The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (9 page)

Many men are angry at women, but more profoundly, women are the targets for displaced male rage at the failure of patriarchy to make good on its promise of fulfillment, especially endless sexual fulfillment.

Men may be too terrified to confront the facts of their lives and tell the truth that possessing the right to engage in rituals of domination and subordination is not all that patriarchy promised it would be. If, as Terrence Real says, patriarchy were a disease, it would be a disease of “disordered desire”; to cure this disease, then, we would all need to reconsider the way we see men and male desire. Rather than seeing the violence men do as an expression of power, we would need to call it by its true name—pathology. Patriarchal violence is a mental illness. That this illness is given its most disordered expression in the sexual lives of men is powerful because it makes it hard to document since we do not witness what men do sexually like we witness what they do at work or in civic life. To take the inherent positive sexuality of males and turn it into violence is the patriarchal crime that is perpetuated against the male body, a crime that masses of men have yet to possess the strength to report. Men know what is happening. They simply have been taught not to speak the truth of their bodies, the truth of their sexualities.

Robert Jensen’s powerful and courageous essay “Patriarchal Sex” drives this message home. Defining patriarchal sex, he writes: “Sex is fucking. In patriarchy, there is an imperative to fuck—in rape and in ‘normal’ sex, with strangers and girlfriends and wives and estranged wives and children. What matters in patriarchal sex is the male need to fuck. When that need presents itself, sex occurs.” Boldly Jensen explains:

One might add that it is a supreme testament to patriarchy’s power that it can convince men and women to pretend that sexual violence satisfies.

Much popular music from rock to rap shares this message. Whether it’s Iggy Pop’s lyrics, “I got my cock in my pocket and it’s shoving up through my pants. I just wanna fuck, this ain’t no romance” or the rap group Mystikals’ lyrics, “When it’s finished, over and done with it, I’m gonna smash a blount and knock the pussy off some bitch.” Of course the truth of men’s lives is that patriarchal sexuality has not satisfied. It has fueled the compulsive need to be more sexual, to be more violent in the hopes that there is a way to be more satisfied. Patriarchal pornography, no longer isolated but ever-present in popular mass media, has become so widespread because males brainwashed by the patriarchal mind-set cannot find the courage to tell the truth. They cannot find the courage to say, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Patriarchal pornography has become an inescapable part of everyday life because the need to create a pretend culture where male sexual desire is endlessly satisfied keeps males from exposing the patriarchal lie and seeking healthy sexual identities.

Gay subcultures have historically articulated with greater honesty and boldness male compulsive sexual desire. And contrary to popular imagination, rather than being antipatriarchal, homosexual predatory sex is the ultimate embodiment of the patriarchal ideal. Jensen observes that “gay-or-straight doesn’t much matter. The question of resistance to patriarchal sex is just as important in that gay men fuck in about the same way straight men do. We all received pretty much the same training…. Fucking is taken to be the thing that gay men do; some might even argue that if you aren’t fucking, you aren’t gay.” More often than not, gay males, unless they have consciously decided otherwise, are as patriarchal in their thinking about masculinity, about sexuality, as their heterosexual counterparts. Their investment in patriarchy is an intensely disordered desire, because they are enamored of the very ideology that fosters and promotes homophobia. Now that patriarchal straight men have been compelled through mass media to face the fact that homosexual males are not “chicks with dicks,” that they can and do embody patriarchal masculinity, straight male sexual dominance of biological females has intensified, for it is really the only factor that distinguishes straight from gay. Concurrently, homophobia becomes amplified among heterosexual men because its overt expression is useful as a way to identify, among apparently similar macho men, who is gay and who is straight.

Patriarchal pornography is a space of shared masculinity for straight and gay men. The images gay men seek are male, but males positioned in the same way as the male and female bodies of straight pornography. Whether catering to gay or straight males, patriarchal pornography is fundamentally a reenactment of dominator culture in the realm of the sexual.

