Subject 22: My father didn’t relate to women. Didn’t understand them. Wasn’t able to seduce them. Didn’t know how to make them feel like, you know, a woman. He distrusted them. A man’s job was to run the house, make the money, make the decisions. Be like iron, pound your fist. Things like that. Very antiquated. Almost medieval.
Subject 7: My generation learned to accept women’s sexual freedom, ultimately their bodies were their own to do with as they pleased and that as a man I had to earn their fidelity and, or, respect for my pride. My father’s generation took women’s sexual freedom as a given, or at least they wanted to. He’s just twenty-five years older. For me, my attitude toward women’s sex lives is sort of a concession rather than a real address. The more human, or rather the more engaged with women as equals I become, the less mysterious they’ve become. In some ways it makes it easier to remain emotionally distant, and wary of women, in the same way that perhaps I distrust other men. I’m not sure if that’s a healthy perspective to have. My father and his peers still wallow in the “mystery of women” in a way that no longer interests me (though it did when I was a teenager or in my twenties). It may not be a generational thing. It might be more individual. I think that my dad and his peers were/are more wholly reliant on women than I am …
I probably see women as more wholly individuals than my dad and his group of friends are capable, and that says more about the times, the difference between our prime and his prime, than about the morals or ethics of my dad’s generation. In part, my attitude is different because I have three daughters by three different women. I’m forty-three and I’ve had to deal with an army of ladies in my life—grandmothers, would-be mothers-in-law (if I were to ever marry), close first cousins, a slew of women friends and lovers, my mother and her friends.
Subject 2: In college, there were a lot of politics for the sake of politics, a lot of young people trying on various postures, ideologies, a lot of PC enforcement both direct and indirect. What I’m trying to say is that, having had my political upbringing there, it’s impossible for me to know whether my gender politics are generational or situational. When I get offended at a sexist comment my father’s friend made, do I find this “objectively” (as if there were such a thing) offensive, or is it simply activating my programming from college’s hypervigilant culture?
Subject 23: I’m not sure I know what feminism has affected in me. I do know my first serious girlfriend was a brilliant feminist and we always argued about the ups and downs of equality. My gen tends to accept women as peers. If I had to guess, I’d say my father’s generation would have trouble doing so. I also think my generation may understand women less than my father’s.
i, a man; i, an image
Guyville in jeopardy: The New Man is analogous to Henry James’s New Woman, but change for him isn’t about his greater independence; it’s about recognizing his interdependence, with a partner, in my study, usually female, even dependence upon her. (This produces ironic situations.) He must recognize different demands and roles for him, and for her. A New Man must investigate the codes that make him masculine, and the models for hetero-normative behavior. And make him who he is or was, make him what he never believed had been “made.” Right,
a made man.
Subject 23: We think we can be whatever we want to be. My father’s generation, they all went into the army or sold drugs.
Subject 1: The burden of living up to a very good father’s example, or not repeating a very bad father’s mistakes, is always a pressure on my generation’s psyche, if I had to generalize. The difference, as I see it, has to do more with expectations of child-rearing—the whole “when I’m a dad, I’ll do things differently, i.e. better” idea. My dad’s idea of raising my brother and me was limited to material well-being: fed, clothed, educated, then at twenty-one: father gig over. I expect more from myself were I to have kids one day.
Subject 9: My father had, and still has, no confidence in himself. He imparted that to me, and I’ve been trying to overcome it for most of my life.
In the 1960s, when many of our mothers came of age, long-haired men were seen as more feminine but hip; the short-haired macho men were soldiers/warriors in Vietnam. Feminine men and masculine women have probably always existed. Styles change. Masculine women, especially notable, in the mid to late nineteenth century, early twentieth: George Sand, Natalie Barney, Vita Sackville-West, et al. Plus, female explorers and adventurers …
A single, white heterosexual thirtyish man in Prada or the Gap on a date; a fortyish married, black, two-child father, in Levi’s, watering his lawn. From the possible panoply of images, on what do men base/select their appearances and behavior? (Clothes don’t make men, they augment images of them.) What goes into their choices? How does each perceive the woman across the table from him, in a club? At breakfast? What image, what female, does he want to see there? Why? How does he think she sees him?
