Men in 1973 vs Men in 2023

"You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."

This meme has been making the rounds. I’ve seen it posted on Facebook a bunch lately. I’m sure it’s on Twitter and elsewhere. Comments that follow are usually some lamentation about the state of manliness. Women are unhappy with their men. Men want to be like these tough alpha males. They post about it on Facebook, which is about as alpha as you can get, tough guy.

On the surface, the meme is basically saying that men in 1973 were super rugged and manly, whereas men in 2023 are all scooter-riding soy-boys who (gasp) wear helmets on their silly, girly little scooters. Men have become effeminate and emasculated and weak half a century later.

It’s funny because this meme also seems to suggest that men no longer ride motorcycles in 2023 and that no men dressed or looked like the scooter dudes in 1973. Of course, there have been roughly the same number of attendees at the massive Sturgis motorcycle rally every year (with some exceptions) for the past 30 years: circa half a million sweaty, salt of the earth bikers and biker babes. And have you ever looked at photos of men in the 70s?

The real irony, of course, is that the meme’s top photo is a screengrab from Easy Rider, the iconic 1969 (not 1973) film starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, about a couple of hippies on a motorcycle roadtrip across the deep South. (The film’s opening was actually filmed here in my hometown of Flagstaff, AZ). It’s one of the most unconventional countercultural films of the era, and was shot pretty much by the seat of their pants as Hopper and Fonda and their ragtag film crew traversed the South during one of the most tumultuous times in American history. (They were joined by Jack Nicholson later on, though the part was originally meant for Rip Torn who lost it after he and Hopper got into an altercation).

Easy Rider is not a film about rugged manly men; it’s about the very sort of people memes like this are supposedly making fun of—sensitive hippie potheads, antiwar protestors, longhairs, bums. The kind of guys “real men” want to beat up. Or at least wanted to beat up back in 1969.

“When we got to New Orleans, it was really dangerous because there were these marines who wanted to take me apart because I had long hair,” Dennis Hopper said of the very real threats of violence they faced while filming. “You’d hear a lot of stories at that time of guys getting cut with razors and things. It was so bad that we skipped going to Texas.”

Hopper and Fonda’s characters, as pictured, were the antithesis of everything commenters on these meme posts stand for, of all their purported cultural values surrounding manliness and masculinity. I often feel at odds with the left these days, mostly over tactics and messaging—right up until I find myself in a rightwing comment thread pining for the good ol’ days, or freaking out about LGBTQ people in a movie or latching onto memes like this one, or using the word ‘woke’ to describe everything they hate. (Can we cancel that word, please?)

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that the current cultural zeitgeist is necessarily helping. I think the left’s approach to a lot of current hot-button issues risks inciting backlash, not just from the right but from the center. Censorship, cancel culture, radical identity politics, none of these are winners in my book. Gender is complicated, and I believe that toxic masculinity and toxic femininity often come in disguise. The two dudes on scooters with their tucked in shirts and bike helmets? They might even identify as male feminists but they could still be sexual predators. Appearances can be deceiving.

Ignored in our meme-fueled discussions are the hard questions about masculinity. We live in a time that is troubling in new and confounding ways. Not because men are, on the whole, worse (or weaker) than before, but because we still clearly haven’t been able to grapple with the problems men and boys face—and what it means to be one—as a society. Murder and violence are still mostly a man’s domain, but now there are also school shootings. Internet porn, in all its ghastly variety, has become the de facto sex education for most boys and teens and that is carrying over into actual sex (which is, perhaps understandably, on the decline with younger people).

The internet in general poses countless new pitfalls for young men, exposed to all the mixed messages, echo chambers, conspiracies and defeatism that have come to define our times. The social movements that cast men as the problem (#AllMen etc) serve mostly to alienate rather than educate, and the alienated run to the open arms of snake-oil salesmen, pickup artists and men’s rights grifters and buffoons. Everything about this feels precarious to me. Unsustainable. Like a motorcycle trip into the deep South in 1969.

Here’s the classic diner scene from Easy Rider that took place at Melancon’s Cafe in Morganza, LA. The teen girls there are practically drooling over the three strangers—Peter Fonda as Wyatt, Dennis Hopper as Billy and Jack Nicholson as George—while the local men have murder in their eyes. The girls follow them outside when they leave in a hurry, swooning over their bikes and strange clothes. The men follow them later on that night, with weapons.

Easy Rider used locals in the roles, so many of the reactions were real, or at least based on real disdain for the Yankees. Peter Fonda gave the local men one line of motivation to help them with their lines:

“We’ve just raped a 13-year-old white girl outside of town.”

After the trio abandons the diner, they talk about what they just experienced.

George: You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.

Billy: Huh. Man, everybody got chicken, that's what happened, man. Hey, we can't even get into like, uh, second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we're gonna cut their throat or something, man. They're scared, man.

George: Oh, they're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.

Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.

George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Billy: What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about.

George: Oh yeah, that's right, that's what it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it - that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Billy: Mmmm, well, that don't make 'em runnin' scared.

George: No, it makes 'em dangerous.

That danger manifests later when—spoilers—the three camp out and are attacked by locals. George is killed, but Billy and Wyatt manage to escape.

But not for long. In Florida, in a scene that was mirrored recently in the shocking, horrific murder of a black jogger by two white men, Billy and Wyatt are gunned down by locals driving a pickup truck while riding down a stretch of empty highway.

And here we are, fifty odd years later, still reeling from it all, from the Civil Rights’ era culture wars that were fought in the streets of Alabama and Georgia and Texas, from the Civil War that ravaged the land a hundred years before that, from the constant tension that exists—as George so aptly puts it—between the notion of freedom and the actual act of being free. Between the word and the thing itself. We wage these wars endlessly over abortion and race and sexuality, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and we holler the word ‘Freedom!’ without ever really thinking what that battle cry actually means.

The film ends with shocking bleakness. The idealism and freedom of Billy and Wyatt’s roadtrip burned down by the cold, vast, unyielding weight of Nixon’s Silent Majority. The promise of change cut short by the reality of an unrelenting violence.

Movie Recommendation: Easy Rider

Pair with: Captain Fantastic

New and Improved Meme:

Thanks for reading, dearest droogies. Be excellent to each other!

Have you seen Easy Rider? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

P.S. As a commenter has pointed out, overall the world is a much better place now than in 1973. I had a line in an earlier draft that I didn’t like, but that basically was calling out the women in comments gushing over the original meme. You really think life was better with the men of 1973? You really would choose to be a woman in 1973 over now? I doubt it. I sure wouldn’t want my daughter growing up in 1973 even if, sure, there are so many new problems that young girls face now in 2023, many stemming from social media and the internet.

Things have improved, just like by the time Easy Rider was made, things had improved, and the tension between progress and the forces arrayed against progress exists in every era. I am optimistic beneath the crust of my cynicism, that things will continue to improve.

Oh, and I know that Captain Fantastic is a random inclusion there at the end, but I was thinking about it for whatever reason as I wrote about Easy Rider and the different countercultural message baked into it, and I’ll need to write about it in a follow-up post.