Having it both ways: Two and a Half Men, Entourage, and televising post-feminist masculinity

Abstract

This article explores representations of juvenile post-feminist masculinity across two television texts: Two and a Half Men and Entourage. These programs exhibit a contradictory continuum of masculine performances allowing men to “have it both ways,” or to be both sensitive and casually sexist within contemporary culture. By detailing how similar kinds of masculinity exist across two seemingly disparate channels and television programs, this analysis also decouples automatic assumptions about representation as being primarily linked to notions of “quality” or “complex” TV emerging from cable and pay cable channels, and instead demonstrates the importance of looking for representational similarities as much as differences and distinctions across channels in order to fully understand the relational shifts between constructions of masculinity and post-feminist illogics.