Or more properly, the man of the year is Paul, the character Mark Rufalo plays in the The Kids Are All Right, the perceptive, wise, winning new film co-written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko. The reason is simple: there hasn’t been a male character like Paul in the movies in, like, forever.

The Kids Are All Right is about a long-married lesbian couple, Nic and Jules, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, and their two teenage children, Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska, who is about to head off to college, and Laser, played by Josh Hutcherson, who is basically a fine young man who has some questions. Joni and Laser are half-sibs: one was born of Nic, the other of Jules, but both were the result of an anonymous contribution made at a sperm bank. Laser persuades his sister to find out the identity of the donor, who turns out to be the laid-back hipster Paul.

For a couple of decades now, Hollywood has not known what to do with male sexual energy. Time and again, it is sublimated, repressed, channeled, tamed, punished, mocked, ignored, or agonized over. In this movie, it is celebrated. Paul is the life-giver, even apart from his relationship to Laser and Joni. He has a farm on which he brings life from the ground; he is an entrepreneur who owns a restaurant where he feeds people. Right from the moment we meet him we are shown that women find him attractive and enjoy him as a lover. As the movie progresses, we see him in other roles: he is the one who coaxes a song from the lips of the taut, controlling Nic (and in Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a perfect match of song and the character’s better, largely forgotten self); who revives passion and confidence in the neglected and underappreciated Jules; who encourages the simmering Joni to assert herself, even as he casts a fatherly cloak (or, literally, a hat) of protection over her; and who provides a model of cool masculinity for the searching Laser, who amid his female-surrounded surroundings, has latched onto a highly inappropriate role model for guidance. It is true that Paul is, as Nic correctly observes, “a bit full of himself” ( a fairly forgivable fault in the cock of the walk) and is no intellectual. But he is vibrant, interesting, considerate and ultimately decent. And never in the film is he required to punch anyone or pull a gun.

He is, unfortunately, disruptive. That is, of course, the ironic underside of creativity. The life-giver is the destroyer, and Paul instigates a disorderly rebelliousness in Joni and almost breaks up Nic and Jules’ stable marriage. This near-demolition is not entirely of Paul’s making; if there weren’t already tinder, Paul probably wouldn’t have been able to start a blaze.  Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg do a fair and unsentimental job of showing the problems that gradually emerge within a marriage and a family–Julianne Moore’s splendid speech near the end of the film is a description both unsparing and generous–and there is little wonder that the freedom offered by the Unattached Male is such a threat to a way of life that demands such discipline and sacrifice. What’s fascinating is that the film doesn’t give us a Paul who is selfish and self-absorbed; as the movie progresses, he begins to conclude that despite the creativity he offers and the joy he both gives and takes, his greater fulfillment awaits his entrance into the deeper commitment of marriage and family. That would leave him with a big question–can he remain the man he is in an institution that requires him to give so much of himself away? But that’s a topic for a different movie. Right now, at a moment when an eminent magazine like The Atlantic can publish with a straight face a bit of silly provocation called “The End of Men’‘, The Kids Are All Right gives us the great gift of Paul, the very model of modern masculinity.

In On theatlantic.com, images from the Gulf.

Camille Paglia certainly rocked the Times the other day: “The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class? In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and religious puritanism. . . .The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm. Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells. In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure. Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium. Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left. . . .Furthermore, thanks to a bourgeois white culture that values efficient bodies over voluptuous ones, American actresses have desexualized themselves, confusing sterile athleticism with female power. Their current Pilates-honed look is taut and tense — a boy’s thin limbs and narrow hips combined with amplified breasts.‘‘ Not American but British, David and Victoria Beckham will serve as poster children quite nicely.

The topic of this article is supposed to be Why Men Don’t Like to Dress Up, but I’m having some difficulty with it, because the premise is obviously untrue.  Men love to dress up.

