At a moment of rapid social change in which gender norms are being challenged, it was predictable that conservatives would begin warning of a new “crisis of masculinity” — practiced as they are in fomenting backlash to trends that unsettle their traditionalist base.That makes this a good time to consider one emblem of manhood that has fascinating implications for gender and politics: the pickup truck.Nineteen years ago, then-presidential candidate Howard Dean caused some controversy when he said that Democrats needed to appeal to “guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.” While he was accused of stereotyping Southerners as Confederate sympathizers, no one questioned the idea that Democrats had a serious deficit with the pickup demographic.Since then, a significant divide has opened up between what pickups symbolize and who’s actually buying them — a divide that says a lot about the place of geography and masculinity in a country that grows more urbanized with each passing year.While some people still buy trucks for work, the pickup has also become a luxury item that carries in its bed a cargo of ideas about rural culture and manhood, enabling men to spend as much as $100,000 on an identity that may have little to do with their actual lives.
I spoke about this with Mark Metzler Sawin, a historian at Eastern Mennonite University who has given serious thought to the meaning of the pickup truck in America.Its popularity, he notes, took off as the number of people who need one for work — farmers, for example — was steadily declining.More Americans than ever are employed in service industries and jobs that involve working at computers all day.
At the same time, men’s dominant position in the culture is under constant challenge.
They remain atop society’s hierarchy — 91 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives are men this year, as are 41 of 50 governors and 76 of 100 senators.But women are making more and more progress toward equality in high-status jobs in business, law, medicine and plenty of other fields.Meanwhile, today’s cultural debate around gender often characterizes old-fashioned masculinity as something dangerous and harmful.Conservative men in particular watch with horror the denigration of “everything that their grandpa did and was praised for,” the traditional habits and obligations of manhood, says Sawin.“The same impulse that caused people to vote for Trump,” Sawin says, “is also what is causing them to continue to buy pickup trucks: this frustration that the world changed, and it changed in a way that made my life worse — or at least made me less powerful.” Which brings us to how pickups are marketed: by placing power at the core of their appeal.In the most common type of pickup ad, the truck is presented as a work machine that gives the man who drives it almost limitless power.
“A man will ask a lot of his truck,” says the rough-hewn voice of Sam Elliott over scenes of pickups traversing dusty landscapes and job sites in one ad for Ram trucks .“Can it tow that? Haul this? Make it all the way over the top of that? Well isn’t it nice to know that the answer will always be: Hell, yes !” The truck makes you strong and capable, up for any challenge.
Does it make you a man? Hell, yes! That idea of the pickup as a tool for work — especially agricultural work — goes back to its beginnings.The first production pickup truck, the Ford Model TT , debuted in 1917 as a vehicle that would allow farmers who were already using their Model T’s for farm work to haul bigger loads.Its roots in rural American work remain central to its marketing, even if rural people are no longer the target customers.That imagery is meant to evoke a kind of manhood that embodies self-reliance, competence, mastery over the environment and a physicality most men have no need for in their day-to-day lives.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the symbolic place of pickups in the rural ethos.There are so many country songs about pickups — from “Truck Yeah” to “If My Truck Could Talk” — they constitute their own subgenre.Of course, like pickups, country music may be rooted in rural America and popular there, but it is consumed by people everywhere.More recent truck marketing uses rural imagery to evoke masculine virtues that you can capture no matter who you are, where you live or what you do for a living.
As Sawin told me, once the auto companies realized the rural market for pickups was saturated, “they still needed to sell more trucks.So they really start[ed] to turn to targeting the suburban White man.” Those may be primarily conservatives, but liberals could constitute a fruitful market as well.In one television ad , a diverse cast of people, including a young Black woman riding a subway, sings “Thank God I’m a country boy.” It’s a kind of double bank shot whose main target may be urban and suburban liberals who feel the urge to buy a truck but need to be convinced that it can be integrated into their worldview.But men are still the primary audience, and sometimes the marketing comes right out and tells them that getting a truck will make them more handsome, strong and appealing to women.
Look closely at the most popular trucks today, and you’ll notice that in many cases the bed — the part that’s useful for work — has gotten significantly shorter, even as the trucks have gotten taller and more imposing.While it’s still possible to buy a truck with an eight-foot bed that will hold a full sheet of plywood, the beds on most trucks have shrunk to make room for larger, more comfortable back seats.The bench seats up front were long ago replaced by comfortable bucket seats, and today’s trucks are outfitted with all the comforts and infotainment options one could want.What you end up with is a luxury vehicle that happens to have a bed in the back — but might not be that useful on a farm.
Unsurprisingly, most owners aren’t using their trucks the way actors do in the TV ads.As a marketing executive told an automotive website in 2019, according to industry data, “75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never).Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less.
And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling … once a year or less.” Owners do, however, cite their desire to “present a tough image” and “have their car act as [an] extension of their personality” as reasons to own a pickup.Many of these luxury vehicles have luxury prices, too.The 2023 Ford F-150 Limited has an MSRP of just under $85,000, before options.Searching in my area on Cars.com , I found many F-150s selling for over $100,000.And people with no need to haul hay to the back 40 are willing to pay that much.
The three top-selling vehicles in America last year were pickups: the Ford F-series, the Ram pickup and the Chevy Silverado — the same three that have held the top rankings for years .Like political parties, marketers of consumer goods sell us not just products but also emblems of identity.
Pickup owners can now be found everywhere, so if there is a “crisis of masculinity,” it may not be all on the political right.But it will definitely sell a lot of trucks..