Male “need” of patriarchal pornography that eroticizes domination is no show of male power. While hatred of women can lead to acts of domination that hurt, wound, and destroy, there is no constructive power here. Tragically, if masses of men believe that their selfhood and their patriarchal sexuality are one and the same, they will never find the courage to create liberating, fulfilling sexuality. It is this reality that leads men of conscience in patriarchal society to fear sex with the same intensity that females often fear sex. As Jensen testifies:

Despite the courageous testimony of Jensen and others, despite the radical critique of patriarchal sex, most men are not breaking through denial and telling the truth about sex. They are choking it down, the pain, the despair, the confusion: they are following the patriarchal rules.

Rather than change, patriarchal males and females have exploited the logic of gender equality in the sexual realm to encourage women to be advocates of patriarchal sex and to pretend, like their male counterparts, that this is sexual freedom. Music videos and televisions shows like
Sex and the City
(written and produced by patriarchal men and women) teach females, especially young females, that the desirable female companion is one who is willing to play either a dominant or a subordinate role, one who can be as nonchalant about sex as any patriarchal man. Socializing women to conform more to patriarchal male sexual norms is one way patriarchy hopes to address male rage. Since this rage covers up the pain that could be the catalyst for critical awakening, it has to be assuaged. It is not just antifeminist backlash that has led to the normalization of pornographic sexual violence in our mass media and in common sexual practice; the desire to keep men from feeling and naming their pain fuels the need for consistent brainwashing.

Male despair, often initially expressed as anger, is a far greater threat to the patriarchal sexual order than feminist movement. While masses of men continue to use patriarchal sex and pornography to numb themselves, many men are weary of numbing and are trying to find a way to reclaim selfhood. This process of recovery includes finding a new sexuality. The assault on the male body by modern diseases, lowered sex drive, and out-and-out impotence has caused individual men not only to question patriarchal sex but to the find new ways of being sexual that can satisfy.

If unenlightened men are suffering their version of the “problem that has no name” when it comes to sexuality, they can ease their pain by breaking through denial and repudiating the patriarchal script of domination and submission. With keen insight Bearman in the essay “Why Men Are So Obsessed with Sex” reminds males that they have a choice:

Compulsive sexuality, like any addiction, is hard for men to change because it takes the place of the healing that is needed if men are to love their bodies and let that love lead them into greater community with other human bodies, with the bodies of women and children.

Bearman reminds men that “no matter how much sex you encounter, it will not be enough to fill your enormous need to love and be close and express your passion and delight in your senses and feel life forces coursing through your muscles and skin.” If masses of men could recover this fundamental passion for their own bodies, that shift away from patriarchal sex might lead us toward a true sexual revolution. To recover the power and passion of male sexuality unsullied by patriarchal assault, males of all ages must be allowed to speak openly of their sexual longing. They must be able to be sexual beings in a space where patriarchal thinking can no longer make violation the only means of attaining sexual pleasure. This is a tough job. And until males learn how to do it, they will not be satisfied.

B
efore feminist movement boys were more likely to be taught, at home and at school, that they would find fulfillment in work. Today boys hear a slightly different message. They are told that money offers fulfillment and that work is a way to acquire money—but not the only way. Winning the lottery, finding a wealthy partner, or committing a crime for which you do not get caught are paths to fulfillment that are as acceptable as working. These attitudes about the nature of work in patriarchal society have changed as capitalism has changed the nature of work. Few men, either now or in the future, can expect a lifetime of full employment. Nowadays working men of all classes experience periods of unemployment. In order to keep the faith, patriarchal culture has had to offer men different criteria for judging their worth than work.

As a primary foundation of patriarchal self-esteem, work has not worked for masses of men for some time. Rather than throw out the whole outmoded patriarchal script so that the nature of work in our culture can be changed, men are offered addictions that make unsatisfying work more bearable. Patriarchal obsession with sex and the pornography it produces are promoted to soothe men subliminally while they perform jobs that are tedious, boring, and oftentimes dehumanizing, jobs where their health and well-being are at risk. Most male workers in our America, like their female counterparts, work in exploitative circumstances; the work they do and the way they are treated by superiors more often than not undermine self-esteem.

One of the antifeminist patriarchal sentiments that has gained ground in recent years is the notion that masses of men used to be content to slave away at meaningless labor to fulfill their role as providers and that it is feminist insistence on gender equality in the workforce that has created male discontent. Underlying this assumption is the notion that women coming into the workforce, no longer looking to their men to be sole providers for the family, have undermined the well-being of men in patriarchal culture. Yet many sociological studies of men at work done prior to feminist movement indicate that males were already expressing grave discontent and depression about the nature and meaning of work in their lives. This discontent does not receive the attention that male workers receive when they blame their unhappiness with the world of work on feminist movement.

