Tough love

Aaron Swan is a guy's guy.

He's a personal trainer. He drinks beer with his buds at Whiskey's on the weekends. He's a big Red Sox fan.

Jack Bauer, who tortures terrorists on the television drama ``24," is one of his heroes.

Why?

``He doesn't really follow the rules. He doesn't have time for the petty stuff," says Swan, 23, who was reading ``Now I Can Die in Peace," a book about the Red Sox World Series win, on Boston Common the other day. ``Jack Bauer does whatever he has to do to get the job done."

The man's man may have seemed MIA in recent years, overshadowed by the popularity of those polished, waxed, and groomed men known as metrosexuals. But our culture is shifting its spotlight back to the guy's guy, the everyday men who wear work boots, change their own oil, get their hair cut at barbershops, and wouldn't have the faintest idea where to get a pedicure or mud mask.

This nod to manhood can be found at the movies -- from the latest installment of ``Mission: Impossible" to the upcoming ``Superman" revival and the introduction of ``Nacho Libre," the courageous chef who transforms into a cape-crusading wrestler to rescue a Mexican orphanage -- as well as on such TV series as ``Prison Break" and ``House." The publishing industry has noticed the trend. New books, which range from a scholarly work by a Harvard professor to a frat-boy rant by a blogger to Jim Belushi's ``Real Men Don't Apologize," deal with the idea of manliness. Vince Vaughn's character in ``The Break-Up" would be a spokesman for these schlubs.

The concept is being used to sell other products, too. In Burger King's new commercial, burly men march in the street declaring, ``Eat like a man, man!" to promote the Texas Double Whopper. In the new ``Man Law" commercials for Miller Lite, a group of men including longtime macho actor Burt Reynolds sit around a table and discuss guy issues such as whether the high-five is still cool.

Bearded male models strutted the runways at this spring's New York Fashion Week. Ryan Seacrest sported a scruffier and more reserved look this season on ``American Idol," and our obsession with those rugged fishermen on the Discovery Channel's ``The Deadliest Catch" is driving the docudrama's success. The series ``Lost" is fueled by its large cast of manly men: people like Locke and Sawyer, archetypal hunter-gatherers; Jack, the leader of the pack; Michael, who is single - mindedly preoccupied with his son's well-being; and Sayid, a former torture specialist in the Iraqi Republican Guard. The hot indie rock band Man Man, whose members sport mustaches and tattoos, is so manly it had to use word twice.

Even gay culture has butched up. The guys in ``Brokeback Mountain" were rugged types. That most macho of shows, HBO's ``The Sopranos," included a story line about a gay mobster named Vito who hung out in a small New Hampshire town where all the gay men are portrayed as firefighters, jocks, and bikers.

Are we seeing a ``menaissance?"

``I grew up in an era when we kept our hair trim. It wasn't about having to prove anything to anyone. If you didn't want to shave, you didn't," says Bernard Washington , 51, as he watched ESPN while waiting for a trim at Unique Cuts in Lower Mills. Washington, a letter carrier who lives in Mattapan, says he's seen some guys go from stylish to a more relaxed look lately -- but adds he wasn't one of them. ``I'm a guy's guy," he says.

What exactly constitutes a guy's guy depends on whom you ask. He could be the guy who doesn't care much about how he looks or what he wears. He could be the man who works hard and works outs, buys his clothes at Old Navy, or drinks beer and plays poker on Friday nights. He could simply be the working man who goes home to his wife and kids every night. But it's definitely not the guy who spends $60 on a haircut, buys his clothes at Banana Republic, and subscribes to Details magazine.

It's not as if this is anything new, and it's not as though manliness ever went away. The concept has just been ``unemployed," says Harvey Mansfield , the Harvard professor who tackles the topic in his new book ``Manliness" (whose title is splashed across the jacket in big, bold, masculine letters). Mansfield says manliness has been a topic ignored in our ``gender-neutral society," one where the male impersonal pronoun ``man" has been tossed out to include women in the name of political correctness.

``We are making a society that is based as little as possible on your sex," he said. ``A man has to be a little bit embarrassed about being a man [these days]. I am trying to bring back the word `manliness'. It's not respected. It serves as a useful standard. You see instances of it as in movies or extreme sports."

Manliness, he says, is embodied in the guy who ``seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk." He's the guy who holds it together in a time of crisis and leads the way. He doesn't necessarily have to drive the nice car, but he can sure fix one.

Mansfield cites John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and Ernest Hemingway as models of manhood. Modern versions would include actor Russell Crowe and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Or someone like actor Tom Hanks, says Ken Belony , 21 , of Revere.

``He's definitely a guy's guy, because he is well groomed but not too groomed," Belony says. ``He's easygoing and laid back" -- someone you'd hang out with. Hanks happens to be on the cover of the current issue of Esquire, manning the grill with a beer in one hand, under the headline ``The Most Normal Guy in Hollywood."

Belony and his friend Peter Chen , 19, were stumped when they tried to think of a guy closer to their age who fit the man's man mold of today. ``No one in our generation is a guy's guy. In this generation you have a whole lot of variety of guy's guys or she-guys," Chen says, referring to pretty-boy actor Orlando Bloom. ``It's an older guy's thing."

A lack of young poster boys for today's man inspired George Ouzounian, who goes by the name of Maddox, to write ``The Alphabet of Manliness," which he hopes will signal ``the death of the effeminate man," he said, jokingly. His book is a lighthearted A-to-Z guide of what men like. It's an inflammatory read with a misogynistic tone. The cover depicts a he-man type punching a giant gorilla.

``I think a lot of guys are looking back to their fathers and thinking you don't see a lot of that today," said Ouzounian , 28, who lives in Salt Lake City and has a popular (and politically incorrect) website, which is modestly called ``The Best Page in the Universe." ``I speak more for my generation than my father's."

Ouzounian considers his father to be the guy cut from that traditional man's man cloth. His father s erved in the Army, fixed cars, and had dirty nails. Ouzounian also thinks of actors like Kirk Douglas, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, or even Tim Allen, who starred as a fixer-upper in the sitcom ``Home Improvement."

To Cambridge chef Jim Fahey , manliness boils down to substance over style -- and style is something he admits to having little of.

``A guy who goes to work everyday and raises his family -- it's taking care of your responsibilities. You don't have to primp to be a guy," says Fahey, who wears boots to work. ``The main concern I have is that I have pants on in the morning. If I have a black and white sock on, I'm happy. That's the renaissance man that I am."

Johnny Diaz can be reached at jodiaz@globe.com.