Manthropology, a CBC podcast so marginal it doesn’t even have a homepage, came to an end this week. Host Pedro Mendes told his interviewer (a woman, inevitably – producer Tori Allen) that he’s calling it quits, chiefly to spend more time with his three-year-old son. In 20 episodes, it seems all Mendes learned was the importance of spending time in cigar clubs sipping brandy with the guys as they debated the venues where it might or might not be acceptable to cry. Mendes also learned from an FTM that masculinity is “socially constructed.” (If true, that FTM wouldn’t have needed surgery and hormone therapy. Using that term rather gives the game away, I think. Women who believe femininity is socially constructed tend to change their tune once menopause hits.)
As a self-contradictory and ‑parodic “exploration of modern masculinity,” Manthropology never made sense to anyone but the liberal yuppie wives who were its real audience. The last thing we need is another urban intellectual giving us a Shop Class as Soulcraft manqué in the guise of an inquiry into manhood. (Does manhood need to be inquired into or merely lived?) And as with every such enterprise of the last two years, the podcast was at a loss to relate to gay males (and vice versa), and heaped insult on injury by wheeling in an FTM as our stand-in.
Who will miss it?