They're Just Men

I had some of the very standard problems as I was going through school, the growing up stuff most of us run into at some point. The kind of stuff where you're attempting to learn how to navigate the social environment. I got along with most people, and I can honestly say I don't think I was ever a bully of any kind. Memory is a funny thing though, so maybe I'm wrong. There might be someone out there who remembers me very differently from the way I remember myself. It isn't helped by some PTSD related issues making a lot of my memory from back then a bit hard to reach. It's like every time I've gone through one of the periods when my mental health has been at its worst, more memories seem to rescind. 

Sometimes though, I come across something, a song, a picture, a smell, a phrase, something that just snaps a memory back into place. There are parts of my memory of my life which have only the most vague sense of association, not anything like what we'd refer to as a memory. I guess, to some degree, this is normal as we age, but it's always a surprise to me, because I can't always call memories back voluntarily. 

I had one of those experiences in these last few days, a memory coming back suddenly. 

I was watching the video that's been circulated of the man whose son has been arrested for the murder of five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs. 

I haven't thought about the memory it brought back for years. It takes the right cajoling for some of them to come out. 

I was in seventh or eighth grade, I think. It must have been summer or some kind of other break period, because we weren't in school. It probably wasn't a weekend, because I spent the majority of those with my father. A friend and I were walking to his house, having left another friends after playing basketball for a few hours. We were about to pass the home of a kid we went to school with. He was someone who had a need to constantly antagonize a handful of people at school, me being one. You couldn't really say he was a bully. He wasn't capable of genuinely bullying most of us, because I don't think any of us were afraid of him in any way, but more that he was always trying to get a rise out of someone. It was a kind of daily needling and antagonism. We went to a small school, in a small town. We all knew each other, and had for the majority of our short lives. It seemed like a few times year, this kid got his clock cleaned when he finally pushed someone to the point frustration got the better of them. 

I don't really remember it all perfectly. I do remember feeling like he must have seen us coming and come out of his house, because he was headed down the walkway away from his front door as we approached. I know we had words, as school aged boys do when this is the kind of dynamic that exists between them. I don't remember what was said, at all. It's after this, the memory is much more vivid.  

The thing I really remember is having him pinned down on the walk in his front yard, trying to decide if I should get off of him, having proven what I needed to or if maybe a few punches in the face might mean he'd decide to take me off the list of people he was constantly needling and antagonizing. I remember that because I was contemplating it at the moment the front door to his house opened, and his mom came rushing out onto their front porch. My heart jumped and I froze. I was sure I was about to be in some bad trouble. I had this woman's son pinned down in her front yard, and we were clearly not playing. That's not a thing mother's take kindly to. I remember a vague feeling being both afraid of how much trouble I was about to be in, and also grateful I hadn't decided to punch him in the face, because it would have meant I'd be in even more trouble. 

I wasn't prepared for what happened instead. The memory of it still has vivid emotions attached to it, all these years later.

For a few seconds, there was confusion, until what she was saying actually hit me. When it did, the confusion was overcome by a wave of pity, sorrow and disgust. Pity for him. Sorrow for all of us, and disgust with her. How could someone's mother do that? How could she say that to someone who was in a position to hurt her child? She was yelling something to the effect that I should "teach that little bastard a lesson." The memory of the feeling is strong, like I couldn't let him up fast enough, couldn't just be away from them both fast enough. I felt disgusted and disappointed with myself. My friend and I just walked away from the whole thing, leaving him with her and her with him, them to each other. I remember my friend and I trying half heartedly to make a joke about it, about the fact that even his own mother couldn't stand him, but I really just felt... sick inside. Not nauseous, but in my heart and mind. I hope things have changed since then, but at the time, if you were a boy, you didn't let other boys know you felt anything other than victorious in a situation like that. Not if you wanted to avoid actual bullying, the kind that could hurt you physically, emotionally and/or mentally. 

I won, right? He lost what there was of a physical confrontation, and he was humiliated. That's winning, in the world of boys, isn't it? It was confusing. I won, but it didn't feel like winning. It felt quite the opposite. 

