Tag Archives: Men and Masculinity

Virtual Models and the Tired Trope of the War Against Men

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Two more pieces up today.

At GMP, I respond to Tom Matlack and to this Meghan Casserly piece in Forbes. See It’s Not the End of Men, and We Still Have Work to Do. Excerpt:

As reported this week, men with children are doing more housework than ever before. We’re up to spending 80% as much time as women do on chores. That’s an undeniable improvement over where we were a few short decades ago. But again, a trend in the right direction doesn’t mean the problem of inequality has been licked. And as that same study found, women are doing much more than those statistics suggest, largely because women spend much more time than men multi-tasking. The fact that we’re doing more than ever before doesn’t change the reality that we’re still not pulling our weight.

There’s a long tradition in men’s writing (see Freud, Sigmund) of complaining that women’s demands are excessive and irrational. The modern iteration of that tactic is to point out how hard men are trying. What more could women possibly want? Don’t women have more opportunities than ever before? Aren’t men doing more domestic chores and showing more affection than their fathers’ generation ever did? Why isn’t that enough? When are these shrews going to give us a break, give us a cookie, and let “good enough” be sufficient?

Individual men are not called to be martyrs. (I don’t know any women who expect them to be.) But we can do better than point endlessly to all the things we’ve done right, as if they constitute a credit balance sufficient to discharge the debts from all the places where we continue to fall short. And make no mistake, we are still falling short. That men are up to doing 80% of the work—and that women are up to earning 80 cents on our dollar—indicates progress. But to use a football analogy, it’s still the third quarter and though we’re catching up, we need another couple of touchdowns to win the game. And some men sound like they’re ready to hit the showers.

At Healthy is the New Skinny, my column looks at the H&M virtual models controversy. See All Women are Real…Unless They’re Digitally Generated. Excerpt:

But models are more than just walking and talking mannequins. For all the real problems in the beauty industry, there’s a growing awareness of the tremendous potential that real (as in human) models across the size spectrum have to inspire us to think differently about our bodies. More and more current and former models – including so many of our HNS ambassadors are speaking out in favor of a healthier approach to fashion. We’re seeing a new generation of models emerge who are genuine role models, willing to share their joys and their struggles and their tools for living happy and complete lives. No computer image can do that.

For the sake of those role models – and more importantly for the sake of the young people who need those role models – it’s worth pushing back against the current H&M campaign. If we’re ever going to return the beauty ideal to something that’s sane, healthy, and attainable, we need real, human women to show it to us.

Resisting the Old Boys

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Though it’s not exactly a take on the Penn State scandal, my contribution for the Good Men Project’s business ethics package is up: Resist the Old Boys. Excerpt:

In our culture, we socialize men to crave the approval of other males, particularly those in positions of authority. The pressure to “give in” and join the OBN (Old Boys Network) isn’t just from older men; for many of us, it comes from within ourselves, as it speaks to our intense, socialized desire to have our masculinity validated by powerful father figures. Sometimes, the OBN coerces us to join a club we already long to join.

Perhaps that’s why it isn’t easy to refuse OBN invitations. One key way to make it easier is to seek out mentors of both sexes. Another is to form close working relationships with women as well as men, resisting the temptation to “flee” to all-male spaces. Men and women can be friends outside of work as well as colleagues in the office. As long as we maintain the fiction that that’s too difficult or too at odds with the laws of nature, the OBN will continue to have a much easier time finding new recruits among the ranks of already privileged young men while excluding women of every age. And a new generation in the Old Boys Networks will learn to cover up for the most indefensible and horrific actions of its members.

“I Don’t Want Your Guilt (or Your Shame), I Want Your Responsibility”

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The Good Men Project runs a small series on “male guilt” today. My column is here: Guilt Is Good, but Responsibility Is Better. Excerpt:

“It’s not your guilt I want, it’s your responsibility!” I often quote that line from Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy to my students who complain of feeling male guilt. I try to always say it with a smile to soften what would otherwise come across as unsympathetic hectoring. I’m not so old I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a young man overwhelmed by a troubled conscience, unsure of the degree of my own collaboration in the Great Crime. Shame is useless, I remind them; but in the end, guilt is only a little less so. Analysis paralysis doesn’t change the world. What changes the world is accepting responsibility.

