Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  men show their feelings(?)

  New men fear being vulnerable but more, they fear showing it, and fear what could be excess(ive) vulnerability.

  Subject 4: My father likes to shake my hand, but I insist on a hug.

  Subject 7: Men are emotionally weak, however dressed in a kind of “I don’t give a damn” type of costume. For most guys, violence and anger are easier to handle than sadness, grief, the powerlessness of death or profound loss.

  Subject 10: Emotions are very difficult for me. I intellectualize a lot. I understand things intellectually. Which is not the same thing as emotionally. If feminism has taught me anything, it’s taught me to speak to the mechanisms of being male, the disorders and orders of it, how masculinity is formed, why, and what society needs from boys to make them into men, in the very narrow and concentrated ways they do.

  Ironic boasting helps us “men”; irony allows for “just saying,” or not saying, lessening or diluting embarrassment. Studying male vulnerability, I observe various forms of irony used by all kinds of men.

  I’m also aware of how ironic it is that I am doing this.

  Male boasts can be a survival tactic, a display to enhance invulnerability and attract females or other males. Florid displays, in nature, can enhance good outcomes for mating and breeding, to attract females or other males.

  Then there are the quieter men, the modest ones—the Mild Ones, not the wild ones, I forget which subject said this. But he’s a mild one. And understated.

  New men have retro impulses, which find their way into our conversations (and suits).

  Hookups aren’t for everyone.

  Subject 15: Friday night my new friend invited me out to a bar where a woman he was pursuing was having a birthday party. He’s handsome, thirty-nine years old, single, and, basically, acts like a seventeen-year-old in regard to women. We went to the wrong bar. While we were having a drink, my friend started talking with a beautiful young woman (probably thirty to thirty-four years old) sitting adjacent to us. She immediately took to him. She and a friend were obviously out to meet men. When she told him that she and her friend were in town for the weekend (she was from Iowa, her friend was from Portland), he jokingly said, “So, are you looking for guys to party with or what?” She immediately, and in all seriousness said, “Yeah!” and pressed her body up against his. He didn’t know what to do. He knew how to pretend to be a man, but he didn’t know how to actually be one—at forty!?! I see this so much. Men in their thirties and early forties who still have all the same sexual insecurities of a high school student. I find this unbelievably depressing. I don’t see anything positive or cute or remotely interesting about this. Never mind the fact that this kind of adolescent paralysis could only come about due to a total misunderstanding of what sex is—the act itself—but imagine the larger cultural repercussions of who-knows-how-many-forty-year-old-men stuck in a state of psycho-sexual suspension/regression! What potential is there for living a good, meaningful life, when the failure to take responsibility for one’s own thoughts, desires, and actions is so heavily, and so deeply mediated, and when, paradoxically, so much of our social life revolves around the indulgence in, and the never-to-be-completed, perfection of the self?

  New men often want new women to make the first move. One guy in my sample says he won’t ever make the first move, not anymore. Women have to call it, and he’s ready, if they are.

  One of my gay male friends explained, “That’s why being gay is easier. Men always want sex.”

  My group is often confused. Many feel, if a woman wants it, she can and should make the first move. But can a guy tell when she’s being subtle, because she doesn’t want to look uncool? Or, if the guy makes a move, and he’s trying to be subtle, same deal, it might not work out. Too much ambiguity on both sides. Sometimes ambiguity is necessary, because emotions generate ambivalence, and hesitation, the need to feel out the situation. Uncertainty creates troubled waters.

  One subject insists, No is no. She says it once, it’s over. I’m over it.

  None of my sample has raped a woman. They all say they’d never do it. I can’t be positive, have no proof, and want to believe them. OK, that’s totally nonobjective, especially because rape stats in the U.S. are off the rails. So, someone’s lying. Or, someone believes he didn’t force her.

