The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism

Norman Mailer's 1984 detective novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, this paper argues, is an allegorical satire on the politics of the Reagan eighties and its codes of masculinity. Taking as its starting point Kate Millett's feminist assertion that Mailer "always seems to understand what's the matter with masculine arrogance, but he can't give it up," this paper contends that Tough Guys Don't Dance encodes masculinity as a form of addiction. The addiction of masculinity is played through an analysis of the novel's identification of differing masculine language games. The revenge plot of Mailer's detective tale of buried heads in the marijuana patch is read as a satire of the eighties twin backlashes against feminism and the sixties. Set in Cape Cod's Provincetown, the novel's tough guy plot is also entangled in early AIDS crisis.