Traditional masculinity is an elaborate system of ritualized posturing. A kind of drag show. It’s men in carefully assembled attire lip-synching the songs of their fathers and grandfathers. At their most grandiose, both drag shows and displays of traditional masculinity are campy exhibitions of gender blown out to cartoonish proportions. The only difference is that drag performers have a sense of humor. Sometimes I think the only thing separating RuPaul and Chuck Norris is glitter.
It’s easy enough for me to see that now, easy enough for me to explain it to you. It would’ve been tough, though, to lay that out for a kid like me growing up in 1980s New Jersey. My little town, Hillsborough, had been an agricultural community until five minutes before we moved there, when townhouse developments like mine began sprouting up like mushrooms. It attracted mostly young boomer families, clean white collars replacing overalls. A new supermarket went in, a McDonald’s, an upscale mall called Bridgewater Commons. The high school got an extension. Everything felt fast and cheap and dumb, a town without a community. They were building a workforce there, an assembly line churning out the future mid-level managers of America. I wanted no part of it.
I knew that the life I wanted to live for myself, a life of creative exploration, wouldn’t be possible for me there. Even the concept of “creativity” was frowned upon for boys; boys who took too many art classes, for example, were suspect. The same was true for boys who performed in the school plays, or sang in the choir, or those who played “female” instruments like the flute.
Yes, there are “female” instruments because—remember—everything can be ranked along the Infinite Axis. Instruments such as the flute or piccolo, which are small and in the higher range, are considered more feminine than instruments like the tuba, which are heavier and in the lower range. Besides the brawn required to lug them around, I assume the perception has something to do with the way their timbres are associated with the human voice. Drums are the most masculine because they involve hitting stuff.
Actually, as I’m writing this, I’m remembering that when we had to choose instruments to learn in fifth grade, I actually wanted to play the flute because I liked the weird, sideways way they were held. My mom dissuaded me, saying that the flute rental was too expensive. But, she said, she could afford the clarinet. Why would the flute cost any more to rent than the clarinet?
She didn’t seem to have any problem affording my brother’s saxophone. It’s only now, writing this down, that I realize the reason my mom didn’t want me to play the flute was because she didn’t want the other kids to think I was gay. Keep in mind, this is my gay mom worrying about her younger son’s sexuality. She knew the language of gender as well as anybody. Probably better than most. For boys, the first rule, as Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon wrote in their 1976 book about male gender roles, The Forty-Nine Percent Majority, is simple: “No sissy stuff.”
The insult “sissy” has fallen out of favor but I actually think it’s the best one we’ve got to describe the squishy center of male anxiety. To be thought as a sissy is to be laughable, dismissible, irrelevant. Barely worthy of scorn. In the hierarchy of traditional manhood, a sissy is less than a woman because he inhabits no purposeful space. He is a non-male. He’s nothing.
By the time I grew up, “sissy” had fallen out of favor, replaced with the harder-edged “faggot,” a word that leaned more heavily on sexuality. Sissies were suspect, but faggots were a threat. My early adolescence coincided with the height of gay panic. The gay rights movement and the AIDS crisis were coming of age together. There were news stories nearly every day about gay people: marching, dying, demanding—some of them were even kissing in public, for God’s sake! Suddenly, homosexuality seemed to be everywhere. In towns like mine all over the country, boys who didn’t fit into the neat box of traditional masculinity, regardless of their sexuality, were looked at with deep suspicion, even fear.
Tom Waits has that song about paranoia, in which a neighbor is working on something in his garage and the narrator of the song just keeps asking, “What’s he building in there?” as if the answer could only be something nefarious. That’s kind of what it felt like back then growing up as a boy who didn’t quite fit the ready-made mold of boyhood. What was I building in there? I couldn’t have told them because I didn’t know myself.
