Category Archive for ‘Men and Masculinity’ at Hugo Schwyzer

Archive for the 'Men and Masculinity' Category

Of opprobrium and cavemen: slightly updated

Published

on August 16, 2010

in Men and Masculinity and Men's Movement

. 10 Comments

I’m a fan of the Good Men Project, a multi-platform initiative started by Tom Matlack that features a webzine, a documentary film, and a very interesting book that I recommend with enthusiasm. I’ve been critical, too, of what strikes me as Tom’s occasional reluctance to see that men’s best opportunity to become fully human is tied inextricably to the liberation of women, a point that was discussed at length here.

At the Good Men Project site, there’s a lot of affirmation of the good that men do, and that’s fine. We all need reminders of our essential decency. But where I think Tom and I disagree is about the nature of masculinity itself. Based on what I’ve read, Tom (and he’s by no means alone in this) believes that while the masculine ideal needs to be reformed and updated and humanized, it is still fundamentally redeemable. I’m not nearly so sure, suspecting that a more thorough dismantling of gender constructs is necessary. In other words, I’m interested in creating a society filled with Good People of all biological sexes, a culture in which one’s plumbing need have no more bearing on one’s behavior and outlook than one’s eye color. That doesn’t mean the end of gender roles, but it means the end of limiting folks to one such role based upon their genitalia.

Tom and his fellow writers tend to shy away from discussions of male privilege, perhaps knowing what a “turn-off” that very phrase is to the sorts of guys whom they are trying to woo as readers and community members. After all, it is axiomatic that a great many men have a very hard time seeing the privilege that they possess merely by virtue of being men, irrespective of race and class. When trying to reach men, it’s often tempting to avoid the charged word “privilege” and emphasize instead the heavy burden that comes with masculinity. It’s a good gimmick for doing men’s work, as I’ve seen in men’s groups a gazillion times over the last twenty-five years. But the discussion of the “yoke of manhood” needs to avoid the implication of false equivalence and the suggestion that men’s burden is heavier than or at least the same as the one that women bear. That’s the trickiest part of doing this work, but it’s vital. No one likes the suggestion of his own complicity in a what is, in a very real sense, a Great Crime. But cutting all of us free of what the wonderful Allan Johnson calls the gender knot requires that we not only accept that suggestion, but acknowledge its fundamental truth.

In the end, I suspect my differences with the Good Man Project are more about nuance than anything else. I admire what Tom and his collaborators are doing, and I think it’s important and needed work. And I winced in familiar recognition when I read his piece in the Huffington Post last week responding to the outpouring of hostility that greeted an article on the Good Men Project in the the Boston Globe. What Tom and his colloborators got was the usual sort of homophobic, misogynistic, chest-thumping, “men are just fine the way they are, damn it” responses.

As I’ve written before, and as most men who do anti-sexist work know well, antipathy runs deep and strong towards men who do challenge traditional masculinity. There are three chief attacks:

1. These male critics of masculinity are gay. Of course, as we all know, the charge of male homosexuality is less about same-sex desire and more about femininity, less about the hatred of male-male sex and more about contempt for women. “Gay”, in this sense, isn’t used to mean “a man attracted to other men,” it’s used to mean “a male who isn’t a real man.” Hence the suggestion, repeated endlessly, that male critics of masculinity “grow a pair.”

2. Male critics of traditional masculinity are in thrall to women. Sometimes, the charge is that these male feminist allies are wolves in sheep’s clothing using “sensitivity” as a predatory sexual strategy. Sometimes, the charge is that they are “pussy-whipped” by wives or girlfriends, desperate for female approval.

3. Men who do what Tom and I and others do are often told we’re filled with self-loathing, tinged with a desire for revenge. The armchair Neanderthal pychologists suggest that we were beta (or perhaps even omega) males as boys, the sort who were always tormented by the alphas. As a result, the theory goes, we grew up with a hatred of “real men”, and thus allied ourselves with feminists in order to undermine the system that made us so miserable.*

I’ve heard it all since I first publicly called myself a feminist (in Mr. Lyon’s History class in eleventh grade in 1983). I can assure Tom that the comments he got can get much uglier. (I’ve only received one death threat that I thought worth reporting, but the fear was real and memorable. For a sample, google my name and the word “mangina”.) Tom seems to know this, and knows it’s all worth it too. He cites one comment he received:

A reader with the handle “Da-Caveman” wrote to reassure me, “As a caveman…my first instinct is to be negative and scoff at men exploring areas that are uncomfortable to us cavemen. When my wife buys me a new shirt…I immediately do not like it…it makes me uncomfortable…When I hear new music…I generally do not like it…it takes time for cavemen to become comfortable with new things. The thunder you hear in the distance is the sound of all the educated, hardworking women that can make a living just as easy as us cavemen. The world is a changing…but we still have football. Keep up the good work, Tom, and keep dragging us out of our caves.”

That rings right to me. I’ve known my share of cavemen. Some are little more than boys. It is for them — and for the women in their lives — that we gotta keep “dragging them out.” The trick, of course, is to do this work while avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of self-pity and macho swagger. We have to do our best to embody this new masculine paradigm, which means that when we are getting a lot of heat, we should neither deny the reality of the hurt nor make it a woman’s responsibility to comfort and reassure us. That can be tough sometimes. But as we know, persisting in the face of derision and scorn to carry an often unpopular message is part of what it means to live as a bold ~~man~~ human being.

*UPDATE: My friends Steven and Michael gave me some gentle pushback on this. So let me say that for some of us, there’s some truth in the second part of this charge, though men who do this work come from across the spectrum in terms of their experiences of their own childhood popularity. Any worthwhile model for masculinity, of course, is one that doesn’t allow the alphas to torment those boys represented by the other letters of the Greek alphabet.

All on the same team: why fighting for feminism and for men’s authentic liberation is not a zero-sum game

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on July 13, 2010

in Feminism and Men and Masculinity

. 9 Comments

Sometimes, I get lost in the safe and familiar tropes of academic rhetoric, to wit this from my closing paragraph in yesterday’s post:

…men who long to shed the straitjacket would do well to work alongside feminists in common cause to dismantle the institutions that sustain and promote rigid gender rules

To which Lisa Hickey, Tom Matlack’s colleague on the Good Men Project, responded:

that’s the point I want to make to you, Hugo, – and with Tom as well. Is it really that men need to band together to “dismantle institutions that sustain and promote rigid gender rules?” Man, THAT sounds hard. Or is it – instead – to have thoughtful conversations like these where people are allowed to say: “This is my view of the world. Right or wrong, this is what I see. Help me solve the problems we can solve today, here and now, the specific solvable problems that make life better for everyone.”

Lisa’s right. Talk of “dismantling institutions” smacks of airy theorizing in the safe confines of the classroom. It does sound hard, it sounds mysterious, it sounds like too much damn work with too little viable payoff. She’s right that we need to have conversations, and that we need to make ourselves clear in language that connects with real people’s real lives.

One way we fight to give men a new freedom to live outside of the masculine straitjacket is to enlist men in the feminist cause. I know that to many, perhaps Tom and Lisa, that sounds like subordinating men’s legitimate needs to those of their sisters and wives. But it’s not a zero-sum game. The point that feminists have been making is that feminism is a vehicle for human liberation. Women who are empowered are women who have the freedom to say “no”. And women who have the freedom to say “no” are women whose “yes” can more fully be trusted. So many of our unreasonable demands upon men are linked to myths about women’s frailty and vulnerability; the less women require men for their protection, the more women are free to choose men for love and companionship. This doesn’t mean that feminism is a ticket for men to abandon responsibility, but it does mean that feminism offers men the opportunity to be more than a strong, silent meal ticket.

