Traditional masculinity is toxic

Well, I've been banging on about this since I first started this blog.  Now it's official:

Last August the American Psychological Association (APA) released its first-ever guidelines for therapists working with men and boys. Nobody paid much attention to these for several months, but they went viral this week. This was largely due to the APA condensing its academic report into a tweet explaining that the key takeaway is that traditional masculinity is harmful and socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage. Suddenly everyone on the internet was an armchair psychologist and conservatives were up in arms about war on men.

Traditional notions of masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness and aggression, are clearly toxic to both men and women. As the APA write in an article accompanying the study: “Men commit 90% of homicides in the United States and represent 77% of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide.” They also point to research that found men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity were less likely to seek mental health support than those who had more open gender attitudes. The guidelines advise psychologists to understand “how power, privilege and sexism work both by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles”.

While all that sounds eminently sensible to me, certain intellectuals on the right have predictably interpreted it as meaning the APA has it out for men. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, for example, made the compelling argument that toxic masculinity is actually great because she “loves James Bond”. (Please can someone explain to Ingraham that Bond is a fictional character?) Meanwhile Tucker Carlson, that bastion of reason, asked: “What would happen if you told girls the qualities that make you feel female are poison and you must suppress them?” I don’t think he quite understands that feminists have been fighting against poisonous gender stereotypes for a very long time. And, by the way, the APA has a set of guidelines for women.

Despite the right using the APA guidelines as an opportunity for outrage, we should all be highly encouraged by the new guidelines. It’s a great sign that toxic gender norms are being gradually interrogated and dismantled and it will literally save lives.

[From Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian]

Why is it?

The Australian Religion

Whereas the majority of Americans believe in some organised religion or other, the majority of Ozzies have no religion.  So they say on the census forms anyway.  But it's not true.  They do have a religion.  Sport.

If LA vanished under the sea because the San Andreas fault had slipped, and there was a footy game on at the same night, guess which would be on the front page the next day?  Guess what the topic of conversation would be when the straighties got together to bond manfully at the water cooler?  You can't?  After all those blatant hints?  Tragic.

And right now there is some tennis thingy on in Melbourne.  Frigging sodding tennis.  Which means the trains are full with sodding tennis fans going to the tennis.  So I didn't get a seat.  I mean, what do my old bones matter, when you're going to cream your pants at the tennis?  I'm a practitioner of sports atheism, after all.  I deserve to stand.

OK.  I'm broadminded.  Even liberal (in the old-fashioned sense of the word).  People should be allowed to play and even watch sport (shudder) as long as they don't act too gay in public.  Did I say too gay?  I meant too sporty.  You know: bouncing balls up and down (not theirs, that would at least be interesting), talking knowledgeably about the fracking teams, for His Noodliness's sake, wearing green and gold or ghastly versions of the Ozzie flag.  Good grief!  Can't they just stay home and drink insecticide so I can get a seat on the train?

Anyway, one good thing, this photo of Lleyton Hewitt leapt out at me from the pages of The Age.  (They do it too, you know, The Age.  Worshipping at the shrines of sport.  It's shameful.) 

I took it home with me and played with my . . . sports . . . . equipment.  You can too, now.  Enjoy.

In touch with your inner man

This article on gay men and masculinity is not without some insights:

• Gay men have an ambivalent attitude towards masculinity.  Well I dunno about other gay men, but I certainly do.  I regard some aspects of masculinity as pernicious: inability to express any emotions except aggression and anger, for example.

• One of the ways homophobes misunderstand gay men is in assuming we secretly want to be women.  Not on your nelly.  Or at least, not for this nelly!  I like being male.  I just like others to be male too.

• Growing up, gay boys are sometimes taunted with words like “sissy,” that imply they are deficient in the masculinity department.  Yeah, or the South African equivalent: moffie.  Jeez it hurt.

• Since gay men are attracted to other men – duh – a certain amount of testosterone is inherently attractive to gay guys.  Indeed.  But testosterone plus warmth and compassion -- wow!  

• We gay men wound ourselves when we learn to think of masculinity as something that resides outside of our own selves when we see other men as masculine, but not our selves.   Yeah, but . . . it's hard to set aside decades of negative conditioning. 

• Identifying those aspects of being a man we most value and then cultivate those parts of our selves can lead to a healthier and less distorted sense of our own masculinity.  My lady reckons I am a far better man than most because I have selected those aspects of maleness I admire and tried to discard those aspects I dislike.  Not that it hasn't been a hard, long journey.   

