Copyright © Michael Kaufman, 1993, 2002 C H A P T E R S 4 - 7 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The author (copyright owner) grants permission for an individual to C R A C K I N G download and print one copy for reading purposes but not for further reproduction or sale. T H E Written permission is necessary for institutions and organizations (or individuals associated with institutions and organizations) to produce A R M O U R multiple copies for individual use, or to make it available in any electronic form. (This applies to all institutions and organizations, including educational, public sector, non-profit, corporate, and commercial enterprises.) 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With written permission, up to two chapters may be photocopied or electronically reproduced for educational use in specific courses, Or igina lly published by Viking (Pe ngu in without payment of a fee. Books Canada) in 1993. The pagination and layout of this electr onic version f ollo w s the For permissions, contact: [email protected]. 1993 book and thus can be cited as the original book. (cid:103) CHAPTER FOUR side are all the wonderful fish of masculinity; on the other are all the beautiful fish of femininity. If life were as straightforward as this image, things would be simple for men. As you grew up, you'd figure you weren't a woman and you'd learn to be a man. So J E K Y L L S , H Y D E S why are so many men confused about what it means to be a man today? Why are millions of men talking about A N D H U L K S Robert Bly and how to discover their real masculine self? Why do some men engage in desperate acts to prove they (cid:103) The Difficulty of are men? It's partly because the whole business of Finding the Man acquiring masculinity is difficult for a boy to pull off. He's trying to fit himself into a hallucination that is tied to an ever-evolving, hard to define, and often elusive, idea of manhood. And, from the outset, he's starting to feel that both pleasure and pain are part of his experience of power. In a Bible I had when I was a kid, there was a (cid:103) The Horror of Our First Wound drawing of Moses at the Red Sea. His beard was long, his Remember that the process of becoming masculine started body strong and he looked rather distinguished in the because of the promise of power to the young boy. He midst of a rather bedraggled league of Israelites. He was sought that power by rejecting the things he associated bathed in a heavenly sunbeam. His arms were raised, with the femininity of his mother and his dependency on staff in hand, and the Sea had divided. Two enormous her. It's not an all-out rejection, for he knows he can keep banks of water rose along the pathway, and in those experiencing them through her; someday he'll marry impossible walls of water, millions of colourful fish swam someone like her. Rather, he drops certain qualities from in panic and wonderment. his personality. Once these are lost to him, he develops in The process of creating gender is kind of like that. a different direction, the way a river might cut through a It's as if the Moses-that-is-society divides the full range of bank of dirt, never to return to its original course. human characteristics into masculine and feminine, the In opting for this course, we distance ourselves from “opposite” sexes, the complementary genders. On one what is usually our most powerful experience of (cid:151) (cid:151) 80 81 CRACKING THE ARMOUR JEKLLS, HYDES AND HULKS connection with another person. Barriers are set up “When I went to camp for the first time,” one man told against the attunement, empathy, oneness and harmony me, “I kinda felt babyish when Mom and Dad kissed me we once experienced. We erect what Nancy Chodorow goodbye in front of all the kids. You know, I sort of calls rigid ego boundaries, by which she means solid pushed them away. Guess what, though? Within, it must emotional walls between ourselves and the rest of the have been, about two days I was homesick as hell. I still world, walls that define ourselves as separate and remember lying in my bunk crying my eyes out. It felt impenetrable.* The degree of separation and emotional like I would die if I couldn't get home. None of the kids distancing varies from man to man. We can be limited in teased me, but I still felt ashamed.” our empathy yet remain compassionate, warm and To the extent that his personality includes these generous. Nevertheless, our dominant definitions of unwanted traits, he feels himself to be someone without masculinity put a premium on separation, independence power. He senses that to have power is to have mastery and autonomy. over these feelings and to have control over those who A man builds up new psychological barriers against still have these feelings. Yet the feelings can't all be a range of human emotions that come to represent his mastered, and so these unchecked and untamed needs own weaknesses. At the same time he remains a complex are, in men, a pit of buried fears, dread, even