There's a longish essay on the American male's lack of charm by Benjamin Schwarz over at the Atlantic. It's one of those fun-to-write-and-impossible-to-disprove essays—charm is pretty hard to define and discussions about who possess it are, as a result, relatively nebulous—but it works well as a discussion-starter. Here's my contribution: societal forces have worked to actively punish charm.
Schwarz writes:
Women commonly complain about the difficulty in gaining any conversational purchase when, say, trying to engage the fathers of their children’s classmates or the husbands of their tennis partners. The woman will grab from her bag of conversational gambits—she’ll allude to some quotidian absurdity or try to form a mock alliance in defiance of some teacher’s or soccer coach’s irksome requirement. But the man doesn’t enter into the give-and-take. The next time they meet, it’s as though they’ve never talked before; the man invariably fails to pick up the ball, and any reference the woman might make to a prior remark or observation falls to the ground.
Allow me to suggest that part of this paucity of suavity stems from the weaponization of gender relations. Men can be excused for feeling uncomfortable casually bantering with women because men can never be sure what will be taken in good humor and what will be considered a grave offense. In the workplace setting this pressure is even more intense and the stakes higher, with lawsuits for casual comments a real fear. It's better to shut down entirely than risk incurring the wrath of HR (or an aggrieved husband whose wife complains about your back and forth after the fact).
Another factor, of course, is that we're all remarkably self-centered at this point. As Schwarz writes:
Even in the most casual conversation, men are too often self-absorbed or mono-focused or—more commonly—guarded, distracted, and disengaged to an almost Aspergerian degree. ... Of course, all of these social and cultural shifts, which are themselves inimical to charm, are rooted in a more basic change—the ever-widening infection of social relations by market values. That development, whether good or ill, indisputably makes for blunter and more crudely utilitarian manners. After all, in a way, charm is just small talk.
I'm not sure I'd blame it on "market values" so much as an older vice: simple solipsism. With the rise of social networks and social media and social connections, many people feel forced to maximize the limited amount of time to impress and/or pump for information the most important person in the room—who can do the most for me here? I've lost track of the number of times I've caught people scanning the room for an important conversation to latch on to even as we chat.* You can almost see the mental calculations: "OK, this guy blogs for the Post. And that gal writes for Gawker. Is that the new wonk on the scene? I think so. He's got, like, 30,000 Twitter followers!"
In such a setting charm is, honestly, not worth the effort. And that's a shame.
*Granted, this may be due to my dearth of charm. I can be a real bore.