On Masculinity. Part 1

A few thoughts on what it means to be a man

My daughter, bless her heart, is always looking for opportunities for me to get out and do some good in the world. Much like the two other women that have shared a home with me for thirty and eighteen years, respectively, she worries about my tendency to isolate myself, to pull away by pulling what they rightly refer to as my “Lone Wolf” card. I have finally come to own the whole Lone Wolf label, even adding to it “McQuade” as a nod to the 1983 Chuck Norris movie “Lone Wolf McQuade” that I watched not just as entertainment, but also as a form of education in what it means to be a man.

I was seventeen when the movie came out, and Chuck Norris was one of the brightest shining stars of what would now be considered the ‘manosphere.’ Arnold Schwarzennegger was another, as he had just starred in a the practially tongue-in-cheek proto-Viking movie “Conan the Barbarian” and would soon play the Terminator, a badass, unfeeling yet funny AF machine that for a generation of young men inadvertently became a guide, if not a goal, for being a man. Toss in Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, and you pretty much have the macho salad many young men were chomping on back then. These men stood on the shoulders of actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, who carried the manly man torch through the sixties and seventies. And let me not forget the man-tutelage that comes from being obsessed with professional wrestling from a young age, and perhaps even worse not realizing that it was not real much longer than is healthy to. Perhaps that should have come with the whole Santa Claus reveal, a sort of “And while we are at it pro-wrestling is not real either.” But it was real to us, just as real as Rambo and Lone Wolf McQuade and Dirty Harry and Rooster Coburn and the Terminator. We learned how to be men from men pretending to be men. Now that will do something to you.

My father died when I was four. My mother raised us three boys on her own, and while I struggled with not having a father back then I have since gained a certain appreciation for not having one man’s sense of what it means to be a man, and with it a father, imprinted on me. Having watched male friends struggle to step out of the shadow of their fathers, fight to not become their fathers, I felt almost lucky to be a father without a script for how to be a father. And yet, I still smuggled a script for being a father into my own parenting, and this script had a lot to do with how I had cobbled together a sense of what it meant to be a man.

Back to my daughter, who was telling me about all the lost young men she encounters in her life. She sees them as adrift in the choppy seas of a torqued, toxic masculinity, struggling with what it means to be a man in this day and age. For some reason she thinks that I might be able to help them. I find this funny considering what I wrote above about my own twisted Hollywood tutelage on being a man. I think my daughter sees my ongoing struggle to be more than just a man, my desire to be fully and completely human. She tells these young men that they should meet me because I have been a marine but also write poetry, do yoga and take mushrooms. I don’t think of myself in exactly these terms, but I get where she is coming from in the sense that I am, like most men, a living contradiction.

She gets that I have wrestled (amatuer, not pro;-)) with the question of what it means to be a man for much of my life, which at least for me has manifested in the sort of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde relationship with masculinity, between being a fully he-man and being fully hu-man. The former (he) I think of as a sort of concentrated, narrow and ultimately stultifying form of masculinity. The latter (hu) acknowledges that we are all made up of masculine and feminine energies, and that becoming fully ourselves is finding a balance or harmony between the two.

I think my daughter sees me as I am, as a boy who grew up with some really torqued instructions on how to be a man, as someone who has since tried to figure this out in a way that does not come at the expense of his or anyone else’s ability to express and ultimately become themselves. So being a man as sort of a side-project to being fully human, rather than the other way around. She also sees me as someone steeped in particular notions of strength, as someone who has had ‘anger issues’ his whole life, as someone who has not adequately dealt with some of the most traumatic experiences in his life, and finally as someone with an ambivalent relationship to violence.

She knows me and my story in a way that I cannot, and yet I know she knows me better than I know myself. I think this is in part because we share some of the same tendencies- probably passed on by nature and for better or worse by nurture- related to what I might call our masculine energies. Like me, she is both fascinated and repulsed by violence and puts a lot of weight into being strong and able to defend herself. Defend herself from what? Violence. Much like me, she has trained in violence (aka martial arts) to protect herself from violence. Like me, she thinks in scenarios and about weapons. I know we are not alone in this regard, as the whole MMA, tactical, bro-sphere is in part built on being able to not only defend oneself from violence, from getting your ass kicked, but also to go on the offensive, to be violent, to kick ass…..#tobeaman. But my daughter is by no stretch of the imagination a man. She would never want to be one either, as she can see how lost and trapped we are in our manliness. She has her hands full just trying to figure out how to be human in this world, let alone be a ‘wo’man.