Perhaps it’s less true for your generation—I’d like to think so—but my generation equated masculinity with sexuality. Whatever other attributes a guy had were knocked down to nothing if he also happened to be gay. A guy’s sexuality overrode anything else the world saw about him as a man. Being gay was the lowest place you could occupy on the Infinite Axis, which was why it was such a big deal when gay men starting coming out of the closet. They were risking everything, even in some cases their lives, by making themselves visible to a world that refused to see them.
I now think: What could be more macho than that?
The concept of “gender fluidity” was unknown to us then, aside from some dim awareness that some people liked to wear the clothing of the opposite sex. Once a year, my high school held a powder-puff football game, in which girls would take the field to play a rowdy match of touch football. The varsity football team would dress up as cheerleaders for the event, donning skirts and wigs and makeup, stuffing their sweaters with big wads of paper towels to make breasts. The fact that this was “hilarious” is a testament to our rigid adherence to strict gender codes. Years later, one of the biggest guys on the team came out as gay. I wonder what he made of powder-puff football.
As a kid, one of the few things I knew about myself was my sexuality. I’ve known I was straight since the first time I fell in love, at four, with a neighborhood girl named Sarah. Innumerable crushes followed, all of them straight, most of them unrequited.
Even so, part of my confusion about gender involved recognizing from a young age that I did, indeed, enjoy “sissy” stuff. Yes, I liked the hard play of boyhood, running around and yelling and spinning donuts on my push-pedal Big Wheel. But I also liked quieter, “girlish” activities like reading and role-playing and whispering secrets. I liked hanging out with girls as much as boys, often more so. I liked baseball and musical theater and building forts in the woods and writing little stories. I liked playing pretend.
From a fairly young age, maybe eight or nine, I sensed that I couldn’t be my full self without judgment. Kids pick up on slight differences between them. They tease one another, poke and prod and try to get under your skin. What was wrong with carrying myself the way I carried myself, expressing myself the way I did? Why did it feel like such a chore to just move through the day as myself? And if it was happening to me, it must have been happening to so many other kids as well. Some of them like me, some of them with the opposite problem: everybody assumed they were straight but they knew themselves to be gay. Maybe they felt misgendered. Maybe they didn’t know and didn’t understand why their sexuality or gender expression mattered to anybody but themselves. Maybe they understood the maddening dilemma of trying to fit in with the group while also being themselves. Why did those two things have to be in conflict?
If a man is willing to accept the premise that he must conform to a model of behavior that allows him to be a man, then what else is he agreeing to? What other pacts is he making in order to ensure his place within his culture? And why? Every person craves acceptance in their group. Groups play by rules. Breaking the rules risks losing one’s place in the group. When rules become too hidebound, however, they eventually squeeze the life out of the thing they’re meant to protect.
Author Michael Chabon wrote a terrific essay about this idea in his book Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces. Chabon received a magazine assignment to cover the Paris fashion shows, and he allowed his fashion-obsessed teenage son to tag along. The son spent the week hanging out with a bunch of designers and fashionistas, and when it came time to leave, he was disconsolate. Chabon misunderstood, thinking the teen had enjoyed the fashion shows and meeting cool people, and
was reluctant to return to his humdrum life. But it wasn’t that, the boy insisted. It was something else.
Chabon finally realized that his son had been dressing himself in elaborate clothes and costumes for years not because he was “trying to prove how different he was from everyone else.” He’d been doing it “in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else—somewhere, someday—who was the same.” The essay ends with this beautiful observation:
“You were with your people. You found them,” I said.
He nodded.
“That’s good,” I said. “You’re early.”
The enduring image I have from your childhood is the way you used to sit in the backseat when we took car trips, your blankie cradled under your arm, thumb in mouth, watching the world flicker past the window. You never complained, never kicked the back of the seat, rarely fell asleep. When I glanced into the rearview mirror, there you were, attending to the world as you found it, content.
You’ve always seemed at ease with yourself. I don’t know where you got that from because I certainly never had it. Neither did Mom. We were both restless kids, both of us wanting something we couldn’t name, something we knew we’d have to find away from home.
