I’ve just become hipped to a couple of things that may be familiar to a good number of people. I guess that’s the price I pay for not having a smartphone; I’m not alerted 24 hours a day to the emergence of every single new pop star or the outrage I should be feeling over one cultural phenomenon or another.
Anyway, the two things:
- Chappell Roan
- Petro-masculinity
At first glance, they may be two of the most disparate concepts imaginable. But I’m here to tell you they are two sides of the same coin.
Alright, in case you are currently as oblivious to them as I used to be:
- Chappell Roan is the hottest of hot new pop stars, wowing ’em from Coachella to the Tonight Show. Her star became a supernova when she adopted a drag queen look. She employs as many over-the top, stereotypical feminine signifiers as she can in her stage persona. She reminds me of all the parading drag queens I used to see walking down Broadway Avenue in Chicago back in the ’80s, their habiliment, their gait, their attitude all screaming an exaggerated, cartoonish woman-ness. The Roan phenomenon is all hugely fun and rebellious; she appeals to 16-year-old girls and 18-year-old gay boys who dance and scream and adore her. When the camera pans the crowd at a typical Chappell Roan show it’s a scene of pure delirium.
- Petro-masculinity is…, oh, man, this is weird…, it’s a cultural moniker describing the most zealous climate-change deniers in America, white macho-men. They loathe environmentalists, acc’d’g to a 2011 academic study, to “protect their cultural identity.” Virginia Tech University political scientist Cara Daggett invented the specific term in 2018. Men, she reasoned, were solely in charge of the world from the Industrial Revolution onward, a time when the universe moved thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. Taking away fossil fuels just to save the planet, these guys hold, robs them of their exalted place in society. They scream an exaggerated, cartoonish male-ness.
This whole swath of the American populace gets tumescent over huge pickup trucks with rifle racks in the cab, that can “roll coal,” and sport “truck nutz.”
These fellows parade about displaying every conceivable symbol of what they consider masculinity. And, almost to a man, they dig a certain ex-President of the United States and harbor a general affinity for authoritarianism.
Their ethos is certainly not fun and rebellion ala the Chappell Roan gang. Nevertheless, they and the teenaged girls and young gay boys who swoon over the legally-named Kayleigh Amstutz are joined at the hip.
This petro-masculinity business is as over-the-top as the lineup of featured performers any Saturday night at the Baton Show Lounge.
And whereas the Chappell Roan crowd celebrates a harmless burlesque of gender typing while the petro-masculine-ists cry out for an oppressive gender toxicity, they are to each other what a photograph is to its negative.
Petro-masculine guys are, to be sure, just male drag queens!
It’s all a stage performance, although neither Chappell Roan’s show nor the Baton on a Saturday night stinks of diesel fumes.