Bummerino metropolis: Apparently there was a time in U.S. history where men were actually charming. They charmed the pants off the ladies left and right with their witty remarks and suave gestures. But that’s all dead now, so most of us have lived lives grateful for the mouth-breathing demonstrations of today’s charmless American man, never even aware of How it Used to Be.
At least, so implies this intriguing diatribe over at The Atlantic called “The Rise and Fall of the Charm in American Men.” One Benjamin Schwarz laments that male charm — which he describes as a kind of offhand wit, playful knowingness, and a simultaneous coolness and warmth, a la Cary Grant — no longer exists, on screen or in real life. And what’s more, the men of today hold charm in “vague suspicion,” don’t respond to it, and hardly even know what it is in the first place:
Women commonly complain about the difficulty in gaining any conversational purchase when, say, trying to engage the fathers of their children’s classmates or the husbands of their tennis partners. The woman will grab from her bag of conversational gambits—she’ll allude to some quotidian absurdity or try to form a mock alliance in defiance of some teacher’s or soccer coach’s irksome requirement. But the man doesn’t enter into the give-and-take. The next time they meet, it’s as though they’ve never talked before; the man invariably fails to pick up the ball, and any reference the woman might make to a prior remark or observation falls to the ground. Men don’t indulge in the easy shared confidences and nonsexual flirtations that lubricate social exchange among women. Even in the most casual conversation, men are too often self-absorbed or mono-focused or—more commonly—guarded, distracted, and disengaged to an almost Aspergerian degree. … Men consistently fail to meet the sort of obvious standards set by guides to etiquette and to the art of conversation common 50 years ago.
Although it would do anyone well to not pine for cultural depictions of trends that go back 50 years unless they involve something easier to get your hands on, like raw denim, Shwarz may have a point here. If all men were Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, well, I’d be in trouble. But the good news is: They aren’t. And they never were. I doubt there’s any woman alive who hasn’t run across her fair share of men who simply don’t seem schooled in the art of making witty banter. They put no premium on being funny or interesting for the sake of it. I have long lamented the lack of good conversationalists in the world — people who listen to what you say, then say something back that’s actually relevant and enjoy the back and forth of it.