Ageing Masculinity in NYPD Blue: A Spectacle of Incontinence, Impotence, and Mortality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Incontinence and Impotence For the masculine ego the body can be used to draw a defensive line between inside and outside. So long as there is very little fat, tensed muscle and tight sinew can give a hard, clear outline to the body. Flesh and bone can pass itself off as a kind of armour. A hard body will ensure that there are no leakages, across the edges between inner and outer worlds. Nature, it seems, has betrayed the perimeter of the male body. It has opened up there a number of gaps and orifices, though mercifully fewer than the female body. What holes remain must be firmly shut…. Tensed, the whole frontier can be kept on red alert.—Anthony Easthope (qtd. in Buchbinder 133–34) In the popular US police drama NYPD Blue, the invulnerable “citadel” of the male body is being stormed both from the inside and from the outside. The masculinity “red alert” is certainly on, the armour is being peeled off, leakages occur, and penises are dysfunctional on prime-time television. As vulnerability, uncertainty, and mortality are foregrounded, one of the key male bodies on display is revealed as profoundly human, rather than idealized. Indeed, it could be argued that NYPD Blue contains a fascinating exploration of the crisis of humanity metamorphosed into a mortality crisis of a plump middle-aged male detective with prostate problems, incontinence, and impotence. While the “masculine” is still being framed problematically as the “universal” here, the shifts and differences represented within this particular manifestation of hegemonic masculinities warrant close mapping from a feminist perspective.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".