Grown Manliness
“Competence, perseverance, duty, loyalty, suffering without complaint, honesty, foregoing comfort for others’ sake, respectfulness and decency, work ethic… basically all the manly virtues.”
My wife’s cousin told me with her face that she was prepared to let me defend the unorthodox statement I had just made. She was not willing to accept it without explanation, however. “That’s what you consider manly?”
As it turns out, I was a boy at one time. Eventually, I would be an adult, at which time, I would also be a man. I never really took the time to separate in my mind the characteristics of my role models into “adult” and “masculine.” Manliness was simply meaningless without maturity. A man was a creature who spent most of his waking hours at a job he hated for the benefit of a family he saw for a few hours each week between working at work and working at home until his children moved away and he retired — after which time he went to church, cooked meat outside with other men, and became the most respectable being a boy could imagine.
When I was a child, the only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a grandfather. The steps in between did not seem desirable.
Of course, I saw characterizations of masculinity in popular culture as well as in the real world. While the Beastmaster used his animal affinity to see some boobs, Conan the Barbarian turned down princess sex because he had already chosen his queen (who was dead at the time, but death was not a serious barrier to a manly man). James Bond’s villains represented the corruption of the manly virtues: too much “loyalty” to the USSR, trying to save the world by wiping out mankind, shortcutting hard work through theft, but these were all clearly bad guys. Bond himself treated women dismissively, but was justified professionally by the advantages he gained toward saving the world, and justified personally by having seen his wife — the only woman he would ever love — killed violently (Bond made no attempt to bring her back from the dead; he was slightly less manly than Conan). And Lou Ferrigno’s Sinbad showed enough empathy that snakes let him tie them together to climb out of a death trap (this clip does not show the whole conversation he has with them about how their reputation is unjust).
Now I am reading this article about masculinity being evil through its fundamental violence. I am simultaneously listening to Dream Evil: “We are the chosen ones. We sacrifice our blood. We Kill for honor.” The movies I named above are all violent films, but I could have named less-violent ones: A League of Their Own, Apollo 13, Castaway, That Thing You Do. With a little thought, I could even name movies without Tom Hanks. These movies all feature men in tense situations in which persistence, loyalty, and performance of duty yield victory while selfishness, incompetence, and apathy bring pain, ruin, or death. Sure, they portray more discussions than swordplay, magic gem lasers, or pools of man-eating piranha, but life as fundamentally a conflict between forces (natural and interpersonal), for which a man must be prepared and which he must oppose or avoid is maintained.
The artistic depictions of men opposing the forces arrayed against them I have named are not unique in time. So while I support Ms. Strake’s suggestion that fathers take their sons to museums, I am concerned that the centralization of violence and the sexualization of women found in Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, and Otto Dix (though without the sex in Dix) is lost on the author when suggesting they will outgrow “masculinity” there. But if they are accompanied on such trips by their fathers, they might learn masculinity from a real-life, nuanced role-model rather than a caricature invented for mass entertainment (either cinematic/musical escapism or the scapegoating of critical writers).
Still, there remains a problem of “toxic masculinity.” This is manliness devoid of maturity or responsibility. Puerility. It is the bastardization of the manly ideals I learned from the grown men around me; it follows the removal of the patriarchs who guide or punish young men as needed.
When I moved away from home at nineteen, I lived and interacted almost exclusively with other men between eighteen and twenty-five, with the average on the lower end. I went from a world where men found prestige in the accomplishments or good behavior of their children to one where it was somehow acceptable to openly brag about how many strangers a person had had drunken sexual encounters with. The first thing required of me was to ask a group of strangers to physically beat me — which I did and they did — loyalty. My immediate superior required me to look at pornography of his choosing — deference toward women twisted into obsession with women as sexual instruments. People around me got into fights over careless words — respectfulness becoming the demand that others show deference. We routinely subjected each other and ourselves to unnecessary pain, disgust, or risk for no real payoff but to make good on a dare — perseverance through hardship but through hardships self-imposed.
What struck me was that the older men in the group participated much less in these games of sex-hunting and bravado. Even by twenty-three or twenty-four, men were more often rethinking their time at bars or spent trying to impress the other young men around them. As men married or had children, they discovered or rediscovered mature versions of masculinity: these even somewhat older men did not mock younger ones for lack of sexual experience, and were more likely to talk about their sexual fidelity than their conquests (while those who cheated did so in silence or were scorned for it); they did not start physical fights in anger, though they often promoted violent games or sports in good fun. Promotions came quickly, and men were judged based on their subordinates’ performance, much like the church men had been judged based on their children’s. Leadership, a somewhat nebulous and variously interpreted concept, was the most valuable trait.
Moderate Masculinity and Radical Femininity
I asked my wife how she perceived the messages she got about “real women.” Her cousin had been shocked that to me a “real man” was essentially equivalent to “an adult.” My wife and I grew up in nearly identical settings, apart from our sex, but this point was very different. She had some people who told her that a “real woman” does not need a man and is a traitor to her kind if she becomes a homemaker. Those voices were overwhelmed by others telling her that “real women” should be ashamed to take on tasks outside household chores and childcare. Some even questioned a woman’s morality if she differed from preparing a certain diet for her family and suggested that a woman should never let her husband change a child’s diaper (because he might be sexually aroused seeing a naked baby). I was not aware that so many of the women I grew up around were passing out cult training manuals to the girls my age. I certainly would have recoiled if I had known they were being told to plan to feed their children beans every night (my father made up bedtime stories for my brothers and me in which beans always foretold epic flatulence).
Maturity was wholly separated from the “real woman” by the battle for the soul of femininity. I was and still am fascinated by this. I see descriptions of “men” or “masculinity” on Medium and elsewhere, and I see the same power struggle over an impractical, mythical man rather than the actionable, practical life advice that described manliness to me in my youth: “People are counting on you.”
