There is a scene in Magic Mike, the Soderbergh male stripper opus, where a new dancer named the Kid performs his first real dance—after an emergency amateur one, and some training by both a older brother figure and a semi-skeezy Matthew McConaughey. The dance is to Big and Rich's "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy." That song began a trend of straight boys stealing from Rock and Hip-Hop to construct a kind of peacocking masculinity. That a straight man directed a cowboy scene between two men, about straight men teaching each other about male eroticism, but not homosexuality, using this soundtrack seemed to an interesting bookend to a recent trend in country music. That the movie is mostly about the economic and social context of Tampa reflects another layer to this trend. Between the release of "Save A Horse..." and Magic Mike, there have been a number of songs by young male country artists that talk about pleasure, masculinity, and the psychogeography of the semi-rural South, including but not limited to Justin Moore's "Back that Thing Up" and "Back Woods,"  Kip Moore's "Something about A Truck," Luke Bryan's "Country Girl (Shake It For Me)," Jason Aldean's "Hicktown," and Brantley Gilbert's "Kick it in the Sticks." There is an emergence of a new kind of country masculinity—aggressive, proud, less courtly, and more about their own pleasure, and their own sexuality. In the context of homosocial tensions, and within the context of Soderbergh's film—this new kind of country masculinity seems to indicate that what is viewed as traditional masculinity is unstable, and perhaps unable to be grounded. I want to write about this instability, and also a little bit about how fuckable all these boys are.


Pitch I just submitted to the Atlantic.