Monday, February 02, 2004
(8:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Why I Hate... Manly Men
As I got out of my car and walked into Burrito Loco, I heard the following conversation:
Guy #1 (backed up by his buddy): Okay, just watch your back.
Guy #2 (sitting in his car): For what?
Guy #1: Just watch yourself and you've got nothing to worry about -- put it that way.
I hate guys like that. I absolutely hate them. If someone ever says something like that to me or around me, I will never forgive him -- no matter how nice he turns out to be later, no matter how immature he was at the time, no matter how many of my female Nazarene friends (all reliable character witnesses, of course) vouch for him.
When I was a freshman, there was a group trying to start a fraternity at Olivet, where fraternities are not allowed. They called themselves TKD (as in, the Latin letters "T" "K" "D"), and they made a lot of stupid noises in the hall and sat together in the lunch room and were loud and stupid no matter what happened. I hated them. Once, when someone asked me what I thought about them, I said (note that this is before a semester of deconstructing homophobia), "They're a bunch of losers and faggots."
Little did I know that the person, who seemed pretty sane, was actually a member! Needless to say, such dissent must be crushed, so the skinniest, wimpiest fucking guy in that "fraternity," a guy who makes me look like a body builder, comes in and starts talking crap to me. Did I really think they were all gay? I didn't even know him -- what business was it of mine to say that he was gay? I pointed out that "faggot" was usually a general term of derision that did not literally mean the person was gay. He would have none of it.
Before long, there was a crowd of "people" (i.e., TKD members) out there. Without backing down on my opinion (still held) that they were all a bunch of losers and faggots, I somehow managed to calm them down. One of them said something along the lines of "Hey, just be smart, watch your back, and nothing will happen."
"What the fuck?" I thought. My roommate, who up to this point had let me handle myself, said, "Are you threatening him?" He himself was a fairly tough guy who could easily have killed everyone in the room, and so his words carried some weight. He let them know that they were never to burst into our room yelling and screaming again, and that was that.
It never happened again, and I never forgave them.
And so, if being a man means joining an exclusive little club to build up your ego, if it means taking every possible insult as an opportunity to issue empty threats, if it means uttering cliched little phrases intended to instill a sense of self-surveillance in your enemies, then I say it's time to join the women. Over all that "manly" shit, I would far prefer gossipping, backbiting, petty grudges, discussions about menstruation, and excessive time spent styling one's hair.
In point of fact, throughout most of my life, I have primarily hung out with a good gender mix of friends, where both sexes were equals -- not like jocks who have their little groupies. In my senior year of college, with the exception of my roommates, I spent nearly all my time with a group of women. As I may have noted before, as well, women far outnumbered men in my early youth. Since I was often the only male around, they were not especially modest or reticent about specifically female topics, so I am not one of those guys who covers his ears and screams every time a woman mentions her period. Perhaps all of this puts me at a disadvantage in terms of specifically masculine ways of interacting -- that is, assertive, direct approaches rather than background attempts to set things up so that they will "naturally" go my way -- and perhaps it gave Punch Drunk Love a rather sickening resonance.
If I had to do it over, though, I would choose once again to have my dad who hates sports and male bonding, my gentle, caring grandfather, and my strong-willed mother and grandmother. I would choose again to side with the girls in the playground wars. I would choose to side with the nerdy girl in my sixth grade math class, even though it got me punched in the stomach (the first and only time). I would choose to maintain all those relationships with women, even though the sexual element has always tended to introduce some confusion (sometimes from my end, sometimes from the girls'). I think that real human life takes place along the boundaries of sexual difference, and I never -- even if it means I don't know how to fight, even if it means I can't do my own oil changes, even if it means that I pick up some gossipping-and-backbiting habits myself, even if it means that I fall in love with close female friends who understandably don't want to shift gears -- want to back away from that boundary.