When I was a kid, I felt like I watched so many of the boys (and girls) around me move along the conveyor belt without ever considering their destination. It was easier that way. I was lucky, I guess, that I felt alienated, because it forced me to think about alternative ways to express myself, alternative dreams to chase, alternative ideas of the person I could become. I envy the ease you have with yourself, but I am grateful for my own itchiness.
For all of its tough talk and false bravado, traditional masculinity is so easily spooked by boys who want to live outside of its narrow boundaries. “No sissy stuff” isn’t really about femininity; it’s about control. We learn to control ourselves, but in doing so, we also become objects of that control. Traditional masculinity tries to keep men on as narrow a path as possible. When you deviate from it, it pushes you back.
I look at you and I see a classic straight white male. You wear hoodies and T-shirts with funny sayings and the same scuffed sneakers we bought you two years ago. Whenever Mom asks if you need any new clothes or, really, anything at all, you tell us you’re good, that you’ve got everything you need. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Sometimes, I see the gears of your brain turning in quiet clicks, and I wonder—what are you building in there?
As we open the door for you and usher you into the next part of your life, I hope you bring your natural comfort with you. I also hope you let it go. Once in a while, seek out the stuff that scares you and move in that direction. It’s that stuff, whatever it winds up being, that will offer you the most rewards. In a weird way, our masculinity holds us back from walking toward our fears because, although it preaches bravery and strength, it doesn’t allow for the possibility that we won’t be brave, that we won’t be strong. It doesn’t allow us to reach out to others for support in our times of fear. That’s what “no sissy stuff” tells us.
I’m encouraging you to look for the stuff that makes you uncomfortable because that’s the stuff that will end up mattering the most. Allow yourself to be frightened, to flounder around, and to fail. Let yourself lose control, reach out, let others pull you up. The ones who do will be your people. Find your people.
six
Do You Even Lift, Bro?
Share the Load
The other day, I called a friend who I heard was going through a hard time.
“Hey, man,” I said.
“Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Good, good,” he answered. (He wasn’t good.) “How’re you?”
“Good!” (I was so-so.)
We chatted for a few minutes about what each of us was doing with our days, cracking jokes, studiously avoiding what we both knew to be the purpose of the call, that he was in emotional crisis, and that I was reaching out to him. Mom watched me conduct my end of the conversation with a combination of awe and horror.
“What did he say?”
I shrugged.
“How is he?”
“He seemed okay.”
You and I have had similar conversations when I’ve asked you about school, girls, your life. Shrugs, silence. Teenage omertà is nothing new, especially among boys, but I wish it didn’t have to be so.
Ruthie, sixteen, also suffers our questions in silence, but she wears her emotions on her sleeve. We may not know the specifics of whatever she’s going through at any given moment, but we get a sense. You, on the other hand, are impenetrable, almost Zen in your stillness. Everything is always fine. When I press, you joke away my questions or change the subject. It’s not that I’m worried about you now, exactly, it’s that I’m worried about what you will do when things aren’t fine because I know what it costs when you don’t let others in.
If the first rule of manhood is “No sissy stuff,” the second is “Suck it up.”
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has built an enormous following by instructing his (mostly white, mostly male) acolytes that the purpose of life is to “pick up your suffering and bear it.”
Pain will come, he is saying, and when it does, nobody wants to hear about it. Why should your pain be any more deserving of our attention than anybody else’s? Bear your pain, he says in one lecture, “so when your father dies you are not whining away in the corner and you can help plan the funeral.”
At my father’s funeral, I sat in the front row with my hands folded on my lap. Later, at the burial site, I watched them lower the coffin into the ground. On the way back, I sat with my head against the window, just the way you used to do on long car trips. After a few days, I went back to school and pretended nothing had happened. I got through it. I didn’t whine.
Having tried Peterson’s method for most of my life, I can tell you it only works as a tourniquet. You may get through the moment, the day, the week. Eventually though, the blood stops flowing altogether, and something in you falls away.