The charge or vibe is interactive.
Subject 20: I remember being in the first grade and I had a male teacher. I remember the parents talking about how unusual it was for a man to be teaching the first grade. It was just so shocking to them. If a male elementary school teacher was shocking, a stay-at-home dad would have been outright absurd!
My subjects are not diehard dandies; some veer that way. Most wear male uniforms, T-shirts, jeans, skinny or loose, black jackets. Style-affected, not afflicted, from my POV (the Gap; Armani; Timberland/hip-hop; boy band/waif; post-punk; new mod). The younger, the slimmer: After twenty-five, chests widen, stomachs bulge, asses spread. Most of the posse visually reads “male.” A New Man doesn’t deny choosing an image, he is conscious of it. Many believe women choose them based on their image.
The New Man’s mother or sister probably had read The Feminine Mystique, which, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, had immediate impact. Generally, 1960s feminists arose, eager to throw off their gendered chains: housework, child work, cooking, all unpaid labor. There were the college-educated housewives, internalized second-class characters. (See the AMC series Mad Men.) They would march under the banner of second-wave feminism. They opened employment doors, got Roe v. Wade passed. Many lesbians and people of color didn’t find a home in the movement; some lesbians faced outright hostility from Betty Friedan and other middle-class, white, heterosexual women worried about charges of man-hating, or worse.
Now, with gay marriage legal, hetero-norm rules.
Subject 9: My relationship to women may not have been the most typical. Until my twenties, my dad was a closeted homosexual. He and my mother still have a good relationship.
Subject 16: When I was in my early teens, maybe 13, my dad explained to me how men can and should be feminists. And my best friends in high school were all women. Any respect I received from my male peers seemed based on my ability to shut out the regular harassment I received for those relationships, as if I knew some secret about women that my peers didn’t. My father’s suggestion stuck with me, and also his self-deprecating sense of humor, particularly as it relates to women, to seek endearment from women with strong character.
what do new men want?
Subject 23: The biggest difference between our generations would be this self-referential element. Now, you can create your image without doing actual work. That’s a strange kind of man.
Subject 24: On the one hand I am who I am. Feminism has definitely affected my attitude to women (for the better) but to myself? I occasionally catch myself making rote assumptions or taking ancient attitudes that I shouldn’t, that belong with my father, or another pre-feminist generation, and that are sadly ingrained from my upbringing/culture/time. Does it make me feel less pressure to “provide” as a man—yes, some. Does it make me respect women who are strong, intelligent feminists—yes—and conversely, does it make me disrespect those who are not, who just want a ring on their finger, babies and a husband to take care of them—certainly. That is the cost to women who choose to ignore their sisters’ gains—some men
, like me, will think less of them. They ignore such gains, and stay with the classic tropes. Is that judgmental of me and (sometimes) wrong? Maybe so. My girlfriend wants those things, and I love her a lot, so there’s the conundrum I have to live with.
Subject 11: Ah the feminists of old! How I miss them. They were my teachers and mentors. Where are the Emma Goldmans, the Lucy Parsons, the Gertrude Steins. [NB: I didn’t interrupt Subject 11 to tell him Stein was NO feminist.] The greatest influence they have had on me is directly through philosophy and politics and indirectly through my most free and powerful female friends and acquaintances who enrich my life with their independent spirit and immunity to the prevailing social architecture. My mother, quite a feminist in her own right, was perhaps my biggest influence. It’s just too bad she was so emotionally abused by her husbands to ever see what my needs as a man might have been. To her, all men were not to be trusted. In a way, then, I don’t trust them either. Including myself.
By the late 1970s, the budding New Man was born into an atmosphere that simmered, not steamed or boiled, with ideas of advancing women’s rights, equality under law; the demand for women’s rights around the globe, equal or similar to men’s. But the Equal Rights Amendment losing, and the insistence on this one issue, once it lost, created a political vacuum, and feminist ennui, I believe.
