MEN AREN'T DOING VERY well. In alarming numbers, we drink ourselves
sick,take drugs, work ourselves to death, run away from home, live on the
streets, kill other people, and kill ourselves. Those still alive enough
to be aware of what it feels like to be a man these days tell me they
feel lonely, isolated from other men, and peripheral to their family
while they trudge along wasting their lives in meaningless work, with
very little sense of who they are or what they are living for.
Masculinity has become a problem, not just for the men who spend
their lives in mortal struggle with its demands, but also for those who
must share the world with them. The qualities that were useful in
protecting primitive society from saber-toothed tigers have few practical
functions these days. Cities full of men stomping around flexing their
muscles and growling manly noises at one another have become our modern
jungles. Men fight for turf and wrestle for control over people and
things, whether through warfare, armed robbery, or corporate
takeovers.
Heavy doses of masculinity are unquestionably toxic. But that's not
the problem. The problem is the masculine mystique-the veneration and
exaggeration of all that is masculine. It stems not from the testicles
but from what our culture defines as masculinity, and how men develop
it.
We like to think of masculinity as biologically determined, but
most of its origins are cultural and historical and so vary from time to
time and place to place. It doesn't exist just in the mind of an
individual man; it's a view of life shared by other men.
Masculinity includes the symbols and the uniforms and the chants
and the plays that make this the boys' team rather than the girls' team.
And as a guy develops and practices his masculinity, he is accompanied
and critiqued by an invisible male chorus of all the other guys who hiss
or cheer as he attempts to approximate the masculine ideal, who push him
to sacrifice more and more of his humanity for the sake of his
masculinity, and who ridicule him when he holds back. The chorus is made
up of all of man's models of masculinity: his comrades and rivals, his
buddies and bosses, his male ancestors, and--above all--his father, who
may have been a real person in the boy's life, or who may have existed
for him only as the myth of the man who got away.
I will tell you what I know about man's battle with the masculine
mystique, from the experience of my son and nephews, my friends and
patients, but especially from my own struggle.
A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN AS A YOUNG BOY
Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails; that's what
little boys are made of.
-- ANONYMOUS
WE KNOW FROM the beginning that we're supposed to be boys, but
somehow the Y chromosome doesn't show. For the first part of our life,
the only visible sign of our maleness is a useless little peanut we're
told to keep hidden.
So we wear boy clothes and try to act like boys act. We practice
being cowboys or soldiers or football players or space jockeys when the
other boys are with us. We piss off porches, roll in the mud, and do
whatever we can think of that boys do and girls don't. We don't want to
be mistaken for girls. We avoid answering the telephone be cause our
voice isn't a man's voice and callers might think we are our mother when
we say "hello." As much as we love our mother, as much as we depend on
her, as much as we enjoy her company, we don't want to be seen with her.
We don't want anyone to think we like doing the sorts of things girls do,
so if anyone is looking, we have to act uncomfortable around Mom. We want
to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing manly things.
We go around pretending that we're big, powerful men, but our
mothers keep reminding us that we are still little boys. When we're
prepared to test our bravery against the forces of darkness in the night,
Mom tells us to brush our teeth and go to bed. Our mother treats us as if
she, not we, owned our bodies and our lives. She isn't even fazed by our
magic peanut. We're still her baby, and as much as we love that when we
need her, she can bring us back from the soaring fantasy word of
masculinity to the inglorious life of a child.
As boys, we long for our father. We wear his clothes, and literally
try to fill his shoes. Anything of his is charmed and can endow us with
his masculinity. We hang on to him, begging him to teach us how to do
whatever is masculine...to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where
he works.
But we spend so much more time with our mother that we begin to
fear she will stifle the masculinity we know we must develop, that she
will civilize us and tame us and destroy us as the wild animals we know
we must be. We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely
under the control of our mothers. We'll do anything with a man, but we
fear that femininity might be contagious, and we don't want it to rub off
on us.
We practice our masculinity, trying to develop enough of it. We
feel a bit foolish with it, like impostors, so we practice it in front of
mirrors, trying to learn how to swagger, trying to mimic the men we
admire. We always overdo it. We aren't big yet, or strong, and we can't
make our muscles grow very much, so we substitute recklessness. We take
risks, dating one another to do whatever frightens us all most: stealing
things, jumping off bridges, picking fights, or swallowing live frogs. We
talk dirty. We show 1 off for the older boys.
Tags:
alarming numbers,
armed robbery,
boys team,
chants,
corporate takeovers,
exaggeration,
father,
girls team,
heavy doses,
jungles,
male chorus,
masculine mystique,
masculinity,
mating,
meaningless work,
men,
men masculinity,
mortal struggle,
primitive society,
Puberty,
saber toothed tigers,
testicles,
time and place,
trudge,
veneration