Flamers

A little while ago I read a remarkable blog post, from a blog which shall remain nameless. In it, the blogger described how he'd been approached by a effeminate (but very muscular) guy. This guy suffered from a -- shock! horror! -- lisp. Repelled, our intrepid blogger assaulted the "queen" and then vomited. There followed a diatribe against feminine guys.

A psychiatrist or psychologist would surely find the whole episode remarkably revealing. To me, it indicates a very strong internalised homophobia. Ah, many will reply, but what if you don't find effeminate men sexy? Well, what of it? If it had been a straight guy responding to a gay one in this way, the conclusions would have been obvious. It would have been seen as a gay hate crime. And let me make it quite clear: I'm not saying that you have to have it off with someone you find unappealing just to be politically correct. Some blokes prefer busty brunettes, others brunets with muscly pecs. Each to his own. But to hit the other guy and then vomit? C'mon! Whatever happened to Sorry, I have a headache?

So why do I call it a kind of (internalised) homophobia? Because what is going on here is a comparable to what happens in race-obsessed societies. In apartheid South Africa, the "whites" were the most desired, the "blacks" the least. The "coloureds" (mixed-race South Africans, who ironically spoke Afrikaans*, the language of the dominant "white" minority) were considered superior to the "blacks" but inferior to the "whites", and the "whiter" your skin was the higher your social standing. Manufacturers of (dangerous and ineffective) skin-whitening pastes and hair-straightening liquids did a roaring trade. Self-hatred brought on by the perverted values of society.

But how is this relevant to the spectrum of gays from queens through to clones? The most acceptable gays (to gays and straights) are those who can "pass". They're "masculine" and "straight-acting". When last did you see an ad in the hook-up section of the personals columns for a "gay-acting" partner?

It's not for nothing that one of the biggest story themes on Nifty is about straight guys turning gay. There are all sorts of reasons why this trope is so powerful to us, and I'll talk about them in a later post, but one of them clearly is that a despised and discriminated-against sexual alternative is embraced by the "real man" (gays, by definition, cannot be "real men"). A straight man turning gay validates us. And the machoer, the straighter, the more masculine the other man is before he turns to the dark side, the better. Hell's teeth, even in my own writing, I use these archetypal stories. In Footy, a straight man falls for his gay best friend.

The least acceptable gays are the "femmes", the "queens", the "gay-acting", the "flamers". When straight society talks disdainfully about "homos", this is mostly what they mean. Effeminate men are despised by most straights and gays. And it's worth asking why. 'Just because' is not an answer. Consider how many gays wish that drag queens would keep away from the gay parades. "They perpetuate stereotypes" is the politest comment I've heard. Why is it more acceptable for a woman to do "manly things" than for a man to do feminine things? Why is it OK for women to wear pants but not for men to wear dresses? Why is being a macho sportsman (even if from time to time you have a mutual blow job with your teammates) acceptable but being a male ballet dancer not?

Think of all the gay icons. Gays are turned on by construction workers and tradies, marines (but not, curiously to the same extent by other kinds of soldiers), cowboys, firefighters, bikies and the leather-clad, policemen, and of course, sportsmen. One can understand the attraction in each case, especially for sportsmen, who must be fit, healthy and muscular just to follow their calling. But so much of the attraction is for a kind of off-hand, totally self-confident, unthinking maleness. Men who don't gel their hair, who don't wear designer label undies, who sprawl in a masculine way in front of the TV to watch the game, who emerge filthy from under a car they've just fixed (competence is a very male virtue), who don't wear deodorant or aftershave. Real men. The kind of men we want to be. So, since we are homos not straights, we indulge in the equivalent of skin-lightening creams and hair straighteners. Even the term "clone" is horribly revealing.

The irony is that I myself am not immune to the attraction of these archetypes. And that I had to spend a lot of time and thought to getting over my own internalised homophobia which made me despise myself because I wasn't real man enough, and made me deeply uncomfortable with flamers. But the first step to coming to terms with this is to recognise it for what it is.

I'm sure I'll get heaps of emails and comments, saying stuff like "but that's just what I like/dislike, it's not homophobia." Fair enough. But the question is: why do we have these likes and dislikes? Our personal values don't happen in a vacuum. They are affected, coloured, driven by societal values. We must understand, because if we end up disliking ourselves because we don't conform to some outdated sexist stereotype than we will just get hurt. Effeminate gay men are us, too. Flamers have feelings. Until they/we are whole-heartedly accepted, gay liberation will not be complete.