What does this look like in practice? In March 2008, I went to the Women, Action, and Media conference in Cambridge, Mass. I listened to a young pro-feminist man from Canada, Derek, ask a simple question to a group of panelists speaking on women in contemporary journalism. What, Derek wanted to know, could men do to confront the still very much extant “old boy’s network.” I wrote him an answer in the form of a blogpost: Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do. The post was about the tactics a young male in the corporate world could adopt to stay out of the “boy’s network”. Since Derek was a passionate young feminist, I didn’t need to “sell” him on the reasons why he should want to.

But the thing is, the road to men’s liberation also lies in refusing to play the familiar games. It is the Old Boys’ Network, after all, that fosters the culture of workaholism that makes it nearly impossible for fathers to both climb the corporate ladder and to be involved closely in the lives of their children. It is the Old Boys’ Network that suggests that loyalty to company and career needs to trump loyalty to family and friends. The Old Boys’ Networks — which exist in academic institutions as well as in the corporate and military worlds, as I continue to see over and over again — promise those who join a sense of cameraderie. You get a group of guys to drink with, compete with, talk about football with, complain (at least obliquely) about your wives and girlfriends with. But you rarely get real friends whom you can trust. The Old Boys’ Networks create a culture of competitiveness, quiet desperation, and silent, private addiction. They harm women by reinforcing the glass ceiling, and they harm their male members by codifying a stifling and rigid code of gender conformity.

Refusing to join the Old Boys’ Networks, wherever they are found, is just one example of where men’s liberation and the feminist cause intersect. By forming friendships with both men and women (yes, Virginia, men and women can be real friends without sexual attraction causing disruption), by building non-hierarchical allegiances with people who share one’s commitments to leading a balanced life, by, if nothing else, starting one conversation about the crushing binds of sexist expectations that limit us all — by doing any of this, we begin to transform everything.

This is not a zero-sum game, people. It’s not empty theorizing in the college seminar. This is real, practical stuff. I am a feminist ally, yes. I am a man who knows first-hand how trying to live up to a masculine ideal brought nothing but ruin and misery into my life and the lives of those who loved me. I do not hate my maleness, but I refuse to be confined by the rules that proscribe a whole set of possibilities to me merely because I have a penis and a prostate. Feminism wasn’t created to liberate me, but liberate me it has, and countless other men as well. When we shatter the glass ceiling for women, when we loose the straps on the masculine straitjacket so that men can be fully human, when we create a world where biology has damn all to do with destiny, then we are all free in the deepest and most meaningful sense. We are all on the same team.

This is everybody’s fight, regardless of color or class or creed. Or chromosome.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us”: on not blaming wives and kids for male unhappiness

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on July 12, 2010

in Men and Masculinity and Working

. 28 Comments

I have a lot of respect for Tom Matlack, founder of the Good Men Project. I honor his tremendous efforts to create dialogue among men about what’s really going on in our hearts and minds; the essays in his self-published book are well worth reading. We need more Tom Matlacks in the world.

At the same time, I want to push back — gently — against something Tom wrote last month in this Huffington Post piece: Rethinking Manhood: The New Feminist Project?

I’m all for introducing a discussion of masculinity into feminist spaces. I was on a panel at last fall’s National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Atlanta on exactly that topic, and I’ll be speaking on another similar panel on men and anti-sexist activism at this year’s NWSA in Denver. Men and feminism is a subject near and dear to me, so I read Tom’s post with more than the usual interest.

But though I agreed with Tom’s basic point that men need to talk to each other more, this paragraph troubled me:

…the media are still consumed with the old feminist battle cry, to the exclusion of the predicament of boys and men. Maybe guys need to complain more publicly about how hard it is to be a good father and husband, and still bring home the bacon. Maybe we should have our own cable network — not for ultimate fighting or pornography, but for guys to talk about trying to do it all while the wife, kids, and boss expect more than ever.

First of all, to the extent that the media focuses at all on feminism, it does so with a mixture of hostility and derision. The idea that the mainstream press carries water for the feminist agenda is risible; indeed, even the so-called “liberal” news outlets tend to spend very little time focusing on feminism except to lampoon it. But perhaps what Tom means is that the media celebrate women’s breakthroughs into traditionally male spaces, while spending very little time discussing the crushing burden of successfully occupying those spaces. That is a worthwhile topic for discussion.

But the real problem, of course, is that both men and women live and work in a system that was designed and is maintained by men. Wealthy men, yes, but men nonetheless. When men complain about being overwhelmed by the demands of wives and bosses and children, they are complaining about a system that men themselves erected. When women complain about the old boy’s network (which still thrives in many public and private institutions today) they do so as outsiders; even affluent white women are still outsiders in a world where women make up 51% of the population and 17% of the US Senate. When men complain about the crushing burden of expectation, they do so as (to use one of my favorite expressions from Twelve Step programs) “architects of their own adversity.”

It’s not little girls who taught little boys that “real men don’t cry.” It’s usually not mothers, either. The dreadful straitjacket of masculinity is put on by other men, by fathers and teachers and coaches and bosses and frat brothers and drill sergeants and peers. While some young women are taught to eroticize the young men who wear that straitjacket with apparent effortlessness, it’s a huge mistake to assume that female desire or expectation is anything more than an ancillary factor in the adoption of the masculine code. As Michael Kimmel and others have pointed out, what drives American men is the craving for “homosocial approval” — the longing for the approbation of, older, more powerful males.

It is absolutely true that wearing the straitjacket of masculinity makes most men miserable in the end; many do lead the lives of “quiet desperation” that Thoreau described more than a century and a half ago. For most of these men, that straitjacket doesn’t feel like a choice, as they learned to wear it when they were little boys. Many of these men blame women for demanding that their husbands wear it, some blame their kids, some blame their bosses. Some blame themselves. But the real culprit isn’t individual men, and it certainly isn’t women or children. The real culprit is the “man code”, a set of rules created and transmitted by men through generations.

Both men and women suffer, but they don’t suffer equally. As Robert Jensen and many others have pointed out, the reason a woman can’t walk safely in a parking lot at night and the reason her boyfriend can’t cry in front of his friends are the same: fear of men. But the cost of not being able to cry is hardly comparable to the cost of rape and the fear of sexual violence. It’s false equivalence to suggest that the fear of being ridiculed as insufficiently manly and the fear of being raped and killed are remotely the same. Those who claim that “the patriarchy hurts men too” need to remember that the potential injuries are rarely as severe.

Yes, men die more often in combat (at least as soldiers) than do women. But men tend to be the ones who started these wars, be they on the global stage or on the mean streets of the inner city. They started these battles not infrequently because of an unwillingness to consider compromise, or because of a hypermasculine, hyperfragile sense of honor. Those who die die at the hands of other men, just as women who are raped and killed in war are raped and killed by men. The homicidal impulse is pretty closely correlated with the masculine code.

Both men and women benefit when men wriggle free from the straitjacket. It’s good and appropriate to bring men and women together to discuss ways to help men extricate themselves, and to strategize to raise a generation of boys who are less confined than their fathers and grandfathers. But we can’t do that while we continue to believe that the expectations of “the wife and the kids” created that straitjacket. Women didn’t force us into this bind anymore than our innocent children did. To suggest that they are somehow to blame for male confusion, insecurity, or inarticulateness is to woefully misunderstand the genesis of the problem.

Rather than saying “hey, what about us guys?”, and demanding that feminism shift its gaze towards soothing male insecurities, men who long to shed the straitjacket would do well to work alongside feminists in common cause to dismantle the institutions that sustain and promote rigid gender rules. Men must remember the famous line from Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic: We have met the enemy, and he is us. Until men accept that responsibility, no authentic progress is possible.