  Boys born under the sign of feminism and the women’s movement should have learned respect for No. The new man learned: When a woman says No, she means it. If the new man is “civilized,” he gets it. But, actually, not using force might be the first sign of a male being civilized. It’s always called “brute force,” like a Bruce Willis movie.

  Another case: she wants the guy to show more aggression. That he desires her, wants her, which can get tricky.

  Still, male aggression, fear of the other, including females, and psychological problems about their mothers and fathers—neuroses—can vanquish “educated feelings,” emotions resist “education.” Irrationality trumps civilized behavior.

  Most people have no idea why they feel what they do.

  At Yale University, in 2014, signs were posted: “No means Yes, and Yes means anal.”

  Then there’s the hookup. Straight-up sex. No strings, no commitment, once called a one-night stand.

  The difference now is that young, new women are agreeing to and setting up sex dates.

  The one-night stand, Mother told me, in her crowd, might have been a beginning of a relationship. That was the 1960s and ’70s, she said, women had sex, chose it, this was the Sexual Revolution, we felt freer, and also got fucked. And felt fucked over. (My translation.)

  New behaviors are unsettled, and unsettling, without agreed-upon codes. (Colleges struggle to make them up, rules, adjustments, dumb as they sometimes seem.)

  Subject 8: Your question about how we new men act toward women seems a little academic to me. Or maybe it’s just difficult to step out of my experience of something so broad and complicated, yet mundane and for the most part automatic, in order to describe and assess it. For the most part the men I know relate to women in what seems to be a very conventionally progressive and healthy manner. Their fathers probably do, too, though I’m sure rough patches have been smoothed over and the progressiveness has been ramped up, barring any backlash against feminism.

  Subject 22: I see in my close male friends a tremendous patience and respect for women. Maybe I just picked good friends. I also see men addicted to fucking. I was a man addicted to fucking for a long time. And that isn’t always a mutually nourishing thing. Sometimes it can be but it’s easy to become a micro Genghis Khan. I’ve seen men fall into that. I remember a broken male friend of mine—truly broken, lost, scared—telling me how all he did now was pick up women and ejaculate in them and leave them in hotels. Told me that with a straight face like it wasn’t horrifying. Maybe he’s the most evolved of all of us?

  in and out of the closet

  Human females and males can both be the colorful sex; that goes in and out of fashion. The two-piece suit hangs in closets, worn by all types of men, not necessarily for work: it works for hipsters, queers, straights, trans men, mad men.

  Why the two-piece suit’s persistence? Easy, economical, unfussy, lets “men” just be “men.” Designers have pushed sari-like long skirts. Good for hot summers, not for cold winters. Also women adopted the suit, they adopted trousers widely in the 1920s, the trouser suit in the 1970s.

  Subject 19: Anyway, when men of my gen get together—I should qualify this as when heterosexual men get together, and most of these opinions are really from a hetero perspective—there are numerous conversations and jokes about sex. Often men appear to be in competition for who has had the most, or craziest, sexual experiences. Or who is the most depraved/salacious. Women are still highly objectified in these huddles, and it’s something that I’ve observed ever since middle school. Men show restraint when women are in the group. Today women would never accept that kind of behavior from men, and I think men have
learned it’s not acceptable, not pragmatic, and it would also be fairly disingenuous because I don’t think it’s how most men really feel. Most of the sex/objectification is about men relating to each other as men, sexually, tribally, the dog battle for alpha status, supremacy, etc. It’s a lot of posturing and acting, it’s about male insecurity and confusion with sexuality and our place in the world. Possibly it is because men feel threatened by women, but I don’t quite relate to that personally.

  are the new woman and new man in sync?

  Subject 3: I also feel burdened by fatherhood, and it’s strange. My father, for instance, never had to take care of children while my mom left for a week, never had to rush home from work to pick up sick children, never had to pack a lunch or change a diaper.

