I will Make you a Man, Despite not Talking to a Camera in my Car
The Holiday Creation Company (hereto-after the HCC) notified me they’ve created an International Men’s Day to be held annually on the nineteenth day of November.
At long last, a day to acknowledge our ceaseless turmoil seething that we face — daily, I might add — as men. You might be asking yourself “What kind of turmoil can this guy be facing as sits there on his iPhone spouting his brand of rhetoric, and his…white-male-ness?”
Our masculine turmoil can range from anything from comprising 61% of the homeless population in the United States to my middle-aged (but equally white) counterparts leading the pack in deaths by suicide. In 2020 alone we accounted for 69.68% of suicide deaths.
If you think that’s something, wait until you read this:
Approximately 1 in 12 men in the U.S. (8.0%) has experienced sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner in his lifetime. This includes being made to penetrate an intimate partner (2.2%), sexual coercion (4.2%), unwanted sexual contact (2.6%) and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences (2.7%). In the 12 months prior to taking the survey, 2.5% or nearly 2.8 million men experienced sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner.
I even have my own delightful story of turmoil. In 2020, my partner and I had a friend, and she was in a group text with my partner and me. Long story short but no less devastating, my now ex-friend stalked us, with a hyperfocus on me. Imagine my shock when I found out that on three separate occasions two mutual friends talked her out of showing up on our doorstep and interrupting my long-term plans of having no long-term plans.
The ending of that story is good. Good for my partner and me, anyway.* We handled it without involving the police, protection orders, or even restraining orders. When mulling over solutions, the police were on the list, of course. There were many reasons why I didn’t want to involve the police. Ask a woman who’s dealt with a stalker and you might hear a similar refrain akin to “Police don’t take stalking seriously,” or “They won’t arrive on time or do anything and I’ll be dead.” Yes, those were issues I took into account. However, none of this logic bubbled to the surface the same way this thought did:
I don’t want them to think I’m a pussy.
Yes, it’s true. I didn’t want the police to think I was a pussy and incapable of protecting my home. That same line of thinking is why I won’t go see a male therapist and haven’t done so since I started going to therapy years back. I managed to surprise myself with some of these thoughts despite growing up with my single father who encouraged emoting and eschewed stereotypical macho displays. So that’s where men are. We are at a point where insidious influences creep in from all corners of the globe and affect the way our thoughts and actions, and none of us are immune.
Why does this happen?
I have some thoughts. We know that video games don’t cause violence. I’m not sure why they don’t but if I had to guess, it’s due to the distinction of them being games like it says in their descriptor. That’s a point toward our suspension of disbelief. Is it our environment? Yes. For all the good things men are capable of, we see a lot of external influences. For as good of a father as he was when I was growing up, my dad wasn’t everywhere. He wasn’t at school. He wasn’t there when one of my uncles said women were “pieces of meat.” He was there when another uncle belittled me by calling me a queer. For context, back in the 90s, the word wasn’t as ubiquitous nor was it undergoing the reclamation it is today. I also didn’t know I was bisexual at the time.
This uncle had a proclivity for talking shit to me. I was a smart-assed-know-it-all. Some would still describe me that way, and I thank them for it. This particular incident was a catalyst for a violent response. My dad, having long been sick of this particular uncle’s brand of bull shit, responded with violence. They ended up on the concrete outside, my father moved aside at the precise moment my uncle threw a punch. Uncle was on top, dad moved aside, and uncle’s fist hit the concrete and uncle broke his hand. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think the outcome was satisfactory. I do think it was a good outcome. Did it stop my uncle from saying dumb shit years after? Of course not. I did notice that the dumb shit was no longer about demeaning me because of my sexuality.
On top of our familial experiences, we also have our friend groups. The friend groups boys have are also interesting to look at. We talked a lot about sex and how excited we were to get laid. We also did a lot of blatantly homoerotic stuff, like playing Gay Chicken. As paradoxical as it is, Gay Chicken is when two straight people, usually they are men, do gay things to each other to see who backs out first. In this game, you might see some groping and kissing. I found out I was bisexual during a game of Gay Chicken because, in an effort to be a man and not lose the game, I wound up on my knees with another man’s dick in my mouth.** There’s also the butt slapping, nut tapping, and literal dick showing that younger men do when they’re growing up. Imagine going through life, and doing gay things concurrent with hearing messages that being a gay man equates to femininity.