Peterson doesn’t confine his philosophy to men, but his appeal is mostly limited to them. And no wonder. His advice confirms what most of us have been told our entire lives. Peterson is the first to admit his idea isn’t new. Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is that life contains suffering. All religions acknowledge this. Any human who has ever lived will say the same. What they don’t agree on is what to do about it.
I cannot recall the number of times I wiped tears from your face when you were little. I can remember the feeling of your pudgy arms around my neck as I knelt down to you, listening to you stammer out the reasons for your pain, holding you until you felt better, wiping your snot off my shirt. Coming to me for comfort was one of the greatest gifts you ever gave to me because it allowed me to be your dad. A dad instructs and reprimands and plays. I’ve done all those things, too, but comforting you felt special, the gift of extending empathy. I don’t know why it felt so unexpectedly good to share your pain. Maybe because I was able to give you something my dad never gave me; I can’t remember a single hug. Sharing your pain with me relieved my own terror of fathering a son. In allowing me to comfort you, you comforted me.
When my mom died a couple years ago, I wanted to experience her loss. I knew that I did not allow myself to grieve for my father when he died, and that failing to do so had condemned me to years of excommunication from my own emotional life. For my mom, I wanted to live my mourning instead of hiding from it. I didn’t exactly know what that meant, didn’t know exactly how I would mourn other than to try to be present for whatever happened and to let whatever felt true be okay.
I got on a plane by myself and flew to San Diego, where Mom had lived with her lovely partner, Sandy. For three days, I folded and unfolded collapsible chairs, cleaned pastry crumbs from counters. I sat shiva and thanked people for coming and reminisced with my brother, and with Sandy and her family. I did all the things I was expected to do, dry-eyed and composed. No
whining. Numb. Angry with myself for my numbness. As I left Mom and Sandy’s apartment at the end of those three days, I felt like I had failed to even mourn the way I wanted. I had lived with the tourniquet for so long I didn’t know how to release it.
That night, I came back to my hotel room and, after a couple hours of drinking, collapsed in tears on the floor, alone. I wish I’d had the strength to share my hurt in front of other people, and I wish it hadn’t taken half a bottle of vodka for me to do so then.
I talk about my mom a lot, sharing stories of my love for her, yes, but also trying to sort through the conflicting emotions I have for a woman who did so many things right when raising us, and so many things wrong. The tears were not an endpoint to my grief, they were a beginning. I hate Peterson’s advice because I have seen how an unrelieved burden can cripple a boy; I’ve seen how asking for help can empower a man.
Yet my instinct is still to muscle through difficult moments by myself when I could use a hand. I still do everything in my power to keep my pain from showing. Most of the time, I think it’s entirely appropriate to keep a stiff upper lip, to endure scrapes and bruises with good cheer and “tut-tut” and all of that. But I also think it’s necessary to expel some of that hurt at times, to bleed on the carpet.
I keep seeing myself, alone, on that flight to San Diego. Why didn’t I bring you guys with me to say goodbye to Grandma Jill? I’ve asked myself that time and again. Fear, I think, fear of being so exposed in front of my kids. How stupid. How disrespectful to her and to you. How utterly, baldly stupid. I’m sorry.
“Suck it up” runs so deep in men. We learn it young and we learn it often. I had a conversation with a woman over email who told me a story about her father and brother. She comes from a family of three, two girls and a boy.
Their dad was gentle with his girls. Not so with the son. Once, when they were children, her brother was given some medication he couldn’t swallow. It’s a common problem with kids—they’re afraid to swallow pills because they think they’re going to choke. Her father grew irate: “My little brother sat on a washing machine while my dad forced his hands down my brother’s throat, screaming, ‘Be a man!’ I witnessed this five-year-old boy crying and vomiting everywhere—my brother couldn’t swallow his pills and my dad was furious.”
A Better Man Page 6