Be a man. It is a simple imperative, repeated
over and over to men, starting when we are small boys. The phrase usually
connected to one man’s demand that another man be ‘stronger,’ which is
traditionally understood as the ability to suppress emotional reactions and
channel that energy into controlling situations and establishing dominance. (Jensen, 2007,
p. 5)
This clarion call
is one that takes many forms throughout a man/boy's life: "positive"
forms like 'man up' or 'be a man', negative forms like 'what are you a pussy',
'don't be a faggot', and strange guilt ridden forms 'I've made a grown man cry',
'I miss back when there were real men'. All of those phrases are ones that I've
heard in my life and their message is the same, "you're soft and should be
hard"; they are the self-effacing call to manhood. I'd like to do two things
here, I'd like to trace what those imperatives mean to one particular soft
little boy who as a means of survival takes up the masculine call to hardening
and I would like to think, to share, possibilities of escaping that hardening
into a space of intimacy and vulnerability.
I've covered details of my
upbringing elsewhere but there are a few things I'd like to highlight before I
get into stories of both my internal softness and the hardening process which I
undertook. While I grew up at a young age without having gender or gender roles
pushed on me from a large majority of my community by the time I'm 8 this is no
longer the case. By 8 I live in suburbia with my mother and little sister, I go
to public school, we go to a 'normal' church. I see my father regularly, we
live with my 'uncle' Eric, as a child I don't see either of these men in my
life as masculine because I don't have the concept that I need role models from
different genders, the gender construct isn't there strongly enough for me to
separate people like that. It's not to say I didn't 'play doctor', or realize
that there were people with different genitalia but in the same way that I
would say 'gay' for years without understanding the implication of it I saw sex
differences without understanding the implication of it. Additionally, the
utopian genderless space of my early childhood while maintained in theory is
also tainted by a strong anti-masculine feeling. I can't place this into
concrete examples but I can tell you that I have even to this day internalized
masculinity as evil. "men are monsters", is a statement that reads as
unequivocally true. While I criticize Jensen in Getting Off for constructing masculinity as only negative traits,
domination/violence/oppression, I do not disagree with him. Men rape, men
murder and wage war, the great horrors of civilization tend to be perpetuated
by men and we simply don't have a matriarchal history to look to in order to
see if women would do the same things with the same privilege or not. As a
child and young adult what this means is that I didn't identify as masculine
despite being anatomically aware I was a 'boy'. It is not until my 20s that I
internally identify as a 'man' despite a large part of my life being read by
others as such, and only then because that reading was true of people in the
most intimate of spaces.
The transition period into middle
school is a trying time for everyone, hormonal changes and new social pressures
mount to fundamentally change the structures of us both internal and external.
The little boy standing at the edge of this transition in 5th grade is a soft
and fragile thing. I cried openly, I was told crying even in public was ok,
crawling under a seat and bawling for hours when I got on the wrong bus. I was
fat, physically soft, I didn't play sports and my peers had no end of insults
to hurl at me for both of these things. My parent's divorce and court battles
were ongoing, a process that started when I was 8 would not completely end
until I was nearly 18. The Christian doctrine I was raised in taught
compassion, love, care, traits I saw (see) as universal but which the
cultivation of only enhanced the external view of me as soft. I was an odd kid
with little to no exposure to TV and enough books in my head to compete with
most adults on literature read. I spent time with other outcasts, children
outside the norm because of race or family structure or behavioral issues. By
the middle of 5th grade I'd taken heaps of insults and occasional physical
because I was soft, and the pressures of my home life were mounting. So I
cracked, I spent 2 weeks in a mental hospital and 2 months in a day treatment
program for a suicide attempt. The suicide attempt was on the heels of an uncle
committing suicide by hanging, the method I attempted. I just don't think until
that moment I had thought of self death as an out and the minute I saw it, I
thought I found a solution. The child that returned from that experience was
bound to be a different kid but that difference was as much predicated on how people
reacted to me after as it was on the experience I had in those spaces. Upon my
return the fact I shared my story openly, the reason for my absence etc, got me
quickly labeled as 'crazy'. While the school had me in a peer mediation program
that fostered skills like active listening, conflict resolution, compassion; it
also had me seeing the social worker and monitoring me closely adding to my
'crazy' persona. I learned pretty quickly the power that being seen that way
had. People were by no means kind to me because of my psychic fragility but I
learned they were less likely to be mean to me when they saw me that way and so
my hardening began.
