What are America's "Manliest" Cities?

Y'all know I'm a nerd and I love lists!  Last week Mars released their 2011 "America's Manliest Cities" rankings. Nashville ousted Charlotte to reclaim the title of "America's Manliest City," and I'm fairly sure that a certain David French had something to do with this development. 

The "America's Manliest Cities" study takes 50 major metropolitan areas and ranks them from manliest to least manly. The study compiles manly metrics of each city like the number of home improvement stores, steak houses, manly occupations and motorcycles per capita. But just like a high concentration of construction workers can boost a city's manly measure, an excess of cupcake shops and fancy furniture stores can hurt a city's rank. This year Los Angeles ranked dead last, deposing Portland, Ore. who owned the nefarious title of "Least Manly City" in 2010.

Here are a few highlights from this manly study: 

    * Nashville can thank its love of rodeo events, pickup trucks and home improvement for its #1 ranking as the Music City dominated the "manly lifestyle" category.

    * Although Minneapolis only ranked 36th, Sergeant Slaughter listed the snowy city as his #1 choice for the manliest city citing, "Do you know how hard it is to chop a hole big enough for your boat to go ice fishing?" Look for ice fishing as a potential new category in 2012.

    * Don't tell your friends in Boston, but despite landing in the bottom half of the rankings, New York City ranked #1 in the "sports" category.

    * Cupcake shops run rampant in San Francisco! The City by the Bay has the most cupcake shops per capita of any city in the study and lost points in the "manly kryptonite" category.

    * When discussing the manly mess that is Los Angeles, standup comedian Judy Gold said, "It's very manly if you like tanning beds, botox and low cal mojitos."

Check out the entire list!