in defense of Bromance

(Ladies, I apologize in advance: I will address men directly in this post, but I neglect to address you directly. So..I decided to give you all this special note at the top of my post. Thanks for reading. I do appreciate it. Let me know what you think about masculinity and bromance.)

I'm editing a new video blog about getting glasses. I want to get it posted before I leave for Europe (on Friday!), but I just finished an article that deserves a blog response. The New York Times did a piece on Paul Rudd and his new movie I Love You, Man. It's a movie about guys being close friends--which popular media has dubbed "bromance" and academics call homosocial intimacy. I am passionate about bromance.

Just a note: I have not seen the movie, but will. So rather than blogging about the movie, I'll be blogging about bromance.

The article praises Paul Rudd--fashioning him as a model of twenty-first century masculinity. That's true, in part. Paul has taken roles where he plays liberal artsy guys trying to figure out life in their twenties and thirties. As a liberal artsy guy in my twenties, I can relate, so he is a representative of my kind of masculinity. But it's a stretch to compare Paul to masculine icons like Marlon Brando or Clint Eastwood.

Paul plays characters who are in touch with their feminine side: they enjoy art, carry on good conversations, and have (at least a few) liberal political leanings. I Love You, Man portends to be a great movie because it examines a major difficulty in the life of the twenty-first century liberal artsy dude: the problem of male-to-male friendship or bromance.

Paul plays a guy who is great with the ladies and has finally pinned down the one that he wants to marry. But as the wedding planning begins, he realizes that he has no close guy friends--no one that he could ask to be his best man. The movie documents his awkward quest to make friends with other guys and to find that one special guy who can be his best man.

I love that this movie addresses the issue of male friendship. It has often been overlooked or ignored, but I believe that guy friendships and guy community are essential to male development. Sadly, many of us don't know how to have close friendships with other men.

A sad bi product of the gay rights movement and the subsequent homophobic backlash has been increased fear among men of close same-sex friendships. We are afraid that if we are in a close friendship with another guy, then it means that we have romantic feelings for him. For the record, this is not true.

I first noticed this fear a few years ago while discussing The Lord of the Rings movies with other guys. More than once guys suggested that Frodo and Sam were homosexual. They were joking, like guys do, but the suggestion frustrated me--in part because these guys did not appreciate Tolkien's art for developing characters and relationships, and in part because I realized that we have no paradigm for close male friendship. We saw Frodo and Sam as Tolkien intended: intimate, loving, and reliant upon each other. But because close male friendship is little represented in modern culture and media (I can't think of many examples, can you?), my friends viewed the relationship through the only lens that worked: homosexuality.

We (American men) do not have a paradigm through which we can understand intimate male relationships. And we need one. The idea of bromance can, in a strange way, made male friendship accessible by making it funny. I hope I Love You, Man can contribute to a cultural shift away from the fear of the male friendship and toward real intimacy and improved male community. Certainly this shift will require more than a Paul Rudd movie, but it seems like a great start.

The Absurdity of Facebook

Here are a couple of videos that comment on the real friend/Facebook friend confusion. Hope you enjoy!

This video is a preview of a BBC show called Facebloke. My friend Jason found it while exploring his interest in British slang...



There's this woman named Christine who posts videos under the name Happyslip. All her videos are excellent--very high quality. Here's one she recently did on Facebook.

I can't seem to get more than 148 Facebook friends...

(this post draws extensively from the February 28 Economist article linked above. read it. it's great.)

Well actually, that's not true. As of today, March 10, 2009, I have 340 friends. Pretty sweet, huh? :)

But according to this Oxford professor named Robin Dunbar, a person cannot sustain a network of more than 148 friends and acquaintances. Apparently, it's just too stressful. Dunbar compares the human network dilemma to the primate network dilemma: "keeping track of who to groom--and why--demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly."

Right...

But Facebook is different, isn't it? Adding a new friend doesn't cost me money and doesn't cause me stress; in fact, adding a new friend can make me happy because I have reconnected with someone that I knew (or kind of knew) in the past and I have increased the size of my friend network, and thereby my bragging rights.

