AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.

A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.

It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)

Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.

As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.

To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.

So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.

(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)

To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).

And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.

And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.

But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.

And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.

Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.

TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.

ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…

A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT all that could be said and done about the early-’90s Seattle music scene had been said and done, here come more exploiters.

At 2 p.m. today, a crew from New Line Cinema will go to the Seattle Center Fountain outside KeyArena to, as a flyer soliciting extras says, “re-create Kurt Cobain’s memorial vigil for a new feature film.”

The movie, tentatively titled A Leonard Cohen Afterworld (after a line in Cobain’s song “Pennyroyal Tea”), is the first fiction feature directed by Todd Philips (who made the documentaries Frat House and Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies).

The script is by Scott Rosenberg, who was involved in the “hip”-violence travesty Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead, and apparently involves a pair of troubled teens who have various misadventures while on the road to Seattle for the Cobain memorial.

Some movie-rumor websites claim it might also include “speculations” on what may or may not have happened among Cobain and his inner circle during the rocker’s last days–a plot-concept which should immediately make all of you collectively go “Ick!” or at least “Potential Ick!”

ON A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NOTE, and as I’ve hinted at in prior installments, I’ve secured the rights to my 1995 book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back from the original publisher. I’ve also arranged financing for an updated second edition, which, if all goes right, should be available from this site and in stores in October, four years after the first edition.

While I never got rich off the old book, I did become known as a Seattle-music-scene expert, at least to European magazine interviewers. Since the Dutch magazine that talked to me over a year ago, I’ve since talked to a Swiss magazine and now the Italian mag Jam.

Here’s some of what I told that publication’s writer:

• Q: The common opinion is that Seattle music evolved in a certain way because of the town’s isolation from the music industry. Now that the ‘grunge hysteria’ is over, the scene returned to a certain grade of isolation? Or maybe the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden/Alice In Chains’ success changed things forever?

  A: Things changed. There’s clubs to play at now. And experienced producers and promoters and studios and indie labels. The reason there didn’t turn out to be a “Next Seattle” (the next town for the music industry to scoop up promising acts from) was because Seattle had been more than just a source of talent. It was a nearly self-sufficient infrastructure for making and promoting music.

  And that’s what’s largely survived the music industry’s retreat.

• Q: When the so-called ‘grunge’ became hyped, the Seattle community reacted with comprehensible hostility. Is anything changed now that the media hype is over, or what you call “timidity” (‘Loser’, Introduction) still rules?

  A: A lot of people here wanted to succeed but only on their own terms. They wanted to be known as artists and/or entertainers, not as media celebrities or as fodder for MTV. The last thing some of them wanted was for their messages of anger and angst to be re-interpreted as something hot and commercial.

• Q: Seattle now and then (then=beginning of the Nineties): is the economic and social situation different? If it’s so, what are the repercussions on the music scene?

  A: A decade ago, the conventional wisdom was that economic stagnation would be permanent, that young people had no real future.

  Today, there’s lots of money flying about, much of it held by college-educated white young adults working at software and Internet companies. The young successors to yesterday’s “going nowhere generation” are now (at least some of them) among the most privileged young people America has ever produced. This new audience has influenced the nightlife scene greatly. The dance club ARO.Space and the new Cyclops restaurant/bar, to name only the most obvious examples, are shrines to the new monied youth.

  But for those without high paying cyber-careers, wages have stagnated and the cost of living has risen (especially housing, which has become ridiculously expensive with the cyber-monied people willing to pay just about anything). It’s harder to be a self-employed artistic-type person (or an artistic-type person with an undemanding day job) here; even as the social pressure rises (even in “alternative” circles) to be upbeat and positive and success-minded at all times.

• Q: Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that mass media didn’t put much emphasys on the political consequances of an underground and decentralized music community like the Seattle one. I mean, when you put under discussion the starmaking process at every level, the consequences are political, economical and social. When you say “I don’t wanna be part of it”, you’re saying that something has to change. Do you agreed? If it’s so, do you think that nowadays is still the same in the Seattle musical scene? Do you think that, in this field, the incredible success of bands like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam brought positive things? Or it was all in vain?

  A: What was initially intended by most of its musicians to be a reaction against music-industry fads became promoted by the industry and the media as just another music-industry fad. In the short term, that had the effect a conspiracy theorist might imagine: Audiences tired of the hype and, around 1996-97, turned away.

MONDAY: More of this.

ELSEWHERE: Jessica Hopper, editor of the Chicago zine Hit It or Quit It (linked here via the indie-rock portal site Insound), has a quaint glossary of indie-scene terminology. Example: “Nature Melt: Hippies dancing or gathering en masse. A: ‘We had to leave Lilith Fair early, the nature melt was out of control.'”

A YEAR OR SO AGO, we wrote about the revived interest by hip bars in bowling iconography (balls, pins, shirts, trophies).

But a revival of bowling images, we warned, didn’t necessarily mean a revival of bowling.

In the past 15 years or so, the Seattle area’s lost the Green Lake Bowl, the Lake City Bowl, Village Lanes, and Bellevue Lanes (now a Barnes and Noble!). The DV8 dance club and the Alley minimall on Broadway also stand where lanes and pinsetters once ruled.

While entertainment complexes of all shapes and sizes have sprouted around here lately, real bowling hasn’t been part of any of them.

One oft-cited reason: Those Kids Today aren’t supposed to be interested in the kegler’s art; and adults are finding it harder to keep league-bowling commitments.

A more plausible reason: Entertainment-center developers simply felt bowling couldn’t provide income-per-square-foot at the rates of, say, video games or water slides.

But now, the Jillian’s yuppie pool-hall chain wants to build Seattle’s first new bowling alley in decades. The proposed 16-lane alley would be built next door to the existing Seattle branch of Jillian’s on south Lake Union. That building now houses an outlet of the Video Only big-box retail chain, central Seattle’s only remaining consumer video-electronics store. But that joint could easily move, maybe to one of the many new retail developments downtown.

Knowing Jillian’s pool schtick, you can expect a Jillian’s bowling alley to be all fancy-schmancy and costlier than your average suburban pin palace. But as long as it’s not too gussied-up, it’d be a great step toward bringing back one of America’s greatest pastimes.

Now, if only Fox Sports Net would bring back the women’s bowling matches that had been a weekly staple of its predecessor channel Prime Sports.

Speaking of the grace of the female form in motion, clueless mass-media people went mildly agog last week when a member of the victorious U.S. Women’s World Cup team took off her jersey at the end of the match, revealing a new-model Nike sports bra that’s far more modest than what beach-volleyball women wear. For one thing, end-of-match shirt-doffing is a long tradition in men’s soccer. For another thing, I dunno about that particular player but women’s soccer has this rep of attracting women who enjoy other women’s physiques. In other words, what’s the big deal here? (The obvious answer: A lot if you’re Nike and you’d like lotsa free publicity for your new garment.)

TOMORROW: The end of Seafirst Bank as we know it?

ELSEWHERE: Thanks to nubbin.com, here are some English-language instructions on Japanese-model Pokemon character model kits:

“Our Company motto is ‘Give safe and enjoyable toys and dreams to children’. That is why we research & improve out produets all the time. This might create out toys to be slightly different from each other amony same iteu depending. On the diffarent lots. As for as out product quality is concerned we pay extre affention…

“It is advised not to take off all the parts because you may may be confused. Tske off and assemble one by one according. Some parts are point so please take care not to be hart.”