Wednesday, October 10, 2018


Men and their Manhood


Questions about what it means to be a man in America in the 21st century come up in the background of the Kavanaugh hearings debacle. But similar questions, complaints, outrages are at work all over our culture today. The federal government has just indicted four white supremacists for causing riots in Charlottesville, VA last year and in other places. These four men are members of what they call the Rise Above Movement. Their description of their movement speaks of "emasculated white men needing to reclaim their identities by learning to fight and engaging in purifying violence." Here male identity is the source of serious complaints. Men have been emasculated. They can reclaim their masculinity only through serious violence, including murder.
Male identity is the topic of a flood of books. In all of them masculinity is presented as problematic or endangered. Different authors regard the threats as more or less serious. Some see problems; others see masculinity destroyed.
Often the problems of men are blamed on women and more specifically on feminism. The feminist movement has focussed public discourse on the problems of women, on the ways in which women have been and still are disadvantaged by unfair practices on the part of men. But no one sees the problems of men. No one cares to help out when they need assistance.
Others attribute the erosion of masculinity to the absence of fathers in many families. With the divorce rate shooting up, more boys are raised by their mothers without a father in the house. With mass incarceration separating more men from their families male children are suffering the absence of a father.
Others cite economic causes: many well-paying manufacturing jobs have moved abroad, to China or to Mexico. With men earning less, their wives need to leave the home to earn a living and the traditional family with a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother and wife has become a rarity. His authority is undermined by the mother also working and often earning more than her husband. Men are no longer the deciders in the family. It is not uncommon for the father to stay home and to mind the house and the children while the mother goes out and earns a living for all. The traditional role of the father and head of household can no longer be maintained.
Men therefore have trouble understanding what it means to be a man. The traditional answers--that men support their families, that men are the ultimate decision-makers, that men are autonomous, strong, and can be depended on to defend their families-- are losing their plausibility. They no longer make sense. They no longer can reassure men that they are valuable and important.
As a consequence of all these changes, men feel adrift. They are unsure of who they are. They do not understand their social position or their positions in the family. They do not know how to meet their emotional and sexual needs or what role they are to play in relation to their children. So it is not surprising that some, at the extreme, for instance, members of the Rise Above Movement cited earlier, try to regain their previous male dominance through street fighting.
What are we poor men to do? How can we find new answers to the ancient question of what it means to be a man?
It is useful, for a moment, to look at the question and ask ourselves what we are looking for. For ever and ever men have defined themselves in contrast to women. The most devastating criticism of a man was, and is, that he is effeminate. He is too much like a woman and therefore is not a real man. The fundamental defining feature of men is that they are not women.
As a consequence men have for thousands of years restricted the range of women's activities. They have been confined to the house, they have been limited to having and bringing up children. They have been kept out of the public life outside the house. Men then could claim that dominating women and all public spheres was their appropriate role. Often men claimed even that God himself placed them in this powerful position. With women able to escape these limitations, men's roles have become unclear and they feel thoroughly threatened.
The remedy is to think differently about what it means to be a man. Defining manhood as being not a woman leads us into a complete dead-end. According to that way of thinking one can be a man only by dominating women. The existence of powerful men demands that women be unequal. Once we commit ourselves to the equality of all citizens regardless of their gender, we commit ourselves to minimizing the difference between men and women.
Yes men and women have different genitals and therefore play different roles in perpetuating the race. Once the child is born, men and women can play equal roles in rearing it and seeing that it grows up to be a productive citizen.
There are, today, other differences between men and women. Women are more emotional; they are better at maintaining relations to friends and relatives. But these are social differences, a consequence of the man's search for differences from women. Men can learn to recognize their own emotions and those of others and learn appropriate responses to them. Men can learn to maintain their own friendships and family relations without needing their wives or female partner to play the role of social secretary.
The crisis of manhood – that men no longer understand what their special role in society is – is made by men themselves. By defining themselves as different from women, they can only be real men at the expense of equality for women. Once the society commits itself to equality for women, the old male paradigm as the dominator in the family and in society at large is outdated and needs to be rejected.
Men can find an identity for themselves by recognizing that what they have in common with women is central and that being a man, rather than a woman, deservedly has lost all meaning. Men will find a proper identity when they learn to honor their feelings and those of others, and when they learn to foster and maintain their own relationships as carefully as they memorize statistics about their favorite team.
Women go into combat in the Marines. Soon a woman will be elected President. There is nothing men do that women are not showing they can also do. There are no biologically based differences between men and women besides those having to do with procreation. All men need to do is to acquire the skills they have refused to learn because they were thought to be skills of women—living their own emotions and caring about those of others, being open to others instead of hiding behind a jokey facade. They must learn to live in the world of feelings.

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