Are real men really back?

Is due respect for men and machismo really back? The girly remake of "Brian's Song" answers the question.

No.

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Before the Sept. 11 attacks, men and manliness, fathers and boys, were under attack – in pop culture and reality.

Celebrity single mothers, like Rosie O'Donnell and Camryn Manheim, told us fathers weren't necessary. Regis Philbin denigrated white males on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," begging for female contestants, and the rules were changed to get them. Female bands and singers, like Destiny's Child and Britney Spears, shoved their "Girl Power" down our throats. Even male entertainers, boy bands and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, looked like girls.

But since the attacks, everyone's lauding the "men are back" theorem. On Monday, USA Today's Life Section ran the cover story, "The Hunk Factor: Manly Men and Their Uniforms Muscle Onto the Scene." "After decades of disrespect and neglect, manly men – the kind of guys who can build a wall and knock one down, who prefer muscular Mustangs to manicured Mercedes – are suddenly chic," it gushed. Right after the attacks, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote, "Welcome Back, Duke: From the Ashes of Sept. 11 Arise the Manly Virtues."

Wrong. Men aren't really back in their rightful place, as a respected, necessary, crucial element of society. Since the attacks, prospects dimmed for male role models.

We were confronted with shows like WB's "Reba," in which the husband-father cheated with a bimbo and left and the daughter was impregnated by her dimwitted, irresponsible boyfriend. Then there was the hit song, "Oops (Hit 'Em Up Style)," by Blu Cantrell, which advocated women steal all money of a boyfriend caught cheating. "Hey ladies," go on a shopping spree with his cash, max out his credit cards. With the soothing voice of a 1940s starlet, Cantrell camouflaged the song's wicked Gloria Steinem instructions to bankrupt men, and topped the music charts for a month following the attacks. ABC's male-bashing yenta-fest, "The View" - which did a whole show on how men are dogs and need to be trained like pets - celebrated it's 1,000th show, this week.

Geraldine Fuhr, a female basketball coach at Hazel Park High School (Michigan) who successfully sued to become the men's basketball coach, took the job of the male coach. She'll make a great "father" figure. Laura Bush is in on the act, according to the Dec. 3 issue of Newsweek, objecting to the president's remark that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." According to USA Today, she was scheduled to be the first first lady to replace the president in the Saturday presidential radio address. Sounds a little too Hillary-ish.

Now, even deceased male football hero Brian Piccolo is being used as a feminist gambit with Sunday's broadcast of the re-make of "Brian's Song." The great 1971 film is hailed by many men as one of the greatest sports movies ever – a dramatic movie guys could watch. Starring macho men James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, it's the story of the friendship between Chicago Bears players Brian Piccolo and Gayle Sayers, as healthy NFL young bucks, and then, Piccolo's tragic fight with cancer. An instant classic, the film didn't focus on race – Piccolo was white, Sayers is black. It didn't need to. "We were teammates," Sayers told TV Guide. And it didn't focus on their crying wives. It focused on them and their deep friendship both on and off the field in the late '60s, before pro-athletes were overpaid, spoiled miscreants.

So why was it remade? To tell the "women's story." TV Guide reports that the remake "expands on the original to include more about Piccolo's family life, as well as the friendship between Piccolo's wife, Joy, and Sayer's wife at the time, Linda." In other words, this brilliant heroic story will now be transformed into another annoying damsel-in-distress movie-of-the-week. The ABC execs must be drooling over the residuals this movie will get from weekly showings on Lifetime and WE (n?e, the Romance Classics Network). Hello – this movie is called "BRIAN's Song," not "BRIAN'S WIFE's Song." (Sayers divorced his wife.) It stars two unknown wimpy-looking guys – exactly the kind of replacement feminists want for strong males Caan and Williams.

Emasculating this classic guys' movie into a chick flick is just another example of the sorry attempt to transform every bastion of maleness into a cross-dressing female version. And the NFL is equally guilty of feminization and wimpiness. Check out "Monday Night Football," during which "Brian's [Wife's] Song" ads are in heavy rotation. I saw one, right after reporter Melissa Stark delivered one of her irrelevant comments from the field, Monday night. Did she need to be on the field to tell us about some player's wife's encouraging notes she leaves in his lunchbox? Who cares? The wife doesn't play in the NFL anymore than Brian's wife did. Listen to Stark's other comments, stuff about players' websites and other extraneous stuff real football fans don't care about. Ditto for Dennis Miller. A recent Detroit News story quoted NFL execs saying that annoying Miller is still around because he gives guys' girlfriends and wives something to pay attention to, since they are not paying attention to the game.

Even for Noonan, her saccharine pro-male sentiment lasted only a week. Sadly, while she pens pro-male stuff in the Journal, Noonan authors pan-feminist columns for Oprah's anti-male "O Magazine" and appeared on her even more anti-male syndicated talk show, where men are buffoons and blithering idiots.

Oprah's another blatant symbol that real men are back to being the Rodney Dangerfields of our culture. Her popular show has returned to its Jerry Springer-esque Dr. Phil Tuesday shows, where bizarre, dysfunctional men – the kind rarely seen in reality – cry while yelled at by Dr. Phil, laughed at by Oprah. "Girlfriend, you need to get away from (insert cheating, insensitive, incompetent, abusive guy's name here)."

No, real men – like James Caan's Brian Piccolo – and their manly influences aren't back in style. But they should be.