The scariest step in a boy's quest for manhood is sexual. Hot and
ready since puberty, he feels it is time for the twins to make it with
girls. They may not want to get close to gifts yet, but the point may be
to remove the homophobic barrier: to prove you're straight so that you
won't have to feel unmasculine in your closeness to other boys.
At first we need girls who don't scare us or threaten our budding
virility. We feel safest with smaller, weaker girls, perhaps damsels in
distress who make us feel strong and important. Yet our male chorus may
propel us toward girls who are "popular" and beautiful, trophies that
announce our masculinity to our fellows.
A virginal 15-year-old boy's wet-dream Wonder Woman might be a
beautiful, popular, undersize, slightly dim-witted, depressed,
14-year-old anorectic (with big tits), who is running away from an
abusive family.
These experiences are at least as traumatic and crucial for the
girls as for us, yet we're barely aware of our partners as we go through
this experience physically together and emotionally apart. Back in my
day, in the sexual Dark Ages when virginity was valued (for girls and
nerds) and pregnancy feared, there were a few girls who could be had; but
since they'd had boys with far more expertise than we, it took guts to
expose our amateurish efforts to their possible ridicule.
But "nice" girls set limits on where they could be touched and on
just how far the efforts could go--i.e, touching only above the waist or
through the panties, sticking it in only partway.
In those days a nice girl would try to hold on to us by holding us
off. She somehow knew that the audience for these sexual experiments was
still the other boys and the invisible male chorus, and all that we
wanted was to get in her pants, and her primary power lay in frustrating
us. How tortured we were, and how grotesquely we overvalued sex as a
result. We might have even thought we were in love with whatever girl
most maddeningly frustrated us.
MATING Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that
makes
the imagination gallop. Woman is also the element of
conflict. With whom do you argue ? With a woman, of course.
Not with a friend, because he accepted all your defects the
moment he found you. Besides, woman is mother--have we
forgotten
--MARCELLO MASTROIANNI
WE MEN NEED WOMEN for many reasons: to take care of us, to bear
children for us, to point out reality to us. Once we've passed the hurdle
of our own virginity, we don't really need women for sex. We might prefer
them, but we can do that for ourselves, and we do. Mostly we need women
to affirm our masculinity. They can do so by responding to us sexually;
by assuring us that we are strong and powerful; and by loving and
nurturing us as our reward for being masculine enough---or as our solace
if we're not.
When we choose a mate, a partner for a lifetime, should we choose
the woman who makes us feel good or the one who makes us look good to our
relentless male chorus? The chorus demands that we honor our masculinity
before we consider our comfort, our humanity, and our soul. So we must
consider which woman will make us seem more masculine--perhaps someone
younger, dumber, poorer, more scared. Or we can try for status. Or we may
protect our masculinity by clutching our balls and escaping each eligible
candidate just before the wedding bells. Can we have a real partner, or
will that just make us look pussy-whipped? Do we want a girl just like
the girl who married dear old Dad, or more like the type of girl dear old
Dad eventually ran off with?
Our ability to fall in love, to go into that most revered of sacred
insanities, requires enough comfort with our masculinity to join it with
someone's femininity and feel enhanced. In order to marry, we must find a
woman who doesn't scare us. If our mother scared us by depending upon us
too much, or because we depended on her too much, or if we felt her to be
a threat to our freedom to be men, we have to find someone very different
from her: someone less seductive or more so, less manipulative, more
direct, sexier, quieter-the opposite of whatever it is that seemed to
make our mother a threat.
But if our mother made us feel secure and proud in our masculinity,
then we want to find that again in our wife. If we are really comfortable
with our mother, we can even marry a woman who is a friend rather than an
adversary, and form a tree partnership. The boy still inside us is one of
the voices in our chorus and helps influence whether we seek either a
woman who will take care of us, a woman whom we can take care of, or, in
the best of worlds, a coupling of equals where we look after one
another.
What we need most in a mate is someone who can enable us to see and
understand all those things to which our masculinity blinds us. Dare we
find in a woman the lost part of ourselves, and by marrying become whole?
Or are we still just measuring peckers with the other boys?
LIVING WITH A WIFE Man must partly give up being a man when he
is
with womenfolk.
-- ROBERT FROST
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