If you have any doubts, go to a football game—NFL, NCAA. Look in the stands. You’ll see tens of thousands of men who have taken enormous care with their day’s wardrobe, starting next to the skin with the luckiest of their lucky T-shirts and building to the regulation team parkas. They will wear the official jersey of a current star, or the throwback jersey of a retired idol in order to help draw the mystic power of mighty ancestors into the day’s conflict. They will top off the ensemble with a well-chosen cap, or imitation leather helmet, or plastic pig snout, or styrofoam cheese head, and they will feel that they have dressed perfectly for the occasion.

And they will not be alone in their sartorial exactitude. Civil War reenactors in blue and gray will scour the hinterlands to find the precise regimental button to wear to their mock conflagrations.  Star Trek devotees will never be caught wearing items from their Deluxe Captain Kirk Uniform Packages from the original series when they meant to be wearing Gold Kirk Uniform Shirts from the 2009 film. A yachtsman will have his special windbreaker and a golfer will have his special sweater and slacks, and many a tennis player will continue to sport his short McEnroe-ish tennis shorts long after his slender McEnroe-ish figure has joined John in retirement. One need look no further than the example of Mr. Elmer Fudd, who always wears the same cap with the side flaps snapped together at the crown whenever he hunts that cwazy wabbit.

What most men do less and less, and what many men no longer do at all, is dress up for work. There was a time, as we see on Mad Men, when men were expected to dress for the office, and that the more successful you were, the better you were expected to dress. None of this came to anyone as a shock, since the world was still governed by a relatively small elite, and they mandated fashion and taste. Appearances mattered, often too much: men who had the right look often rose higher than men of greater ability who didn’t.  And even those who challenged the powers that be—Martin Luther King Jr., Lenny Bruce, Chuck Berry—wore versions of the suit and tie. They wanted to change, challenge, join the power structure, not destroy it, and their clothes demonstrated that.

But as Mad Men shows, not all men take to a suit and tie. Don Draper looks great and takes pleasure in the power that his appearance brings him. But Pete Campbell, young and unformed, doesn’t so much wear his suit as is worn by it; the suit is like the outline of a drawing that he is filling in. And for poor Harry Crane, deskbound and thickening, wearing a suit is a yoke of servitude, another obligation that society, family, marriage imposes upon him.

The sixties, of course, changed everything.  The new fashion freedom men enjoyed  fell on peacocks and drones alike. But over the years, the easygoing spirit of Casual Friday took over, and in many places became Sloppy Whenever. “Suits’’ became a synonym for executive power that was clueless and stodgy. Instead of the Don Drapers pulling the Harry Cranes to dress up, the Cranes pulled the Drapers down.  “The only people in Los Angeles who wear a tie,’’ a friend from the television business recently noted, “are the agents.’’

“It’s appalling how men dress today,’’ Tim Gunn, the creative director of Liz Claiborne said to me in a recent phone call. “More and more, I’m meeting men who have attained some professional stature, who not only don’t wear a tie, but who don’t know how to tie a tie.  I’m flabbergasted. It’s like they’re wearing a sign that says `I have arrested development.’ What are they signifying?’’

What indeed.  Back in 2005, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Ben Bernanke gave a speech in which he answered that very question. “The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work,’’ the former scholar and researcher told his audience. “Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what. . .Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call ‘signalling.’ You have to do it to show that you take your official responsibilities seriously.’’

Bernanke’s right (although you’d think a guy who’s able to understand credit default swaps could find himself a comfortable suit.) Men should be as willing to demonstrate their pride in their families and their professions as they do in their teams. And don’t forget: a lot more people are going to admire the way you look in a suit and tie than the way you rock a cheese head.

This article originally appeared in BG, the magazine of Bergdorf Goodman.

