For the last few years I’ve been seeing woodsmen on my city’s streets. They wear long beards and long hair, or long beards and no hair. They favor beat-up leather boots and wool beanies and jobs involving wood. At Best Made Co., a downtown boutique, they purchase hand-painted axes and canvas portage packs. At French atelier APC, they try on pieces by Carhartt, a manufacturer of blue-collar outdoor wear, that have been recut for slimmer legs and thicker wallets. Until recently, they were able to hone their bow-hunting skills in the basement archery range of clothier/barbershop Freeman’s Sporting Club.These urban dwellers seem to be getting ready for a long camping trip that never takes place; their flannel grows tatty and their boots scuffed, but they are never stained with real dirt.Actual lumberjacks, of course, no longer wear flannel. They wear polyester fleeces and CAT boots and wraparound sunglasses and XXL T-shirts. Professional explorers (mountaineers, polar researchers) now wear outfits—often puffy down or synthetic loft in a breathable waterproof shell—that resemble spacesuits. Turn on the Discovery Channel or NatGeo, and you’ll see both types of outdoorsman within two hours: the blue-collar workers emptying our forests of trees, our oceans of crabs, and our rivers of gold; and the explorers, Gore-Tex clad, embarking on extravagant, high-risk vacations. But in order to find Brooklyn’s noveaux voyeageurs, you’ll need to flip over to FashionTV, because they do not exist in the wild.
In any era since the invention of polyester fleece, flannel is a patently absurd choice for outdoor work: when woven from wool it is too heavy; when woven from cotton it fails to retain heat once wet. But the fashion industry, in its ongoing campaign to dust off bygone archetypes of masculinity, has revived the fabric. Along with waxed canvas and leather, flannel plays an important role in repackaging the sex appeal of the vintage outdoorsman while sidestepping both the flimsy artificiality of petroleum-spun fabrics and also the earnestness of organic cloth, which carries with it a whiff of environmentalism—a supposedly emasculating ethos that prudishly promotes the suppression of desire.
Basic physics dictate that, in order to become more sustainable, technology must become ever lighter, quieter, and less hungry. Is it merely a coincidence that these engineering constraints also mirror our favored model of femininity? In a recent study, pollsters found that 82 percent of respondents felt that going green is “more feminine than masculine.” The risk of feminine contamination, the researchers concluded, “holds men back from visible green behavior like using reusable grocery bags or carrying around reusable water bottles.” Add to that the reproachful tone that environmentalists often resort to in their attempts to spread the gospel of Deep Ecology—which stresses the rights of the ecosystem over those of man—and you glimpse how environmentalists came to be miscast as sanctimonious nags.
To expiate their green guilt, tough guys go to extreme lengths: they live in unheated houses, fuel their trucks with rancid cooking oil, subsist on other people’s trash. The tension emerges most clearly with regards to food. Many progressives would like to eat local and organic but don’t want to be seen as either pampering or depriving themselves (or both pampering and depriving themselves, like the diners in Portlandia who must personally visit a chicken on its farm before they can feel sure of its free-range pedigree). In an attempt to live more naturally, a few dozen men in New York City, along with one woman, have reportedly committed themselves to a so-called caveman diet. The diet’s strictures allow them to eat only meat and vegetables—no grains, sugar, dairy, or oil—and requires days of fasting between meals. “I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” one of the dieters told the New York Times.
Like many Americans, the cave people seem distrustful, even contemptuous, of vegan asceticism. Abstaining from animal byproducts is considered difficult, but not tough: your kid sister might gladly survive on barbecued seitan and cartons of Rice Dream. Even as progressive men renounce the traditional notion of subordinated femininity, many still harbor conflicted notions about manhood. They want to feel individually reckless, but not socially irresponsible. They want to minimize carbon emissions, but not to scold, scrimp, or carry tote bags. They want to be pure of deed but wild at heart. So they dig ever deeper into the past, searching for a way of life that existed before “real” men and their ecological consciences parted ways.