[This is the third of a linked series of posts. The previous two are Darl and Homophobia and Behaviour Modification. These articles I wrote for Wilde Oats also consider some of the issues I touch on here: The End of Gay and Gay, Then and Now.]

The Village People, making fun of the stereotypes.

*the first book written in Afrikaans was written in Arabic script to convert the "Malay" (Indonesian) Muslim slaves in Cape Town in the early 19th century. Ironic that their creole of Dutch became the language of the apartheid regime. Now there's self-hatred for you! And apartheid is pronounced apart+hate. Easy to remember.

Face Off

This was a fascinating article from The Economist magazine. The sub heading is that a disease-free society helps effeminate men attract women. I quote:

IT IS not just a sense of fairness that seems to be calibrated to social circumstances (see article). Mating preferences, too, vary with a society’s level of economic development. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Ben Jones and Lisa DeBruine of Aberdeen University, in Scotland, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Dr Jones and Dr DeBruine, themselves a married couple, examined what might be called the Deianira paradox. Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess—his jealous wife, Deianira, accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful. Deianira’s predicament is a woman’s ultimate dilemma. In a man, the craggy physical characteristics associated with masculinity often indicate a strong immune system and thus a likelihood of his producing healthier offspring than his softer-featured confrères will. But such men are also more promiscuous and do not care as much about long-term relationships, leaving women to raise their kids alone.

They then go on to show a relationship between the health indicators for a given country and its women's preference for 'effeminate' vs 'masculine' men. The whole article was intriguing, but what interested me more was how they used digital manipulation to adjust more "masculine" faces to make them look more "effeminate". Look at the image. The guy on the left is more "masculine", the guy on the right more "feminine". Now, I knew that without being told. And so probably, did you. Isn't it fascinating that such subtle distinctions should still be so easily perceptible? And matter, too?

Because it also suggests something else to me. I find the guy on the left more attractive, but if I met the guy on the right, I would be more likely to assume that he's gay (cliches, I know). My attraction to the guy on the left shows how deep-rooted my gayness is. I'm responding 'viscerally' if you like to my innate (cultural?) perceptions of maleness. What is interesting about the research is that this innate/cultural attraction is malleable in women depending on the need for 'manliness' in that culture. But why doesn't this apply to gays? Perhaps because we're not going to have his baby. Which implies in turn that it is about something else. But what, exactly? I don't know.

It also points out the absurdity and cruelty of the Christian-Fascist attempts to 'cure' gayness. Something this deep, this 'instinctive', will not be easily altered.

An altogether most fascinating article.

One final point: I think Hercules was as partial to men as women. So where does that fit in?

Heterosexism

It's something I've always known instinctively: straight men aren't afraid of gay or bi men for the reasons we think they are. Straight men, like gay men, care much more about how other men see them than about how women do. They act macho not to impress women, but to impress men.

To quote Jammie Price, from "NAVIGATING DIFFERENCES: Friendships between Gay and Straight Men",

[Since] "being a man is" highly valued in a patriarchal context, signifying gender with other men becomes one way for men to compete for power privileges and resources. Men come to value self and other men for their ability to be a "man". In any given situation, men assess their masculinity in relation to other men and strategize actions based on those perceptions. Through this process they gain a sense of self-worth and relative standing. Hence, many men see interactions with other men as "character contests", stages on which to assert their masculinity. Those who assert their masculinity the best receive the highest regard, and accordingly, the most power and privilege among the men in the interaction.

The culturally ideal or "hegemonic" way that men signify being men in the United States today is to (1) display an ability to control, compete, and produce relative to other men, particularly at work; (2) subordinate women and reject effeminacy; and (3) express heterosexual desire. Being physically fit and of moderate size also help men to signify masculinity. The better or more a man demonstrates some or all of the above characteristics, the more masculine he seems to himself and others, [while] failure to demonstrate some or all of the above characteristics becomes the ground for men to devalue another man. (Numerous references omitted)

In her fascinating book, the author shows that for very many straight men, a friendship with a gay man is much deeper than their friendships with other straight men, because they are not competing. They can trust their gay friend with things they would never tell their straight friend. For many of the gay men, though, their friendship with the straight man is less valuable than their friendship with other gay men, because for us it is hard to trust straight men. We have suffered at their hands too often.

The book helped me understand why one straight friend regards me as his best friend, while I do not feel the same way about him. He is drawn to me precisely because I am not a real man. And I am not drawn to him because he is.