In an article on CNET.com called “Why No One Cares About Privacy Anymore,” Declan McCullagh celebrates (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) the changing mores and advancing technology that seem to be turning the idea of privacy into a quaintly passe concept. Noting that the anticipated storm of privacy objections to Google Buzz have simply not materialized, McCullagh suggests that people, particularly young people, just aren’t all that worked up over the idea that the world knows their business. “Internet users have grown accustomed to informational exhibitionism,” he writes. “Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.” McCullagh quotes the Judge Richard Posner, a conservative political theorist, who has written “As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.” The truth about privacy is counter-intuitive, McCullagh concludes: “Less of it can lead to a more virtuous society.”

In many ways, this is certainly true. It always seemed astonishing that homosexuals were denied security clearances during the Cold War because their secret left them susceptible to blackmail. During my parents’ generation, people kept secrets about all sorts of things because social stigmas were attached: a drinking problem, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, mental retardation in the following, a marriage outside of one’s race/religion/ethnic group. People have gotten over most of these things. We feel better because because we can lead lives that are more free and more honest.

And yet, there is still much we would resent having put on public display. Who among the exhibitionists would like to have the details of his finances spread across the globe? And while Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford and others have given infidelity a bad name, do we really feel that people are not entitled to keep their romantic liaisons to themselves, free from community judgment?  But what is really important to realize that we are not always in control of the things we need to be private about. Just last week, Mary Cheney, daughter of the Great Scaremonger Dick Cheney, and an odious person in her own right, spearheaded an effort to attack the Department of Justice lawyers who represented accused members of al Qaeda who were in detention. Now, these lawyers were not performing this entirely professional action in secret, so the parallel is not exact, but all of sudden, here they were doing their jobs in relative anonymity, and now a public rabble-rouser is accusing them helping America’s enemies, which certainly sounds like the definition of treason to me. A perfectly normal, yea, even admirable activity has now been spotlighted and stigmatized, and if you think it’s impossible that a right wng nut will one day take a shot at one of these lawyers, then I envy your peace of mind. It may be a better world that doesn’t require so much privacy, but in the meantime, it’s a pretty good protection against hysteria and malevolence.

A wholly personal and entirely idiosyncratic ranking of the what were the very best elements of what, apart from these and a few other gems, was a beast of year:

1.) London. A full week living the life of a roving journalist, enjoying posh circumsances, a limitless credit line, and the company of smart, thoughtful people.
2.) In the Loop, Armando Iannucci‘s scathing political satire
3.) Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantei‘s impressively realized reimagining of Henry VIII‘s divorce crisis, and the role of the worldy, modern Thomas Cromwell
4.) Johnny Damon‘s ninth inning of Game Four of the World Series, in which he singled after a nine-pitch at bat, stole two bases on one play, scored the go-ahead run, and effectively expunged hope from Phillie hearts
5.) An Education, Lone Schefrig‘s tart, gimlet-eyed coming-of-age story set in London just before the sixties began swinging, with an excellent cast featuring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Emma Thompson, and, in a career-establishing performance, Carey Mulligan
6.) Jon Stewart‘s astonishing smackdown of Jim Cramer and CNBC’s slobbering market boosterism
7.) Liaquat Ahamed‘s majesterial Lords of Finance
8.) The audacity of hope: the Inauguration of Barack Obama
9.) James Harrison‘s amazing, huffing puffing 100 yard interception return as time expired before halftime in the Super Bowl, nearly thwarted by Larry Fitzgerald‘s tackle after a desperate field-long pursuit
10.) Chesley Sullenberger lands his plane in the Hudson, a feat brilliantly captioned by a New York cop: “What’s there to say? A bird–a plane–super man.”