Responsibility means giving up the excuse of biology or culture to explain behavior that hurts, demeans, or exploits others. Taking responsibility means forgoing the temptation to explain away our bad behavior with appeals to evolutionary psychology, testosterone, or our Y chromosome. It means recovering the capacity for self-reflection, empathy, and articulate self-expression that we suppressed as boys in order to fit in with the other guys. It means talking about the things we were warned not to talk about.

If we’re not willing to do that work because we think it’s too difficult—or not worth doing—then we’re shirking the charge to grow up and become fully human. And if we evade that responsibility, then guilt is exactly what we should feel.

Read the whole thing.

From self-mutilation to marathons to playing with my daughter: a note on pain

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Good Men Project runs a series this week on men and pain. Lots of great pieces. Here’s my contribution: No Gain in the Pain: Self-Injury, Endurance Sports, and Male Narcissism.

Excerpt:

The worst pain I’ve known in my life has been self-inflicted. That makes me a lucky man indeed. I’ve watched loved ones die of cancer, and seen the horror of pain that isn’t chosen. I’ve watched my wife give birth, and seen how pain can be inextricably bound up with the gift of new life. I’ve learned that there’s nothing redemptive about choosing to suffer needlessly. My pain—whether inflicted with a razor blade or with a 50-miler through the mountains—never alleviated another person’s hurt or contributed to the well being of the world.

I’m grateful to have the scars I do. More than once, when mentoring a self-mutilating teen, I’ve established rapport simply by rolling up my sleeve. I’m grateful too to have logged the miles I did, as it helps establish credibility when I’m challenging another middle-aged marathon junkie whose running is jeopardizing his marriage. Pain, in the end, did give me “gain”—if only because it equipped me to talk openly and honestly with others trapped in the self-absorbed world of the self-injurer or compulsive exerciser.

There is enough pain in life we don’t choose. And I’m done adding my own self-indulgent hurt to the world’s suffering quotient.

Affirmative action for boys means perfectionism for girls

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My piece at Jezebel this week looks at how “affirmative action for men” drives perfectionism for young women: Women Are The Real Victims Of The So-Called ‘Men’s Crisis’. Excerpt:

Young men… are collectively rewarded for their absence of academic ambition and community spirit. By the intensely competitive standards of college admissions, what might seem like a lackluster volunteer record from a high school girl (say, 5 hours a week reading to the blind) seems positively heroic when it belongs to a guy. The more time the mass of young men devote to the gym or to playing Call of Duty, the more the shrinking number of even moderately ambitious dudes benefit; they become the chance for a selective school to keep its gender ratio from becoming too female-heavy.

The traditional “stressors” in so many young women’s lives – the obligation to care for family, the burden of chasing an unattainable physical ideal, the pressure to be sexy but not sexual, the worry about “running out of time” — all these were present well before the current frenzy of anxiety over the end of manhood. These familiar worries have now been joined by the depressing reality that young women have to be far more accomplished than young men just to receive equal consideration in college admissions.

Read the whole thing.

The soft bigotry of low expectations: affirmative action for boys

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The New York Times reports today on a new study about changing college admissions practices, done by Inside Higher Education. The results are depressing and predictable: colleges are increasingly giving preference to wealthy students — and to men of all races. I write about this at Good Men Project today: Do Boys Need Affirmative Action?

Excerpt:

…when it comes to competitive admissions men of all backgrounds are now lumped in the same preferential category as athletes, children of alumni, and offspring of donors. Though rumors have persisted in recent years that some colleges did favor men in admissions to try and achieve a balanced sex-ratio, we’ve never had evidence of just how widespread this practice is until now.

There’s no question that the percentage of women receiving bachelor’s degrees has climbed in recent years—and that at the same time, slightly fewer men are attending or finishing university. There are a host of hotly debated reasons for this shift. Some, like Leonard Sax, argue that boys lack the natural ability to focus that girls possess, and as a result tend to fall behind in school. They may need extra help, a different pedagogical approach – and apparently, preferential treatment in admissions.

But it’s hard to escape the sense that the decision to admit guys with lower grades than their female peers is tied to a panic about the seeming feminization of ambition and success in our culture. In the 1920s, the Ivy League famously initiated quotas to keep down the number of Jewish students, who were considered too bright, too pushy, and too likely to displace the young WASPs in pursuit of their gentlemen’s Cs. In the 1980s, there were widespread rumors that the University of California was taking steps to reduce the very high percentage of Asian students at campuses like Berkeley.

