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As Americans we have a certain sense of masculinity. Masculinity is being macho, being tough, being brave. Masculinity is not caring about grammar. Masculinity is fearlessly leading your troops in battle. Masculinity is Steve McQueen jumping over a barbed wire fence on his motorcycle in order to escape the Nazis. Masculinity is Joe Namath guaranteeing a Super Bowl victory for the Jets and coming through. It is about not sweating the small stuff. It is eating red meat, drinking beer (not light), and watching a game. It is about not caring about your appearance. If it is about becoming muscular, it is not for aesthetics but for function. Masculinity is about short sentences. It is about talking only when you need to. It is about expressing no emotion. It is not about beauty. We as Americans all know what it is to be masculine, and so do Norman Mailer, Alex Haley, Lawrence Linderman, and Muhammad Ali. We all know what the clichéd man is supposed to be like, we all know what is considered feminine and we all know how the most masculine man in the world, the heavyweight champion, is supposed to act. This having been said, we all also know that Muhammad Ali did not act this way: he wrote poems, he danced, he was garrulous, and was obsessed with his physical appearance. Thus when discussing Muhammad Ali the issue of masculinity is always brought up, either implicitly or explicitly, as one tries to make sense of these feminine qualities in such a masculine character. In Norman Mailer’s essay “Ego” and Muhammad Ali’s two interviews with Playboy, we see that Ali used these feminine qualities to achieve a masculine end -winning- and in doing so even expanded the definition of masculine. In “Ego” Mailer begins his discussion on masculinity by giving a working definition as it applies to boxing. There are fighters who are men’s men. Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of one they have left for a nose.… They have a code- it is to fight until they are licked, and if they have to take a punch for every punch they give, well, they figure they can win. Their ego and their body intelligence are both connected to the same source of juice- it is male pride. (717) What is masculine in boxing is what is masculine in everyday life, just magnified. If it is masculine to not care about your appearance, then it is masculine in boxing to fight until your nose is no more than a knob. If it is effeminate in society to avoid a challenge, then a truly masculine boxer will fight until the end, punch for punch, until the fight is over. Mailer gives this description of boxers that are men’s men in order to later contrast Ali to it and show how revolutionary Ali’s fight plan of “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” was. Throughout “Ego” Mailer makes it clear that Ali does not exemplify typical masculinity.
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