jackb
towards a normal masculinity
subtitle pending
I’m sick and tired of being told what men ought or ought not to do. I’ve recently been curious about the very occasional posts I encounter on Substack that call for more men’s media, more positive / affirmative writing about men that is written by men. An article interrogating the decline of the male novelist; an article seeking personal essays; articles discussing a general absence of men from literary culture altogether; on and on. This of course happens concurrently with morons autistically muttering “sigma, gamma, alpha, sigma” over and over or aspirational pimp-fluencers masturbating into your computer monitor and calling it insight. Still more people are offering their two cents on the male loneliness and mental health problems, the apparent wayward directionlessness of young men today, obsessively diagnosing and prescribing cures for the nature of men’s existence ad infinitum until we behave in the way best suited to some kind of purpose that is most decidedly not our own.
I was animated to write on this topic not because I have my own program for masculinity (though I suppose I do live one out) but because this simpering geek responded to a high-potential but played-out conceit (there’s a hunger for authentically masculine perspectives in the culture) and nosedived it into precisely the same crash site as everybody else who has written on this topic.
In case it isn’t obvious, let me name the mistake these people make: you keep trying to get me to explore your preferred vision of men as if it were my own. Perhaps men writ large don’t claim any of the alternatingly sterile or tard-raging scribblings that constitute men’s media nowadays because they don’t identify with it.
Look at the linked article above. It starts out reasonably enough, expressing interest in men’s accounts of their attempts at sex and romance. What follows is the same constant barrage of prescriptive assaults on masculinity that we have all experienced every day of our lives for the last few decades. You must tell us about your feelings, men. It’s okay to tell us what you feel - in fact, it’s better and more manly if you front your emotions. ““Real Men Don’t Talk About Their Feelings, says Evil Chauvinist ‘Traditional Masculinity’ Bogeyman” is the same headline about men and the problems with our behavior that I have never stopped hearing, ever, and probably never will, from every direction simultaneously.
It really gets under my skin. It’s so close to doing something useful and appears sincere and truly curious. The author of that post goes on to claim that one of the best things he has ever read on the topic of masculinity is a twitter thread making the assertion that men are unnecessary for the teaching and development of good men, that ‘traditionally masculine’ people are “not as happy as they think they are”, that men should not consider how they might adjust to changes in how they relate to women economically and culturally. this is all so unbelievably, obviously incorrect that i almost can’t believe a man wrote it and another man described it in the superlative.
The end of the article is a call for men to share their perspectives, but only as it might make others feel heard and seen. This isn’t an interest of men specifically, it’s an interest of people who are pathologically fixated on men’s feelings to the point of fetishization. You can just picture the heavy breathing and accelerated heartbeat that these people must display when a man affects emotional sensitivity. It’s why these essays and articles can never, ever ask for men’s perspectives without explaining what specifically that perspective ought to be. These people don’t want to hear about men’s beliefs, they want to hear their own beliefs repeated back to them by men. Remember this bit from 30 Rock?
so what should men be writing?
I don’t know. To the extent that we ‘should’ be writing anything, most of us probably don’t know either. I guarantee you if men had things to say, they would be doing so frequently. It might be best to let us come to you.
I wonder if women get their morning coffee and think on how being a woman makes them feel. Ladies, when you’re waiting for your work computer to boot up, do you meditate on what femininity means to you? Does your soul cry out for an outlet to plumb the depths of how your ovaries have colored your soul, publicly and without holding anything back? Because the answer to the male-targeted versions of these questions is almost always going to be “get away from me you sicko.”
personal essays
I only took one creative writing class in undergrad, which was called Creative Non-Fiction. It sounded ridiculous, a contradiction in terms, but in retrospect this is perfectly appropriate for the product of a cultural era defined by polarity and oppositionalism. It turned out that this species of writing referred to what I read the most of and aspired to professionally write myself: memoirs, opinion pieces, cultural commentary, et cetera.
