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A Brief History of Machismo, With Attention to
the Male Mystique
By Michael Fowler
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It takes only a quick glance at our culture to see that the citizens who pack
the most machismo are musicians, particularly rock musicians, but anyway pickers
and singers. Guys who play musical instruments and sing, activities that even
children and women can do, are the baddest guys around. They strut around in
leather and chains and Halloween makeup to prove it. It also takes only a fast
peek at our past to see that, as recently as fifty years ago, the dudes with the
most outsized machismo were mathematicians and scientists, guys who were
unleashing the atom on an unsuspecting planet.
In the forties and fifties, musicians could be cool but not possess machismo.
Crazy as they played, they were not, to use the term most often employed, macho.
Macho was J. Robert Oppenheimer who could blow anybody away with his atom bomb.
Women blushed and fainted when Oppie strode by, and if he'd only played a
Hagstrom six-string through a stack of Marshall amps back then, he'd have had
every woman in the world at his feet. The most macho musician in the fifties was
probably Bill Haley with his Comets, and note that he named his band after an
astronomical phenomenon, trying to cop some of that mathematical machismo. Bill
Haley couldn't score any chicks without hinting at scientific prowess, and
chicks were first and foremost what owning machismo was about, with being able
to destroy the planet at number two.
How did our present day reversal, with musicians now more macho than
mathematicians, come about, and what if anything can we do to put the number
crunchers back on top again, assuming we care to? To answer this we're going to
have to go back to the very beginnings of math and music and check out the scene
then and how it's changed today. Well, we won't go all the way back, but we will
go back pretty far, and quickly too, so fasten your safety harness and hang on.
Around Shakespeare's time musicians were far from macho. It's clear from the
plays of the Bard that your average musician was a small, beardless man dressed
in green with a funny hat and bells and curled slippers called a minstrel. He
sang songs like:
Oh we sport and jolly on the green
Hey ho hey ho
And we dancey prancey o’er the scene
Sing nonny nonny oh.
While singing this bubblegum drivel, the minstrel skipped about trying to play
power chords on his lute. That he sometimes managed to slip into milady's
chamber after hours was a start toward becoming macho, but that he could be
swatted to death like a mosquito and didn't know which end of a sword to hold
was against him. If our little green minstrel had thought to put on a suit of
armor and clank around while singing, he might have been macho centuries ago.
But he didn't, the nance, and no court musicians or wandering minstrels had fan
clubs or groupies.
If you want to see who was macho in Shakespeare's day, or nearly in
Shakespeare's day since he was born a hundred years later, check out Isaac
Newton. He wasn't macho as we understand it today, of course, since he was
completely unmusical and died a virgin, but he made enormous strides. Look at
that long hippie hair and glowering gaze in his portrait. Dig his manly
controversies with Hooke and Leibnitz. Newton didn't take nothing from nobody.
And could he play draughts! Let him king a man and you were dead!
In Newton’s day math and science had as much to do with magic and mystery, and
therefore with love and the whole range of emotions, as they did with hard, dry
science. Newton had the ability to fathom the mysterious unknown, and that gave
him his macho aura. Everyone was affected; he was a superstar to his secretary
and gardener; an outrageous egotist to Hooke; a Joe Camel to women, or he would
have been if he'd known any women. It's easy to imagine Zak or Izzy Newton
behind a synthesizer at Woodstock 2004, mesmerizing the crowd with keyboard
genius and scoring chicks by the bushel, because he has that universal control.
In fact, mathematicians controlled the mysterious and swayed our emotions from
early times, right up until they wore us out with the atom bomb. Go all the way
back to ancient Greece and Archimedes, whose ‘Give me a point to stand on and
I'll move the world’ is still the last word on catapults. Archimedes was a
mathematician and a stud. No musician could stand up to him, not with those puny
reed flutes they had way back then, and women loved the way he touched them and
said ‘Eureka!’ His type ruled unchallenged until the bomb.
When the bomb became an unpleasant fact of life, though, musicians got to work
and took crowd approval away from the math guys. Oppenheimer, macho for years,
spent his last days suspected of being a Commie and trying to cut down on
cigarettes. Einstein, a rugged honcho who combined long-haired glam and violin
prowess with mathematical testosterone, ended up a fat guy with liver trouble.
Now the bomb was deadly and a drag, and the tool of nerds. Real men didn't
invent that kind of bummer. Real men were math illiterates who liked to split
your wig and stomp your carcass. To bring popularity to this kind of behavior,
they had the amplified heartthrob of ever-louder rock music. Now science was
cold and deadly, but rock heated up the world. Our passions and emotions passed
out of the hands of the mathematicians and into the fists of Megadeth and
Anthrax. Doesn't it explain these groups’ names, that they are at least as
powerful as the bomb?
But Megadeth, Anthrax and kindred so-called ‘heavy’ musicians are in reality
painted actors and not macho at all, as anyone who goes to their concerts knows.
Without lighting effects and limos and overpriced tickets they would collapse on
stage. It's time, I think, for a new definition of macho, or rather a return to
its original mathematical connotation. The question is, who sways our emotions
more, mathematicians or musicians? Who has more power? And of course, who scores
more chicks?
Probably the musicians still out-gun the mathematicians in these respects, but
the tide I think is already turning. On college campuses across the land we are
beginning to see math majors in chains and leather with a lot of tattoo work and
body piercings. Chicks are drooling over these guys and getting their help with
calculus and set theory. At the same time, rock groups are forming whose members
weigh about 115 pounds and refrain from sex until marriage and don't even wear
makeup with their fruity 100% cotton clothes. Finally, if mathematicians can
find something as terrifying as the atom bomb again, and they probably will,
then they will certainly have more machismo than musicians, at least until
people get tired of being afraid of it.
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On his rapid walks through his hometown of
Cincinnati, Ohio, Mike Fowler spreads a trail of pheromones that people are
quick to pick up on. Women stop and say, 'Who is that good-looking man?' Men
shake their heads and mutter, 'He's got it all. I can't compete.' The analysis
of his armpit swabs shows that Mike is indeed a fortunate guy.
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