“I’d be more nurturing if I thought it would get me laid”: how the straitjacket of masculinity is reframed as women’s fault

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on June 14, 2010

in Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Science, Sexuality and Working

. 157 Comments

In a comment below last Thursday’s post on the myth of male inflexibility, SamSeaborn wrote:

…mating, at least in the early stages, is dominated by female choice, and women do have a tendency to prefer doers, not feelers as partners. Sure masculinity and feminity are ever-adjusting, but the problem at this point is, it seems to me, that masculinity is squeezed between an expanding concept of feminity (the best man for the job may be the woman) and the reality “on the ground” that forces most men to compete more intensely for the fewer places “in the sun” because, put in overly simplified terms, it’s those men most women seem to be interested in. I’m not saying men have no power in sexual negotiations, but those who have tend to be the ones who are in scarce supply, and that’s those who managed to get through the fiercer competition.

Again, I’m all *for* changing that, but I don’t see female CEOs being interested in male kindergarten teachers. This is the crux of the problem, and feminism isn’t really offering any advice.

He got a number of replies, of which La Lubu’s was both typical and cogent:

Where I come from, teaching and nursing do not take a man out of the “wanted” pool—it’s the polar opposite. Those are considered decent jobs. Are female CEOs (yeah, there sure are a lot of those) dating those men? No. But are women of the same social class dating and/or marrying them? Hell, yes. People—men and women both—date within their social class. Men of high socioeconomic status might recreationally fuck a woman of lower status, but they sure the hell don’t marry them (or even introduce them to their country-club friends).

Who do you know, in your life, that has rejected a man with a decent paying but below six-figure job because of his earning power? If you don’t have any anecdata, what statistical evidence can you show me that states this? I have never seen that—ever. I see the opposite—heterosexual men who hold those jobs that you (as a male) regard as unmasculine, are almost always married. Evidently, women have a different measure of what constitutes masculinity. We don’t really give a hot damn who is King of the Mountain.

The argument that SamSeaborn advances is basically this one: “Men don’t like wearing the straitjacket of masculinity, true. But women want us to. In fact, the only way we get laid is when we engage in stereotypical male behavior. Therefore, it’s women’s fault that we’re suffering from the constraints of manhood, and women have only themselves to blame that they cannot find the male partners they claim to want. If women would only change their sexual decision-making, then men would behave better. But as long as women reward hyper-masculine asshole-dom with sex, then men have no incentive to change.”

I hear this argument frequently from anti-feminists of both sexes.

Stay with me for a second: I’m old enough to have gone to elementary school when they still showed movies in class: proper films, the sort that came on reels. Students fought for the privilege to “thread the projector”, a term that will be meaningless to anyone under thirty. And many of the films I remember best came from Disney’s “Trure Life Adventures” series. These had been filmed in the 1950s, but they didn’t seem dated in mid-1970s classrooms. I remember film after film exploring the wonder of mating. Everything was G-rated, of course, but the basic idea was obvious: males in the animal kingdom do all that they can to put on impressive displays in order to attract a female. The latter had all the power when it came to sex selection. Reading Sam’s comment, I can’t help but wonder if his sexual worldview owes more to Disney nature films than to 21st century human reality.

I hear from a great many young men the familiar complaint that “girls just want bad boys”. There are lots of reasons why we socialize young women to want disaffected, hostile, and brooding young men. Mostly it has to do with the “my love can change him” notion I wrote about in this post. It’s a phenomenon of the very young, however; relatively few adult women continue to buy into the delusion that they have the capacity to love a violent and unreliable man into compassionate responsibility. The point is, a great many young men oversell the “good girls only want bad boys” trope because they sense the obvious benefit: if they then themselves mistreat women, they are not doing it out of any defect in their natures, but out of a rational strategy for improving their mating odds. It is women themselves who have made these rules, these boys and young men say (often with sincerity); we fellas just have to adapt as best we can. It’s yet another corollary to the myth of male weakness: bad male behavior gets cunningly reframed as an evolutionary adaptation demanded by women, and the blame for everything falls nicely once again on the shoulders and hearts and libidos of the be-uterused.

Sam is talking about the grown-up version of this. In a world which is still in some sense a jungle, he argues, even the most well-educated and successful woman wants a man who can take care of her. This may be more likely to mean “make lots of money” than “beat up creepers who ogle me”, but it’s still the lament that women’s hearts and sex drives don’t really match up with feminist politics. Though all of the evidence suggests that more men don’t seek out nurturing professions because of a combination of socialization and fear of ridicule by other men, many anti-feminists suggest that women’s refusal to take male nurses or kindergarten teachers seriously as potential mates is the primary force driving men away. When real-life women like La Lubu and Mythago and the others in the comment thread suggest that this is just so much pap, their experiences and desires are dismissed as anecdotes that are entirely unrepresentative of the mass of “real women” about whom the likes of SamS apparently know so much.

It is axiomatic that heterosexual men and women regularly misunderstand what the other sex wants. These misunderstandings are reinforced by a media that hypes absurd caricatures of masculinity and femininity, leading young boys to imagine that without an eight-pack on their tummies, they are destined for lonely celibacy — and leading girls to believe that all young men insist on being partnered with those who have bodies like Khloe Kardashian’s. These misperceptions are excusable in adolescents, less so in adults a decade or two (or three, or four) removed from puberty. Too many men and women assume that their acquaintances of the other sex are lying when they say things that deviate from culturally-imposed expectations. So when a man hears a woman say, “No, I really do want a partner who will be an equal rather than a non-communicative workaholic”, he may tell himself, “Bullshit. She’s just saying that. I know what women really want.” This “knowledge” is often rooted in random anecdote, or his own imagination, or some slick purveyor of misogyny masquerading as common sense like Tom Leykis or Laura Schlessinger. (To be fair, many women have a hard time believing that male weakness really is a myth rather than a biological reality. When a man says to his partner, “Honey, I only want you”, she may have been so conditioned to believe in the impossibility of male fidelity that she too thinks her own quiet “bullshit.”)

To the extent that men really are being “left behind” in the new economic and educational paradigm, it is because of the inability of so many men to slip the surly bonds of traditional masculinity. The problem isn’t female teachers who “don’t understand boys”, the problem isn’t “feminism”, and the problem isn’t the imagined disconnect between heterosexual women’s politics and their libidos. The problem is a hopelessly constrained vision of what it means to be a man, a vision largely created and maintained and passed on by men. Fathers and brothers and peers; rappers and ballers and professional pugilists; these are the all-too-faithful perpetuators of the myth that women will only accept “sturdy oaks” who “give ‘em hell” and never, ever, display grief or vulnerability.

Individual men suffer from what is, in the end, a collective masculine crime; we are, to paraphrase an old AA saying, the architects of our own adversity. The relentless attempt to shift the blame to women’s irrationality or inconsistency cannot long obscure that hard and heartbreaking truth.

The myth of male inflexibility

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on June 10, 2010

in Global Feminism, Men and Masculinity and Working

. 60 Comments

My student Mon-Shane, the same wonderful person who has recorded and uploaded a number of my women’s history lectures, points me to this piece from the ever-reliable Ann Friedman in today’s online Prospect: It’s Not the End of Men. Friedman is responding to this Hanna Rosin piece in the Atlantic, another offering from those who are convinced that feminism, cultural shifts, and economic transformation have led to a terrible crisis for American men. Friedman:

The latest contribution to the masculinity-crisis meme is “The End of Men,” a cover story in this month’s Atlantic by Hanna Rosin. Women are outperforming men in schools, at work, and at home, she argues. The global economy is shifting in such a way that it favors “female” characteristics, and male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, construction and finance are declining. “As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as keys to economic success,” she writes, “those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest.” What if, she asks, “the economics of the new era are better suited to women?”

It’s disappointing that, despite a history of sharp observations about gender and 5,000 words to work with, Rosin makes the same oversight as all of the other hand-wringing articles about the state of the American male. She thinks the problem is men; really, it’s traditional gender stereotypes. The narrow, toxic definition of masculinity perpetuated by Rosin and others — that men are brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers — is actually to blame for the crisis.