In her massive journalistic treatise
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man,
Susan Faludi documents the reality that some males, especially older men, felt that changes in the valuation and nature of work, as well as competition with women for jobs, robbed them of the pride in being providers, creating what she calls a “masculinity crisis.”

Masses of men in our culture may believe that their ability to provide for themselves and families is a measure of their manhood, yet they often do not actually use their resources to provide for others.

Feminist theorists, myself included, have for some time now called attention to the fact that the behavior of men who make money yet refuse to pay alimony or child support, or their peers who head households yet squander their paycheck on individual pleasures, challenges the patriarchal insistence that men are eager to be caretakers and providers. Barbara Ehrenreich’s
The Hearts of Men
was one of the first books highlighting the reality that many men are not eager to be providers, that the very idea of the “playboy” was rooted in the longing to escape this role and to have another means of proving one’s manhood. Male heads of households who give a meager portion of their wages for the needs of their family can still have the illusion that they are providers. Nowadays women’s income can be the backup money that allows many patriarchal men to squander their paycheck on drugs, alcohol, gambling, or sexual adventures even as they lay claim to being the provider.

Today’s male worker struggles to provide economically for himself. And if he is providing for self and family, his struggle is all the more rigorous and the fear of failure all the more intense. Men who make a lot of money in this society and who are not independently wealthy usually work long hours, spending much of their time away from the company of loved ones. This is one circumstance they share with men who do not make much money but who also work long hours. Work stands in the way of love for most men then because the long hours they work often drain their energies; there is little or no time left for emotional labor, for doing the work of love. The conflict between finding time for work and finding time for love and loved ones is rarely talked about in our nation. It is simply assumed in patriarchal culture that men should be willing to sacrifice meaningful emotional connections to get the job done. No one has really tried to examine what men feel about the loss of time with children, partners, loved ones, and the loss of time for self-development. The workers Susan Faludi highlights in
Stiffed
do not express concern about not having enough time for self-reflection and emotional connection with self and others.

There is very little research that documents the extent to which depression about the nature of work leads men to act violently in their domestic lives. Contemporary patriarchy has offered disappointed male workers a trade-off: the perks of manhood that a depressed economy takes away can be redeemed in the realm of the sexual through domination of women. When that world of sexuality is not fulfilling, males rage. In actuality women are weary of male domination in the sexual sphere particularly, and rather than making for greater “domestic bliss,” men’s turning to sex for the satisfaction that they do not receive at work intensifies strife. The movement of masses of women into the workforce has not undermined male workers economically; they still receive the lion’s share of both jobs and wages. It has made women who work feel more entitled to resist domination than women who stay home dependent on a man’s wages to survive.

Working-class and middle-income women I have spoken with talk about the extent to which working outside the home after years of staying home bolstered their self-esteem and provided them with a different perspective on relationships. These women often begin to place greater demands on male spouses and lovers for emotional engagement. Faced with these demands, working men often wish that the little woman would stay home so that he could wield absolute power, no matter the amount of his paycheck. In many cases when a woman’s paycheck is more than that of her male partner, he acts out to restore his sense of dominance. He may simply confiscate her paycheck and use it as he desires, thus rendering her dependent. He may increase his demands for sexual favors, and if that does not work, he can simply withhold sex, thus making a working woman who desires sex feel her power undermined.

Most women who work long hours come home and work a second shift taking care of household chores. They feel, like their male counterparts, that there is no time to do emotional work, to share feelings and nurture others. Like their male counterparts, they may simply want to rest. Working women are far more likely than other women to be irritable; they are less open to graciously catering to someone else’s needs than the rare woman who stays home all day, who may or may not caretake children. Domestic households certainly suffer when sexism decrees that all emotional care and love should come from women, in the face of the reality that working women, like their male counterparts, often come home too tired to deliver the emotional goods. Sexist men and women believe that the way to solve this dilemma is not to encourage men to share the work of emotional caretaking but rather to return to more sexist gender roles. They want more women, especially those with small children, to stay home.

