American testosterone: Hummers, carrots, and other things.

IF you really want to know what's happening, go get another cup of coffee when the news comes on and get back in time for the commercials. They've always been revealing, but Hummer's "Restore Your Manhood" spot is a 30-second State of the Union.

In case you were bitten recently by the tsetse fly, it goes like this: Two young men are in a grocery checkout. The first is buying tofu, organic veggies, and skim milk. Directly behind him in the line is the second young man, whose basket is full of beef ribs, potato chips, and pizza. The sight of all that macho fare makes the first young man cringe in shame and sends him straight to the GM dealership where he buys a Hummer on the spot. As he's driving away in it, smiling proudly, the message "Restore Your Manhood" flashes on the screen.

Even I did a double-take the first time I saw it. My instant analysis, that it was a masterpiece of self-parody, lasted all of two seconds before I came to my senses. American automakers are so constitutionally incapable of self-parody that if their advertisers were foolish enough to bring it up, they probably would think it was a new cruise-control button for driving in parades; words like nuance and oblique have no meaning for them except as sexy-sounding names for new models.

Hummer must therefore have intended the pitch to be taken straight and had to have known how it would be received by the usual suspects. Did they deliberately set out to enrage feminists, gays, vegetarians, environmentalists, and PETAbears all at the same time? True, there are no Hummer buyers among them, but these are the people who throw things, burn things, and run naked through things. If real men like to confront obstacles, Hummer was supplying their customer base with a gantlet.

As the ad continued to air, my interpretive juices flowed. Next I decided that Hummer was appealing to the silent majority's seething resentment of political correctness. Most Americans agree that it's wrong to use outright slurs; what galls them is having to flag their vocabulary to avoid the landmines set to explode when someone trips over a subtle undercurrent. For example, it's okay to say "masculinity" because you might be getting ready to condemn it, but you can't say "manhood" because whatever you say next is bound to be something good.

What else? Well, Hummer might be appealing to political swagger, saying, in effect, that American might well conquer the Middle East and cause the oil wells to flow like milk and honey, and if it doesn't we'll dig up Alaska. Or maybe they were banking on the power of reverse psychology: "If the wusses keep telling me not to buy a gas-guzzler, I'll by-God buy one." Or maybe they were striving for a profitable combination of nostalgia and patriotism. The Hummer is copied from the Hum Vee combat vehicle used by American troops in Iraq, so the public might come to regard it with the same affection we felt for the WWII Jeep.

Or maybe they just wanted to get people talking and writing about the ad. To find out, I googled HUMMER MANHOOD AD, and sure enough, I was not alone. The bloggers and their hit men--there were almost no female respondents--had pounced on the subject with a vengeance but with a paucity of ideas. Of the several dozen I read, only a handful said anything interesting or even coherent. A vet challenged the tofu buyer, "Join the army and drive a real one!" A snob observed loftily, "The only kind of men this ad could persuade are those who can't afford the $48,000 sticker price." And an earnest family-values booster droned on about being a good husband and father in a tract consisting entirely of cliches.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The rest was nothing more than an adolescent cleverness contest couched in a monotonous stream of obscenities that pulsated with brutal, mocking anger. The consensus of opinion was that any man who bought a Hummer must be under-endowed, rendered by many respondents with the juvenile phrase "a teeny-weeny wienie." It all boiled down to the S-word, the F-word, and a list of everybody and everything that sucks: driving, not driving, eating meat, eating vegetables, Bush, supermarket scanners, Cheney, card-swiping machines, Rumsfeld, plastic bags, and people who make a point of asking for paper bags in a loud voice to advertise their eco fides when they're really destroying trees SUCK BIG TIME! TURN THEIR F***ING CHAIN SAWS ON THE F***ERS!

It had nothing to do with the Hummer ad. It was Web Rage, virtually indistinguishable from every other site treating of a controversial subject: the same tightly wound frustration, the same vicious outbursts, the same inarticulate vulgarity, and the same overabundance of males revealing the same things about themselves that they reveal in similar eruptions of Road Rage. American young men are mad, as mad as hell, but they have little choice about whether to take it anymore. Products of a society that views adult manhood as a politically incorrect threat to be held up to ridicule and rendered inadequate, they are incapable of the towering rage of Lear or the baleful imprecations of Achilles. Infantilized by a hostile culture, they cannot rise above the sputtering, foot-stamping tantrums of Rumpelstiltskin.

Our feminized public schools know how to stamp out foot-stamping males. Operating on the principle that the XY chromosome is a genetic disorder, they use Ritalin to soothe the rumpled beast. When it wears off, our feminized counseling industry stands ready to remake maleness in its own image. Their latest success is born-again Road Rage, recently renamed "Intermittent Explosive Disorder" and given the jaunty nickname IED. As with the earlier "anger management," the name triggers visions of a panicky hostess desperately trying to keep the peace when two of her guests square off; helplessly fluttering her hands, changing the subject, offering more chocolate mousse, anything to get them to make nice. This is the way of the woman-dominated counseling industry. Admit you were bad and "seek help"; operators are standing by.

When women are bottled up they raise the selflessness bar and get more bottled up. When men are bottled up they either engineer a self-immolation scenario worthy of a Wagner opera, or else they simply curl up and die. Twenty-something men seem to be opting for the latter. College is no longer the place to catch a husband. For the first time ever, female undergraduates outnumber men by some 2 million, compared with the ecstatic ratio of four men to every woman that prevailed in my student days in the 1950s. Women now earn slightly more than half of business-school bachelor's degrees, and their enrollment in medical and law schools is up to 50 percent.

Though young men may be giving up on the professions, they haven't given up on the oldest one. The 40-year-old woman realtor who was murdered in a model home in Texas told her ex-husband that her online dating service had paired her with several men 15 years her junior, and that they all wanted to move in with her and let her support them.

The gold standard of manhood restrained is Brad Pitt, who seems to have curled up and died in the arachnoid clutches of Angelina Jolie. His cocky grin started to fade after Jolie, announcing her condition in a news conference, used the words "When we found out we were pregnant ..." Now he looks dazed and glassy-eyed as he passively follows behind her in his backwards baseball cap, wandering through Africa saving children. Somebody give that man a Hummer before it's too late.

Actually, it's already too late because Hummer recently changed their ad. Now when the health-food guy drives off in his new two-ton toy, he bites into a raw carrot and the screen flashes the words "Restore the Balance." Nice try, GM. You came to the rescue of American manhood for three whole weeks.

Florence King's NATIONAL REVIEW columns are collected in STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002.