Noli Irritare Leones

Actually, I don’t. I haven’t worn mascara in decades. But it seems a suitable blog post title for my topic of the day, which is masculinity.

Hugo posted a couple of weeks ago about “masculinity and the male feminist dilemma.” Not being a male feminist, I may not be the best person to advise on how to resolve male feminist dilemmas, but in the course of the post, Hugo made passing reference to another guy, Robert Jensen, who has a few words to say about “toxic masculinity.” As Hugo put it,

There’s a lot of debate among feminists of all sexes about whether masculinity, as a construct, can be redeemed and reimagined along feminist lines, or whether it needs to be abandoned all together. Allies are divided on the issue; the lads at Men Can Stop Rape famously created their Men of Strength campaign, seeking to offer young men a masculine counterstory in which something traditionally associated with maleness, physical toughness, becomes something pro-feminist. (Posters for the campaign featured young men of color holding their girlfriends tenderly, with the tag line “My Strength is not for Hurting.”) Robert Jensen, on the other hand, is a celebrated representative of those who regard masculinity itself as irredeemably toxic, a point he drives home vividly in his powerful Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, a book which deeply troubled Courtney Martin.

This brought me up short, because seeing masculinity as irredeemably toxic feels so alien to me. I find masculinity, at least in some forms and at least some of the time, fun and sexy. What the heck could Jensen mean?

I’m not particularly wild about reading a book about how bad porn is. I already don’t watch video porn, which I’d expect would be mostly what the book is about, and, given that the whole book is about how bad porn is, I can’t imagine I could read it without reading far more than I ever want to know about exactly the kinds of sex scenes I want out of my imagination, rather than in it. So, rather than looking for Jensen’s book, I Googled him, and found an Alternet article on The High Cost of Manliness. What’s bad about masculinity, in Jensen’s eyes, is not too hard to understand:

That dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture is easily summarized: Men are assumed to be naturally competitive and aggressive, and being a real man is therefore marked by the struggle for control, conquest and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants and takes it. Men who don’t measure up are wimps, sissies, fags, girls. The worst insult one man can hurl at another — whether it’s boys on the playground or CEOs in the boardroom — is the accusation that a man is like a woman. Although the culture acknowledges that men can in some situations have traits traditionally associated with women (caring, compassion, tenderness), in the end it is men’s strength-expressed-as-toughness that defines us and must trump any female-like softness. Those aspects of masculinity must prevail for a man to be a “real man.”

…

That view of masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads men to seek to control “their” women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery. But this view of masculinity is toxic for men as well….

So far, I agree with Jensen; views of masculinity that make it all about control, domination, and not being like those icky women certainly aren’t in my interest. And yet, a world without some variety of masculinity and femininity seems to me neither possible nor desirable, but Jensen’s arguing that it’s the only way to go. Why?

From there, the argument that we need to scrap masculinity is fairly simple. To illustrate it, remember back to right after 9/11. A number of commentators argued that criticisms of masculinity should be rethought. Cannot we now see — recognizing that male firefighters raced into burning buildings, risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to save others — that masculinity can encompass a kind of strength that is rooted in caring and sacrifice? Of course men often exhibit such strength, just as do women. So, the obvious question arises: What makes these distinctly masculine characteristics? Are they not simply human characteristics?

We identify masculine tendencies toward competition, domination and violence because we see patterns of differential behavior; men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We can go on to observe and analyze the ways in which men are socialized to behave in those ways, toward the goal of changing those destructive behaviors. That analysis is different than saying that admirable human qualities present in both men and women are somehow primarily the domain of one gender. To assign them to a gender is misguided and demeaning to the gender that is then assumed not to possess them to the same degree. Once we start saying “strength and courage are masculine traits,” it leads to the conclusion that woman are not as strong or courageous.

I know what he’s talking about here, this notion that character traits and virtues are neatly divided up between one sex and the other, rather than, as they really are, sometimes sort of vaguely correlated with one sex, but with huge amounts of individual overlap. It’s the kind of thinking that gets brought out in Thomas Bartlett’s article The Puzzle of Boys (hat tip to Marriage Debate).

Drawing on neuroscience research done by others, Gurian argues that boy brains and girl brains are fundamentally dissimilar. In the nature versus nurture debate, Gurian comes down squarely on the side of the former. He catches flak for supposedly overinterpreting neuroscience data to comport with his theories about boys. In The Trouble With Boys, a former Newsweek reporter, Peg Tyre, takes him to task for arguing that female brains are active even when they’re bored, while male brains tend to “shut down” (a conclusion that Ruben Gur, director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Tyre isn’t supported by the evidence). Gurian counters that his work has been misrepresented and that the success of his programs backs up his scientific claims.

Bartlett, I hasten to add, doesn’t stick just with Gurian; his article, which I found an interesting read, covers a range of opinion about differences and similarities between boys and girls, from Christina Hoff Sommers’ arguments about boys being shortchanged, to the American Association of University Women’s report on facts about gender equity in education, to Lyn Mikel Brown and Ken Corbett.