Honorable mention, in no particular order: Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Go Like Hell, by A.J. Baime; Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme‘s poignant, gallant family drama, with really wonderful work by Anne Hathaway, Rosemary DeWitt and Debra Winger; Quentin Tarantino‘s rollicking, unhistorical Inglorious Basterds, with a whole raft of thrilling, scenery-chewing performances; Joseph “You Lie!” Wilson; Glover’s Mistake, by Nick Laird; Battlestar Galactica; Mad Men; Closing Time, by Joe Queenan; teaching Cara to drive; “You and I and Love”, by the Avnet Brothers; and “Sometime Around Midnight,” by The Airborne Toxic Event

In Britain, Borders UK has gone into administration, as they call bankruptcy, and the other big chains, most notably Waterstone’s, are not asking for whom the bell tolls. Meanwhile, in the US, both Borders and Barnes & Noble both posted quarterly losses, and, according to the AP, both “forecast a difficult holiday season, saying competition from discount chains and online retailers is stiffening.”

Having whiled away many a pleasant hour in various outposts of these chains, I am sad to hear of their problems, and the prospect of losing pleasant shopping experiences in well-lit, well-designed, welcoming spaces is most dismaying–although, truth be told, it would be more dismaying, if the chains hadn’t used their powerful economies of scale in a similar way to drive out so many independent book shops. The net effect of this was bringing the boom or bust mentality which governs film and TV and Broadway–something needs to be an immediate hot, or it’s on to the next thing–into the world of books. The old practice of slowly nuturing authors as they grew in talent and ability under the financial protection of lucrative reference books and crossword puzzle books and so, which had been one of the glories of the sleepy world of publishing, is long gone. Authors need to be an immediate it, and the lucky ones who have attained that status become name brands and get to keep publishing. That’s why you can still read the new Ludlum, even though Robert Ludlum has been long dead.

It’s sad to contemplate the death of the bookstore, but in this way, it follows what netflix is doing to theaters and what online shopping is doing to stores. Civilization’s greatest achievement has been the city, but all this makes me wonder whether three decades from now, cities will even exist.

This is most minor footnote to what is, after all, a terribly large tragedy, but last week’s shootings at Fort Hood reminded us of a question that has long rattled around in our heads: why does the U.S. Army continue to maintain so many bases named after Confederate generals?

Fort Hood is named after General John Bell Hood, a hard charging Kentuckian who commanded a brigade of Texans at Bull Run and Gettysburg, and who lost an arm and a leg in combat. Texas is also home to Camp Maxey, an Army National Guard training facility named after Samuel Bell Maxey, who parlayed an undistinguished military career into a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Texas is hardly alone in honoring rebel generals. Virginia has Fort Lee, named after Robert E. Lee, the south’s most distinguished leader; Fort A.P. Hill, named after Lee’s gutsy but frequently illness-wracked subordinate, and Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard installation, named for the George Pickett, anofficer best known for his disastrous attack at Gettysburg and his hair-do (perfumed ringlets).

North Carolina has Fort Bragg, named for Braxton Bragg, an irascible and largely incompetent commander. Louisiana has Camp Beauregard, named after Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a general with a natty name and neat goatee who commanded the forces that fired on Fort Sumter and started the war, and Fort Polk, named after Leonidas Polk, a bishop who was named a corps commander because of his friendship with President Jefferson Davis, and who is best known for being decapitated by a cannonball fired by an uncannily accurate Yankee gunner. In Georgia there’s Fort Gordon, named for John Gordon, a competent commander during the south’s declining years; Fort Benning, named after Henry Benning, whose troops fought well at Burnside’s Bridge, Devil’s Den, and other engagements where apostrophes aren’t required; and Fort Rucker, named after cavalryman Edmund Rucker, a colonel who was presented with title of general after the war stopped.

It’s not hard to see why bases were named after these men–tender local feelings, a desire to mend the nation through magnaminity, the invocation of a native son’s martial example. But as we get farther and farther away from the Civil War, it’s hard to see why we continue to honor men who, after all, did secede from the union, and who did fight for a racist government in the cause of preserving Negro slavery, and who did, ultimately, lose the war, thanks in part to strategic and tactical mistakes committed by these very generals. Surely the almost endless conflict in which we have been engaged for the century and a half since the Civil War has produced heroes worth honoring who are encumbered by less baggage than these men, whose principle claims on distinction were for actions perpetrated against the United States and the soldiers in its service.