Real little boys, as psychologists William
Pollack writes, will do almost anything they can to avoid being seen as soft.
[…] Sometimes, parents will encourage their sons to ‘toughen’ up. […] The first
time La Hoya boxed, he was punched badly smack on the nose, and ran home in
tears. But, as he reports, he soon ‘learned to manage’ his fears. Since he went
on to become a prize-winning boxer, this initiation could be read as the
prelude to a success story. But a price is paid for the ‘hardening’ of boys (as
Pollack calls it): they learn to become anesthetized to both physical and
emotional pain and to keep it to themselves. […] Boys are ashamed to tell
others when they are injured; the simple act of telling is an admission that
they are not bearing their pain silently, stoically, ‘like a man’. (Bordo, 2000,
pp. 56-57)
Part of what Bordo
is drawing attention to is that even a man like Oscar de la Hoya, a man who
literally beats other men for a living, is at risk of being seen as soft. It is
only because he is now a world class boxer that he can tell the story of
running home in tears at all. Hardening isn't just the emotional stoicism, it
isn't just the anesthetizing of pain, it is also the embrace of violence. I
learned this almost as quickly as I learned to embrace my new found crazy
persona. I'm not sure where my first act of violence happened, I can't trace it
back to a single moment where I realized being violent was an option. What I
can tell you is that early in 6th grade my capacity for and frequency of
violence was enough to get me placed in a self contained special education classroom.
I learned that violence, and later the mere threat or potential of violence,
kept me safe. Children tend to stop hurling painful words at the kid that will
smack them for it. That violence for me wasn't just expressed at my peer group,
at home my mother and I got into increasingly violence physical altercations.
My anger, a protective emotion both physically and psychically for me, reached
uncontrollable levels spurred into murderous rage by reactions to drugs meant
to prevent me from killing myself. Sharing stories of my violence from this
period is hard, I was a kid that was pretty fucked up in a lot of ways and it
is painful and embarrassing to think both of what I did and what perhaps some
part of me will always be capable of. I think everyone, all human beings, are capable
of violence, of truly awful atrocities, but feeling that darkness as part of
human nature doesn't make confronting it in yourself any easier. Perhaps the
worst violent act I produced in school was in 7th grade. I had a shop class
which was one of the few spaces I worked quickly and diligently in, the teacher
thought it was because I was good at it and enjoyed it. In reality I did it
because once my project was done I applied the tools of the shop to making
homemade weapons. That 7th grade me was better prepared for prison than a
classroom. I spent hours honing bits of copper wire into hooks and blades,
attaching them to pens and lanyards. The incident happened in gym class, in
that space of so much pubescent anxiety, the locker room. I'm not sure what the
kid said, I know he was one that hadn't learned the lesson to not be cruel to
me through rumor and threat. I know that whatever he said that the reaction I
had was disproportionate. His words were met with my weapons, a sharpened piece
of copper wire attached to a lanyard opened his arm up from shoulder to elbow.
The cut was deep enough for blood to run pretty good but not enough for him to
need stitches. To highlight at this point how much I'd changed is what I did
after I tore open a wound like this in another person. The same kid that 2
years earlier had cried getting on the wrong bus, who had trained in
compassionate conflict resolution, handed the weapon to the kid with a handful
of paper towels and told him that he fell into one of the lockers. I could feel
my heart beating in my throat when the gym teacher came and saw the blood. I
thought I was done, this final act of violence would end up with me kicked out
of school. It didn't occur to me that it would also probably land me in jail.
