The men on the dating sites tell us that they love Kerouac, whose Dean Moriarty epitomizes this hero
Despite their increased tolerance for gay male sexual orientation, the users I encountered expressed their disdain for the feminine in the content and the style of their profiles
As for content, the profiles I examined mark gender through cultural references, which are a key element of the script of hegemonic masculinity. Many male profile writers’ lists of favorite authors and musicians are exclusively male, and these are often not short lists. Moreover, the central characters in frequently-mentioned books reinforce hegemonic masculinity. In Men and Masculinities, Stephen M. Whitehead discusses the mythical image of the man as adventurer and explorer: the myth of man leaving home, rejecting the private sphere, distancing himself from the feminine. Whitehead offers a few of many examples: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and its film relation Wall Street, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and all of the road films that have followed it. Many profiles I encountered also highlight beat poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, whose alter ego Henry Chinaski speaks of his exploits with women throughout Bukowski’s work. In a search on OkCupid of male heterosexual users between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven in a one-hundred-mile radius of Philadelphia, 3.4 times as many men than women expressed an interest in Bukowski. (To access the heterosexual women’s profiles in order to make relevant comparisons, I made a profile as a straight male user.) In a search of the same population, 115 male users and thirty-four women expressed an interest in Bukowski; seventy-four men and forty-one women stated an interest in Palahniuk; and seventy men and seven women indicated an interest in Kerouac.