Women, it seems, are the “new Jews” of higher education—forced to be better than everyone else in order to be treated equally.

Machismo and mortality

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My piece today at the Good Men Project: Men with ‘Macho’ Attitudes Die Early.

Excerpt:

In just a few months, I will have outlived my father’s father. That’s a haunting thought, especially as I have a very young daughter. Heloise is only 2; my wife and I took a long sweet time to become parents. If I am to see my little girl grow middle-aged, I am keenly aware I need to make different decisions than my father and grandfathers made before me. I can’t prevent every accident, of course, and even the most careful attention to diet, exercise, and doctor visits isn’t a perfect prophylaxis against untimely death. All any of us can do is improve our odds. And improving those odds means letting go of the foolish masculine ideal that demands we treat our bodies as if they were indestructible.

One of the defenses of the macho ethic is that it encourages men to be strong and tough to protect and defend their families and communities. Even if that were true, you can’t protect if you’re not present. The tragedy of traditional masculinity is that it shortens men’s lives; the scandal is that it does so in the name of making them better husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.

We need to remind men that part of being a “real man” is being mentally, emotionally, and physically present for the people who love and rely upon us. Being present—and staying present—requires us to be better stewards of our bodies and our spirits. It doesn’t mean hypochondria or endless introspection. It means remembering that our value doesn’t lie only in our capacity to defend or to provide. It lies in our capacity to love, to connect, and to nurture.

We can do none of those things if we aren’t there.

Gripping the sword, embracing the lover: SNL spoofs the masculine double bind and the myth of male inflexibility

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Chloe sends me a link to this Saturday Night Live skit that ran last weekend. With Helen Mirren as special guest star, the cast cleverly spoofs our cultural confusion about masculinity. Two comedians take on the roles of Hugh Jackman and Gerard Butler — actors who have shown a penchant to oscillate between playing romantic, sensitive leading men and hyper-macho heroes. They pound their chests and sing Broadway numbers before welcoming Mirren, who plays Jule Andrews — and promptly becomes genuinely homicidal.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live often, but this was one of the funnier and more pointed skits I’ve seen in a long time.

The SNL short points at two key problems in our contemporary representations of masculinity. Popular culture is deeply ambivalent about men who break free of traditional gender roles: romantic comedies celebrate men who can be sensitive and insightful, witty and artistic while action films feature cartoonish exaggerations of swaggering manliness. In the case of actors like Jackman and Butler, the two genres in which they are most famous for working grow ever further apart: the action movies feature greater savagery (and less depth) than ever; the romantic comedies show us heterosexual male protagonists who are increasingly comfortable with their “feminine” side. The SNL skit riffs on the absurdity of that ever-widening gap, lampooning our own confusion about what it is that we expect men to be.

At the same time, the skit plays on a darker myth, the one that says that men can’t emotionally multi-task. Men can either be violent, protective, macho brutes — or they can be intuitive, kind, and charming. But to expect them to integrate aspects of both traditional masculinity and traditional femininity is a massive overask, or so the myth of male inflexibility has us believe. Of course, in real life, not many people expect a man to be both a Spartan general and a tender aficionado of musical theater. All that most of us would like to see is men who are capable of both compassion and decisiveness. What we’re missing are images of men whose emotional dexterity and flexibility is as great as women’s. Those men do exist, of course. We just see them so rarely.

Chloe asked me for my thoughts on the skit at almost exactly the same moment that I got an email from a student of mine who wanted to share a line from a Japanese anime comic (or film, I’m not sure; one of my readers can fill me in.). One character says to another:

“Unless I grip the sword, I can not protect you. While gripping the sword I can not embrace you.” Isn’t that another perfect encapsulation of the double bind of masculinity, my student wondered. Continue reading →

“Men Run When They Lack the Words to Stay”

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A slightly different version of this post first ran in June 2009.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day; she and her boyfriend of several months are “taking a break” from their relationship. He’s in his early thirties, she’s in her late twenties; in different ways, each carries the “baggage” of family, faith, and previous lovers.