Living in a house with four females, I take a fair amount of shit for being male. The cat is male, but because he is fixed or more highly realized or evolved than me he seems to get a pass on this front, which means that the four females (three humans and a little mutt) focus their derision on yours truly. I do my best to spread a bit of it to the cat, but he does a damn good job at keeping his man card hidden. Me, I can’t seem to stop pulling my man card out and looking to get it validated by said females. And validate it they do, just not in the way I might want. I catch the knowing looks, smiles and even cackles as they deal, in concert and en masse, with the unintended consequences of a human being trying to only be a man.

I have male friends who complain about being ganged up on by women. They feel like they cannot be men anymore, and sometimes send me videos and clips from the manosphere that usually involve some bald guy who takes himself too seriously and has spent too much time in the gym wanking about how he is under attack by women and unmanly men (aka women) and how he plans to assert his masculinity on other men and of course women, who while it might not seem like it really like, according to him, to be told what to do and be put in their place. Watching these dudes, I really wonder how they can keep a straight face while they spew their shit about who men are and what women want. I think many of them are making a living as ‘influencers,’ which makes me worried for the ‘influencees.’

I used to do an annual hunting trip in Montana with a group of men- all good people and friends- I met while living there. Montana might as well be known as Mantana, as I found the whole question of what it means to be a man on full display out there at all times. Men could be real men in Montana, driving big trucks, raising cows, hauling rocks, and shooting things- all that cowboy rugged individual shit. Rambo would fit in perfectly in Mantana, as would my main man Lone Wolf McQuade. I had found the place to be a bit stifling in part because gender roles seemed to be more fixed than back on the East Coast. In Montana, men went hunting while the women waited for them at home, becoming ‘hunting widows’ for several months. Sure there were a few women who could drop an elk but they were few and far between. So were the men who kept their hands and boots clean, who did not know how to dial in a rifle at the range, field dress an elk or coax a cutthroat trout out of the Yellowstone. And while each of us had aspects of ourselves that fit this bill, we knew that for all practical purposes these men were not even considered men.

We used to hunt close to the Marlboro Ranch, which was owned by Phillip Morris and where the actual Marlboro man would hang out, looking mustached and cool, riding horses and roping cows and smoking himself to death. We would stay in a small cabin, and when we were all together we would make food, drink whiskey, talk about hunts and guns and bullets while all the while giving each other incessant shit. And the shit usually revolved around our manliness or someone else’s lack of it, usually wandering into the murky waters of sexuality to discern who was more or less of a man, the flip side being always who was more or less gay. For a certain generation of men, I think it is difficult to talk about or traffic in masculinity without towing in homosexuality in some way, shape or form. I think this might be changing, albeit slowly, over time, but I think many of us tragically misidentified our natural, feminine energy as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ in nature, and spent much of our lives running away from it. Exhibit A would be the way the movie ‘Brokeback Mountain’ would get brought up if and when one of us made the mistake of trying to share too much with the group. For us it was not about TMI- as in too much information- as it was about too much intimacy, at least in a group setting. We were almost allergic to it, and broke out in accusations of gayness.

But then we would go out hunting, either alone or in pairs, and this is where we flipped the whole man script and related to one another as human beings. I would look forward to trudging out into the snow with one of my friends so that at some point we could drop the man-banter and open up to one another about the scary and real challenges of being ourselves, of being alive. While we did not always know what to do or say with what we shared, we did know that we had connected in way that we could not as larger group of men (or at least as the men we were pretending to be in front of one another.) We also knew, almost instinctively, that what got shared between us out there on the hunt was off limits for the manly man roasting that would go on when we got back. And roast we would, knowing full well that we were caricatures roasting caricatures, and that by enacting our mass caricaturing of manliness we were letting go of some of the worst or most toxic aspects of the masculinity we had been steeped in our whole lives but that no longer served us.

I will pick up the theme of caricatures in the next part, but will leave it here for now. I look forward to hearing any and all thoughts and ideas on what I have tried to communicate thus far. And in keeping with the whole manly man caricature theme, know that any dude wants to poke fun at the truth I am trying to share in this post that I will gladly punch their hair off:-). JK….