The goal of feminism was, first and foremost, to win rights and freedoms for women. While changing men was never the primary focus of any wave of the movement, feminists of both sexes have long understood that egalitarianism is not a zero-sum game. Feminism offers men something of tremendous value: the opportunity to escape at last the suffocating straitjacket of traditional masculinity. As feminists have long pointed out, and as serious science and comparative anthropology have made clear, that straitjacket is a cultural construct, not an immutable biological reality. As I said in 2007,

I’m a feminist because I want to create a world where men and women alike can realize their potential; I’m a feminist because I believe that our potential is not directed or confined by our chromosomes or our secondary sex organs. My penis and my Y chromosome do not destine me to be unreliable, predatory, and emotionally inarticulate. My wife’s uterus and her estrogen do not limit the horizons of her professional or athletic ambition. Feminism is, as we’ve all heard, the radical notion that women are people. But it’s also the radical notion that men are people too, complete human beings, with the same range of emotions and the same capacity for empathy and self-control as any woman.

We’re all in agreement that modernity poses a challenge to traditional gender roles. To the historian, of course, the point is that it has never not been so: the sense that we are only now entering a prolonged period of masculine uncertainty is rooted in a false nostalgia for a time that never really was. As Michael Kimmel and others have shown, masculinity has always been “in crisis”. Generations of American men have complained of feeling “emasculated” by assertive women (read Rip Van Winkle sometime); a century ago, social conservatives fretted that co-education would make men irrelevant. The one constant from generation to generation is the keen anxiety that masculinity is fragile, perpetually at risk, always in need of protection from the encroaching and emasculating effects of luxury, intellectualism, and feminism.

None of us deny that the new economy has left many men — particularly working-class men — feeling bewildered and disheartened. The shift from a manufacturing model to a service and information model has brought instability and high levels of unemployment, particularly among men who don’t have a college education. But the same anxieties to which Rosin points were found nearly two centuries ago, as industrialization meant an end to a way of life for millions who defined themselves as artisans and farmers during the agrarian age. The discombobulation and uncertainty that defines contemporary men is an old story, not a new phenomenon. In the 1800s, farmers and blacksmiths had to become office clerks and factory workers; they were forced indoors (into a traditionally female space). And they coped, mostly by adapting themselves to new economic and social realities. (For example, men who had once built muscles naturally through manual labor now built them in gyms and through sports. The games that had once been considered childish — like running around with a bat and ball - became all important signifiers of adult manhood. The point is, masculinity is highly adaptable, and to its critics, remarkably difficult to kill.)

Friedman shares that same well-founded optimism for men’s capacity to adapt:

Perhaps the answer lies in the success of high-achieving women. In previous generations, women busted all sorts of gender stereotypes in order to get their piece of the economic pie. While there were various schools of thought among feminists about how to best make the case for hiring women, all involved reshaping popular notions about women’s abilities. Women could be firefighters and floor traders, CEOs and carpenters. The best man for the job just might be a woman, or so the 1970s slogan went.

It’s long past time we also acknowledge that the best woman for the job might just be a man.

Indeed. Shaped by a shifting culture and driven by economic necessity, the next generation of male workers at every class level will show the willingness and the enthusiasm to move into what were traditionally female professions. I see it in the increasingly egalitarian attitudes of my working-class community college students, where the number of young men interested in professions like education or nursing has begun (slowly, it must be admitted) to rise. Feminists have long suspected what reason and experience and science all show, that testosterone is not an impediment to empathy and that the the possession of a Y chromosome needn’t hinder the development of emotional and verbal intelligence.

Men are not weak. I make that case over and over again. But there’s a corollary to the myth of male weakness: the myth of male inflexibility. It suggests that unlike women, men are too rigid to adapt to a changing culture. It suggests that extricating oneself from the straitjacket of traditional masculinity is more difficult than escaping the corset of traditional femininity. And whether this incapacity is consciously feigned or sincerely believed, it’s rooted in a myth rather than a reality. If feminism alone can’t get men to develop their own emotional and vocational dexterity, then we can be certain that the inexorable realities of global economic patterns will accomplish the task. It has always been that way in the past, and will surely be so again.

Boy crushes, and further evidence of men catching up to women: some thoughts on the new Gallup poll

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on June 07, 2010

in GLBTQ, Men and Masculinity and Mentoring

. 0 Comments

In 2004, several years before the pop culture began to talk about the “bro-mance” (a term that describes straight men’s increasingly intimate friendships with male buddies), my All Saints kids let me know of a term that they were using regularly: “boy-crush”. I wrote about how I learned of the boy crush in this post. What struck me was how much less homophobic banter and anxiety there seemed among the young men I worked with compared to my own memories of high school. Though the teens at an affluent and famously liberal Episcopal parish in suburban Los Angeles might not be representative of all young American males, their ranks included representatives of all the standard cliques familiar to generations of adolescents, the popular and unpopular, the athletic and the bookish, and so on. Nearly across the board, the comfort level with same-sex affection was much higher than it had been when I was in high school a few decades earlier.

I thought about the boys in that high school program while reading this Charles Blow op-ed from Saturday’s Times: Gay? Whatever, Dude. Blow commented on last week’s Gallup poll numbers, showing that for the first time, Americans’ acceptance of what the poll called “gay relations” had crossed the 50% threshold. Blow notes the real surprise, which is that men’s acceptance of homosexuality may now exceeds women’s, an apparent reversal of long-standing assumptions about greater female tolerance of sexual diversity. (Blow does cite evidence that suggests that rather than surpassing women, men have merely “caught up” to women’s traditionally greater levels of acceptance.)

I was pleased that Blow interviewed Michael Kimmel, whose work on men and masculinity created an entirely new academic discipline and a professor who has done more than anyone else to broaden our understanding of male identity. Kimmel, whose recent Guyland is the opus magnissimum on contemporary manhood, is an optimist. Rather than joining those who insist we’re in a national masculinity crisis (a crisis usually blamed on feminism), Kimmel thinks we’re raising young men with far greater emotional dexterity than their father’s or grandfather’s generation. Leaving aside the legitimate concerns about addiction to pot, porn, and video games, the evidence in the Gallup poll backs up what many of us who work with young men have already started to see in the past decade: more than at any time in the past, guys today are developing an unprecedented capacity for intimacy and for friendship (with both sexes). Though hardly immune to anxieties about their masculinity, and overly enamored of cartoonish depictions of manhood (think of the wild popularity of MMA), the evidence is clear that a critical mass of young men are far more accepting of homosexuality than ever before. This is very good news.

Teaching at an urban community college where most students are first-generation immigrants, the young men I work with at school generally come from far less socially progressive backgrounds than those I mentored in my years at All Saints Church. But though class and culture have an undeniable influence on how many young men negotiate their way towards adulthood, it’s clear that this increase in acceptance is not confined to the ranks of middle and upper-middle class white boys. This shift is bigger than that. To see so many young men evincing the same degree of tolerance towards sexual diversity as their sisters — this is a wonderful reminder of the basic truism that high levels of testosterone and the presence of a penis never need be barriers to learning empathy.

We’re winning the fight for hearts and minds. But we still have a very long way to go.

We are always on the record: how the most interesting man in the world gets it very, very wrong

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on May 05, 2010

in Mass media, Men and Masculinity, Mentoring and Youth

. 10 Comments

Driving to school on Monday morning, I passed a billboard on Robertson Boulevard. Part of the immensely tiresome “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer, the slogan on this particular sign read “The Bulk of Your Life Should Be Off the Record.”