But that's the thing about violence and fear, they work. He said exactly what I
told him to and while the teacher I'm sure didn't believe it for a minute that
poor child was so terrified of what I might do to him if he told on me that he
stuck to that lie. Often when I think of my childhood I think of the trauma and
pain that pushed me from a sensitive caring kid into the monster of middle
school but I was also that trauma and pain for others. I cannot imagine how he
recovered from my abuse, what hardening he had to go through to survive me, I
try not to think about the wake of pain and suffering my transformation left
behind it.
The thing with using fear and
violence to make yourself safe is there's always someone scarier and more
violent than you are. Ivan was this person for me. In 7th grade Ivan was a 17
year old angry and violent gang member. My first interaction with Ivan was him
telling me in no uncertain terms while sitting behind me that he was going to
shove a pencil into the back of my head. A combination of fear and anger welled
up in me and my cold response was for him to do it because I'd pull it out and
shove it in his neck. Thankfully he didn't take me up on the challenge,
thankfully he was also probably not bright enough to realize that if he did it
I was not actually going to be capable of following through on my threat. See
Ivan over the course of a year taught me a few valuable lessons. 1) there's
always someone bigger and tougher than you 2) being friends with the top of the
violence food chain is almost as good as being the top 3) manipulating those
powers allows you to change not just your world but the world. I straddled an
odd position, my violence and being in a self contained classroom meant I was
friends with a lot of juvenile delinquents. I didn't shy away from my intellect
though, nor did they as having someone who could do things like make explosives
fed their own love of destruction and violence, and so I also had friends that
were the geeks playing geeky games and reading books. Straddling these two
worlds was what allowed Ivan to teach me that third lesson. When popular kids
would mess with my geeky friends, Ivan and I would mess with them. Ivan enjoyed
being able to torture anyone for any reason so channeling him was pretty easy,
and his gang values meant that being part of his in group meant being protected
and by virtue of that so were my friends when I was around. The popular kids
and jocks didn't get to pick on the geeks anymore, at least not when we were
around and that was my little band aid for the awful things I did that I was
using this new found power of violence to protect those weaker than me. I
wonder if Ivan, who I would later see smash a kids head into the wall so hard
he required 10 staples, thought the same thing about his protection f me.
The system may have problamatized my
violence but it also excused it. I had a hard life, boys get violent, I just
needed to learn to control it all. My external violence was met by a
therapeutic model that would teach me emotional stoicism. I needed to learn to
control my tonal inflection and volume because the way I said things made
people react a certain way even when I didn't intend that meaning. I needed to
learn to take deep breaths and relax, to control the rage because my violence
was keeping me in a self contained classroom and preventing me from exploring
my intellect the way I should. And let's be clear, that emotional control
covered my sadness (learning to suppress tears on my own) and my depression
(suicide and self harm could never be an option again)as well. My emotional
volatility got me labeled as bipolar and the psychiatrists made it clear, I'd
learn to control and modulate my own expression of emotion or they would
chemically regulate it for me. My choice was express emotion both appropriately
and less intensely or be chemically restrained with atypical antipsychotics and
benzodiazepines. If you've never had the experience of literally drooling on
yourself because your brain has been so chemically restrained I don't suggest
it. Needless to say stoicism was something I learned out of necessity as much
as I learned the violence there.
8th grade holds the event that taught
me I needed to reign in the violence, that swords aren't just sharp bits of
steel, they are tempered to create a beautiful killing machine. Note even now
as an adult who feels well adjusted I cannot help but see beauty in and use
poetic language to explain these processes. The forging of a sword in fire (the
trauma of my life), the beating of it into a shape (my early use of violence
and anger), the tempering of it in oil (learning stoicism), and finally the
sharpening of that shape into an elegant implement of death is a metaphor I
cannot help but romanticize and that is terrifying. It's not my last act of
violence, it's not even the worst act of violence I've done, hell it's not even
the most violent altercation between my mother and I, but it's the one that
makes it completely clear to me that how I used violence had to change. My
mother and I were fighting (verbally) about something, I don't remember what we
fought a lot it wasn't exceptional. I lost my temper and hit a bookshelf, it
didn't break I didn't hit her I didn't even threaten to hit her, I just lost
control and lashed out as per usual at an inanimate object. This pushed her
over the edge, she shoved me and started swinging at me. I'm not sure why I did
it, I didn't intend on using it as I told the police later, but I stepped back
and pulled out a knife I had in my pocket. I wouldn't have stabbed her, as I
later told my lawyer the blade was pointed away from her if anyone was even
going to get accidentally stabbed it was going to be me and not her. I was
getting beat and I didn't want to get beat anymore, I wanted to scare her into
stopping and it worked. When she called them she wasn't in any actual danger
though I suspect she was still terrified and would remain terrified for a long
time. I was in my room when she called the police, I knew she would so I
barricaded myself in my room. The police were not amused and when I finally let
them in they came in guns drawn. Having a loaded weapon pointed at you is
another experience I don't suggest.
