Eleven years ago, a man stood on some empty bleachers at a football practice and made a statement so simple and yet so confounding that it immediately cached itself in internet history. Posted on Vine in June 2013, “What’s better than this? Guys being dudes” garnered over 35 million views and became a meme that outlasted Vine itself. The man featured in the four-second video is Steve Addazio, then head football coach at Boston College. The expression that would cement his legacy far more than his college coaching record (61-67) was inspired by his defensive coordinator Don Brown. "That's his saying all the time, be a dude, and what being a dude is, is being a baller. You know?” Addazio told ESPN in 2013, “Just being a real baller. Just being a dude.” But what does being a dude really mean, or a guy, or for that matter, a baller? These words generally refer to people gendered male, so the statement roughly translates to “men being men.” I was surprised to find that while the internet loves this meme, its denizens have offered little in the way of gender analysis, and I am stepping in to fill the gap. Because Addazio’s proclamation is as fundamentally conservative as it is hilariously tautological, and it obscures the radical potential of his question. The vine has been reposted a million times everywhere, but several comments on the most-viewed YouTube of the video illustrate perhaps the most obvious interpretation: the perennial paradox of the ultramasculine trying to distance itself as much as possible from homosexuality, only to end up seeming gayer than ever. “Most masculine vine ever,” Essence V comments, to which AnonymousX responds: “Masculine sounds kinda gay. It's guys being dudes. Doesn't need any more wording.” Another commenter then chimes in with, “why do you care if it sounds gay? Are you insecure or something? It's just a goddamn word.” Elsewhere in the comments, NN writes, “Me as a teenager trying to convince the world that I'm straight.” So this video has clearly aggravated plenty of debate about how gender relates to sexuality, but not as much about gender itself, and really…what is so great about guys being dudes? View this post on Instagram A post shared by College GameDay (@collegegameday) When I first saw this vine in 2020, I was struck by how it evidences mainstream America’s attachment to gender and all its trappings. How comforted people feel by seeing society's expectations of traditional gender roles fulfilled. The Tab.com, which asserted in 2018 that this is “the best vine ever made,” says the four-second video “speaks to the American inside all of us. Once you've replayed this Vine some 20 times you start to wonder what is better than this. Sun beaming down, polos and khakis, American football, Boston, the American Dream.” Ashwat Giri comments something similar on YouTube, saying that Addazio “is expressing something which many of us are familiar with but fail to articulate, namely, appreciation for a happy and organic moment.... how endearing (or ‘cute’) he is and how much we sympathize with him.” Like so much else, traditional gender roles have been mythologized as hallmarks of a simpler, more wholesome time–American culture’s (white, Christian, colonial) underpinnings have explicitly tied traditional gender roles to that which is ethical, healthy, holy, safe, sane, and destined for success. The clearest evidence of this is the way that trans, nonbinary, and gender-conforming people’s rights have come to the fore of our national conversation, and the enormous backlash from people who find them terrifying, repugnant, or both. So far in 2024,…