I’ve loathed some of the Dos Equis slogans. The worst one so far features an image of the hirsute interesting man and the words “He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.” My favorite: “At museums he’s allowed to touch the art.” Clearly designed to appeal to young men (though one suspects the boys most easily amused by this sophomoric humor are under legal drinking age in the USA), the Dos Equis campaign is typical of much modern advertising: it plays on young men’s longing for reliable, hyper-masculine father figures. The Most Interesting Man in the World dispenses something even more valuable than tips for how to get rich or get laid: he offers certainty about what it means to be a man. He is notable for a complete absence of self-doubt. Given that so many young men are crippled by the absence of mentors and a nearly paralyzing degree of uncertainty about their lives and their roles, the appeal of this sort of advertising is obvious.

But while most of the advice in the Dos Equis campaign is silly and puerile rather than truly misogynist, the suggestion that the bulk of one’s life should be off the record infuriated me.

At the very heart of what it means to be an adult — for those of you who like to gender everything, a man rather than a boy, a woman rather than a girl — is the commitment to matching one’s language and one’s life. To be a grown-up means to live with integrity; integrity literally means “wholeness” or “congruence.” Put another way, an adult lives his or her life as if they are always on the record, with no disconnect between public pronouncements and private practices.

This commitment to congruence doesn’t mean one speaks to toddlers the way one speaks to one’s lovers. It doesn’t mean one doesn’t save some behaviors for behind closed doors. To put it another way, the rest of the world doesn’t get to know what my wife and I do in the bedroom. The point is, if they were to find out or stumble in, they would see that how we connect intimately and privately is radically compatible with the public aspects of our lives.

The world needs grown-ups. And grown-ups know the shabbiness and the heartbreak of a life lived in compartments. They know that young people — and all of us, really — need role models whose words and actions match. And whether in the public eye or not, they’re always on the record.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from my comments as a response to those who think I’m taking this much too seriously:

As we all know, irony gets lost in translation (especially with American adolescents, who tend — despite their affected sophistication — to live in an irony-free zone). Think about the old Miller Light “Man Law” ads; the boys I knew in youth group adored them, quoted them, and, despite their awareness that the commercials were tongue-in-cheek,tended to take them very seriously.

All advertising is didactic. It teaches something, even as it flatters the audience into believing that they are in on the joke. That’s the thing about ads like this: they aren’t ironic. They appear to be; Dos Equis may want an urban educated audience to think “Hah, look at how we’re playing around with the problem of contemporary masculinity in a hyperbolic way”, but they know damn well that a substantial percentage of folks out there aren’t going to be able to do that kind of rapid meta-analysis. Particularly teens, who are always the target of alcohol ads, as they are the ones whose brand loyalties have yet to be firmly established.

And though I was never much of a beer drinker in my day, I drank a lot of Dos Equis in college. It was, for a long time, my favorite beer.

When a “can” ought to mean a “should”: on men and empathy

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on February 18, 2010

in Men and Masculinity and Relationships

. 24 Comments

I got an interesting email from one of my regular commenters who uses the handle “Randomizer”. He sends me a link to this post at Overcoming Bias which references an intriguing study that appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin back in 2001: Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand . The abstract:

Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

Bold is mine.

For the second week in a row, someone sends me a link to promising research.

In plain English, the studies suggest that the notion that men lack the capacity for empathy — equivalent in degree to that more commonly displayed by women — is simply false. When motivated to put a dormant skill to use, the study suggests men can be every bit as intuitive as women. For a psych journal, the phrase “wiped out any difference” is very strong stuff indeed — it leaves no room for those who insist on men’s diminished capacity to love, to connect, and to care on which to stand.

So this raises the question that gets discussed at the Overcoming Bias site: if men can empathize every bit as well as women, why don’t they? Randomizer points to one of the commenters at OB, a fellow calling himself BD. BD writes:

(In the masculine) value system, empathy is not connected to caring for someone. It’s connected to believing that the person can’t care for themselves Or believing that the person is a threat. “Don’t ask me to treat you like a child. And don’t ask me to treat you like a boss whose volatile ego I have to tip-toe around.”

And there can be a “Golden Rule” thing going here as well. ” He may not want to treat her “like a child” because he doesn’t want to be treated “like a child” either.

With his peers, he can just relax and be himself. Male friendship and peerage is often a rough and tumble thing. It’s not to say that male friendship doesn’t have its own rules. Its just that significant empathy is not part of that. When he is dealing with people he cares about, he tends to default to his most comfortable and peer-like relationship model, which happens to feature minimal empathy…

I think BD is right in one sense, in that I think we do indeed teach men to associate empathy with the burden of managing someone else’s fragile emotions — a boss who needs placating, or a child who can’t yet self-regulate. But if he’s implying that men and women have different but equally valid interpretations of the purpose of empathy, I think that’s much more problematic. In BD’s formulation, men are taught to see empathy as a tool to be used in a certain select set of scenarios, two in particular: first, when a reward is available, such as from a boss (or, in the case of the study we’re citing, cash-for-empathic display); two, when dealing with someone needier and more vulnerable than themselves, such as a child or the victim of a particular tragedy. It is not, in other words, a relationship tool — indeed, in “guyland”, a relationship in which empathy is not required is far more egalitarian than one in which it is needed.

Here’s how culturally constructed masculinity warps us all: for far too many men, empathy gets associated with manipulation and dependency rather than intimacy. The message seems to be: You can have my empathy, or you can have my respect as my equal. But you can’t have both. I don’t think that marks a “healthy difference” between men and women. It’s absurd to imagine that we can sustain healthy relationships when one sex believes empathy is a necessary component of all our interactions and another sex believes it to be an unpleasant tactic, a tool to be employed in a few instances, most of which involve a hierarchy of power and respect.

So the good news: one more bit of evidence that the full spectrum of human emotion is available to every member of the species, regardless of biology. The study reinforces the truth that the reason so many members of each sex utilize less than that full spectrum is attributable to socialization and choice, not to physiology. But we need to do more than say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting”. We need to recognize that this is one of those instances where ability translates to obligation; if men can empathize, than I think it’s fairly clear that they should do so far more often than they do.

Why? Merely to make wives and girlfriends and sisters happier? No, though making relationships better is nothing at which to sneeze. It’s that in the end, all great cruelty is, as Timothy Findley so famously said, a failure of the imagination. And the kind of imagination at which men so often fail is not the ability to imagine alternate universes or other fantastical things — it is the simpler failure to imagine what another person feels. When men regard that kind of imagination as a tool or a burden rather than as a gift and a responsibility, they become the chief architects of human suffering. To refuse to empathize is to be complicit, in a way either large or small, in the ongoing great crime.

I’ve often said that one of my two or three favorite novels ever written is Forster’s “Howard’s End.” I’m hardly alone in my deep love of the book and its world view. And I’m hardly alone in trying to remember, always remember, the simple epigraph of the text: “Only connect.” That is true of prose and passion, it is true of Americans and Haitians, and it is true of husbands and wives.

We can do this. And if there was ever an instant when ability leads inexorably to obligation, I think this is it.

Fatherhood and feminism: not a zero-sum game.

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on February 17, 2010

in Men and Masculinity, Parenting and Sports

. 8 Comments

Kathryn Lopez posts a column this week about the immediate aftermath of Super Bowl XLIV: Brees after Super Bowl win was a poster boy for family. K-Lo notes that the winning quarterback for the Saints scooped up his young son in the aftermath of victory, holding him with both love and glee.

It’s an image America needed.

“Given that about one-in-four American boys are living apart from their dads at any one point in time, it is great to see a Super Bowl champion with his wife and son, and to see that this win is all the bigger for him for being shared with his son,” Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project said.

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce,” and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, isn’t a football follower, but she liked what she saw: “It bespoke an intimacy of real time spent together. Even in a football stadium of screaming fans the toddler boy didn’t look anxious. He knew he was safe. He was with dad.”

I couldn’t agree more that it was a touching moment. I too like the image of a father embracing his son; I like seeing unguarded affection between parents and children. We all agree it’s a lovely thing.