They frisked me, put me in handcuffs
and took me to the station. I got lucky, granted I gave them a written
confession because I thought in my youthful naïveté that they would see what I
did. Turns out even if I was right and she would have hurt me they didn't care,
parents have a right to beat their kids and no one ever has the right to pull a
knife on another person. I got lucky because my mother said she'd take me home,
I got lucky because despite the fact the uniforms disagreed the detective made
them take me back home. I'm thankful, time in jail would probably have forced
me to harden more, a moment that made me realize I needed to step away from
violence could easily have become the moment that forced me to become the hard
and evil monster I was on a path to becoming. I cannot imagine the fear my
mother went through, I knew I wasn't capable of really harming her but I'm not
sure she knew that. I spent a year and a half on probation, an excuse to stop
doing drugs, to stop fighting, to stop a lot of stuff without losing face. Even
other hardened boys understood not wanting to go to jail, understood the
pressure of probation. I could turn down drugs, because I was on probation. I
could talk out conflict instead of fighting it out, because I was on probation.
At the same time I was taken out of public school for high school doing
catholic school instead. This meant that my reputation needed to be rebuilt, I
found my own hardened group of punk rock kids to do that with, but it also
meant that all my juvenile delinquent friends fell to the wayside as we no
longer had classes together and my social life tended to naturally revolve
around people I went to school with.
I learned through life experiences
the hardening of violence, I learned through therapy the hardening of stoicism,
I'm learning through feminism, theology, and life to balance being hard and
soft. I still see men as monsters and masculinity as evil. I still look on my
violent past with a deep sense of shame, with a worry that the monster I was
then is still with me today, he's just hiding. Life has taught me that the
monster of masculinity takes other forms, forms not so obvious, he can be
selfish and manipulative as well as violent and domineering. Neither form of
masculine domination is a good thing, neither is a person I want to be, both
are paradoxically modes we push men to be and admonish them for becoming. I've
focused on the violence because I've overcome it, but also because it's the one
society is the least comfortable with and so the easiest to recognize the
damage with. The stoicism is a much harder pain to explain but I'll offer one
last example of this hardening before I work through some experiences and possibility
of leaving it behind.
It's 2008, I'm 22. I've climbed the corporate
ladder and am sitting in my own office, a special education coordinator for one of the largest busing contractors in the nation. At 22 I have only one person
above me at our location, I'm literally one rung from the top. I'm also in excruciating
pain. I'm in my first flare up of Crohn's, I've been in flare up for weeks.
I've lost at least a pint of blood, I tell myself I'm just sick I'll deal with
it when my work is done. In pain so bad I can barely, and sometimes not at all,
stand up straight I work 10 plus hours a day to finish billing. I spend an
inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, the blood there makes me think I'm
dying. After 3 weeks of the pain and blood, with billing diligently finished, I
calmly tell my mother I need her to drive me to the hospital. I explain my pain
and the blood but with as little tears as I can muster. I spend 7 hours in an
ER refusing pain meds, toughing it out because I think I need to. In some ways
I need to, they poke and prod asking if this or that hurts, 7 hours later
finally accepting Dilaudid nothing hurts anymore I feel wonderful. It's later
explained to me that the pain I experienced is more akin to labor pain than any
other pain, I'm assured breaking a bone would have hurt less. I don't disagree,
the experience completely changed my pain scale, what was a 10 for me is closer
to a 5 now.