horror. human being with needs to be intimate and nurtured. Because these things are associated with women's power and the power of life itself, boys and men remain secretly afraid of women. * For Jessica Benjamin, the child wants to solve “the Horror stories gives us an insight into this battle. The insoluble conflict...between the desire to hold onto mother and fear of all these needs and latent possibilities is the theme the desire to fly away....The 'solution' to this dilemma is to split – to assign the contradictory strivings to different parents.” of many such stories: men are unable to control their Benjamin suggests that in setting up emotional boundaries, the animal urges, lurking within is a beast with untamed boy might be losing his capacity for mutual recognition, for emotions that only primordial blood can quench. The merging with another. “Emotional attunement, sharing states Jekylls and Hydes, and the Incredible Hulks. Men remain of mind, empathically assuming the other's position, and imaginatively perceiving the other's needs and feelings – these fascinated and envious of women's procreative capacities, are now associated with cast-off femininity. Emotional but it is an envy that inspires fear: witness the attunement is now experienced as dangerously close to losing Frankenstein myths in which men are the creators of life oneself in the other.” CRACKING THE ARMOUR JEKLLS, HYDES AND HULKS but, again, all goes wrong for they are unable to control women. No, it is women who must be protected and their creations. looked after by us. In the dark corners of their hearts, boys are afraid of These attitudes towards women – the envy and needing the mother they are distancing themselves from anger, fear and disgust, dependency and protectiveness and of wanting to be all that she represents. We hear so – have been demonstrated in men's immense fear of much these days about father loss. Indeed, as we've seen women's bodies and women's power from the earliest here, the relative absence or emotional distance of most patriarchal societies to our enlightened world today. fathers in our society has a big impact on the lives of men. Some early patriarchal societies developed elaborate But what we can also see is the immense pain and rituals based on the idea that women's menstrual blood confusion caused in boys and men by their separation could infect and reduce the power of men. Women were from their primary love and their first model of caring segregated during their menstrual periods or after and behaviour. The first wound of men is just not the childbirth; their mere touch could destroy men's father wound, but, simultaneously the mother wound. It cherished objects. In some North American indigenous is the loss of our mother, the rejection of those parts of our cultures, women weren't allowed in the ceremonial sweat birthright that we associate with femininity. lodges during menstruation, although this acknowledged what they believed was women's superior power at that (cid:103) Exorcising the Mother Wound time. Patriarchal societies have carried forward to the Up to a point, boys are able to handle the mother wound present many taboos concerning menstruation. In both because we are rewarded for accepting the ways of the Islam and orthodox Judaism, couples are not allowed to patriarchal world: we will come out on top. Rather than have sex during a woman's period, and no woman may feel our loss of the mother and our fear of women's enter a mosque or synagogue. Only less dramatic are the power, we join the fraternity of men, self-defined as prevalent social taboos around menstruation; for many, it superior to and more capable than women. is still something not talked about, still wrapped in an air And in a remarkable feat of human creativity, we of mystery. The images I have are of my mom coming bundle up our fears and project many of them onto home from the drug store when I was a kid with The women. We then say that it is women who are the weak Package Wrapped In Brown Paper, of the woman rushing and fearful ones. It isn't males who need nurturing from off to a washroom clutching a huge purse when a simple (cid:151) (cid:151) 84 85 CRACKING THE ARMOUR JEKLLS, HYDES AND HULKS pad or tampon was all she needed, or of the men and would inherit their power and who, by their existence, women who feel oral sex is somehow dirty during could confirm a man's potency. This seems to be the menstruation. Menstruation is a process that breeds source of the sexual double standard, by which euphemisms – “that time of the month,” “feminine monogamy is demanded of women even where hygiene products” packaged in boxes displaying images polygamy, or at least promisculity, is indulged in men.