The Economist counters that most of my Facebook friends are not really friends, and in truth, Facebook friends are not even part of my network. (The Economist only considers a person to be in my network if I am interacting with that person...as opposed to anonymously perusing their profile. Some people call this stalking) Apparently, Facebook tracks how much we poke, comment, message, and IM one another. Here are the average number of contacts broken out by gender and number of friends:

• a guy with about 120 friends comments on about 7 of his friends' walls and chats or messages with about 4 of his friends. with 500 friends he comments on 17 walls and messages/chats with 10.
• a girl with about 120 friends comments on about 10 of her friends' walls and chats or messages with about 6 of her friends. with 500 friends she comments on 26 walls and messages/chats with 16.

A few comments on the data:

1. We interact with a very small proportion of our Facebook friends. But somehow I still want to increase my number of friends. Why is that? Maybe Facebook friends have more in common with baseball cards than real friends. When I was 8, I couldn't buy enough baseball cards--I would go to the store every weekend and tear into a pack or two with my allowance. The players on the cards mattered for a few minutes, but by the next weekend I had forgotten about the old cards and wanted to get new ones.

Now, I love Facebook but would like to suggest that many of our Facebook friends are actually just contacts or acquaintances--not friends. (Well now I feel like Mr. Obvious)

2. Women/girls/gals have more vibrant social networking lives than men/boys/guys. I think that's great. That's part of why I like women: they really enjoy socializing and building relationships--even online relationships. I have heard that guys, alternatively, join social networking sites to accomplish specific goals or to complete certain tasks. Most common goals/tasks for guys: flirting, making business contacts, planning events, meeting social needs. I read an article a few months ago that said married men are by far the least likely demographic to have a Facebook page--and I conjecture that their disinterest in social networking stems from their disinterest in flirting. What do you think?

3. I don't get stressed out by adding new Facebook friends, but Dunbar's theory about a limit on the number of human intimate relationships fits my experience and fits the data. We may have quivers full of Facebook friends, but still we are close with only a few.

I like that. Even as Blackberry, Twitter, and Facebook have made relationships easier to maintain, our real capacity for relationship and our need for intimacy has not changed. We still search for a few intimate friends and family members with whom to share our lives.

And it follows that our capacity and need for spiritual intimacy has not changed. God is still there and still relevant whether I have 50 Facebook friends or 500.

a kinder, but still shrewd, manager

(A couple of weeks ago I posted about the parable of the shrewd manager in Luke 16. I meant for this post to be the start of a three part shrewd manager series. Here's part 2.)

Davidthird comes from my position in my family. My dad's name is David, my grandfather's name is David, so I am David the third. Davidthird.

This post is about David the first, David Edgar Dilworth, or Grandpa D. He was a great servant of the church, first as a missionary, then as a theology professor, and finally as a pastor. Grandpa D passed away four years ago this week, and as a memorial I wanted to share a story of the shrewd manager in his life.

My Grandpa suffered from neuropathy, a disease that affected the nerves in his extremities. The disease became so bad that he could hardly move his hands or feet toward the end of his life; regardless, he taught classes at a church in La Canada every week until he was 82. He would roll into the classroom with his walker a few minutes before class. A few times he asked me to write some notes for him on the white board, but frequently he taught without notes--for his class and for himself. His final series of classes, the ones I remember best, were on the parables of Jesus, and he knew them so well that he did not need notes.

It worked out that he taught on the parable of the shrewd manager just a few weeks after I had studied the passage in my dorm. I was surprised at the timing--I had not heard of the parable in eighteen years of life, and suddenly it had popped up twice in one month. He began his exegesis slowly, constructing the world in which the shrewd manager lived and then walking his students through the sticky text of the parable. He took his time, savoring the text and the students. Grandpa D loved the Bible, and he used quiet charm and disarming smile to teach others to love it too.

But his charm did not cause him to mince words--I think especially in his old age. He knew that Jesus was serious when he said, "No servant can serve two masters...You cannot serve both God and money." So in his calm, compelling way, he called the class to conviction, and the room grew silent--La Canada is a wealthy place.

Grandpa D could have shied away from this last verse, shielding himself from the class's forthcoming hard questions and criticism, but he did not. My Grandpa did not draw his worth and his purpose from the class's approval, though he frequently had it; neither did he draw his worth from money, though he was not poor. He lived for a higher honor, which he has now received.

Well done, good and faithful servant.