  Subject 8: My parents married very young, so they basically grew up together. She became a feminist and he learned to relate to her as that. But at the same time, she became a mother, and he became a doctor, she had a part-time job doing something that was never quite as satisfying as it should have been, and he spent the majority of his time immersed in a career that was increasingly satisfying (and well paid). And they learned to relate to each other in those ways, too.

  The majority of U.S. females are earners, sometimes the only one in their families, single mothers, et al. They are graduated from college in greater numbers than males. And with the economic downturn of 2008, many jobless women used that period, and their savings, took loans, or got grants, to return to college and earned degrees to help them find better jobs. Most men did not, and the gap between the sexes grew wider.

  Men are still expected to carry heavy suitcases up three flights of stairs, to satisfy or help women. Unless the woman objects, he will, usually. On the other hand, with more girls doing sports in school, they are becoming physically stronger. Might not need any help. On the other hand, if you are stronger, isn’t it the gracious thing to do?

  Subject 14: I didn’t have much of a father. And when he was around, he didn’t father much. And this is more or less the norm for the friends I grew up with (in high school and beyond). So I suppose the first difference is that I found myself having to draw an image of masculinity to imitate from women (and children). I don’t think he had to do that.

  A guy can agree, and want, to be a house husband, watch the kids, do the home biz. Does it affect his sex life?

  Subject 3: The idea that women were made/not born—same for men, or at least that was the idea—fascinated me, because I didn’t have much interest in being a man, at least the kind of man my father was, though my father’s masculinity is, I’ve realized, a little hobbled, which already brings up a question: Is failed masculinity better or worse than successful masculinity? … There’s still some benefit to “being a man,” I think, and I think you can do it without being a creep to women. But it’s a subtlety. Some are better at it than others. I guess what I’m getting at is: How do you throw out the bath water without the baby?

  Subject 7: Virility is a coveted aspect of human life. In and of itself male vigor is positive. Women want it in men, and women who feel they have no use at all for men admire it, emulate it, and respond to it. The can-do attitude projected from and onto maleness is still very present in American society. But it’s a kind of, or rather can be a kind of “drag,” a performance of sorts, any man can play the role. It’s easy to see and only the simplest of us appreciate the one dimensionality of that subject position.

  time out with mother

  I visited my mother. She’s a good listener, and I was explaining how young women are different from her generation, how they’re redefining femininity and equality in relationships. Women now don’t want to be man-haters. (Mother shoots me the big look.) They want their way, independence, but paradoxically they also want men to be powerful—even independent women are like that. Plus, they’re dissatisfied. “Disillusioned,” Mother said. They’re conflicted, I went on, like the new man is [Agreement here]. So I laid my concept on her—“post-feminist malaise.”

  “Oh, jeez, Ezekiel.”

  Not an unexpected response.

  I challenged her to table tennis and blew her out of the water. (She beats me at Scrabble, mostly.)

  She supports my doing this field work. She probably would support my doing anything.

  masculinity: object of study

  Theoretical work on masculinity (and whiteness, though not my field) began in earnest in the 1980s: Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, seminal. Many academics, mostly male, got into it, Women’s studies offered courses, cultural studies too. Social scientists were already there, but looking at differences between men and women from their angle of vision.

  Subject 24: I am one of those men who is more at ease with women, for whatever reason. Some of them are decent reasons, but it’s just a comfort thing, and I’m OK with that.

  Subject 12: Femininity and masculinity, at least their social expression, are interdependent—gallantry arose in association with the idea that women (at least chaste, noble women) could serve as objects of desire in a divine sense—that there was something godlike about womanhood that men should be willing to die trying to protect. That notion of masculinity was dependent upon an opposite notion of femininity, and as the feminist movement has prompted a shift in the latter I do think many men are now completely confused about their role in society—some abandon any idea of masculinity altogether, some hold on to it in aggressive, thoughtless ways with no consideration for other people.

  Right, no femininity without masculinity, and vice versa, terms in relation, always, and sensibly, from my POV, women’s studies has expanded its field of vision, to include masculinity. (If you build it, they will come.)