Of course they do not critique the economy that makes it necessary for all adults to work outside the home; instead they pretend that feminism keeps women in the workforce. Most women work because they want to leave the house and because their families need the income to survive, not because they are feminists who believe that their working is a sign of liberation. When individual men stay home to do the work of homemaking and child rearing, the arrangement is still viewed as “unnatural” by most observers. Rather than being viewed as doing what they should do as people in relationships, homemaking men are seen as especially chivalrous, as sacrificing the power and privileges they could have as privileged male workers outside the home in order to do woman’s work inside the home.

It has been through assuming the role of participatory loving parents that individual men have dared to challenge sexist assumptions and do work in the home that also invites them to learn relational skills. They document the rightness of feminist theory that argues that if men participated equally in child rearing, they would, like their female counterparts, learn how to care for the needs of others, including emotional needs. Even though more men actively parent to some degree than ever before in our nation’s history, the vast majority of men still refuse to play an equal role in the emotional development of their children. They often use work as the excuse for emotional estrangement. Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.

Many men use work as the place where they can flee from the self, from emotional awareness, where they can lose themselves and operate from a space of emotional numbness. Unemployment feels so emotionally threatening because it means that there would be time to fill, and most men in patriarchal culture do not want time on their hands. Victor Seidler expresses his fear of having downtime in
Rediscovering Masculinity,
confessing, “I have learned how hard it is to give myself time, even an hour for myself a day. There are always things I am supposed to be doing. A feeling of panic and anxiety emerges at the very thought of spending more time with myself.” He argues that most men have such a limited sense of self that they are uncertain that they possess “selves we could want to relate to.” He contends, “We only seem to learn that the ‘self’ is something we have to control tightly, since otherwise it might upset our plans…. We never really give ourselves much chance to know ourselves better or develop more contact with ourselves, since…all this threatens the ‘control’ we have been brought up to identify our masculinity with. We feel trapped, though we do not know how we are constantly remaking this trap for ourselves.” Competition with other men in the workplace can make it all the more difficult for men to express feelings or to take time alone. The male who seeks solitude in the workplace, especially during downtimes, is seen as suspect. Yet when men gather together at work, they rarely have meaningful conversations. They jeer, they grandstand, they joke, but they do not share feelings. They relate in a scripted, limited way, careful to remain within the emotional boundaries set by patriarchal thinking about masculinity. The rules of patriarchal manhood remind them that it is their duty as men to refuse relatedness.

Even though male workers like Kenneth Blanchard, author of the
One Minute Manager
and coauthor of
The Power of Ethical Management,
share the wisdom that relational skills should be cultivated by men to improve the nature of work and work relations, most work settings remain places where emotional engagement between workers, especially a boss and a subordinate, is deemed bad for business. Were more men in touch with their relational skills and their emotional life, they might choose work that would at least sometimes enhance their well-being. Although women with class privilege such as Susan Faludi or Susan Bordo who write about men express surprise that most men do not see themselves as powerful, women who have been raised in poor and working-class homes have always been acutely aware of the emotional pain of the men in their lives and of their work dissatisfactions. Had Susan Faludi read the work of feminist women of color writing about the poor and working-class men whom we know most intimately, she would not have been “surprised” to find masses of men troubled and discontent. Women with class privilege have been the only group who have perpetuated the notion that men are all-powerful, because often the men in their families
were
powerful. When Faludi critiques the popular feminist notion that men are all-powerful, she counts on the ignorance of readers about feminist writing to perpetuate the notion that feminists have not understood male pain. It serves her argument to promote this inaccurate portrait.

Visionary feminists were writing about the fact that working-class men, far from feeling powerful, were terribly wounded by the patriarchy long before Faludi conceived of
Stiffed,
and it is difficult to imagine that she was not aware of that writing. It is disingenuous of her as well to act as though the liberation movement that women created to confront their “problem with no name” addressed women cross class lines. Feminist movement has had very little impact on the masses of working-class women who were in the workforce prior to the movement and who still remain there, just as dissatisfied and discontent with their lot as the men in their lives. Poor and working-class women have always known that the everyday work experience places men in an environment where they feel powerless and where they are unable to articulate that on patriarchal terms; to use Faludi’s words, they feel “less than masculine.”