It could be more embarrassing. There was a time when there was a Camp Forrest in Tennessee, named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the slave trader, general, and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Lucky that’s been deactivated.

I loved the article in The New York Times the other day about the new ideas about the Battle of Agincourt, the mythic victory that the English under Henry V enjoyed over the French on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, in 1415, and that gave rise to Shakespeare‘s stirring “Band of Brothers” speech. “They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud,” writes James Glanz, “riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. . . . But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers. The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight.” The painstaking detective work undertaken by the hsitorians is truly impressive. I also enjoyed seeing a mention in the article of the historian Conrad Crane, who made news in recent months as the lead writer of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual that mapped out the successful strategy adopted by General Daniel Petraeus in Iraq. I will always be grateful to Dr. Crane, who as Col. Crane, West Point instructor, led me on a privileged tour of the cemetery at West Point, which turned into a pretty damn good piece for Time magazine 12 years ago.

Writing in The Daily Beast, Rebecca Dana contends that by avoiding the use of euphemisms in his announcement of his sexual affairs, David Letterman “has perfected the art of disclosure.”

“When David Letterman confessed last week to having had sex with women who work on his show, the real shock wasn’t the affairs themselves (I mean, honestly people) but rather the language he used to describe them. “I have had sex with women who work on this show,” he said.

He didn’t euphemize. He didn’t dissemble. He didn’t confess alcoholism, drug addiction, or personal weakness. He didn’t appeal to Jesus or the state of New York; didn’t define simple verbs, praise his in-laws, haul out his wounded spouse or dwell on how much he’d let everyone down. It was the most skillful handling of a sex scandal in the modern era.”

Dana contrasts Letterman with Mark Sanford, Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign and other politicians who cloaked their admissions with evasive language. “All of these men had sex. But none of them plainly mentioned the fact of it, as if `seriously sinning’ somehow softens the blow.”

Dana’s observation is accurate but myopic. Letterman not only broke no law but is allegedly the victim of a crime, while Spitzer and Ensign may have been guilty of violations and Sanford had disappeared. More importantly, a frank admission based on the Letterman model would have been useless to these men. Does Dana really believe that if Spitzer had said “I was having sex with high-priced call girls” his `perfect disclosure’ would have helped him weather the storm any more easily?

The real implication of Letterman’s admission is that for a large and growing segment of the population, shame is an outdated concept, a vestigial idea from a disappearing world. Whole ranges of behavior that just a generation ago needed to kept secret out of fear of embarrassment and humiliation are now forgiven, accepted and even encouraged. Young people live their entire lives on Facebook with no fear of reproach. Various empowerment efforts mitigate the stigma of a disadvantaged background. Struggles with drugs and alcohol are causes for therapy and ultimate vindication. Homosexuality, interracial relationships, children born out of wedlock, divorce–mere retro plot points on Mad Men. People don’t even bother to deny looking at internet porn. Ordinary girls go wild and bare their boobs while starlets flash their labia. In the UK, where CCTV security cameras are prevalent, young drunks arrested for fighting outside pubs frequently ask police for copies of the tapes of their brawls.

Privacy is a crucial legal concept to those of us who remember when a person’s private actions could be used to cause him or her emotional, financial and even legal harm. But among young people, the domain of privacy is shrinking, and as it diminishes, the idea of shame is shrinking as well, and across all sectors. Is there any sense that the gang of bankers and brokers who brought on the financial collapse feel any shame? I’m not aware of any.

Letterman could get away with his admission because audiences have fewer moral expectations than electorates, and because his audience in particular simply had no expectation of faithfulness on his part at all. He would have invited judgment had he acted ashamed. But younger people are getting older and older people are getting deader. One can well imagine in twenty years time a politician who’s being questioned about sexual misconduct looking into the camera and saying “Yeah, I did it. Haven’t you?”