  Women in the academy worry that men (biological; trans) will dominate, the way men have always, in everything: e.g., they talk more in class, on panels, shut women down. Will trans women be more assertive? Anecdotal: Two trans women have told me how hard it is to give up “male privilege.”

  How far can people move from the constructions that made them “what they are”?

  And in opposing also betray their origins?

  “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And, by opposing, end them.” —Hamlet

  Time will tell, and, throughout it, people have told lies.

  Will the newly independent woman lust for and mate with a less ambitious, nice guy who doesn’t care about career, doesn’t shoot deer, likes to bake?

  Subject 19: There seemed to me a moment when being a feminist was a culturally exciting thing, but now it is often used as a slur. I hear people accusing others of being a feminist, rather than individuals seizing the term. Often people go on the defensive, as if being a feminist is a bad thing. I think in the last ten years we’ve suffered some kind of regression. There is an obvious nostalgia for older repressed generations. I think both men and women feel this nostalgia. In many of my friends’ relationships, women are breadwinners. In my own relationship, my wife makes significantly more than I do and is more ambitious than me. My wife resents this to some degree, and wants me to be more of a breadwinner. I think it’s a nostalgia for our parents’ era. We’re in a subconscious dialogue with our parents as we become the age they were when they raised us. Forgive me if that makes no sense.

  Subject 11: Lack of muscular development from fear of manual labor. Skin white as Boar’s Head–brand sliced chicken. Skinny capri pants that looked better on the woman who donated them to Goodwill. Yellow plaid shirt with pearlescent cowboy buttons. Rat Pack hat. Ironic baby-step walk with shoulders hunched up as if the world were filled with refrigerators falling from the sky.

  Subject 17: The dignity of women is important to me and I used to chalk this up as due to my “post-feminist liberalism.” But I’m not beyond being covetous, sexually insensitive, and objectifying. But weren’t previous generations of men sexually guarded or obsessed with protecting and upholding women�
�s chastity?

  In the post-women’s-movement era: what kind of partner do women want us to be?

  And: what do I feel during sex?

  Men want longer orgasms.

  Men worry: performance, performance, performance.

  Some are performance artists. Some play performance artists: Michael Fassbender performed sex like a machine in Steve McQueen’s movie Shame.

  Men, even New Men, usually don’t want to wear condoms. The issue is often performance anxiety. In WWII, GIs were provided with rubbers and used them, because they didn’t want to get the clap, syph. Maybe then, during that war, “men were men.” Since AIDS, there is less resistance to using condoms but performance remains a problem.

  (Wasn’t the “greatest generation” also a silent generation and is that what made them “manly”?)

  In a noisy bar: atmosphere, raucous.

  Any story about a woman he loved and lost gets to me. I wouldn’t tell them, it’s my effort to maintain some distance, some bit of objectivity, not to stain the playing field.

  Guys might debate whether women are really cool with dads playing moms. Or if the new woman thinks, gazing at her man folding the laundry—even for a sec—I’d rather be dominated. Question: how will people live with gender unsettledness, survive their voluntary undoing?

  Subject 23: I was raised in a house full of women, so there’s a lot of feminist support built into my everyday perspective, which it’s easy for me to take for granted.

  Subject 24: The obvious differences between me and my father are expectations, like not having a “wife at home” whom you support as the sole breadwinner. And if there is that situation, the woman is more uncomfortable than before, as she knows it’s maybe not the norm anymore, so that must (may or can?) affect her self-image/esteem.

  Subject 11: My mom was married at twenty and had to quit college so she could have me. Dad demanded that she marry him in the Catholic church even though she was Methodist. Her parents disowned her. That was the Bronx in the 1960s, like in Goodfellas. She found herself stuck in the suburbs with no driver’s license or college degree and two bored kids to manage. He thought it was fine to cheat on her, since he earned all the money. When he was home, all she did was fight with him.