Canadian author Craig Davidson is part of a he said/she said discussion on Nerve.com of American author Charlie LeDuff’s new book US Guys (or Us Guys, depending on your interpretation) in which LeDuff explores 11 male subcultures including rappers, bikers, Manhattan fashionistas, men at the Burning Man festival, a gay rodeo crowd, and Civil War re-enactors. Introduced as “the dick-swinging author of two testosterone-saturated novels,” Davidson offers some of his insights on the state of masculinity these days:

Is the American male in decline? LeDuff thinks so, but that could be a function of the five-time losers he tends to focus on. I’m not sure the American male is in decline so much as in a shifting phase: country to city, blue-collar to white. Yeah, the shift’s been going on for decades, but there is this sense that the toughness and resiliency is being leeched out of modern men. Too many lawyers. Too many pencil-pushers and pencil-necked geeks. Too many metrosexuals. Too many critics. Over half of my buddies have never been in a fight, never worked a joe job, can’t change the oil in their SUV, or build anything more complex than an Ikea bookshelf.

Would Hemingway approve of that stealth (below the belt?) swipe at critics? Given the tales of his barroom brawls, quite possibly. This Quillblogger doesn’t want to discourage modern men from sharing their feelings and experiences but can’t help wondering what the mythic men Davidson wistfully refers to – “the John Waynes and Clint Eastwoods and Hunter S. Thompsons whose hard-drinking, hard-living, serio-masochistic ways stand as a token of a lost manhood that appeals to generations of men” – would make of Davidson’s later comments in the piece that give way too much information about his “bedroom shortcomings.”