So what’s the problem? The folks K-Lo cites in her piece (and the organizations with which they are affiliated, like the Institute for American Values) are relentless in their insistence that fatherhood has been damaged by feminism. For the cultural right to which folks like Wilcox and Lopez belong, the empowerment of women has led to the inevitable marginalization of men. In the strange math of social conservatives, it’s all a zero-sum game: the greater the freedom of women to divorce, exercise reproductive sovereignty, and earn money outside the home, the less self-worth their male partners will invariably feel.

It’s subtle in this piece, but explicit elsewhere in the writings of the anti-feminist traditional marriage movement: the great lie that male responsibility is contingent on female vulnerability. Only when women defer to men, submit to men, allow men to take the proverbial reins — only then will men “feel” valued, feel needed. According to this tired bit of wisdom, men get confused and alienated when they are denied the opportunity to shoehorn themselves into a traditional masculine role. The notion that gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, the notion that men and women can possess different plumbing but the same skill set — all this is too much for the be-penised to grasp. Fathers have abandoned their families, the lie goes, because they no longer feel needed or valued as men.

I adore my daughter. My worth as her father is not compromised by the fact that my wife earns a good living outside the home. My wife relies on me as I do on her — we rely on each other to be there, to do what we say we’re going to do, to pick up the dry cleaning and the baby food when we say we will, to be faithful. The fact that my wife could be a successful single mother without me doesn’t vitiate my value as a Dad. The fact that the world wouldn’t go to hell in a handbasket were I to disappear doesn’t mean I don’t feel loved and important. My daughter needs me, and I believe her life is better with me in it. My wife and I love each other and are building a life together. But my manhood — and my status as a father — is not under attack in our culture, unless you buy the myth that insists that a husband’s dignity requires a certain amouht of frailty on the part of his wife.

So here’s to encouraging fathers to be present in the lives of their children. And here’s to recognizing that the greatest obstacle to making that happen on a wider scale is not feminism, or the culture, or the legal system — it’s our outdated notion of masculinity itself.

Rip Van Winkle comes to the Super Bowl

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on February 09, 2010

in Men and Masculinity and Sports

. 5 Comments

Lots of folks are talking in the blogosphere and the mainstream media about the misogynistic tone of so many of the ads during this year’s Super Bowl broadcast. Since my family resisted a television until 1978, my football viewing memory goes back no farther than Super Bowl XIII — but I’ve seen most of the games since that Steelers-Cowboys epic, and agree that this year’s batch of ads were the most consistently sexist that we’ve ever seen.

The good news,of course, is that virtually every news outlet in the country pointed this out. The feminist blogosphere was not alone in decrying the orgy of woman-hating (and the concomitant celebration of the caveman myth) that went on during Sunday’s broadcast. When a staid entity like Time magazine exclaims “Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?”, we’re making real progress. So many of the ads were so unrelentingly puerile, so clumsy in their attempt to suggest that modern American men are just so many latter day pre-nap Rip Van Winkles, that even folks who don’t normally use words like “misogyny” found that that noun came quickly to their lips. To the extent that the overreach of these ads was so astounding that it forced even the mainstream media to criticize the relentless sexism, I think there’s a fairly substantial silver lining to what we saw on Sunday.

It’s also a golden teaching opportunity. Spring semester classes don’t get underway until February 22, and I’m not teaching at the moment, so I don’t have the chance to have a discussion this week about the ads with my students. I did note the sexism of the ads in a Facebook status update, and got a number of comments and messages in response from friends who don’t necessarily share my feminism, but did share my indignation at what we saw during the Super Bowl. For those who insist that sexism isn’t a problem any longer, who think that the feminist case that we live in a world which continues to hate women is whoppingly oversold, Sunday afternoon was a wake-up call. I’m excited about the implications.

I reference Rip Van Winkle for another reason. The story of Rip Van Winkle was written in 1819 by Washington Irving; it featured the basic plot line of half of this past Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials. An amiable man married to a woman who needles and nags him relentlessly, Rip takes a hike in the hills to escape his wife. He runs into an all-male group — the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew, male adventurers who came to America without women. They hand him a Budweiser (well, not quite, their magic liquor) and Rip gets very, very drunk. He falls asleep and wakes to discover that twenty years have passed and his wife has died.

Rip thus gets to be single (and the envy of other henpecked husbands) without ever having to confront his wife. He is rescued from the misery of marriage by bonding with a group of men who embody an ultra-masculine archetype, and that bond is cemented by drinking their special brand of alcohol. While drunk, his problems magically disappear and he reemerges into civilization liberated and free. If that isn’t a hefty part of the plot of most of what we saw two days ago, I don’t know what is.

The absurdity of the story is that Rip Van Winkle was written in an age when coverture was the law of the land — husbands had almost total legal control over their wives. Rip could beat his wife, divorce his wife, and abandon his wife with virtual impunity; his own unwillingness (which he probably falsely imagined as inability) to engage with his spouse is the source of his frustration. Just as so many men still do, Rip blames his unhappiness on what he imagines are the voracious and inexhaustible demands of a perennially dissatisfied woman. Plenty of men run away from intimacy and engagement to seek comfort in booze and masculine cameraderie. None in real life have the magical outcome that we see in Rip’s case. But the power of the story lies in its promise that alcohol and male bonding can make one’s troubles (always personified by a woman, either a wife or a mother) vanish.

Washington Irving ought to sue several Madison Avenue agencies for copyright infringement.

Men and the Work/Life balance: an upcoming radio program and campaign

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on January 19, 2010

in Mass media, Men and Masculinity and Working

. 0 Comments

I’m delighted to announce that I will be participating in Feminism 2.0′s first 2010 “Wake-Up” campaign, which kicks off next Monday. The summary:

Fem2.0 is kicking off the New Year with Wake Up, This Is the Reality!, a campaign to help change the way Americans talk and think about work and to begin shifting the national narrative away from privileged “balance” and corporate perspectives to one that reflects the reality on the ground for millions of Americans and American families.

On January 25, we will launch a two-week blog radio series on how work policies impact specific communities. That will be followed by a week-long blog carnival (Feb. 6-13) that will flood the public space with articles, opinions and personal stories about what it’s like to work in America today.

One week from today, on the 26th, I’ll be participating in the Work/Life and Men: Superman Versus Family Man radio show. Click on the hyperlink for more details on how to listen; there will be a podcast made available for subsequent download.

Details:

Tuesday, January 26, 1:00 PM EST

Host: Marc Chimes

Scott Coltrane, Dean, University of Oregon; Author, Gender and Families
Hugo Schwyzer, Blogger, hugoschwyzer.net
Joan Williams, Director, Center for WorkLife Law at University of California - Hastings

What does it take for a caring, responsible father to be both a breadwinner and a family man? If there is a work/family balance, it appears to depend on where you stand in the social order. Come investigate with our panel the daunting barriers working fathers face in sharing responsibilities in the household. Join with America’s leading experts as they discuss the problems, possibilities and policies surrounding fathers in the workplace.

Neither male nor female: Jesus as man, Jesus as role model

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on January 11, 2010

in Christianity and Men and Masculinity

. 4 Comments

A reader named David writes:

I find myself deeply entrenched in one debate about God and how God created us in God’s image “male and female” and what, if anything, that reveals about God. Some men I have run into believe that manhood is a trait designed by a masculine God and that certain characteristics (ordained by God, in a sense) of manliness are exclusively specific to masculinity. I guess that so their argument goes there is no spectrum of gender, only masculine & feminine and if you fall in between or share some qualities of each than that’s on you and not something Godly. This line of thinking always ends up with chivalrous expectations of manhood and that bad men are either not chivalrous or less than manly (or both and women are to be passive & rescued).

