The 40-Year-Old Virgin's Assault on Modern Masculinity.

We are in the middle of a paradigm shift. These occur once every 20 years or so, sometimes even less frequently, but it is happening again. Our perception of what it means to be a man is rapidly changing. Films such as Fight Club and American Beauty tackled the new face of masculinity in today’s culture, and they succeeded to a point. I prefer them over The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I do not, however, think they did a better job at showing what has become of the modern American male. This is not an essay on ethics, on whether or not premarital sex is good or bad; rather it is here to discuss how we perceive and cope with it in the new century. Whereas Fight Club and American Beauty were gritty with comic relief, The 40-Year-Old Virgin deals with these issues using jokes that nowadays mostly appeal to the 16-25 demographic. But if you fail to recognize the undercurrent of this humor, you miss the point of the movie.

Andy (played wonderfully by Steve Carell) is the titular character who works at a seemingly local electronic store. One night he is invited to play poker with the guys and they begin an innocent conversation about the nastiest, raunchiest, dirtiest things that they have done to their sexual partners. But when it is Andy’s turn, he struggles to come up with a realistic story, and they figure out that he has not yet done the deed. And so it begins that his buddies at work try to get him laid. From waxing his chest and responding in the form of a question, to “tackling drunk [women],” Andy attempts everything, but can’t quite follow through. One day he meets the attractive, but intentionally not stunning, Trish (Catherine Keener) and really does fall for her. Now he must figure out whether to act with his heart, or follow his friends’ increasingly ludicrous suggestions.

Sex is not something that is important for Andy. As he relates at the poker table, he tried when he was young, and as it didn’t work out, more time passed, and he just stopped trying. The thing that makes it important to him is his friends. He just wants to be one of the guys, so he’s willing to go along with their plan for so long, but at one point he makes them stop because now he’s smitten with Trish. And he just wants to do this his own way. She likes him for who he is, and even challenges him to 20 dates without sex, a request with which he is more than willing to comply. He would rather not have sex. But she, as is implicit in her challenge, knows that that is what all men want. And when he doesn’t even want sex on the night of their 20th date, this very fact frightens her. She becomes so paranoid as to accuse him of being a sexual predator and using mentos as roofies. I mean who wouldn’t want to have sex. Sex is something expected of our culture today. The adults expect it and the teens who haven’t done it are growing into a small minority. I am not condemning this, I am simply pointing out that this is different for the popular understanding as of 20 years ago.

People have sex, but this movie points out that sex does not just make you a member of the largest fraternity on the planet. It is not just one of the stepping stones. It has become the most important. To have sex now means to become a man. Nothing else is required.

There are also two other scenes that are relevant to the masculinity issue, although they are on a different note. The first is the running joke told between David (Paul Rudd) and Cal (Seth Rogen), which is comprised of “Know how I know you’re gay?” and an appropriate response. But what do they really mean? Do they mean gay as in homosexual? Perhaps, but I think it goes deeper than that. Namely, if a man is gay and, thereby, does not have sex with women, how can he be a man, in the masculine sense? So these guys have endowed the word gay with a sense of castration. And there are certain attributes that are considered synonymous with being castrated. One of these is being a virgin, as is pointed out at the poker game. Before they deduce that he is a virgin, they think he must be gay. There is little difference in popular opinion. Also doing such things as listening to Coldplay, liking Maid in Manhattan, and being “celibate” confirm your apparent gay-ness.

The other scene in one in which Andy takes Trish’s daughter to a birth control clinic. At the meeting, the fellow participants discuss their fabricated sex lives. Despite the fact that they are all under the age of 17, they claim a diverse set of experiences which seem as if they could only come from a pornographic film. These teens have seen them and brag about being able to perform as well as Ron Jeremy. Teens used to brag about their cars and how fast they could go (which Freud would say is not very different), but now they talk of their respective abilities. Rank has always been determined by something comparable to the amount of testosterone or libido that an individual had, but not since the influx of Christianity has the Western world, of which we as America make up only a small part, based the threshold between man and boy on sex.