* of flowers and birds to hide the disgust or shame. These But men's unconscious fear of women goes beyond attitudes have been accepted by most women in our an envy of women's procreative abilities to a fear of being culture who in turn have often imparted them on their contaminated by all those things that we have rejected. unwitting daughters. Meanwhile, some religious Within the dominant forms of masculinity, men are authorities express reverence for the mother and her afraid, to a greater or lesser degree, of their own weakness powers of life, just so long as she doesn't get too uppity and vulnerability. And so masculinity, of whatever and insist on having power over her own body and brand, is a defence against unwanted desires and claiming the right to regulate her own fertility and vulnerability, a form of protection against feeling envy of procreation. All that dirty, nasty blood might go to waste. women's procreative powers. Psychoanalyst Alfred Adler Historically, we men have done all we could to erase called this “the masculine protest” and judged it to be the memory of women's power of creation. Patriarchal “the arch evil of our culture, the excessive preeminence of societies developed elaborate myths of creation in which manliness.” men, a patriarchal God, or male gods are credited with having created the earth. Philosopher and sociologist Mary O'Brien has written convincingly that patriarchy was a response to the realization that the ultimate human * But whatever the power of these patriarchal myths, they are capacity – childbirth – was held by women. Men began only myths and thus ours to rewrite. In Timothy Findley's dominating women in order to control the circumstances magnificent retelling of the story of Noah and the ark, Not in which children were born. As various anthropologists Wanted on the Voyage, Noah is a sadistic patriarch, God is a decrepit, cantankerous old man who surrounds himself with a now suggest, only by enforcing monogamy on women coterie of sycophantic angels, and Noah's wife – dubbed Mrs. could men know for sure who their offspring were, who Noyes in the book for the simple reason that she doesn't even rate a name in the Bible – emerges as a hero. CRACKING THE ARMOUR JEKLLS, HYDES AND HULKS (cid:103) Trying to Grasp a Slippery Fish and I were talking and, after a bit of prodding on his side, I said that in a few years his penis and testicles would be The boy begins to move towards something that is as big as mine. He only laughed and said, “No way,” as experienced as “not female.” This break from the mother if I were suggesting he'd be able to walk on water. and identification with the symbols of manhood is based, This internalized image of the small, boyish self in part, on an idealized and imaginary image of the father. remains a nagging presence in each man's unconscious, so It's a shimmering fish he's trying to hold on to. I ask one much so that, as adults, men go to war to prove middle-aged man about his images of masculinity and he themselves potent, risking their lives to show they have immediately thinks of his father. Then he stops short and balls. This is certainly not the root cause of war, but it says, “I have no real image of him. Wow, I never thought does help explain why so many young men allow of that. He wasn't there a lot. I know he was strong and themselves to be marched off to the battlefield. fair, but nothing really comes to mind.” Even when the Because we base our masculinity on an idealized father has a strong presence, he is still representing an image, this process takes place even when the father is illusion, for he must embody an impossible measure of completely absent. The child simply constructs an image independence and social power. of manhood from the raw materials provided by siblings, The sense that all is an illusion, that we can never older men and the media. I asked a middle-aged engineer have the power we imagine should be ours, is manifest in about his early images of masculinity and it was his uncle our own young bodies. The penis, for example, might be whom he thought of and not his father. He only met his our passkey to the world of power, but at an early age the uncle once or twice, but this older man remained a little penis and testicles are not much defence against the spectral presence in his life. “My uncle, well, he was an world. Nor can they measure up against the impossibly engineer off in Central America cutting roads through the huge genitals of one's father or older men. I remember jungle. That image was with me all through childhood: standing in the shower when I was five or six years old, off somewhere cutting roads through jungles.” Is it any staring up in awe at my father. Years later I realized a full surprise that this man went on to become an engineer circle had turned when I was showering with my son and specializing in forestry work? saw the same crick in his neck and the same look in his Any man will do as a model of manhood. After all, eyes. More recently, when Liam had just turned nine, he in the mind of a young child, all grown men are fathers. (cid:151) (cid:151) 88 89 CRACKING THE ARMOUR JEKLLS, HYDES AND HULKS Any image of manhood can be turned, in the cauldron of It's right then that we first experience the confusion our unconscious minds, into images