I’ve always contended that God is neither male or female or, in fact, God is both. Though we gender God as “father” and “He” and Jesus is referred to as “he” and “son of man”, the Holy Spirit is often referred to as having feminine qualities in the Old Testament. Thus, since God is “3 persons in one” and those 3 persons make up God then how can we be created wholly in God’s image? Are we to be three persons in one or simply have full range person-hood like God?

Not for the first or last time, let me first recommend the many resources on this topic available through the website of Christians for Biblical Equality.

I’m not a theologian. I’ve read theology, talked about theology, studied theology (medieval Franciscan scholasticism was a doctoral field of mine at UCLA), but I’m not a theologian. Others have wrestled with these questions for centuries, and feminist theologians in particular (one notes at this point the passing eight days ago of the important, if controversial, Mary Daly) have offered critical analyses of our reflexive habit of referring to God as male.

Jesus, however, certainly was physiologically male. In his human aspect, he was a man (the early church fathers struggled against those who could not bring themselves to acknowledge that Jesus pooped and peed). And from my standpoint, the maleness of Jesus Christ matters because in his life and ministry and relationships, Jesus himself embodies a full and complete manhood. Traditionalists, desperately seeking biblical support for archaic gender roles that have nothing to do with faith, like to emphasize Jesus as warrior. Jesus chasing the moneychangers out of the temple always gets mentioned by those who promote the “Muscular Christianity” agenda, even though it is only in the last gospel, John, that the story gets embellished to include the use of a whip. (The synoptic gospels don’t mention the weapon at all.)

Jesus got angry, clearly. Jesus also wept publicly, but we rarely hear my traditionalist friends using His example to repudiate the “big boys don’t cry” ethos. Jesus allows Himself to be anointed by a woman, infuriating his disciples who are upset about the cost of the perfumed oil — but perhaps also upset by what seems, to them, like an almost feminine vanity on His part. The examples of Jesus engaging in tender and nurturing behavior far outnumber those in which he behaves as the muscular He-Man of conservative traditionalist teaching.

For me, as a man, it matter that Jesus was a man. When Christ came into the world, the world already knew of women’s capacity to nurture and care for the vulnerable. The rigid gender roles of a broken world meant that empathy, intuition, and compassion were rarely, if ever, associated with men. If Christ had been a woman, come as a servant to heal the world; to insist on the primacy of Love over all else; to die for others — She would have fulfilled an expectation that we have about women’s supposedly innate willingness to serve and sacrifice. The religious authorities expected a proper, muscular king; what sort of messiah behaves as Jesus behaved? What sort of messiah dies on a tree without lifting a finger to fight back? What sort of messiah allows women who aren’t his wives to touch him? (Women were, of course, allowed to touch other women.) The answer is, of course, an unexpected messiah, one who comes in the body of a man to teach all of us of each male’s potential for full, radical humanness.

Many women in the church struggle with Christ’s maleness. Those who have been betrayed and abused and exploited by men find it difficult to believe that a man, be-penised and be-Y-chromosomed as Jesus was, could prove worthy of trust, prove capable of both selflessness and non-sexual intimacy. I understand that reluctance to embrace the male aspect of God, particularly when one has known little that is good from men. At the same time, I think that one of the countless ways in which the story of Jesus is redemptive is in His maleness — by coming in a man’s body, the God-made-flesh offers the world a radically revisionist model for what it means to be a man. In his commitment to non-violence, in his courage, in his capacity to resist formidable temptation, in his willingness to display his own emotion fearlessly but never destructively, he serves as a model for all of us — but in a very real sense, for men in particular.

When Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, “there is no male or female in Christ”, he’s referring to the notion that relationship with God through Jesus is available to all. But there’s another way of reading that passage that I find helpful. Jesus was physiologically a man, but He lived fearlessly unchained by traditional gender roles; he could be both masculine and feminine, and in that sense, he transcended gender categories themselves. For men who outsource their self-control and their own emotional maintenance to mothers and wives, girlfriends and daughters, Jesus’ life — upon which Christians are called to model their own — is a stern rebuke.

I live as a man, in a man’s body, but I refuse to be bound and limited by the straitjacket of culturally-constructed gender roles. In my own imperfect efforts to slip from that straitjacket, I have many wonderful role models, both living and dead. And as a Christian, I have Jesus too.

Perfection of the Life and the Work: the tragic hubris of Urban Meyer

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on December 28, 2009

in Men and Masculinity and Sports

. 7 Comments

If you’re a college football fan, you surely didn’t miss the breathless coverage of the mixed messages sent this weekend by Urban Meyer, the head coach at the University of Florida. Meyer, recently voted the “coach of the decade”, announced Saturday he was stepping down from the position in order to focus on his health and his family; on Sunday, he changed his tune, noting that he was taking only a “leave of absence”, and expected to be back on the sidelines for the two-time national champions soon. The paper of record summarized the most wrenching aspect of the story:

One of the most poignant moments of the Urban Meyer resignation-unresignation as Florida coach came Christmas Day.

After weeks of soul searching, prompted by a trip to a hospital, he told his family that night that he would be leaving his job, Meyer said to The New York Times.

Meyer said that upon hearing the news, his 18-year-old daughter hugged him and said, “I get my daddy back.”

A day later, Meyer was gone again. Not completely gone. He announced Sunday that after a day away to think about things, he had decided to stay put. He is merely taking a leave of absence.

Jeremy Foley, Florida’s athletic director, made it clear — to fans and to recruits — that order had been restored in Gator Nation. “He is the head coach taking a leave of absence,” Foley said.

In 24 hours, we went from the perfect holiday story to a tale about the relentless pull of the coaching profession. The king leaves his throne for his family and then decides — or is convinced — that the throne was not so bad after all and announces that for a time he will be the power behind the throne.

What do we make of this bizarre drama?

The bit about Meyer’s daughter is heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Football coaches occupy a particularly significant niche in the American psyche: as archetypes, if not always in reality, they are the most hyper-masculine of older men. (Meyer is a youthful 45.) In a culture where the young warrior and the youthful athlete are those with the greatest masculine cachet, gruff generals and taciturn football coaches have the unique privilege of claiming unimpeachable toughness even as they soften and age. The demands of both war and coaching tend to be all-consuming, involving long separation from family — and as we all know, the classic masculine archetype is of the man who chooses a world away from women and domesticity. Think of Hector pushing away Andromache before he goes out to die at Achilles’ hand; think of Gary Cooper in “High Noon”, turning away from new bride Grace Kelly to take on a desperado who threatens his town; heck, think of three-quarters of the movies you’ve ever seen. And think of Urban Meyer, torn between his daughter’s tearful longing for her daddy and his own sense of responsibility, not to his family or to his team, but to a masculine ideal of work and sacrifice that has torn apart Western families for millenia.

And it’s hard not to think of Yeats:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

Urban Meyer wants, like so many Americans, to imagine that he can have both the perfection of the life and the work; he seems, judging from his mixed messages this weekend, to long to “be there” for his daughter and still be the relentlessly driven coach of the most successful college football team of the past half-decade. Like so many ambitious men, he tells himself “If I just work harder, or pray harder, or learn a new technique, then I can manage to ‘do it all’”. The Greeks knew hubris when they saw it, and the modern manifestation of hubris is the belief so common to so many men that they can live their lives in compartments, keeping everyone happy and winning praise from all. Meyer’s hubris isn’t that different from Tiger’s: both the philandering golfer and the workaholic football coach believed that they could lead double lives with impunity. Tiger’s deception is the more obvious, but Meyer’s — rooted in the tragically mistaken belief that one can serve two masters, ambition and family — is no less destructive to those who love and rely upon him.

I rejoiced when I heard the news on Saturday that Meyer was stepping down: a man putting his health and his relationships ahead of his career, how refreshing! As the father of a daughter, I thought of Meyer’s girls weeping with relief that they were getting their “Dad back”, and I teared up a bit myself. And then came Sunday’s “vanity”, and I thought of his daughters again — and all the rest of us who are the collateral damage of the heroic ideal.

