Is This What Women Really Want in a Man?
These days, there are countless versions of masculinity but only one enduring image of mass-culinity. The rare breed of male who makes most of American womankind swoon is worried less about what it takes to be a man than what it takes to please a lady. This latter-day Fabio can be found on Dancing With the Stars, The Bachelor, and, of course, the covers of romance novels. But sorry—there’s one place you’ll never see him: in the mirror.
(photo: Kevin Cooley)
Yes, Fabio still matters. True, it’s been more than 15 years since the Milanese wonder last appeared on the cover of a romance novel, but his flowing tresses and pneumatic pecs and cornball courtly manner remain shorthand for a kind of lover who still inflames the passions of lots of women. For starters, there’s the woman who watches TV dating shows, adores the novels of Nicholas Sparks, and uses a fireman calendar to count down the days till Dancing With the Stars returns. But it’s not just the PTA mom in Dubuque; there’s also the hot girl three cubicles down in marketing who claims the last book she read was The Goldfinch but actually plowed through The Fault in Our Stars, who secretly prefers The View toVogue, and who might profess her love for Benedict Cumberbatch’s offbeat wit but really comes alive for Channing Tatum’s perfectly defined derriere. Which is why hunky romantic heroes in the Fabio mold are again inspiring lust and longing. In truth, they never went away, but they are newly ascendant, thanks to the considerable cultural fatigue—on the part of both women and men—with the preening, underfed, self-loving, sensitive-to-a-fault men who have multiplied so widely since the turn of the millennium. As the passion pendulum swings back to Fabioesque figures, you might wonder what the secret to their sex appeal is. It is shockingly simple. Take it from Fabio himself: “To be polite, to be a gentleman,” he says. “To open the door when you take out a woman for dinner. It also means when you go out with that person, you pay attention to that person and you turn off your phone.”
There’s been an inordinate amount of hand-wringing lately about the “end of men"—as represented by such recent pop-sociological male archetypes as the Apatowian man-child, the lumbersexual (basically a plaid-clad metrosexual, the suffix -sexual being to men in crisis as -gate is to scandals), and the enlightened, enervated hipster, whose sensitive, self-absorbed, share-every-feeling ways all but demanded the strong, silent type’s return to favor. None of those guys would think to turn off his phone during dinner with a woman. But there is a kind of guy out there, an attentive, broad-shouldered woman-worshipper seen lately in movies and on TV, who would. He’s a throwback; an uncomplicated man who is comfortable with his masculinity, happy with who he is, liked by other guys, and loved by women. He is a man’s man and a ladies’ man. He is a tender beefcake. He is the new Fabio.
What he isn’t, dear reader of this magazine for modern men, is you. Central to the fantasy of a Fabio figure is that he is decidedly not preoccupied with himself. His focus is on his romantic partner. He is uninterested in skinny jeans, skinny suits, or skinny ties. His physique isn’t hospitable to that style of dress, but he’s not that kind of guy, anyway. His body looks more like the product of basic training than a yoga studio. He is allergic to irony. He’s a doer rather than a thinker (or a worrier). Grand romantic gestures do not embarrass him. As John D'Salvo, the Bronx-born romance-novel-coverboy rival of Fabio in the nineties, once told the New York Times: "Jacuzzis are nice, but sharing and providing for her every need without ever expecting anything in return is what it’s really about.”
Or just listen to the godfather. “I think when you’re a real man, you don’t have an ego,” Fabio opines. “And you have to be a pillar. A woman has to feel protected.”
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His code is simple and allows him to see things in black-and-white and not get lost in shades of gray. Speaking of which, it bears mentioning that the new Fabio is basically the opposite of that other frequently fantasized-about character: Christian Grey, the icy, self-regarding, egotistical BDSM bad boy of 50 Shades of Grey, whose sexual peccadilloes are designed to make a woman feel the opposite of protected. No, the new Fabio is an old-fashioned type whose lineage goes back to literary protagonists from Romeo to the men who populate the novels of the Brontë sisters. Contemporary romantic heroes, while just as ardent in their passions as those classic characters, tend to be a bit less damaged. “They’re not all tortured, angsty, Heathcliff-type characters,” says Sarah Wendell, the author of Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels and coauthor of Beyond Heaving Bosoms. These fictional figures have always been popular with women. And while this breed of man may have lost ground to more modern male archetypes, he never disappeared, which is why the romance genre, driven almost entirely by female readers, is one of the few bright spots in the struggling book business (and a leading light in the e-book business). But the male characters in these books are, by and large, a little bit more … regular than the new Fabio. Many, according to Wendell, are veterinarians and accountants. And while the new Fabio shares these guys’ honor and steadiness, he is definitely not a vet or an accountant. He combines their romantic sensibility with self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and action-hero bravery in the mold of Eustace Conway, profiled by Elizabeth Gilbert in her book The Last American Man years before she ate, prayed, and loved. Conway is the modern-day Davy Crockett who lived alone in a tepee in the Appalachian woods, hunting for his food and sewing his clothes out of buckskin. Asked whether there was anything he couldn’t do, he declared, “Well, I’ve never found anything to be particularly difficult.” This casual can-do competence is also a hallmark of the new Fabio. He’s a lover, not a fighter, but if he had to, he could beat you up with one hand tied behind his back.
