ABSTRACT
The differences between Travis Henderson and David Howard point up two competing views about the effects of a steady income on masculinity. One has its locus classicus in Kerouac’s On the Road, of which Manohla Dargis writes, “Fast cars, whisky, women, a few last, soiled dollars – the hipster’s journey was the pleasure principle on wheels” (16). Potently sexual, Road Man embodies that modern form of masculinity that Jeff Hearn identifies as “founded on speed and fragmentary, fleeting images” (198). A man on a passenger plane can conquer time and space much faster, but it’s the fact that the man behind the wheel or on the bike is generating that speed, steering those curves, and deciding which exit ramp to take that gives his journey its phallic frisson. Dargis’s phrase “few, last soiled dollars” sums up the discontinuity between this masculine potency and gainful employment. In On the Road those “soiled” dollars are usually begged, borrowed, or stolen (often from women). Jobs, when held, are in marginal occupations (security guard, parking lot attendant), temporary in duration, and performed slackly.
