Florida Man, the cliched figment of the liberal imagination and an object of constant mockery and memeification, has long been derided by elites. The website floridaman.com catalogs all news headlines beginning with the two-word phrase followed by something swampily insane. The Florida Man Reddit page has 734,000 followers, and an unrelated Florida Man Twitter half that. On the cover of the Florida Man “adult coloring book,” a guy in an American flag cape guzzles beer in his jean short cutoffs while stepping across a dirty pond full of alligators. Just think: For a mere $7.99, you could order this adult coloring book, break out the colored pencils, and show the world what a rube looks like.
But Florida Man is much more than what he is made out to be. There’s no doubt that there’s a Floridian ethos relating to an affection for sun and surf and the attendant lifestyle choices that accompany living in a state with excellent weather for the better part of the year. But the idea that men from Florida are, on the whole, crazier or more prone to partake in mischievous criminality than their Midwestern or Southern brethren is an artifact of — get this — the state’s unusually transparent government records laws. Eat your heart out, Rebekah Jones. The state’s Sunshine Act (as in, “…is the best disinfectant”) makes crime and booking reports public for media perusal.
Any state’s arrest records will turn up wacky and outrageous behaviors. That’s why someone is being arrested. But the mythos of the Florida Man meme is a projection enabled by such a rich trove of clickworthy reports that can satisfy the elite media’s desire for stories starring downwardly mobile red-state rubes provided by the Sunshine Act. News producers looking to fill empty news slots with cringe-inducing content about some nonelite “other” certainly trawl Florida state databases on Monday mornings in hopes of finding a suitable Florida man to embarrass and frame as the week’s “Florida Man.”
They yearn to discover the Florida Man holy grail, such as the guy who walked into a convenience store cradling an alligator, but any incident of drunken debauchery will do. Perhaps a Pensacola old-timer hits the bottle a little too hard, or perhaps there’s something involving the antics of a face-tatted South Florida rapper jacked up on the latest synthetic street drug. The meme must be born, and reborn. Florida, the third-largest state in the country, is home to an exquisitely diverse cast of characters, which makes finding a Floridian who’s momentarily fallen on hard, hilarious times that much easier. The truth, of course, is that if things had played out a little differently and another state with a penchant for good, old American ruckus, which is to say, every state, had a Sunshine Act of its own, we could very easily be talking about the ignominious acts of Ohio Man or Rhode Island Man or even Delaware Man. What happens in Delaware, anyway?
The Florida Man meme selects the fringier, more anti-social elements in the state and attempts to frame the totality of Floridians as gator-toting loons. But what’s most lately interesting about the phenomenon, as a Florida man myself, is how the term has been reappropriated in recent years by a more “sensible” middle-class and upwardly mobile demographic. The shift was incremental and mostly attributable to higher-status Floridians growing tired of the elite media mocking the state. The result has been an affected Florida Man aesthetic that plays off the ridiculousness of the Florida Man meme. This isn’t to say that status-anxious Floridian strivers consider Florida Man their intrastate kin, but in attempting to rehabilitate the state’s image, a tenuous understanding has been reached: It’s us against the rest of the country.
The Florida Man aesthetic favored by the upwardly mobile Floridian is heavy on an affected kitschiness that launders the grit and the grime usually associated with Florida Man, resulting in an ironic and socially acceptable variation of the meme. The updated version of Florida Man usually presents as a youngish conservative bro, not unlike a “barstool conservative,” who enjoys watersports and has a great appreciation for mediocre country music acts such as Luke Bryan. This new Florida Man, whose frat-boy attire betrays the fact that he works a cushy office job, has always been a Florida fixture. But as the state became a source of elite media obsession and ridicule, even pre-pandemic, he leaned into a persona that turned up the volume on the more flamboyant Floridian elements of his personal style and demeanor. Flip-flops and cutoff shorts, which had previously been stylistic choices necessitated by the state’s warm weather, now take on a more symbolic meaning. In these pandemic times, stories about the original Florida Man have been steadily replaced by stories of his well-behaved, yet presentably trashy, second cousin twice removed: New Florida Man.
Florida Man has been gentrified. Perhaps this New Florida Man didn’t get a DUI in his everglades fanboat, but he is a #covidiot. He might not go on a bender and tote around reptiles, but he will take his family to Disney World during a pandemic and demand that his children attend in-person school. The horror! He is a more respectable menace, but a menace he still is. Mock him!
The embodiment of the New Florida Man is Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s come to national prominence by basically playing up the kitschy Florida Man shtick of his citizenry. When the media and other assorted Florida haters attacked the state for its supposedly lax pandemic policies, DeSantis embraced the attention, grew into himself as a politician in the process, and framed Florida as “the free state of Florida.” The spirit of the original Florida Man meme animates such products like the recently released golf balls the box of which is emblazoned with the following politically incorrect phrase: Florida’s governor has a pair.
Florida, with its terrific weather and business-friendly pandemic policies, was always going to be a state that attracted blue-state expats in droves, but there’s no doubt that the rebranding of the Florida Man aesthetic has played a huge role in the continual migration — Floridians aren’t idiots. You’re an idiot for not basking in Florida’s sense of sanity, for not being in on the joke, for not heading down to the beach, where business is booming and “normalcy” returned a long time ago. The state is no longer merely a retiree mecca or an outpost for eccentric weirdos looking to drop out of society but the hip and cool place to be.
What’s been fascinating and hilarious to me as a longtime Florida man is how quickly new arrivals have adapted to Florida, which is to say that they adopt the new Florida Man persona and style right away. Walking around Miami, I’m surrounded by sunburned blue-staters wearing boat shoes and pastel linen shirts. In previous years, these New Yorkers or Californians would’ve been immediately slotted as tourists, but now, they’ve taken on a far more hilarious form: memes in progress. As new arrivals, they’re calibrating their new personas, which is always the case when one adopts a new home, but it’s been something to watch them fine-tune their levels of “Florida-ness”; they’ll tinker, perhaps removing the linen shirt and throwing on a Tampa Bay Bucs jersey if they’re feeling especially low-brow, in a kitschy way, of course. But the irony is not lost on me that many of these new arrivals who are fashioning themselves as New Florida Men were the very same elitists who only a few years ago were laughing at Florida Man.
Be careful overusing a meme you don’t understand lest you become one yourself.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
