ABSTRACT
Don Draper's was an existential crisis about the meaning of masculinity in a pre-feminist world dominated by male privilege. The male bromance in The League reflects a version of masculinity in which male dominance manifests as verbal jousting and the elevation of a seemingly trivial fantasy football league to a hyperbolic extension of masculine identity. Narratives of masculinity show the absurdity of simplistic accounts of history, but also demonstrate how ubiquitous such simplistic narratives are in popular accounts of the recent past. Fatherhood is one of the subject positions that constitute masculinity, and specific iterations of fatherhood deeply inform traditional versions of masculinity. Adam Shackler maintains a similarly ambivalent relationship in his performance of masculinity. Louie works to trouble the hegemonic assumptions about gender and sexuality that serve as the foundation for the nice guy/asshole dichotomy. The episode begins with Louie catching his twelve-year-old daughter smoking pot at a New York street festival.