(There is some discussion about what “equal” means, also in sex. Orgasms, or who’s on first.)
I mean, we boys breathed the aroma of freer lives for women, but in actuality what was happening on the ground wasn’t so sweet. Still, their/our mothers and aunts espoused women’s rights, and we/they learned them, early. Our fathers (some who art in heaven) squirmed, resisted, supported, ignored, or asked for divorce. Or, she did.
Subject 17: I noticed that a friend of mine seemed, in his relationships to women, particularly his wife, like a throwback. He works a lot, and seems to not make time for his wife, trained as a teacher, but who watched their child full-time. Surprising to none of their friends, they are now separated, pretty much because of his not being around at all. The breakup in itself also reminded me of an earlier generation, when people would break up more readily—my parents separated after forty-nine years, but many of my older relatives are on third or fourth marriages, with kids from scattered spouses.
Subject 7: Truth be told, my father taught us, and many of my friends’ dads taught them, how to philander. They all did that, and most of my generation fell in line with that to some degree, and intensely in certain periods of our lives.
Subject 4: I grew up in a house full of women, my father and I and my mother and my three sisters. So I always put the toilet seat down—and I do this at home, still, even though I live alone. I understand menstruation. I have a lot of female friends, though I have a lot of male ones too. I like people not because of their sex but because of who they are. And even though I generally “identify” as gay (I don’t really believe in “identity”), I have had desires for women, one in particular, and I still desire her when I think about her.
default settings: race, sex, etc.
People arrive in the world with default positions for sex, class, race, maybe intelligence and sexuality, constructing early, essential environments; let’s say, they’re preordained—what I’ll call “unoriginal sin platforms.” These positions generally stay set—like marries like—though positions can be reset with effort or by chance—father beats the market, class shifts; sister becomes brother, gender shifts (sexual attraction is very complicated); white marries Asian or black marries white, their children affect “visual race” shifts.
A person can now consciously immolate default positions, bodily ones too.
Historically, gendered roles went unquestioned: gendered behavior was attached to physical bodies, which designated roles in families, for one, making roles more than just acceptable but expected and natural—natural for women to do X, men Y.
While I was doing this project, I had dinner with a genderqueer friend, born female, and not in my sample. We met in grad school and stayed in touch, through all her changes, and mine. She calls herself “she,” and sometime after we got together she wrote me this (abridged):
“But because I think the shift is toward interrogating ‘roles’ entirely, I don’t take testosterone but I have a 5 o’clock mustache and no tits. I often use the men’s bathrooms because the women’s are so tightly patrolled. I’m an outsider in both. Or an insider but at risk, staring at gender’s seams. I’m often implicated in deception by people’s assumptions about my gender. A checkout clerk says ‘he’ to me. I unconsciously puff up my chest and perform ‘he.’ In the women’s bathroom I chat in line to my friend and make my voice higher and more gentle to calm everyone down/earn my passage. But what if/when they find out? And what is it exactly that they find out when they do?
“I’m also confused about my attitudes towards women because I’m also confused if I am a woman. Genderqueer. I’m certain I haven’t had ‘women’s’ experiences … like walking down the street being catcalled, like sex with men, like straight female bonding … I have been called a feminazi though, I have been reviled as dyke and dyke is especially bad because it falls outside of male sexual use.”
Since the traditional behaviors that once aligned bodies with roles have been shattered, attributes of femininity and masculinity lie in pharmacies, surgeries, and at makeup counters. Trans men and women demonstrate gender fluidity. Gender isn’t role-reliable, and no one should be complacent (most are). The feminists began this push, to unyoke gender/roles from the body, to make it an unsettled proposition.
(I know my mother and her friends did, tried.)
Bodies—and roles—moot.
Subject 13: Men are now expected to understand women and not to see them as mysterious or inexplicable. While this is of course very good, it flies a bit in conflict with the facts: that men and women are rather mysterious to themselves and all the more so at this pace of societal change. I think that men are now expected to be able to balance two conflicting directions. They’re expected to consciously absorb and adopt an ever-growing intimacy within a family but still provide a sense of the exciting, of bringing home (and sharing), a bigger world. Even if, and perhaps especially if, the woman is also very active in the world of work or other activities.
