In news that shook American society to its core, it was revealed this week that Brett Favre has made some bad decisions that resulted in pics. None, however, were returned for a score. They were sold to a website. It is impossible to predict how many women are going to come forward in the next week or two claiming to have been sexually involved with Favre. He’s only been playing since the Cold War. That’s a lot of hotel rooms he’s been in and a lot of masseuses he’s tried to be. Many of those affairs were probably Wisconsin women, which means that if we factor in what Keynes referred to as the “CHZ multiplier,” we will have some idea of the kind of ass Favre would have been sexting had he played in a more seductive locale like Miami, Seattle, or the middle of the desert. If his playing style is at all indicative of the rest of his game, we can safely conclude that he makes passes at everything he sees and that despite some ludicrously bad decisions he has maintained a rarefied niche in the pantheon of American Heroes. Until now. If the media is going to destroy Favre in the coming months, I hope it will at least pump its schadenfreude with a heavy heart. We do not have many classic American Heroes left in our culture. The question is, do we need them anymore? Brent Musburger, the voice of college football, made news this week when he publicly endorsed the use of steroids by professional athletes under a doctor’s supervision. It begs the question of how much the sports industrial complex can ask of its players. How titanically must the players collide in order to justify you buying an HDTV? How unreal must the action be to sell you a subscription package? Above all, what is the responsibility of the profiteers to the performers? Can football stay marketable when concerns about brain damage generate more bad publicity than anyone can ignore? The NFL is, in other words, conforming to what the rest of our culture is: more retail than reality with a slight sheen of plastic. Brett Favre has become a hero because he stands apart from all that. He makes bad decisions not sanctioned by the coaches on the sidelines. He has a cannon arm and he sometimes knows how to use it. He will break a play intentionally and at times he is unstoppable. He is a winner, but not in the clinical sense that gives Colts games the thrill of watching surgery. He smiles, he is clearly as insecure as the rest of us, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. He cries. That’s right, Deadspin. You have set forth what is going to rob this country of its first crying man’s man. Luckily, more will come. What Brett Favre represents is the link between the American Hero of yesteryear and the Cosmopolitan Male Role Model of the future. Exhibit A, John Wayne. Exhibit B, Barack Obama. The archetype of the Marlboro Man is dead. It contracted emphysema and died in 1998. That it was put out to pasture reflects an increasing emasculation of our culture. Traditionally manly traits like taking stupid risks and one upmanship have been hit hard in the past few years. Both are responsible for the recession we’re still in, and both are exactly what Brett Favre has always done. There’s not too many guys left who we respect because of those traits. If you try to pin down exactly what our culture connotes with masculinity, you come up with a rough sketch of spontaneity, determination, rugged yet practical values, and adventure. The countering force in this culture is traditionally the restraining, socializing domesticity of our female archetype. It makes sense, then, that Mainstream USA in 2010 is more effeminate than ever before, because our world is increasingly domestic. Most people will live their entire lives without significantly leaving their comfort zone. We are urbanizing and communizing; home is essentially everywhere for us. That leaves us free to absorb ourselves in trivia. Public figures unfortunate enough to have been born human are common fodder for gossip, like the recently-set benchmark for sports infidelity, Tiger Woods. Or Brett Favre. In this new world of comfort and safety, we can safely say our eulogies for the Man’s Man, like the yeoman farmer before him, without fearing that he’ll wake up in his coffin. Manliness is by no means gone, but our conception of it has changed to something of a sleek, urbane alpha dog, maybe a gentleman in some circles, a rebel in others. Regardless, the prototypical man of today is consummately of his milieu; maybe in charge of it, but precedented and safe nonetheless. The wind-whipped men who make their own way in this crazy world are a dying breed. Few of us are going to spend any time anywhere lawless. We have no use for that paragon. * * * insert picture of a rugged cowboy, with the caption, “We hardly knew how to be ye.” The New York Jets had to deal with another raunchy headline this week, one claiming that some of the men in its employ have libidos. (It was bad enough that the Jets’ owner adopted the name “Woody Johnson” just to send more efficient booty texts himself.) The situation was quickly condemned. From the NFL’s halls of power it rang: Never again shall the self-described “hottest sports reporter in Mexico” be made aware of the sexual tension between her and the team of enormous, naked men nearby. Nothing was her fault, and I certainly don’t intend to excuse the players’ behavior. What rolled eyes everywhere was the feigned shock that underlay the official responses to the situation. It’s a sign of the times that the PR pharaohs ran this story back to the make-believe land where Ines Sainz isn’t ever going to be catcalled and where she is not looking at the big dongs a-danglin’. Are we really that willing to let go of reality? And as Confucius said, talking about escaping reality will always bring you back to talking about Brett Favre. I thought I got bored sitting around the house. Every August we are treated to the same realization. “Whale, uhh, I hayd this great dream that, uh, I was really good at fooh-ball, and, uh, I woke up and, uh, still wuz.” Then he cries. He always cries. His emotional candor is the single thing that I’m using to string together the proposition that he is partly an example of what is to come in the realm of male role models. I leave you with what I have considered the most fascinating twist of this whole Favre story. The use of the word “slut” has been used to describe promiscuous guys for a few years, although to my understanding it’s really only taken hold in our generation. Trolling the blogocesspool for this story, I have come across many such references to Favre, some of them offered freely by male fans. Saying “he’s a slut” about a revered sports hero says a lot about how much we need him, and machismo in general, hanging around.