I haven't thought about that in years. I'm honestly surprised the feelings are still so strong. I didn't become friends with that kid, but for a while, he had to try much, much harder to get under my skin. Over time, I'd learn his father was physically abusive, toward him and his mother. Later, I'd hear he pushed his own mother around, physically. I can't say whether it was true, but I believed it then. Like I said, it was a small town, everyone knew everyone's business. Still, there was always this sneering antagonism. Later still, the antagonism having resumed in the years between, at a point when things in my own life were spiraling, in no small part through not having effective treatment for misdiagnosed mental illness, I became the next in the line of boys who gave him the punch in face he genuinely seemed to want. 

By that time, school suspensions weren't unusual for me, and they'd be a regular part of my academic experience until it ended, but this was one of only two for fighting. There was one other instance where I got involved in a melee as a group of other kids jumped a friend of mine. My mouth and my attitude toward authority were responsible for the rest of my suspensions. I was much more likely to have trouble with the teachers and administration than other students. I might not like some of the other students, but I was able to get along with most of them and avoid the rest. Even as I was regularly in trouble for not recognizing authority appropriately, and there was a near no tolerance policy on violence in my house, my mom defended me where that fight was concerned. It wasn't the first time she'd defended me to school administration. It was close to the last time she defended me, but I don't think it was the last. She knew this antagonism had gone on for a number of years, and her attitude was more or less, "What do you expect him to do? How long is anyone supposed to put up with that if you all aren't going to put a stop to it?" She wasn't wrong. Everything else about all of it was wrong though, including me, understandable as my actions may have been. I understood my part in it. I felt shitty about it. It was all just shitty, and there was no way around how shitty it all was. 

There was no way of telling that story, at that time, in that situation either. The saddest part is that I might not have liked that kid, and I may have momentarily wanted to pound him into the linoleum, but I also knew he needed something, and no one I might be able to tell was going to be able to give or do for him what he needed. It was beyond them. I knew my actions had just contributed to the cycle. It was just shitty and made me, a kid who was already angry and sad, even more angry and sad. 

After that, there was a kind of detente. I think more than anything else, he'd gotten what something inside of him wanted or needed. I didn't know it, but I learned one of the lessons in the complicated world of boys and men through all of it.  

I saw that man, in that video, and it brought that memory back because I had the same feeling I had back then, when I was a kid, walking away from his house, and after going through the process of not being able to put to words what I knew about that kids life. Just a sick feeling. Nobody won. It's all shitty and it just makes me angry and sad. I thought about that kid, who'd grown up with his father beating him, to then push his own mother around as I watched the video of this man, who would rather his son be a murderer than be gay. I understand exactly how this man's son becomes someone who decides to try and kill as many people as he can. I understand how his son becomes someone who chooses a club that is a haven for queer people as the place to do it. It lead me to thinking about a lot of the men I've known through the years. Family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances. Their fathers, sons, brothers, cousins etc. Gaping maws of unrecognized need, insecurity and outright fear. In forty-five years now, I've probably known thousands of them. 

I can abhor the way that empty void expresses itself and that it exists within me. I can feel a deep, desperate rage at the fact that there are so many men who are so desperate not to acknowledge, that desperation will turn to manipulating the same void in other men as a way to try and quiet their own. I can hate the fact that this manipulation is so often  the inspiration for violence, and I can hate that this violence is so often directed at people specifically because they exist outside of this cycle, not being subsumed or consumed by this void, as a way to insure the next generation experiences it. I can know and have loved the LGBTQ+ people who have always been in my life, and been there to accept me when this void was part of why I couldn't accept myself. All of this can be true, and it's why I can look at the man who is his father and understand why a twenty-two year old picks up a gun, and decides the way for him to be a man is to try and kill as many queer people as he can.  

The manliness of it all. The unreachable plateau of the men they'll never be, the constant terror of being recognized for the men they aren't, the need to keep up the facade so they'll get recognition as the men they fear they aren't. They all have their individual quirks, the particular ways these insecurities and fears present themselves, but we all know them. We see it, all the time. We all know. 

It's the screaming void that is the living absurdity of Donald Trump. It's the thing that draws them to him. It's the reason for the pompous fawning Elon Musk is engaging in with others who are also publicly demonstrating how badly they need to be recognized as men and the fawning done over Musk by fanboys who are drawn to a man making "power moves," despite those decisions burning down the very thing he's promised to save. 