Subject 21: Some friends claimed there had to be an element of evil, you know, like conquest was never egalitarian, and that women AND men secretly want to be dominated. One acquaintance, he advocated for what he called “the caveman approach”: a demand, straight up, to a stranger at the bar at closing time. Look, I have been happily married for ten years. The “mating game” mentality is a distant memory for me. But anyway, looking back, I wonder if the two approaches are so far apart: perhaps the convincingly sensitive routine was just a Trojan horse to conceal a caveman.
Gender bending was more style than substance, but also helped, incrementally, foster gender-rights movements: Da-vid Bowie, Prince, even Jagger, became models of difference, though with less discernible political effects, until recently, with the trans movement. It has produced dramatic results, in relatively few years, and, compared with other rights movements, has been accommodated very quickly. The reasons why should be studied: What about its claims appealed more? For one, my theory is: it has spread and been adopted quickly, because the academy for over forty years has taught courses on race, gender, and women’s and gay rights, and has been educating generations about it, preparing the way for acceptance.
Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 transformation from Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, assisted by Hollywood cosmeticians, dress designers, et al., caused attention and controversy: Jenner’s “choice” to look glam and femme; her telling Diane Sawyer she felt she had a woman’s brain. But on November 12, 2015, because Caitlyn’s a learner, she was quoted as saying: Being a woman “is more than hair and makeup; it’s more than clothes. If I have a platform, it’s not just for trans issues. It’s also for women’s issues” (New York
Times, Style section, D11). She’s a Republican, her politics not transformed at all.
Subject 21: I’m not a good example. When I was growing up, my concept of gender was a little fuzzy. Probably still is: I don’t really have an idea of what masculinity is. And maybe it’s not just me, maybe it is generational. I don’t measure up to what I imagine other people’s concept of masculinity is, so I don’t pay much attention to the concept. It’d be nicer to measure up on some general standards for humanity, not some set of gender-specific benchmarks.
Subject 3: In the context of parenthood, many groups I encounter (most of them heterosexual, though not all) split down the lines of gender: the women hang out together. The men hang out together. It drives me a little bit bonkers, because I find most of the women better friendship material than the men. But in the parenthood context, it’s more difficult becoming friends with women than at the office or elsewhere. And the fathers can be weird about homosexuality, gender roles, all that (though my non-parent friends, gay or straight, tend not to be this way, at least not so impulsively). I’ve seen some of those fathers burn out—shut down, not open up to their spouses, families. This happens with women, too, obviously, but men, I’ve noticed, tend to be more frequently exhausted by their slightly evolved roles as more involved parents. Women have been exhausted by parenting for years.
Subject 5: Me, I grew up in the church, I was excited to get married, have kids, and possibly be in the ministry, continue the lifestyle I was bred into, the only lifestyle really, Jesus is Lord, and that is the way shit goes. I taught Sunday school, went to Europe to a Bible school for my first year of college and wanted to save the world. There were no women pastors, no real positions of leadership for women, they cook and are great at getting the social side of things going. I can’t wait to find one of my own! Fast forward a little, to art school. I had come there never drinking, never doing drugs, a virgin, and generally an innocent child of twenty. I wanted to witness and share the love of Christ with all of these people “living in darkness.” I soon found that these people, the gays, the freaks, the hippies—all seemed to be doing pretty well. In fact, I was the one that lived with guilt and shame and sorrow, and this constant feeling of someone watching me. They were comfortable in their own skin, way more than me in mine. I found the women to be incredibly aggressive. I will never forget a girl walking away from me in her apartment, dropping her clothes, and begging for my virginity. All the heroic bullshit male braggadocio AND dreaming, and I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t special, it was … crass. Kind of gross even. And it started happening with a lot of girls at art school and realizing a lot of the guys around me found women who were really aggressive, who slept around. It turned a lot of us off. Super free with their bodies, less interested in men for the traditional needs but also really fun to be around.
Men and Apparitions Page 26