of the father. He between sex and gender. Until this stage most of us were may not be your actual father, he may be an uncle or able to play with a range of human possibilities. We may grandfather, an older brother or teacher, but in our society have buried certain emotional orientations associated a child tends to develop an image of that idealized father. with femininity, but we were still able to be babies sometimes; we didn't always have to be strong; we could (cid:103) From Puberty to Manhood cry and have tantrums; there was some room for This story is far from complete at age five or six. All the nurturing. With these physical changes we suddenly see conflicts of the early years re-emerge with a vengeance ourselves becoming men – here comes the hair, there goes from pre-adolescence through our teens. Around age five the high voice – but we still feel like complex human we hit a plateau. By then, most of us have taken the social beings. We still have a variety of urges and emotional definitions of gender and integrated them into our needs, not all of which conform to our understanding of developing personalities. Things seem okay for several masculinity. Our sense of ourselves as now really years, but in our pre-adolescent years, when we're eleven becoming part of the male sex clashes with our worry that or twelve, everything starts to get shaken up, and it takes we have not yet achieved full manhood. We have this tremendous emotional energy to re-establish the bulwarks new body image in our heads, but it's at odds with our of gender identity. still young bodies. This is the source of the early Our childhood security is shaken by all the real or adolescent fascination with strong male heroes with anticipated changes in our own bodies. Our adult pumped-up bodies – Charles Atlas in my day, Arnold sexuality awakens as we enter adolescence, along with all Schwarzenegger for my son's generation. The upshot of those long-expected physical changes associated in our all this conflict is the tumult of emotions and confused minds with manhood. Our changing bodies become a behaviour of adolescent boys in our society. source of both pride and embarrassment. We never feel This personal struggle is miles away from the gender like we're changing fast enough, but we quickly lose our struggles of our early childhood. Then we fought for both childhood elegance and grace. Our voices crack, orgasms approval and independence from our parents. In happen while we sleep, penises become erect in the adolescence the social context and our personal situations middle of class. are different. Now we're fighting for the recognition, love (cid:151) (cid:151) 90 91 CRACKING THE ARMOUR JEKLLS, HYDES AND HULKS and approval of our peers. The boys around us become over. Then he got his first girlfriend and I got replaced by the mirror of what we want to be or what we want to someone else. I mean we still hung out, but not nearly as avoid. We're sure that other boys have it all worked out much. I acted like I didn't care because I didn't want him and we are the only ones who are plagued with self-doubt thinking I was weird and I started going out with a girl I and fear. We have to keep a distance even from our best knew, but it wasn't the same.” friends; otherwise maybe they'll discover our self-doubts. Since we're supposed to have left boys behind, Or maybe we fear being too dependent, needy or passive. adolescence is also a time when many young men feel It is in these painful moments of adolescence that lifelong immense fear about homosexuality and their own sexual patterns of isolation from other men are born. orientation. John's fear of being thought “weird” would In a culture based on emotional separation among have been all the stronger if, like many boys, he and men and on the imposition of a heterosexual norm, we David had explored each other's bodies when they were have had to undergo a traumatic shift in affections. young or maybe masturbated together when they reached During our childhood, other boys were the main object of puberty. The intensity of this fear explains why most gay- our affection; they were our main playmates and our bashing is done by adolescents. trusted allies. Now, with a growing sexual interest in This period is further complicated by the way our girls and a caution about opening up to other males, we society is structured. The real or relative powerlessness are expected to do an about-face in our closest of young people, male and female, impinges on our relationships and re-orient towards girls. If boys are the developing sense of self. In our early childhood, boys model of what we want to be, girls become one means accepted a self-definition that equated us and our actions through which we measure our achievement of this goal. with power. All those symbols of boyhood play, all the Yet boys remain our chief companions, the objects of our guns and superheroes, became projections of our power. admiration and, for many more years, the real love of our But this sense