Consider Maksim Chmerkovskiy, the Ukrainian-by-way-of-Coney Island Dancing With the Stars veteran who’s at the head of the parade of new Fabios who have been marching across screens both small and large. Recently, on The Meredith Vieira Show, he told the tale of losing his virginity in his teens to a supermodel in her thirties. The gushing applause of the women in the studio audience showed that Chmerkovskiy remains cougar-bait in his thirties. Why? The same unrelenting charm offensive that was on display through 14 seasons on Dancing With the Stars, which has led to his being linked to the likes of Kate Upton and J. Lo (she has denied that they dated). When he won the show in season 18 with the Olympic ice dancer Meryl Davis (yet another rumored paramour—though they maintain that they are just good friends), he celebrated on Live With Kelly & Michael by repeatedly planting kisses on Davis’ hands and forehead, the kind of retrograde romantic gesture most modern men would never deploy but which goes over big with the women tired of leaning in.
Network television is a particularly fertile territory for this kind of guy. The Bachelor has long been a proving ground for new-Fabio aspirants, and on the show’s 19th and most recent season, the kind, square-jawed farmer Chris Soules embodied a prime example of the type, especially since he carried on his broad shoulders the romantic wound of having been dismissed from The Bachelorette last year. After he invited his harem of bachelorettes to his native Iowa to present red roses to the deserving few, he remarked, “Hometowns are extremely important to me.” This is another crucial aspect of the new Fabio: He invariably bears the mark of the place that made him who he is.
The Big Four is probably the place on TV where the new Fabio thrives most, because the women who love him are the networks’ last loyal viewers. But cable is certainly not immune to his charms. Consider Joe Manganiello, who managed to overshadow True Blood’s original trio of male hotties when he arrived on the HBO show in its third season. He’d begun building his monumental physique by lifting 100-pound bags of cement on a construction crew before being cast as Alcide Herveaux, the owner of a general-contracting company who also happens to be a werewolf and ultimately dies trying to protect the show’s heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, played by Anna Paquin. For his efforts, he won Sofia Vergara in real life.
To finish sculpting his body for the True Blood part, Manganiello hired the trainer who’d worked with another wolf charged with protecting Paquin: Hugh Jackman, whose Wolverine in the X-Men franchise also represents an avatar of the new-Fabio type: strong, self-abnegating, super-loyal, and super-ripped. Australia has a knack for producing these kinds of brawny guardians—see, for instance, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. As the god of thunder, the hunky Hemsworth sports a flowing mane, rippling musculature, and a wardrobe worthy of a romance- novel cover and displays the same impulse to protect the object of his affections—Natalie Portman’s Dr. Jane Foster—whatever the cost.
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Then there’s Channing Tatum, whom Emily Gould, the ex-Gawker editor and sometime relationship writer, calls “the all-around ideal of contemporary masculinity.” In movies like Dear John and The Vow, he brings his all-American persona and linebacker physique to roles as modern romantic protagonists who may throw a few ill-advised punches when they’ve been wronged but always do an admirable job of loving women and getting nothing in return (in the case of The Vow, because the woman can’t remember who he is).
Tatum is also, as has been much discussed, a truly sick dancer (he even wooed his wife with his moves on the set of Step Up). Fancy footwork turns out to be a trait that many of the actors who play new-Fabio-worthy characters have in common. This is obvious in the case of Chmerkovskiy, and it’s hardly a coincidence that Manganiello has impressive moves—see him in Magic Mike, alongside Tatum—as does noted song-and-dance man Jackman. Hemsworth has even appeared on the Australian version of Dancing With the Stars. Dance allows a guy to express a sensitive, vulnerable side without requiring him to be, you know … insufferable. “I have dated dudes whose move in arguments is to cry and talk about how it’s because their father never respected them, and I hate that shit,” Gould says. “It’s awful. This drippy seventies man who’s in touch with his feelings is the most toxic kind.” Being a lord of the dance shows women that the new Fabio is sensitive to her. It’s not about him. Because, as the actual Fabio points out, real men aren’t driven by their egos. “Smart women want a real man,” he says. “That’s why so many women today are unhappy, because there are not many men left.” In a sense, he adds, we haveseen the end of men—proper men, anyway: “Chivalry is out the door. It’s funny, because women are almost more manly today than men. It’s okay for a man to be sensitive, but not too sensitive. More sensitive than a woman, you pass the line.”
Fabio is yearning for (and, you might argue, a product of) an earlier, less complicated time. And actually, one of the most persuasive new Fabios to come along lately hails from just such a time. He has a knack for the gallant gesture, from giving his coat to a shivering lady to enduring torture to protect a woman’s honor. He’s unfailingly kind to children and animals. He’d never dream of backing down from a fight, and he has the respect of his fellow men. He is handsome in a rugged but boyish way, has a perfectly chiseled physique, and looks great in period garb. All of this is because he is a Scottish Highland warrior living in 1743. He is Jamie Fraser, the kilt-wearing 18th-century romantic hero played by Sam Heughan on the new Starz time-travel fantasy–cum–bodice ripper Outlander, based on the best-selling books, which returns for a second season this month. Fraser is the embodiment of the discredited (except by Fabio) notion of chivalry—whose rumored demise is much exaggerated. “People resist the concept of chivalry because they think of men with handkerchiefs bowing and scraping and speaking poetry,” says Ronald D. Moore, who created the series. “But it’s really just a mode of honorable behavior.”
Honorable behavior is just as possible now as it was in Jamie Fraser’s day, but we have this terrible habit of complicating things. It’s understandable, really, because there are so many things to worry about: our clothes, our bodies, our jobs, how much money we have, what other men think of us, and, most of all, what women think of us. But what the new Fabio and his female fans tell us is to let all of that fall away and listen to our simple, honorable, chivalrous, dancing, door-holding, hand-kissing, blond-locked better angels. “Life can be extremely complicated,” Fabio advises his younger cohort. “It’s up to you. Keep it simple. If you keep life simple, you’re going to have a great life.”
By Kevin Cooley
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