Guy guys

When I was at university in the early 1980s I worked for a while as the doorman at a disco. The primary benefits of the job were the power to make or break people's evening and regular access to the society of promiscuous young women. The pay was atrocious and insult was added to injury because the waitresses and bartenders inside the club raked in the tips, some earning more than my weekly salary every night.

Still it was a job and it was "sociologically" interesting. I began my training as the snob some may find me now to be at that club as I became familiar with the type of guy most likely to be thrown out.

This type, briefly, drinks one of the heavily marketed lager beers and has considerable loyalty to his brand even though he could not distinguish it from any of the other leading lagers. He watches professional sports and will talk at great length about his team. He has strong political opinions of a very conformist type, and uses the same terms as he uses to talk about sports to describe why his party is best. He likes heterosexual sex, at least he likes to talk about it a whole lot, but is not very fond of women.

He is harmless alone but put him at a table with a bunch of guys just like him and look out. The waitresses at the club used to keep an eye for the type and the giveaway was that a whole table would order the big-selling lagers. The waitresses used to call it asshole beer.

His type is nothing new or unique to our era as any reader of Northanger Abbey can witness to. There are few better literary portrayals of the type than the character of John Thorpe. A guy guy, which is to say a guy who is very intent on being guy-like and is not much of a man really. John Thorpe shows the pattern well in Chapter 8 when he engages Catherine for her first two dances and then promptly disappears to play cards leaving her alone to wait.