The fella — I’ll call him “Gordy” — is a bit overwhelmed by the gal, “Calliope.” Gordy, apparently, does something that I very much remember doing in relationships when I was younger: retreat in the face of intense emotion, particularly in the face of a woman’s anger. Many young — and not-so-young — men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners. When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling a bit as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got — or he feels he hasn’t got — the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code”. And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.

I’ve been over this ground before in the three posts in the male transformation series. The three posts from the autumn of 2007 explain aspects of the problem — and the solution — in considerably more detail. But what I want to focus on today is Gordy’s need to “take a break” from the relationship, and the reasons that seem to undergird it. It’s entirely possible, of course, that “wanting a break” is code for “I really am tired of this relationship, and want to get out for good, but lack the courage to say so directly.” But from what I can tell, there’s something else at work. Gordy doesn’t want out; he has fallen in love with Calliope and wants to be with her. He also finds her — the complete package of Calliope-ness — to be more than a little overwhelming. He’s not calling an end so much as he seems to be calling for a time-out.

Let me say again (though my MRA critics don’t hear this) that I don’t think women are always blameless when heterosexual relationships go south. Women have their own lessons to learn — and in the case of sexist acculturation, it might be more apt to say that they have their own lessons to unlearn. But I write much more often about what men can and ought to do because, well, I’m a man. I’ve lived nearly 44 years in a male body, and while I don’t pretend to be a professional relationship expert, I’ve lived a bit — and thought a lot — about the ways in which culturally constructed masculinity undermines our collective happiness and our ability to function intimately with other human beings. And so I focus more on what men can do, respecting the reality that women have had plenty of experience being told how to behave by the males in their lives. Continue reading →

For every slacker, a perfectionist: some thoughts on class, sex, and the community college

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One of the things about teaching full-time at an urban community college is that I have a front-row seat for social, economic, and cultural change. And when it comes to issues of race, class, and gender, the transformations I’ve seen in the last two years have been profound.

California, like so many other states, has been hard-hit by the recession. We’re on our third straight year of draconian cutbacks to higher education, with no end in sight. Fees are rising, class sections are being cut, hiring is frozen. And this has changed the student population, at least in my classes.

My students are whiter and more middle-class than they’ve been in over a decade. From the mid-90s until the mid-00′s, Pasadena City College grew progressively “less white”, with European-American students falling from perhaps 30% of the student body when I began teaching to about 15% by 2005. (And at PCC, we count immigrants from the former Soviet Union and from much of the Middle East as “white”, including students of Arabic and Armenian descent.) But with the coming of the economic downturn, the white middle-class kids are returning in droves.

Students who once would have skipped the community college and headed straight to state universities are coming here first, both because of cost considerations and because spaces have been drastically reduced at California’s public four-year institutions. In our community college district, we have more than a dozen high schools that serve as our feeders. But traditionally, we’ve drawn relatively small numbers of kids from the “affluent” schools (like La Canada and San Marino High Schools). I note — and this is all anecdata — that within the past two years, the number of students coming from those more prosperous communities has climbed.

What this means, of course, is that I have more students than ever in my classes who are “college-ready.” The percentage of my students whose writing and reasoning skills need remedial attention is lower. But the danger is that at a place like PCC, the students from more privileged backgrounds raise the competition level — and make it easier for those who lack basic skills to fall through the cracks. When the average goes up (and in most of my classes over the past two years, the “average” scores on exams have indeed risen), competition grows fiercer. And in an era of declining resources (we’ve had major cutbacks to our tutoring and counseling services), that means it’s harder than ever for the college to function as a ladder into the middle class.

There’s something interesting happening as well around gender. I’m getting more men in my classes again. In my nearly twenty years here, women have averaged around 55% of overall enrollment, though that number is skewed by the high number of men in vocational education classes. In the humanities and social sciences, the percentage of women has hovered around 65% of all students until recently. But we’re seeing more men coming in, no doubt due to the terrible job climate.

But here’s where the sex differences remain stark. It’s axiomatic that the poor economy has ratcheted up anxiety for everyone. But from listening to students in my gender studies classes, that anxiety manifests quite differently for men and women. While both men and women are more likely to live with their parents for longer periods than before, my female students are much more likely to carry full academic loads. While I have roughly equal numbers of men and women in all my classes save for women’s studies, those who are taking more than the standard 15 unit semester load are overwhelmingly female. My female students are also more likely to be working multiple part-time jobs. Continue reading →