of power starts to wear thin as we become lives. aware of who really does and doesn't have power in the “I remember,” says John, “when David and I would world around us. Because of our class or race, because of do everything together. Every day after school we'd hang our physical abilities or differences, because of our out, listen to music, do homework, watch TV. We'd do religion or ethnic group, because of not being superheroes stuff on weekends and at night went to movies or slept or saints, because we are just plain real people, we (cid:151) (cid:151) 92 93 develop a feeling of inadequacy and sometimes even a bit and how we feel is measured on a scale of personal of self-hate. We start feeling different from others, maybe insecurities. Every action or gesture threatens to become not quite as good. We spot the limitations of our parents. a divining rod that points with precision to underground We feel anxieties about money, jobs, relationships, rivers of inadequacy, to our underlying failings as men, success. or, on the other hand, to our own image of masculine All this is exacerbated by that strange invention of power. In Grade Seven or Eight I was fascinated by the twentieth-century Western societies: adolescence. way a particular older boy chewed gum. I was in awe of Puberty no longer means the entrance into adulthood as the way the tiny muscles flexed in his cheeks and the it once did. Now it signifies the entry into a netherworld subtle sense of power, control, toughness and sex as he of competing demands: we're told to act like adults, but worked over his Juicy Fruit. This one action represented we don't have the power to make adult decisions and be to me then the full glory of masculine power, and try as I independent. We have adult bodies, but don't have the might, it seemed impossible for me to emulate him. social or economic resources to live adult lives. Adults One thing has remained the same from earlier years. endeavour to confine and control our sexuality. We want We had already learned that masculinity was something to be independent, but in many ways, enforced for which you had to fight. The drama of school-yard dependence keeps us behaving like children. battles was a struggle to shape and define our manhood, The real social powerlessness we experience clashes a struggle that continues into adolescence. What doesn't with the masculine ideal. It exacerbates our confusion persist, however, is our emotional capacity to process all over the difference between sex and gender, and we feel these sources of conflict and stress. When we were really even more inadequate as men. So teenage boys become young, we could feel two conflicting emotions at once more aggressive both verbally and physically; it's a way without feeling stress. We get through our childhood of announcing, loudly, that they're all right. All sorts of conflicts because our personalities, our mental structures, behaviour in sports, in school hallways or at the mall are still being formed and remain flexible. Once they are makes this statement. Harassment of girls or taunting of set, however, it becomes hard to negotiate between weaker boys is more of a performance for one's peers than conflicting pressures and demands. If things don't fit into anything else. Sexism has as much to do with the our sense of self, well, they simply don't fit in. The other hierarchies and power relations among young men as it reason it gets harder to emotionally process these new does with feelings about young women. sets of demands is that we have progressively lost the The stakes are high. How we are judged by our peers tools of emotional release, and this has made us more (cid:151) 94 (cid:151) 95 vulnerable and less able to deal with stress and to (cid:103) CHAPTER FIVE respond to the difficult challenges of our new world. By our teenage years, by the time we really are men, we find our sense of male power increasingly confused and tarnished. The stage is now set for our adult T H E B U R D E N experiences, for the intricacies of sex, for new types of relationships with women and with men, for the violence O F P L E A S U R E that might still be a presence in our lives and for the conflicts and crises of men in an era of change. (cid:103) Men and Sex Some of us act like prisoners of our raging hormones. We learn to be sexual aggressors; some days our sexual needs feel insatiable. But men's experiences of sex are rich, complex and varied. More than any other part of our lives, it is in our sexual lives that our contradictory experiences of power get acted out, where our fragility and power combine with an experience of ecstasy. This is often hard to pick up. As much as men talk about sex, we spend little time talking about our personal experience of it: what we like and what we don't, what's easy for us and what's hard. In a workshop on sex I attended, one older man was asked if he had ever talked to another man about his sexual experiences. Not missing a beat his reply was, “Sober?” (cid:151) (cid:151) 96 97