Used to make me feel sad, dating, not to know how she felt. Now I’m chill, more indifferent, anyway, guarded, have to be.
old new men, new old ones
The urge for sex, or lust, manifests itself; the approaches can be more subtle than whistling. Buying a woman a drink in a bar. Come-on lines. Again, new men are making it up as they go along. New women are too.
Guys like me—my sub-subculture peers, late twenties to early forties—have problems our fathers, grandfathers, etc., didn’t have. Especially around sex. Sure, it’s “easier” than it was for our elders in some ways, but harder in others. Attitudes have changed, because of the pill, the sexual revolution, less unwanted pregnancy, legal abortion: advantages. There’s also recidivism. There’s religion. There’s backlash. CONFUSION.
Subject 17: One of my first girlfriends asked me if I fantasized about her when I masturbated, before we started sleeping together. I told her I hadn’t because I thought it was objectifying. She was offended that I hadn’t held her in higher sexual esteem.
New women are meant to know when they want it, know better, anyway, best-case scenario. Young women are also confused, and their hormones act on them too, social pressure, etc. New Men, males generally, have been very slow in getting it. Their fathers or grandfathers, the older gen men came on hard; they might have rammed it in, literally. Boys are still encouraged to be boys, to act like “men.” To be assertive. Tough. Study the behavior of boys in playgrounds, their war play, their stances, notice how parents are undecided about when to stop it. They want their boys, and girls, to stand up for themselves. But to what degree—how to decide and set limits, which, along with their peers, game culture, etc., determines what kind of “men” are being grown.
Subject 12: Masculinity is as complex and nuanced and confusing for thoughtful men as I imagine femininity is for thinking women. It’s not just about being strong and capable and steady and good, but it’s also about murder, and overcoming fear, the self-hatred it engenders, and putting the needs of others above oneself. The final result of this is the male equivalent of childbirth: killing another human being. This is the essence of masculine heroism, the sublimation of the self so that one may commit an evil act. Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Cain and Abel, Grendel and Beowulf—one man lives, the other dies. I see very few men who have any notion of their place in the world—I think it’s particularly difficult when a central component of masculinity is service to society, and society has told men to abandon traditional notions of masculinity.
brief note toward male friendship
I wrote to the group about best friends, the buddy movie, bromance phenom.
Subject 12: My relationships with other men are quite varied, as are my relationships with women. I suppose the only constant for me is a state of confusion and lack of clarity about how I should be living. This is something my father’s generation, and particularly his father’s, did not have to deal with, and I think their choices were more straightforward. They all joined the army, they all cleaned their plates, they all married before twenty-five, none of them divorced, and I’ve never heard of an affair (or at least if they produced children they were taken care of somehow).
Most of my sample say bromances are dumb, like “chick flicks” for guys, playing to the lowest common denominator. Father/son stories appeal more.
No one mentioned a best friend betrayal. Nothing like my situation.
Betrayal comes in all sizes and shapes, though, and telling bad stories, recalling bad memories, is not for the easily downhearted. Some would be deniers of their own history. Some want to remember only the good stuff. Can’t blame them.
“acting like a man”
Men are made, unmade, done, undone.
Are men ever unmade beds? Do-overs?
Manly/womanly; mannish, womanish.
Churlish. Fetish. Newish.
I quiz myself:
What if I lost my apartment and had to live on the streets?
What if, before the pill, in the 1950s, I’d gotten a girl pregnant: would I have married her? (Those days returning to U.S.A.?)
An invading army—sinister enemy drones fly low (though who can tell now?), monster nuclear submarines rise at the coast like behemoths, landings on the beaches.
What would you do? Fight? I think I would. Hide? Run? They sweep block by block, what’s your move? You may wonder: It might already be over. (There should be a one-minute warning.) Panic in the streets.
I’d have bought an Uzi or another attack weapon. I’d be armed.
Maybe my sample would awaken like sleeper cells. Maybe we/they are not immune to instinct.
How do you know the enemy? Is that an instinct? Fear is, right? But enemies disguise themselves, and might be your best friends.
I stop imagining. Shake my head, shake it, shake it out, shake shake shake.
Whatever comes, whoever, whenever, however, no one wants to be disappeared, imprisoned, offed.
One night, in the hood, I watched a scene between two twentysomethings, white, male and female arguing. She looked drunk or high, she’s talking at him, he keeps silent, he is walking faster and faster to get away from her. She starts shouting: YOU HAVE TO CARE ABOUT ME. YOU HAVE TO CARE ABOUT ME. Over and over. Pretty intense. It was about two in the morning, no one else around, I stayed with the drama, a private performance in public. No one else mattered, they did their thing, and I stood behind the trunk of a tree, then in my doorway, and watched, right, a voyeur. But, hell, it was amazing: You have to care about me, you have to care about me. Isn’t that it, isn’t that it, isn’t that what we all want. And what I felt, and never said aloud.
It came to an end, down the end of the block, under a harsh streetlight, he held her in his arms. He did care. Then, anyway. What would happen, eventually, I’ll never know, but I still see it, and wonder about them. About her.
In the future: My genderqueer friend is optimistic. She thinks “there is a big shift coming, we’re in it, it hasn’t arrived, anything static or fixed denies it, no identity politics but lots of identities, language is way behind, language doesn’t ‘get’ it (or at least any language that isn’t poetic, any language that seeks to define), middle America is closer than we think because it actually isn’t hard to see we’re all just sacks of skin—but also, it’s impossibly far off because it’s about power, always about power holding itself.”
I wrote her: “I’m not sure about history, but I’m probably on the wrong side of my body.”
People unfortunately are seldom impartial where they are concerned with the ultimate things, the great problems of science and of life. My belief is that there everyone is under the sway of preferences deeply rooted within, into the hands of which he unwittingly plays as he pursues his speculation.
—Freud, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle
These pages, this field report and survey, contain other men’s thoughts, but always my preferences, because unwillingly I participate in everything I may want to change. And, everything I am, and may not want to be.
acknowledgments
My gratitude to the MacDowell Colony and the Chinati Foundation for the space, time, and solitude to write this novel. Thank you to all of the men who responded so generously and intelligently to Zeke’s questions. Thank you, Colm Tóibín, for suggesting I look into Henry James’s friend Clover Hooper Adams, that I’d like her. You were right. Thank you to everyone at Soft Skull/Catapult for your help and devotion. Thank you, Joy Harris, agent and friend, for being with me through this weird ride. Elizabeth Schambelan, thank you for your careful and helpful reading of this novel in its early days. Thank you, Thomas Beard, Patrick McGrath, and Josh Thorson, for your astute comments. I want to acknowledge here, to remember, Paula Fox, Harry Mathews, and Denis Johnson, who all died in 2017. Great, astonishing writers. I am very grateful to have known them as friends. Thank you, DH, for your love and incredible sense of humor, the ridiculous in life and in me.
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Lynne Tillman, Men and Apparitions
Men and Apparitions Page 30