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A. “Ikea-boy,” is not fully present to himself even though he is the proper consumer subject, hailed by all of the hegemonies that construct us in the 20th century, the most fun being “shopping is good” but also that human life can be measured in money and economic value. Recall the scene where his apartment morphs itself into a fully illustrated Ikea catalogue. This is not reality imitating art, it’s reality imitating advertising and the hegemonies of commodity culture. Norton takes refuge for his insomnia in the unreal world of self-help discourses, in which he is fully hailed, and through which he’s finally able to sleep.

To be self-conscious about oneself as a man means to be already suspect as a man. That is, developing a conscious discourse of manhood is a potential sign that a man has failed to become a man in the hegemonic ways—that is, without consciousness. Toward a presentation of an answer to this dilemma, what we can suggest instead is that instead of being an effect of nature, masculinity is not a thing; rather, masculinity is a set of signs and signifiers, discourses, media images, and scripts that overdetermine what we think we recognize as masculinity.

Modleski’s project is an example of feminist scholarship that, to quote from MacDonald: [O]ften maintain[s] gender systems, albeit “alternative” ones, designed to stand in direct opposition to those of dominant society. […] One sees [in] them […] the continued assignment of femininity and masculinity to specific behaviors. (MacDonald 1998: 7) In fact, the word “transgender” appears only once—in the last paragraph of the book—to reference the failure of queer politics and theory, as well as feminist masculinity studies to “break free of restrictive gender roles” (Modleski: 163).