They say biology is the decider, but they reveal this as something they don't believe in the next sentence. Despite their own biology, they try so hard to be recognized as the men they are terrified of not being. They sling weird insults like "soy boy," as a way of delineating who is a "real man." They use pseudo science to create categories. Alpha. Beta. Now, with an entire industry of manliness influencers and grifters claiming their alpha status, diluting the potency of the term, they've invented sigma, which brings it all full circle. The sigma, the man who so self contained, so effective at manliness, he doesn't even need a group of other men to lead, like the alpha, who needs the recognition of betas. It's the spaghetti western archetype, the loner who can roll into town, clean up all the troubles, bed the women and ride off when he's done, but instead of horse, he drives a Tesla and wears six hundred dollar sunglasses while he chops wood on Tik Tok or Instagram. A former president, still wielding a significant amount of influence. The richest man in the history of the world. It's still not enough. Biology isn't enough for this. They know this. That knowledge is plain and clear in their actions and the transparency of their need in their declarations. All of it, done so they can get the adulation and respect of other men, as being men. 

I've felt it. I know it. If I'm completely honest, damn near all of the worst decisions I've ever made, the things I've felt worst about, had the most regret over later, can be traced back to it, either as the driving factor in the decision or as the thing that called up a malignant kind of regret. Any man in this country who tells you they don't understand it, they've never felt that feeling, is lying to you, because they don't want to be perceived as being less than the man they want you to believe they are. 

This is the insanity of masculinity the right wants to reenforce and reproduce at even greater scale. It's possible this is really the only "culture war." The fight to go back to the days when no one said the emperor had no clothes. The days when the public looked at men like Trump and Musk and said, "It's just men, being men," instead of recognizing all of this as a performance born out of something almost like a neurosis, installed by the way we transmit and teach masculinity. 

A significant part of what they're fighting for is to keep in place a culture which turns boys into men whose insecurity, need and fear, instilled in them by fathers, grandfathers, brothers, friends, teammates and family, can be manipulated into producing the violence needed to enforce the order which ultimately privileges the figureheads who represent it. It's the need to continue to produce men with this impossible screaming void who will do anything not to acknowledge, including kill for a culture that doesn't care how they die, what kills them or how what it instills in them leaves them little but empty, frightened and alone. 

It can be manipulated, in large part because we don't face that it's real. We don't have a language for it. Feminism has come and unearthed, analyzed and dissected what it is for women to have femininity and the gender roles assigned to it imposed on them. Through feminism, women have found the way to overcome the need to hide these things. Women have come to have a language, a shared community, a common understand, a language to express how all these insecurities, needs and fears effect them and their lives.

There's been no such thing for and among men, and in a way, there's still a kind of social compact about hiding all these things that come with masculinity. We look at Trump, we look at Musk, we look at the Elliot Rodger's of the world who go on killing sprees and blame women for why they need to kill women, and we focus on them, we focus on the individual circumstances or we focus on the failings. We make sweeping statements about young men, in their parents basements. We make jokes about the lengths men will go to instead of just going to therapy. 

There are truths in all these things, the way we talk about them and there are things to be learned, and certainly things worth mocking. What we don't do though, is put this same spotlight on masculinity. We stop at the privilege men clearly do have. We don't ask what the cost for that privilege is, and realistically, it's not up to women to do this. It shouldn't be the project of feminism. It's a project men have to take up. 

To treat this all as inherent in men, not the byproduct of masculinity, not something imposed on men as much as femininity and the gender roles imposed on women has highlighted, is to give the patriarchy feminism has outlined and aligned itself against, a kind of invisible power. We either believe men and women aren't that different, and indeed there is an entire spectrum of people, with poles stretching from the binary to completely beyond it, where gender has no boundaries or we believe there is some kind of essentialism, these problems arise from men inherently, not masculinity. When we see instances of violence like the murders at Club Q or like the other recent shooting by a man who was a manager at a Walmart in Cheseapeake VA, it's become just another step in the endless cycle to turn to mental illness. We haven't begun to excavate how often mental illness has roots in the way we transmit and impose masculinity on men and boys, and we haven't begun to ask how much these instances of mental illness are the result of imposing on men what wouldn't be healthy for any human being. 