Then there’s femininity itself. Some of our beloved media and classic insults towards men involve equating a lesser man to a woman. “You play ball like a girl!” from The Sandlot. Or a well-intentioned personal trainer referring to knee push-ups as “girl push-ups.” More crude but direct examples of this are men calling other men girls. Needless to say, there are a plethora of mixed signals codifying the image of an “ideal man” in the hearts and minds of the young boys and men out there.
One of the biggest mixed signals links to some of the above examples, and hashtag blessed, people do seem to be talking about it more often. Look at the thread of logic: if we’re insulting men on the grounds of masculinity and femininity, and we associate emotional expression with women, it’s no small wonder that men would, on an unconscious level, suppress some emotional expression. Suppress it and man up, and soldier on. Expressions of anger, however, are acceptable, even if those expressions frighten the women and children in their lives. The other problem with suppression is that when you suppress something, it still exists. It exists, and it royally fucks up the way you express it over time in detrimental ways. In some cases, at least the ones I’ve witnessed, not knowing how to express something in an appropriate way can still come out as an aggressive form of expression. All this in the name of “manliness.”
Masculinity and Manliness
So what is masculinity? What does it mean to be a man? The answers may disappoint you. I am okay with that because I am a man, therefore, I will suppress any semblance of feeling derived from it and soldier on and man up.
Masculinity and femininity as qualifiers are useful in making sense of some things. For instance, reading a scientific paper that discusses post-pubescent secondary sexual characteristics regarding physical features makes sense. It makes sense for us so that we can then make sense of what they’re talking about so we can digest the information. It also makes sense to use these terms for the parts that we play in life. Drag, for instance, is a campy feminine expression. Similar campy masculine expressions would also involve drag performances from a drag king in lieu of a drag queen. A more concrete example would be some of the gender-affirming care a person can receive to amplify the desirable traits of the image they want to put out in the world. An enby might get top surgery to remove fatty breast tissue and flatten their chest, thus de-accentuating the feminine appearance due to once having breasts. A cisgender, male bodybuilder will take anabolic steroids to accentuate the masculine secondary sex characteristics needed to win a show. Female bodybuilders may use steroids for the same reason, but they have to deftly toe the line to not appear too masculine, or else they won’t place high in a competition. A transgender man will take exogenous testosterone (and maybe an estrogen blocker of some sort) to accentuate their desired gendered characteristics.
Thinking back to the question at hand leads to more questions. Was I less of a man when my testosterone levels were lower than they should’ve been at age 31? Was I more of a man when I elected to engage in my gender-affirming care referred to as testosterone replacement therapy or hormone replacement therapy and my levels elevated beyond the highest range of normal? Was I a middleman when I tamed my testosterone dosage down to a therapeutic level and my levels were within range?
The answer is I was the same man with some subtle differences, like being able to take a 45-minute nap and wake up without crashing for three hours, being less moody overall, and attaining broader shoulders along with an even sicker lat spread.
With that in mind, it’s easier to define masculinity by what it’s not. It’s not your hormone levels. It’s not sartorial. It’s not misogyny, it’s not abject hatred for “the other.” It’s not your dick. Most important of all, it sure as hell isn’t what some other man deems it to be in hardline, definitive terms. First and foremost, it’s what you choose for it to be. If you find others with those commonalities, congratulations, you have what are colloquially called “your bros.” Once there, masculinity involves a fair amount of introspection for the attainment of emotional acumen, which will hopefully allow you to experience the depth and breadth of the human experience. That includes an often-used and misunderstood term known as “toxic masculinity.” Is it an accurate descriptor? Sometimes. Other times, a well-intentioned good man will say that those men are not “real men,” but they do so in error. Toxic masculinity is part of the human experience and it amounts to a reductive trope of masculinity that embodies the most negative of traits. Implying that a toxic masculine man isn’t a “real man” denies them a small part of humanity, and for the one doing the labeling, it doesn’t allow for them to face, head on, the problem of some of the same behaviors promulgating the headspace of their bros. You have to accept the good with the bad to glean a full picture of yourself. Regardless of all these things, if you say you’re a man, sure, you’re a man. I believe you. I want you to believe you, too.
Other Sources:
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/coc-homeless-populations-and-subpopulations-reports/
*Some of you reading this might be close friends of mine as well as friends of the person in question. However, do not take sides. They need help and support, but those two things can’t come from me.
**That didn’t happen. The truth of the matter is that I was a theater kid in high school.
