mentioned traditional masculinity. One popular figure in contemporary conservative masculinity is Josh Hawley, a Missouri senator recognized for encouraging the January 6th insurrection and then was captured on film running from the riot. In 2023, he published a book, Manhood, pulling inspiration from translations of the Bible, attempting to make room for traditional views of masculinity in contemporary society. He explains that “this is what men are called to do, to assert themselves and their power to uphold the right. They are called to acquire the power of a warrior,”^[56] which is hugely different from expectations of assimilation in the decades prior. This approach to masculinity pulls from outdated perspectives on society and masculinity, racing back to the abandoned symbol of the Cowboy. This discussion of masculinity is nostalgic for a time when white men believed it was their right to take the land of Indigenous people, the bodies of women, and argue their government’s agenda at the point of bloodshed. Some of the confusion about masculinity is the lack of a healthy model, especially in a country that is undergoing constant economic, nationalist, and violent turmoil for a sense of stability in a global power dynamic. As the Cowboy becomes an ideal masculinity, it highlights “conservative climates such as those of the 1950s and today, [which desires] to reify masculinity as a vital tool for dealing with the growing male malaise as a result of the Cold War, progressive politics, and now the "war on terror."^[57] 

Through this violence “the performance of masculine crisis imbues violence with meaning and returns validity to the masculine identity.”^[58] By building violence into the foundations of masculinity, the American war industry sustainably fuels a permanent base of men to perpetrate its agendas. Through propaganda and the ability to manipulate the definition of masculinity, it enables men to permanently seek something that may be unattainable by design. This is further supported by the “technologization of work and war referred to earlier has diminished the importance of the male body as a productive or heroic figure and thereby undermined traditional male identities.”^[59] 

By addressing gender as a binary in the context of traditional American values, the system is expected to have an order and composition, perpetuating imbalanced power dynamics. By prescribing gender and affiliating it with their respective roles and attributes “one is not simply naming a (sexual) division of labor; one is, rather, naming a system of power, further denoted variously as patriarchy, sexism, male dominance, and so on.”^[60] Discussing the permeable and imperfect boundaries of cisgender masculinity begins to unveil the benefits of having no design for the perfect man. The character design of the Cowboy represents an American ideal that was fabricated in the beginning and symbolizes a time in American history that was not equitable. The Cowboy becomes the symbol of an unattainable masculinity, distant and without flaws. Because of his romanticized nature, the problems with his identity are not affiliated with him, but affiliated with the symptoms of the times. The Cowboy is an untouchable designed figure to represent something impossible, that is invulnerable to the evils of American nationalism.

The Frontier

The future of masculinity sits at an uncomfortable angle, suspended in the middle of development and a stubborn yearning for when white men were perceived as inherently good in American society, and didn’t have to work at it. Arthur Miller views the characters of his Western, “not as ideals but as semi-lost souls trying to carve out an identity for themselves in an inconsistent and contradictory world … [resulting in] disappointment and disillusionment [as] inevitable consequences.^[61] White American men are coming from a history where “violence has been recognized as one of the single most evident markers of manhood and therefore serves to allay any fears and insecurities that may arise,”^[62] reminiscent of the senseless hyperviolence of the Spaghetti Westerns, performed only to ward off the threat of the other. There is contemporary conservative language discussing new cultural anxiety that “the left tells us the warrior character traits are symptoms of ‘traditional masculinity’. Which calls a form of false consciousness from which men need to be liberated… They say men must be reeducated to abandon competition and their instinct to be tough.”^[63]  Previous expectations of the future of masculinity hope that one day it does not require men to “involve aggression. It can involve love, compassion, consideration, and respect for all persons regardless of race, class, or gender.”^[64] Discussion of masculinity from the 20th century also acknowledges that “this traditional masculinity is as fruitless and exhausting as chasing wild mustangs in the desert for a few dollars. Like the poor beasts, men can’t help but be corralled and trapped by the forces around them.”^[65] Within the past seventy years, masculinity has navigated liberation, reformation, chaos, and demolition. It lacks an effective model.

Palahniuk’s main character describes his favorite part of his support group as “being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.”^[66]  Evaluating the imagery of the West exposes an unattainable ideology of masculinity, only being upheld by governments and institutions so large that it is impossible to see the point. American nationalism and economics rely on men never being enough. The Cowboy became the symbol of American white masculinity and stepped into the shoes of the distant father as the nation developed, leaving men to decipher masculinity without his flaws. By moving the goalposts of masculinity, it enables the constant need for development. Built in a system of cyclical violence, consumerism, and gendered tension, the identity of a man is expected to be constantly under construction.

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