The class was fine. I enjoyed the readings and some of my classmates’ work, but as with all workshop environments, the most important part was field testing my own writing before a captive audience. This quickly became my least favorite part of the course.
Just a few weeks into the workshop, I found myself reading aloud from a piece describing my relationship with my brother in the time leading up to his death. We’d been assigned to compose a short memoir, and in my total creative poverty, I struggled to think of anything compelling to write about myself. I eventually settled where I did because the deadline was looming and I knew the content of such a narrative would imply profundity and weight regardless of the actual quality of the writing. So I found myself running through the greatest loss I’ve ever experienced by way of precious little turns of phrase designed to impress strangers. My shame and embarrassment were sharp and immediate. Yes, I was guilty of vulgar commodification of my brother’s memory, but above all I was ashamed of revealing some of the essential truth of myself so incautiously.
Vulnerability is a porousness of our psychic borders - a permeability of the boundaries that prevent others from directing our behavior and emotions. To be vulnerable is to take a risk that someone may do harm within our domain, yes, but it is also a risk that something from within may venture outward and be lost or harmed. Each of us has very little that is as precious as ourselves, so we are jealous guards of what animates and moves us. To be cavalier with our private thoughts is to diminish them; time and repitition grind even the most devout adoration into dusty indifference.
why am i so mad about it
It’s possible that it really was the tweets linked in that article that set me off, especially when paired with the reference to the moronic survey data claiming that 44% of the men responding think “society says Real Men don’t talk about their feelings”. I guess we can try to suspend our disbelief to the maximum and not immediately discount that statement as laughable nonsense, but I don’t think I’ll succeed. Whatever could possibly be meant by ‘society’ in this context, it is definitely going to include cultural and political opinion as distributed by media. Which means these survey respondents apparently believe that journalists, politicians, celebrities, television writers, academics, and so forth are claiming that men should keep a stiff upper lip and do their best Gary Cooper, and that none of these people are asking men to be sensitive. If they believe themselves, then I can only marvel at the sublime cognitive incompetence of these men. Perhaps when they read “society” they performed some kind of esoteric linguistic alchemy and substituted “Andrew Tate et al., and literally zero other people of any cultural import whatsoever”, which caused them to arrive at this bizarre conclusion that Society wants men to keep their feelings in despite every single dominant form of cultural production loudly and constantly agitating in the opposite direction.
One of the great blessings of social science is that even when it is totally and obviously wrong in every single one of its claims and conclusions, it can often still be useful as a conversation starter. Regardless of their intellectual capabilities, this survey did reveal that nearly half of those men believe their emotional expression is repressed by a culture that denegrates male sensitivity. We can still wonder how and why they feel that way and try to account for it.
One possible answer is that they may have actually heard and felt this pressure in their private lives, no matter what the telly or their twitter follows have to say. I’d be inclined to give this some weight if the last twenty years had not made it obvious that media-inspired hysteria frequently overrides tangible reality as a basis of belief formation. Regardless of whether you bleed red or blue, you will uncritically accept that the other team votes against their obvious self-interest and does so because they have some false consciousness or are being duped or otherwise brainwashed by predatory ideology. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that the same mechanism applies as a cause of behaviors other than the ones you personally wish to discredit, so we can say with some confidence that it’s at least as likely the survey respondents have been misled into believing they are emotionally repressed by society as it is that they genuinely are experiencing such repression.
I think the far more likely explanation is that this bankrupt hedge-stoicism that says “real men don’t talk about their feelings” really is foundational to how we understand masculinity today; the mistake is in naming it a virtue rather than a vice. Like a postmodern Kronos, it has pride of place in our creation myths as the Great Enemy that is defied and replaced by the superior ideals of the new age. Men today know instinctively that the image of men as emotionless and taciturn is crucial to their understanding of what kind of thing they are; they simply mistake the presence of this image for its endorsement. This is what enables the male feminist (for example) to describe our culture as a patriarchy that punishes vulnerability and quashes sensitivity, and then be showered with praise from every direction for saying so. His manhood is an eternal striving to divorce masculinity from its shadow.