“If they could see me now”: sex, homosociality, and the internalized male audience

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on December 10, 2009

in Homosociality, Men and Masculinity and Sexuality

. 7 Comments

In the comments below yesterday’s post about Tiger Woods and homosociality, Tom questions my use of the concept in describing the golfer’s infidelities with a certain type of woman. If homosociality drives men to use women to seek status in the eyes of other men, he wondered, how does it explain the behavior of men who have (what they thought were) clandestine affairs? Doesn’t the desire for secrecy vitiate the argument that the behavior is driven by a longing for validation from other men? It’s an important question, and deserves a longer answer than can fit in the comments.

In 2005, I wrote a long post about the task of helping women silence their internalized audience. The internalized audience is that Greek chorus in one’s head, made up of parents, peers — perhaps pastors and professors — and so forth. When one does something, even in secret, that one imagines might either delight or scandalize members of that audience, one spends time ruminating “What would they think if they could see me now?” For many women in particular, that internalized audience is incapacitating and shame-reinforcing, as I wrote in that post and again in this one.

The notion of homosociality dovetails nicely with the male version of the internalized audience. In other words, status-seeking young men don’t just perform for other flesh-and-blood males (fathers, brothers, coaches, Alpha guys) — they perform for the internalized audience of those figures. In Guyland, Michael Kimmel’s marvelous work about contemporary young men, Kimmel interviews a fraternity member who recalled having sex with a young woman whom all of his “brothers” thought was incredibly hot. The young man remembered that all he could think of while hooking up with this woman was what his “bros” would think if they could see him at that moment. The homosocial boost to his ego, in other words, was more powerful than his own sexual excitement — even though his fraternity brothers were not, in fact, watching or (yet) aware of his “conquest.”*

This young man wanted his male peers to find out eventually. But his pleasure came not merely from letting them know that he had sex with a particularly desirable woman, it came from contemplating their reactions before they knew about it. This is a not-uncommon scenario; the actual revelation of “what happened last night” is almost anti-climactic compared to the delicious validation that comes with imagining other men’s envious, even awed responses to this evidence of his masculine prowess.

In describing his own coming-of-age in rural Mexico, Amherst professor Ilan Stavans writes in the anthology Muy Macho of his ritualized first visit to a brothel:

Losing our virginity was actually a dual mission: to ejaculate inside the hooker and then, more importantly, to tell of the entire adventure afterward.

It’s not a leap to imagine that the thrill while with the prostitute lies chiefly in the imagination of how the recitation of the night’s events to one’s peers will go down!

For men who, for any reason (often because of adultery) need to be secretive about their extra-marital sexual lives, it’s certainly possible, even probable, that the validation that comes from imagining the status-boost that would come if their buddies knew who they were bedding is almost as good, or perhaps even better, than actually letting them know. Just as so many little boys, playing alone on a court or a field, imagine that they are in a stadium in front of a huge cheering audience, so too slightly older boys, getting it on in a hotel room with a gorgeous young woman who isn’t their wife, may imagine something remarkably similar.

*It is popularly believed that in single-sex groups, it’s common for women’s discussion of the sex they’ve had with men to be much more graphic than men’s discussion of the sex they’ve had with women. If this is true, then it reinforces the point that men’s story-telling is not about the exchange of detailed information, but about the opportunity to gain status in the eyes of other men. Other men may want to know that you got the “hot chick” into bed, they may want to hear your claims of how good it was (and how good you were), but any further detail about what transpired is positively unnecessary. For homosocial reinforcement to work, that it happened is enough — how it happened is irrelevant.

Tiger Woods and the “misogynistic homosocial economy” of desire

Published

Hugo Schwyzer

on December 09, 2009

in Desire and objectification, Homosociality, Infidelity, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sexual harassment

. 100 Comments

(The title of this post differs slightly from when it was first put up this morning.)

Lots of discussion in the blogosphere these past few days about this Eugene Robinson column in the Washington Post: Tiger’s validation complex. Robinson, who is African-American, is troubled by more than the famous golfer’s equally famous multiple infidelities. He’s troubled by the type of woman that Tiger seems to have pursued:

Here’s my real question, though: What’s with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who’ve been linked to Woods resemble one another. I’m talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story — and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn’t variety but some kind of validation…

…the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes — some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an “official” standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious — a control freak even when he’s committing “transgressions.”

There is a long and painful history in the African-American community revolving around the penchant that a great many successful black men have had for pursuing white women. Indeed, the problem (if we can name it that) is a staple of magazine articles and fiction aimed at African-American women. I’m not a commenter on race, so it’s best that I merely note that the reaction Robinson is having is connected to a bitter and complicated history that is a good deal older than the now-disgraced superstar golfer.

But there’s a part of Robinson’s piece that isn’t just about race; it’s about the way in which men of all ethnicities use certain types of women as “trophies.” It is almost axiomatic that female beauty is a commodity which men employ to boost their status with other men. I wrote about this in April 2006, in a post about men, women, homosociality and weight. An excerpt:

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

“Whiteness” can function similarly to “thin-ness”, particularly for men of color. America has a long and bloody history of violence towards dark-skinned men who were even suspected of a sexual interest in white women. For some men of color, to be with a white woman — particularly one who embodies the all-American “Barbie” ideal — is to say to the world “See, I’ve made it. You can’t touch me; I’ve achieved sufficient power and wealth so that I can have ‘access’ to what was once forbidden and could have gotten my grandfather lynched.” I’m not saying that was Tiger’s motive (Robinson is, and he’s in a better position than I to do so). I am saying that bedding whiteness, in the misogynistic homosocial economy, gives status points.

One of the important challenges we all need to take up is that of separating out what aspects of our desires are organic to us, and what aspects are socially constructed and reinforced. Men who are afraid to date heavier women “because of what my buddies will say” or women who are reluctant to date shorter men “because of how we’ll look together in public” do have, I think, an obligation to distinguish their fear of losing status from their actual desires. As we all know, the human libido is flexible but not infinitely so; it can be influenced but not entirely molded by culture and experience. Most of us have preferences and types, as I wrote in 2005, that are to some degree essential to us:

…feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body. Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive! Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture. But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether.

Most of us — not all — have certain physical “types” to which we are often drawn…A “type” does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth). Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an “Asian fetish” that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality. But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle. We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women “know how to treat a man better.”

I’d add the Tiger corollary to that, which is that individual preferences are fine insofar as they are not thinly (sorry) disguised excuses for pursuing a particular type of woman in order to gain validation and status in the real or imagined eyes of other men. Untangling what we want sexually from what we ourselves want in order to meet cultural or familial expectations is a universal challenge. Unlike my postmodernist friends, I do believe we have an identity and desires that are deeper than our culture; our sexuality, although more malleable than many imagine, isn’t entirely a tabula rasa. (If that were so, there’d be far fewer GLBT kids growing up in conservative Christian households than there in fact are.)

Part of becoming a responsible, sexually mature adult is doing the often difficult work of discerning what one craves inherently from what one has been taught one ought to crave, and what one has learned will win approval from parents or peers. It ain’t rocket science, but it isn’t easy either. And while Tiger may “organically” crave youthful white women with Barbie-esque proportions, one suspects that for all his achievements, he has not yet come close to gaining insight and understanding of the role sexuality plays in his life. And the consequences of lacking that understanding are, as we have seen in his case, devastating.

Hugo Schwyzer

Archive for the 'Men and Masculinity' Category

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Rip Van Winkle comes to the Super Bowl

Men and the Work/Life balance: an upcoming radio program and campaign

Neither male nor female: Jesus as man, Jesus as role model

Perfection of the Life and the Work: the tragic hubris of Urban Meyer

“If they could see me now”: sex, homosociality, and the internalized male audience

Tiger Woods and the “misogynistic homosocial economy” of desire

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