None of this is to excuse the heinousness of these actions or the violence men so regularly bring into the world. It's almost guaranteed that to say what I'm saying here is going to invite the criticism that this is centering cis, heterosexual men, when the victims of their violence are so often people who don't fit that description. Accountability has to be part of the process by which we go about establishing a culture, a world where we aren't visiting violence on each other so often and so callously. Nor is the point the police or criticize the very real, rational and understandable expressions of anger in the face of how little has been done about that violence. I feel the same rage and anger. I haven't escaped without the scars it leaves. It's marked my entire life. The point is to better understand what part masculinity plays in this violence. The disparity in the levels of violence brought into the world by men, cis hetero men specifically, and the violence brought into the world by everyone else, suggests this is necessary all by itself. 

Additionally, it's necessary because it can't be argued that this sense of masculinity, especially the most traditional conceptions of it, aren't the most effective levers for the far right. They are the most effective levers of recruitment and of motivation. It is perilous to continue to leave any excavation of masculinity by men to the right, which is the current reality. When everyone who isn't on the right has nothing but contempt and mocking for why so many young men feel lonely, out of place and without a support system (which is, itself, part of the results of how we transmit and impose masculinity on them), it makes them very easy marks for the far right. The manosphere is an extremely fertile ground for the far right and fascist movement. Trump didn't get to be their figurehead and be elected because he was a paragon of efficacy, intelligence or integrity. I'll be the first to mock the kind of superficial argument which boils down to, "Someone told me I needed therapy, so I joined a white supremacist group," but it's no less superficial to look at the kind of recruitment techniques and the varieties of sentiments they're using to get and keep men on board and continue to act like this is a problem of individuals. And that's not even getting into the way the sexism rooted in the way we transmit masculinity cause rifts within the coalitions trying to oppose the far right and the fascist movement. 

I could say, "I'm willing to do it!" and try to gain attention and "lead the charge," as the saying goes, but that has its own pitfalls. As someone who is to some degree aware of the way the transmission and imposition of masculinity has effected me, I'm wary of attempting to take up such a mantle. Not only are there questions of qualifications, there's the very clear and obvious degree to which the space where  people are portending to do this is filled with, self acclaimed experts, wannabe gurus masquerading as a kind of new age lifestyle coach and plain old grifters. I see how those roles are also a kind of response to the insecurities and fears of manhood and masculinity and I'm self aware enough to know I'm no more immune to a pitfall like that than anyone else. Ambition is good we say. Why not see someone make a career out of doing something good? It's a little too easy to let the nexus and commingling of capitalism and masculinity excuse behavior that isn't quite acting in the good faith, and to be purely honest, too many of the people already presenting themselves as engaging in this project are starting from a place that accepts a whole lot of suppositions which need to be questioned. This isn't something that's going to work if it's being lead by any individual or small group of individuals. Part of undoing the harm masculinity is doing to men and the people around them is going to be developing new ideals about what good leadership means and looks like.   

This is a project men are going to need to be encouraged to take part in and are going to need examples of men who are able to find the places they can be vulnerable and honest about these things. Like feminism, it's a project which is going to as realistically need the input and action of men who aren't experts, aren't academics or psychologists or sociologists, if only because of the kind of status those positions and titles confer. It's going to need cis, hetero men to take part in it most especially, because we've been least willing to put a critical eye to masculinity, but it's also going to need gay men, trans men, and people who are non-binary but the world confers the expectations of masculinity on. This is also the best way to start to really understand the way toward a masculinity which doesn't result in the kind of striking disparities in violence we see now, and is more likely to produce a conception of masculinity which isn't basically killing men en masse.  

This is also part of coming to the truth of the kinds of shocking, terrible attacks like the one on Club Q. The people who commit these acts are just men. They're not monsters in some metaphysical sense. Morally, yes, they've committed monstrous acts, and they are still just men. It isn't something mystic which causes all this violence, from men, especially cis hetero men, against everyone who isn't cis hetero and against each other at such shockingly high rates. It's masculinity, how we transmit and impose it. Not addressing that essentially treats it like some kind of mystical, unknowable factor, and it's not. They're just men.