By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Men of America listen up, it is time to head disaster off at the pass. I sense the demise of the traditional American man. I see the ashy plume that signals the unrest of the male psyche and the molten core ready to explode and devour us all. OK, it might not be that epic, but it ain’t good. The ashy plume is men’s reality television.

Not the he-said-she-said, who-loves-whom slop directed at women and teenagers but a different kind of slop directed at us…and we are gobbling it up as fast as they can shovel it to us. It is men’s reality television. While I don’t have the latest Nielsen’s television ratings in front of me, I can tell you by gut instinct that reality television for guys has to be the fastest growing segment of the reality television world.

I’ve long been a leader of the reality television temperance movement but I too have fallen to its lure. Not to shows with bimbos vying for some dullard’s attention, or teenagers living some figment of reality in a posh southern California zip code, but to reality shows featuring guys doing nothing more than being men.

When I say men, I don’t mean biologically, I mean men, like your granddad was a man. Boot straps, hard-nose, self-reliant; you know the drill or at least you remember stories of it. The evil genius of the reality television machine saw the Achilles’ heel or at least the spongy soft underbelly of the bulk of guys in the States and went for it. They gave us what we, some consciously some subconsciously, long for, a life of adventure and success. The reality shows targeted to us found the last of a dying breed, men who are models of what we could have been or whom we daydream of being.

But we are not those men. No, we are a bunch of candy asses jockeying desks and cubicles all over this country making enough money to pay someone to mow our lawn and service our cars. We fill the adrenalin void with flag football games and dangerous fishing trips into the Bay with its 85-degree waters and nasty foot-and-a-half chop, but that is far from enough.

In some guys this feeling is so buried that they can make it through their whole lives without feeling its pull, but for most of us it is there, surfacing every once and a while in some and constantly in others. I believe that the pull on these feelings may become stronger in many of us now that the Siren’s call of shows like the “Deadliest Catch,” “Ice Road Truckers,” “Lobster Wars,” “Survivorman,” “Man Versus Wild” and other programs of the same ilk call us back to where we belong.

These shows serve us guys in different ways; to some they are an opiate to calm the dreams of a life out side of cubicle farms and suburbia, for many they are an invitation to occasional flights of fancy (that’s manly fancy not fancy fancy) and for a minority they are a how-to video to a new life. Of course the producers of these shows realize only a very few frustrated guys will ever make the move back into a more gutsy existence, and that is good for their business; because as soon as you are doing something manly for a living the last thing you want to watch is guys doing manly stuff for your entertainment. This minority will want to watch sitcoms and travel shows to calm their nerves after a day of being men.

I think this manly reality television stuff is here to stay. As long as guys’ hands are getting softer and their muscles flabbier there will be a thirst for what is macho that will be lightly wetted by this kind of television. While I’m on a roll let me throw out a prediction—the next man’s reality show will focus on coal miners; it is the next frontier for testosterone TV.

These shows will always be the province of men too because there isn’t time for much relationship analysis or minutiae drama on the deck of a pitching crab boat or in the cab of a Peterbilt grinding through a Arctic blizzard or an unstable mine shaft miles underground.

So if your adventure lust is not satisfied by fishing trips in the gulf or a viewing of the reptile exhibit at the Exploreum or a whitewater canoe trip on a river in the north Georgia mountains…err…scratch that, they made a movie about a bunch of guys on a canoe trip on a north Georgia river and if I remember correctly it wasn’t a particularly great trip. Then go watch somebody else doing what you wish your wife would let you do and take some satisfaction that at least there a few males out there balancing our servitude of softness.

Now it is time for me to go shine my loafers while I watch real men battle the Bering Sea.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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