To be exposed as ‘soft’ at the core is one of
the worst things a man can suffer in this culture. Tears are permissible, even
admirable, when they fill the eyes of an old warrior reminiscing about battle
or a jock talking about his teammates. In such contexts, tears are like the
soft penis after satisfying sex: they don’t demean the man but make him
loveable and human --- because he has proved his strong, manly core (Bordo,
2000, p. 55)
That's the dangers of a masculine
hardening to pain and suffering. I lost blood, I was in excruciating pain but I
both didn't share that and I didn't deal with it until I'd 'man'd up' and gotten
all my work done. All that hardening of youth and even as an adult and I didn't
feel like I was 'man enough' to cry, to express pain, to ask for help. "Never
again" or so I tell myself; but looking at it I still do this, I come to
class some days at a 7, I push the pain away to go to work or write an essay, I
wait to see the doctor when the appointment is a week or two out because I can
manage until then. This masculine suck it up mentality has real cost, my
intestine has scarring that would be much less, in reality I'll need surgeries
and interventions I wouldn't need if I'd taken care of things earlier. I cannot
help but be aware I will face those things with that same masculine stoic edge,
the pain of surgery, the fear of both a low quality life and the possibility of
death will be fears, anxieties, sadness that I will likely never express to the
outside world. I justify this as pain, suffering, death being experiences we
all inherently face alone, the reality is I'm afraid that sharing those fears
will make me be seen as weak, will garner sympathy and not empathy, or worse
that I'll actually be left alone, seen as too weak to be worth investing in,
another broken toy cast alone onto an island of misfit toys.
I can't leave it here. I can't just
tell the story of hardening. I can't just share the tragedy that even a soft
little boy, raised in a space so close to utopia, even he hardens, even he
feels the pressure to become a man. I have to share the possibility of
vulnerability, I have to try to find the intimate spaces where care and
compassion can break through. I have to not leave myself open to the same
criticism I had for Jensen, that his deconstruction project was so strong but
that he left us with so little to build up from. He did however leave us with a
wonderful abstract vision:
I believe that love (based on a commitment to
equality articulated in our core philosophies and theologies), compassion
(based on our common humanity), and solidarity (based on our need to survive
together) can anchor our lives at every level from the intimate to the global.
I believe those things in part because of my necessary faith in 'the better
angels of our nature,' as Abraham Lincoln put it, but also because of my
experience. In my life, weighed down as it is sometimes in struggle and
failure, I have experienced that intimacy. Once experienced, it's difficult to
return to the illusory. (Jensen, 2007, p. 179)
I wish Jensen had
shared his experience of intimacy with us, given us more than abstract vision
but a concrete example to look to and hold as we stumble and struggle together
in the dark to create the world he sees and to experience the intimate care we
all so desire. I'm going to attempt to share a few intimate moments, hope that
in these tiny stories of love, compassion, and solidarity that we can find some
experience or pattern to carry on in our hearts and into the world. I also want
to make it clear that I hold paradoxically the need and desire to do that with
a clear need and desire to be read as effective at the masculinity project.
Being read as 'man enough' protects me but also allows me to challenge that paradigm
in spaces I otherwise couldn't (hardened men will allow me to challenge them to
compassion and love because they read me as 'man enough', to have earned the
right to make that challenge), I also admit that some of it is a fear of giving
up the safety of privlege being read as a man and as effectively masculine
enough gives me. We are all but human and accepting that, the reality that this
means we will misstep and fail I think is the first step in the journey toward
a better world.
