constellations #87: types of guys
Hi again.
Recently I listened to this interview with the writer Catherine Lacey because I had just read her fascinating novel Biography of X. In the interview, Lacey talks about how she created the book’s title character, X — an avant-garde musician and artist with a complicated, mysterious past. Lacey says it was a process of “creating a character by thinking about what kinds of things she made first” — X’s experimental performance art projects, her pseudonymous novels, her impressive songwriting, all of which Lacey details in the book. “Like, what if I wanted to have a character that had done all these different things — what kind of person would that have to be?”
Lacey’s question — “what kind of person would that have to be?” — reminded me of an essay I read (whose opening paragraph went mildly viral on Twitter last week). The essay is about being online and about feeling like a certain kind of person. To put it bluntly: “Online discourse,” writer Dan Brooks says, “is presently shaped by what I call Type of Guy Theory.”
Brooks explains the theory like this: “Its project is to name a series of essential identities that express themselves in certain behaviors — speaking to the manager, reading David Foster Wallace, breaking up with someone who writes for The Cut — but are not limited to those acts.” Brooks’ preteen son comes home from school talking about VSCO girls and Karens; my TikTok feed is currently filled with recommendations for Sally Rooney girlies and stories about horse girls and complaints about gym bros and guitar guys. (Eventually they start to skew kind of inane; I just got a TikTok meant “for the type of girls who get really cold in the winter.”) The list goes on and on.
Maybe if you are not Very Online, this trend will feel foreign to you; Brooks is arguing, too, that this intense impulse to categorize is felt acutely by young people today in a way previous generations didn’t experience. (I do think, of course, of the classic early aughts Type of Guys prototype: the Mean Girls cafeteria scene.) But I think almost everyone has some level of experience with the way a personality type or social label can feel like an alluring trap.
There’s a podcast that satirizes this whole idea of Types of Guys; it’s called, fittingly, Guys. On each episode the hosts bring on a guest who is an expert in a certain Type of Guy — foodies, preppers, audiophiles; guys who are really into prog rock or South Park — and they run down its various attributes. How does one become a menswear guy? Where do ska guys trade opinions online? What kind of issues exist in the Yelp guy community? Etc.
A friend and I were discussing the podcast and how we couldn’t figure out what Type of Guys we are — there wasn’t even a specific topic on which we felt we could serve as the featured guest expert. But that doesn’t mean the appeal of identifying as a Type of Guy is lost on me. Frequently on the show, the hosts will read YouTube comments or Reddit threads from the relevant Guys and you can hear a real sense of community and mastery. (And whether or not the mastery is legitimate, the feeling is certainly there, and that counts for something.) The wine guys are proud to be wine guys! It seems nice!
But in the face of raising a teenager, Brooks points to a problem with the narrow self-definition that results from Types of Guy. “The bedrock assumption of Type of Guy Theory,” he writes, “is that identity exists independently from behavior; you are a type first, and you behave accordingly.” Brooks wants his kid to understand that what he does is the basis for who he is — that the choices he makes define him more than a label he saw online ever could. (Figuring yourself out as a teenager and writing a novel are not precisely the same process. But that idea brought me back to Lacey’s example of centering Biography of X on the “kind of person” who’d make the art X makes — coming to understand someone, even a fictional someone, by focusing on those choices, rather than imposing a Type on her and writing from there.)
The “illusion of a fixed nature,” Brooks writes, is dangerous in part because it “gives us an excuse to repeat bad behavior.” We think we are doomed to certain kinds of mistakes or misdeeds, or we’re prone to limit what we believe is possible for ourselves, if we think the die is already cast. But thinking about choices as choices can open up the possibility of change. It reminds me of something I learned when I wrote a newsletter about personality a few years ago: that some research claims we’re happier if we believe that our personality is changeable rather than stable. It is, in other words, generally good for our self-image not to think that we are a certain Type of Guy whose behavior is narrowly predicted for us by said singular category. This is, I think, related to what some psychologists would call “maintaining a fluid sense of self” — being attuned to multiple parts of your identity, rather than being intensely focused on one. To do so is a means of being open to change in ourselves, and being adaptable when the world around us inevitably changes.
(“i don’t know who needs to hear this, but your job isn’t your identity,” goes another silly tweet I saw recently. “your identity is the interchangeable 3-4 month hyperfixation you make everyone’s problem.” Or, from the title character in Biography of X: “Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I’d?” Fluid sense of self in a nutshell.)
And it’s not just a question of self-image, Brooks points out, but of values, too. To “insist that what we do determines who we are — and not the other way around,” he says, “is to make freedom and therefore responsibility a part of our worldview at the most basic level.” And while I wouldn’t say Biography of X is necessarily a book about predestination, I love the way these ethical themes — how much freedom a person has to define herself, within and outside her natal context; what responsibility that person has to then make choices that are honest and compassionate towards the self and others — are currents running through it.
Many years ago I bookmarked an edition of a newsletter that’s now been wiped from the internet. In it was a piece of advice about feeling messed-up about things that happened in the past — but it also feels like a piece of advice about how to be the Type of Guy you want to be today, and tomorrow: not as a grand act of self-reinvention or as an attachment to a new stereotype, but in quieter and more considered moments. “Strive to do better in the future, and not in some grandiose, compulsive way,” it said. “Just try to make the small good choice every time you are presented with a new choice to make.”
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Also: I wanted to share some newsletters from the past month that have been helpful to me in thinking and talking about the ongoing crises in Gaza and Israel. (These aren’t sources of on-the-ground reporting or invitations to activism, both of which are also crucial — just things that have helped me think more clearly and deeply. I hope they’re helpful to you, too.)
The first is from Jamie Lauren Keiles. It’s a series of questions he wrote with his mom in mind (“An effort to not disappoint my Jewish mother” is the subtitle); he says it documents “the thought process that led me to arrive at my beliefs” about Israel and Palestine.1
And then this one, from the writer Charlotte Shane, which is about bearing witness to suffering, about exhaustion, about empathy.
And finally: one from Malaka Gharib, whose newsletter “A list of beautiful things” is exactly what it sounds like. “It seems strange to share a newsletter like this in such a horrific time of suffering,” she writes in the latest volume. “My hope with this edition is to offer an insight to the war through art, poetry and beauty, which have an important role to play amid tragedy.”
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Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: art: Judy Chicago: Herstory at the New Museum and Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris at The Barnes Foundation — both great; movies: Priscilla and May December — still figuring out how I feel about both; performances: Philip Glass's piano etudes at Lincoln Center, Jessica Pavone’s Clamor at Pioneer Works, my friend Lars in a Weakerthans cover band — outstanding, all; books: the aforementioned Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (wow) and Geoff Rickly’s Someone Who Isn’t Me (also wow); miscellany: this profile of Tracey Emin; really great pastries (sesame scallion bun, chocolate chip cookie, earl grey morning bun) from Radio Bakery in Greenpoint; a really great sandwich from Carmenta’s in Bushwick; my band Keeper’s first show in many years, alongside Halpine and Ava Mirzedegan, which was outrageously fun; lots of serendipitous little New York moments
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This time last year I was: celebrating metonic cycles; and before that, playing the best video game I’ve ever encountered; and, before that, handing the mic to my favorite Vintage Menswear Guy.
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Thanks for reading. You’re exactly the right type of guy! See you next twenty-fourth.
xo,
M
I believe this has gotten paywalled since I first started drafting this newsletter — imo it’s worth a subscription, but if you can’t do that and want to read it, please let me know.