Masculinity is a Prison
That title was the t-shirt worn at the family gathering in Utah last week by Kim’s 6’6”, 300-pound rugby-playing nephew who literally wears size 16 shoes. His name is Josh and he and his 6’4”, 340-pound, also rugby-playing, brother, Will are either the last gasp of the Gen X crowd or the first entrants into the Millennial cohort, depending on how you slice the generational cake. Both of these guys are sons to a hard-drinking (Single-malt scotch and bourbon), cigar-smoking, ex-rugby-playing, career Naval air-rescue helicopter pilot. The three of them have more hair on their various exposed body parts than most people have on their head. If hair is nature’s way to lubricate the body against friction of any sort, these three he-men should be sliding through life like a hot knife through butter. The two younger ones have big booming voices and are never much out of ear shot in a crowd. The father, Woo, is far more soft-spoken like the John Wayne and Gary Cooper cowboy idols that he so much enjoys watching. Woo is a member of the Silent Generation, which is exactly like he acts while he slowly takes up whatever task his wife Sharon has assigned him at that moment. These are the prototypical males of our youth. Each one of them has anywhere from a rugged half-inch stubble on their face to a full-on ZZ Top beard, almost engulfing their eyes and running down their necks and onto their back and shoulders. If one was brave enough and didn’t know them well enough, one might be make jokes about their simian features, but these are well-educated and relatively sophisticated men of the world.
Will works in a Trader Joe’s and is forever lifting heavy boxes and de-pallatizing foodstuffs with which to stock the shelves of this new-age grocery store that everyone speaks of with fondness. Josh is a TV producer who earned his chops traveling around the world running interference for Anthony Bourdain and learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as he went. Both of the guys play around lightly with guitars and keyboards and both have solidly funny senses of humor. I think it’s fair to say they are masculine role models for their generation. When I look at my own two sons, Roger and Thomas, neither of them is as large as life as Josh and Will and the same can be said for my nephews Alex and Jason as well as my in-law nephews Dominic and Ben. Don’t get me wrong, they are all quite masculine in their own ways and they all have beards to prove that they can get grizzled as easily as the next guy. Roger is capable of more physical work than anyone I know and Thomas, with his red Irish beard has that Damian Lewis look about him. Alex is mild-mannered and design-focused. Jason installs garage doors by day and paints and sculpts beautifully by night with some hot-rod refurbishing thrown in. Ben let’s a river run through it and is a fly caster, while Dominic, who is a Registered Nurse, has that blend of rugged genteelness that makes his bedside manner quite relaxing for his patients, I imagine.
The story of modern masculinity has been building momentum for a number of years. It has been a source of concern in many quarters while in others it gets derided and pooh-poohed as nonsense. The #MeToo Movement (thank you Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Epstein, Louie C.K., Al Franken and so many more) brought us a new level of caution about gender aggression awareness and even gender humor. Donald Trump spent five years in that spotlight and managed to avoid too much sticking to him (until the recent E. Jean Carroll adjudication) despite his obvious lack of political correctness and misogyny of biblical proportions. Now the gender battles have taken on a political culture war aspect that seems to be pitting the right as the upholder of white male sovereignty and the left as sniveling wokeness advocates.
But the realities of the male gender crisis are as obvious today as the feminist movement and bra-burning era were several decades ago. It is hard to deny that older men who were taught lessons of manhood that are not always appreciated in today’s polite society, and young men who struggle to find the centerline between extreme gender fluidity and macho disdain are all struggling as much or more than women these days. It is true that it is still a man’s world from the perspective of political leadership and corporate control, but even those old bastions are quietly and yet decidedly breaking down. Based on the enrollment and performance of women in the educational pipeline overall, but especially in the professional worlds of medicine, law, business and academia, women look poised to pretty much take over world sooner rather than latter. Meanwhile with advancing AI and Robotics, manual labor will be dramatically declining and perhaps disappearing soon. That will leave fewer and fewer “manly” jobs for men and men will become what? Hood ornaments?
Today I read an article from the Washington Post that took the form of an opinion piece, saying that men are lost and they need a map out of the wilderness that all these social currents have flash flooded them into. It seems there is a cottage industry being built by some men who propose that they have a solution for young men who are in search of their masculine identity, but don’t want to put women or themselves at risk by getting all macho aggressive about it. Some people say that having children sorts the problem out if not solves it for some men, especially if the children are girls. But that seems to me to be less the case than it might have one day been. Modern parenting is its own minefield with book banning and gender and transgender issues all around children as they try to grow up and find their own way. There are many heartfelt stories of fathers who modify their stand on such issues in deference to a struggling child that needs kindness, but, unfortunately, there are an equal number that highlight the cruelty that gender bias and deeply ingrained norms and perhaps primordial lusts establish and escape outward in too many men.
The interesting thing about the WAPO op/ed is that it ends with a very insightful attempt to define the best modern role model this author found amongst all the opportunistic wannabe influencers. It is hard to sort through something like good masculine role models with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley trying to twist the topic into a monetized or politicized advantage for themselves. Scott Galloway, an NYU business professor, entrepreneur and author seems to have found a space to do this in a balanced and compelling way. He is not afraid to declare that men think about sex more than women and that they are more impulsive (at least statistically speaking). He said it best with, “My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.” I love that and have finally found my best definition of masculinity and released myself from the prison that it can become in this day and age.