I want to share an early act of
intimate compassion, one that is absent from my earlier stories because it felt
disjointed there. When I was hospitalized I didn't share that experience with
anyone until after I was out of day treatment. I had my parents, a little
sister too young to understand, who knew because of their proximity and
position but open sharing wasn't until much later. Even in my return to school
the experience I shared was as much a tale spun as a sharing of reality. My
dearest friend Chris is the one exception to this. He was my only peer I talked
to on the phone while institutionalized. He is the person who I shared my fears
and feelings with, the only peer I admitted openly to still wanting to die. At
such a young age the fact that he embraced me and my suffering with such love
and compassion is a testament to him as an individual and to the possibility of
the good in humanity in general. Chris shared his own pain, at the possible
loss of me, at how what I did made him feel. There were many late nights
talking, enough tears to fill an ocean, deep hugs and embraces meant to help
each other feel grounded to something in a world that felt like it was spinning
out of control. Chris didn't shy away from that compassion and love in the face
of others, willing to embrace me as a greeting or in need regardless of who was
around. We created in that space a group of us that shared our feelings, our
fears, our loves, our desires, openly powerfully a group of men vulnerable at
their core to each other. That core expanded to a church group, a group that
fostered that sharing around a rope symbolically and literally binding us each
to one another. Our core group took that into the world, shared that space in
phone calls and in darkened rooms at sleepovers. We boys from 13-18 did
something I've seen so few men in my adult life be able to do, to hold each
other, to cry, to share hopes and fears, to be soft and gentle with one
another. Maybe that's the space Jensen calls us to create, the embrace in
compassion regardless of who is around us. The sharing of hopes and fears with
each other, face to face without having to stick it between macho chest beating
or stoic lies of it all being fine. Maybe telling each other how loosing each
other would leave us broken and in pain, not lying about being able to just
suck it up and move on when the world rips away someone we love. Maybe that's
what intimacy looks like. It's that great hug, tight enough and long enough you
feel like you're melting into the other person, a hug filled with such love and
care that you can feel some part of your stress and pain melt away even if it
returns the instant later. Maybe it's about expanding that feeling beyond just
those moments into spaces, times, places, that cause that feeling to continue
on.
Physical care and intimacy is hard.
I've spoken a lot here about physical hardening to pain and through violence.
I'm still soft, both in terms of embracing the love and compassion, empathy, in
me but bodily I'm soft like cuddling up with a giant teddy bear, a huge organic
pillow. A good hug from me is filled with warmth, emotional and physical, it's
the feeling of being enveloped in a warm blanket on a cold night. I find those
moments with a partner are what make intimacy for me. There's a rhetoric of men
wanting to sleep after sex and women wanting to cuddle. This isn't my
experience. I always want to cuddle, I like the feeling of physical desire
slacked meaning that our embrace can be nothing but care, love, intimacy. I try
to set that intimate space around the act of sex as often as possible. I enjoy
a partner with light touch, with massage, with kisses and hugs and cuddling,
before and after the actual acts of sex. I like the idea of blurring that
space, of thinking about sex as that whole process and not just the explicit
acts of sex we do in the bedroom. By not separating foreplay and sex in my head
I create an intimate space that flows and feels much warmer but also much more
natural. I find doing this means that the intimacy isn't restricted just to the
cuddling after colitis that most men pretend to hate. I find doing this means
that touch does something different something new and wonderful. And frankly,
if men need a selfish 'hardened' reason for trying this out, it makes sex
better and easier. My challenge though is to ask men to think beyond
performative benefits, to ask what it would feel like to put the feeling of
intimacy and care before the feeling of physical pleasure. And to explore
physical pleasure in that space, to not make it about 'getting off' as quickly
and efficiently as we can but allowing ourselves to enjoy the intimate journey
to pleasure and orgasm and to revel in that same journey in our partner. Yes,
getting off feels good but so does a lot leading up to and following that. Yes,
getting someone off feels good, but so does exploring their body, their
pleasure, their world.
Act first and always out of a space
of compassion. That's the call I give to myself, the standard I want to live up
to, the standard I so often fall short of. It's a call I want to share with the
whole world, it is I believe consistent with what Jensen wants to create in the
world. I am hopeful that my two little vignettes of that intimate space might
help shine light on what those ideals look and feel like, that they can help us
find other spaces in everyone's stories that bring those things to the fore. I
hope that someday I can let go of the hardening, to be the soft person that
hides so often at my core surrounded by all kinds are armors safe from the
vulnerability of exposure but also hidden from the joy of intimate connection.
Bibliography
Bordo, S. (2000). The Male Body. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Jensen, R. (2007). Getting Off. Brooklyn: South End Press.