Brown thinks boys are more complicated, and less single-minded, than adults give them credit for. So does Ken Corbett, whose new book, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, steers clear of generalizations and doesn’t try to elucidate the ideal boyhood (thus the plural “masculinities”). Corbett, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, wants to remind us not how boys are different from girls but how they’re different from one another. His background is in clinical psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer studies—in other words, as he points out in the introduction, “not your father’s psychoanalysis.”

But it’s the “boy brains and girl brains are fundamentally dissimilar” side of the argument that, I think, points to why someone like Jensen would argue that “We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity.” Indeed, if “the whole idea of masculinity” (and, for that matter, the whole idea of femininity) is that men and women are fundamentally dissimilar, then we do need to get rid of it, simply because it’s not true. In the real world, men and women are much more alike than different, and, for most traits that can be typed “masculine” or “feminine,” individuals of each sex differ more than the average of each sex.

But then, imagining my way into Jensen’s argument that way makes me realize why I see things differently from him. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t see masculinity, or femininity, as mostly about grand differences between the sexes in how brave or gentle or adventurous or empathetic we are. When I use the words in my own head, I’m mainly thinking about everything superficial and shallow. I’m thinking about aesthetics and how we make ourselves sexually attractive to each other. I’m thinking about mascara.

I don’t mean that in a “women like pink things, possibly because of berries in a forest” way. I mean all the ways in which we care about gender presentation. I’m thinking of my former coworker, from Iran, telling me about her girlhood disillusionment with the new government of Iran, when they forbade nail polish, “and no one has the right to tell you not to wear nail polish,” and I’m also thinking about my mother, the other day, telling me about going to buy a Christmas present for a child who wouldn’t otherwise get one, and looking for “a girl who wants trucks, definitely not a girl who wants make up,” and I’m also thinking about Bond’s love of her boots. I’m thinking about the hankering for regular old male masculinity and female femininity, but I’m also thinking about the desire either for a touch of androgyny, or for all out female masculinity and male femininity, about all the superficial ways, in clothing and gesture and manner, that we deliberately either play to or bend against the gender that is supposed to match our sex, and look for people who perform gender in the way we like. I’m thinking about the difference between this and this (both linked in Bond’s Tips For Crafting A Masculine Presentation post, and, FWIW, if I were dressing purely for my own comfort, I’d prefer the men’s shirt inside the more feminine blazer, with pants from the women’s department, but only if they have pockets, please).

I’m thinking about John Barrowman. As Captain Jack Harkness, he plays bisexuality in a masculine package, dashing and masculine as Dr. Who’s assistant, more darkly anti-hero masculine in his Torchwood spin off series:

On the other hand, here you can see him in curlers and lipstick, showing the preparation to play the part of a drag queen, and, later, singing that drag queen’s anthem of self-esteem, “I Am What I Am,” from Cage Aux Folles:

And here he is in the part of a straight man who “won’t send roses,” assuring you that he’s far too much of a manly man to do anything mushy like fall in love, until that “and roses suit you so” tells you that you have him after all:

Same guy, not that much difference in his looks and movements, but performing gender in three different ways.

Now these superficial things matter, not just in fun ways, but also in ways that can confine and harm us. As Jill at Feministe puts it,

… However, I will tell you that you’re a little dense if you don’t understand that things like heels and make-up and taking your husband’s name and baking cookies for his office party do not operate in a vacuum. I’m all for frippery and frivolity and cooking and baking and flirting and making yourself happy; I am not for the “I Am a FEMINIST Because I Choose My Choice!” line of reasoning. It is silly and, well, meaningless.

Sharing a family name is a fine and good goal; the fact that women are always the ones to change their names (because of social pressure or because it’s just easier or because we aren’t as attached to our names) is a problem. Clothes, shoes and make-up are pretty and fun; the fact that women as a class as expected to be ornamental and are considered failures (or not quite women) if we don’t live up to a certain standard is a problem. Cookies are delicious; the fact that the task of baking them for the office meeting / school bake-sale / after-school snack / someone else’s holiday party always seems to fall on women is a problem. See?

In fact, performing masculinity and femininity can trip us up not just at the office, where some of us might wish to be judged on our gender as little as possible, but in the bedroom, where we might most want such things. Jensen’s starting point, after all, is sex, and while I’m not, without actually reading that whole book about porn that I find so unappealing a prospect, prepared to sign on to his actually being right about all his criticisms, I do agree that there are varieties of masculinity (and, for that matter, femininity) that can be harmful in the bedroom as well. In particular, the “women are supposed to be coy and say no whether they want you or not, while men are supposed to keep after you and not take that no as the last word” version of masculinity/femininity can cause all kinds of trouble. (If you want to play that game, can you please negotiate a safe word ahead of time and leave the rest of us, who want our yes to be yes and our no to be no, out of it?) But it’s hard for me to imagine what sexual relationships that get rid of masculinity would even look like (even feminine/feminine pairings, like masculine/masculine ones, it seems to me, have the other gender figuring in somehow as a path not chosen).

So I’ll go with a masculinity flexible enough to fit real people, over getting rid of masculinity altogether.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under Feminism, Music, Sexuality, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.