Technically speaking, this is where pro-feminist men and the mytho-poetic men’s movement part company. I have a foot in both camps, and it is in the latter that I have found a positive vision of masculinity as something that is acquired (or more accurately, transmitted) from older men. I will blog about it at great length, at some point.

Suffice it to say that I see no reason to concede the language of “real men” to the right-wing. Check out the folks at Men Can Stop Rape, look at their men of strength ads — you’ll see what I mean:

http://www.mencanstoprape.org/

http://www.mencanstoprape.org/info-url2698/info-url_show.htm?doc_id=48543

It’s funny that a very similar phrase came up in a conversation I had with a friend a month back. I was trying to think of a synonym for emasculate that could apply to a female and, unable to think of one on my own, published a post to an etymological community for their advice. The closest we came was “defeminize”, but I’ve never heard that used as an insult. A friend told me she didn’t think there was a good alternative to emasculate: “not in a society such as ours where to be a man is to have power and to be a woman is to be without power. So to strip one of one’s manhood would be bad, whereas how could one be made lower than not man?”

but, that’s just me.

Many men’s concern is not insecurity about losing manhood — it is insecurity about GAINING manhood. While girls have a certain point in their life at which their mother takes them aside and explains that, like it or not, they are now a woman, boys have no such experience. The onset of shaving really doesn’t have the same significance.

How, then, does a boy know when he’s become a man? This question, I think, is what Hugo is trying to address.

I think, and you might agree, that it is important for there to be a positive definition of manhood. This definition is what Hugo is trying to create, when he speaks of “real manhood”. Boys have a strong desire to have something, anything, to strive towards, and pointing them in the right direction is better than letting them choose a bad direction on their own. (Consider this example of a bad direction: Is a boy a man after he’s had sex with someone? Would he be even more of a man if he’s had sex with even more people? Is there an alternative “path to manhood” that high-school and college boys can be directed towards?)

In closing, I’ll say that yes, some men are worried about becoming “less masculine”. But the root of this fear comes from men’s perception that manhood is NOT intrinsic. We perceive it as an acquired characteristic, and many men don’t know how to acquire it.

-Allen

I sense that people often develop policies designed to address the needs of some archetypical person or situation, even if they ignore non-conforming people and situations. Ideally I’d like policy makers to reject the use of archetypes and embrace difference generally. Another strategy, however, is to embrace the appeal to archetypes, but to expand the archetype catalogue.

Thus in 1950, the “voter” archetype may have been a white, educated, middle-class, “upstanding” male, and the “black” archetype may have been an uneducated, poor, “unworthy” male. Elections were designed for the convenience of the archetypical voter. While liberals talked about creating a “color-blind society,” the civil rights movement may have created a color-conscious society, complete with a new black archtype: long-suffering, persevering, patient, worthy, and male. Thus if people in the 1960s talked about lazy, shiftless blacks, someone could respond, “Would you say that about Dr. King? Or Reggie Jackson?” There was a new archetype, and the old arguments based on assumptions of the old archetype no longer fit.

Of course, Dr. King does not reflect the diversity of all blacks. Anne Franks does not reflect the diversity of all Holocaust victims. Helen Keller does not reflect the diversity of all people with disabilities. But if people can bear these archetypes in mind, they will be less likely to conclude that policies designed for white, educated, middle-class, “upstanding” males are good enough for everyone. It’s progress.

Back to “manhood”: I see gender roles as one more pernicious aspect of archetyping that should be abandoned. But this is a hard sell to a 12-yr-old who is persuaded that he must be Rambo to be a man. Rather than opposing his desire to conform to some concept of masculinity, I may have more luck redirecting him to a different masculine archetype: a knight errant, the cowboy sheriff, Superman, Han Solo, Jesus, that Kung Fu guy, a Promise Keeper, the Fonz. (Ok, I’m dating myself, but you get the idea.)

Yeah, the kid will need a few more attitude adjustments throughout his life - but don’t we all? Often, incremental progress is as good as it gets.

To my mind, the greatest problem with trying to make Real Man and Real Woman into positive constructs is exactly what I take Hestia to suggest: that they either place unacceptible requirements that men and women should behave differently, or they are really just unnecessary distinctions within Real Human or Real Adult.

On the other hand, in defense of such constructs, I can see a point to them as way stations (or as the best we can hope for in the present moment). I don’t carry the baggage of being raised a girl and living my adult life as a woman. I carry the baggage of being raised a boy and living my adult life as a man. In a gendered society, this is different baggage. In order to overcome this baggage and be a decent human being, I may have to work on different issues and come to different realizations (or the same realizations by different routes) than I would if I had been raised as a girl and lived my life as a woman. To the extent I will never overcome my baggage, and to the extent that I wouldn’t even want to totally obliterate my history, I may never be able to achieve an ungendered Real Human state. Instead, the best I can achieve is a state in which I figure out what it means to be both a decent human being and a man. I think that Hugo is using “Man” in a gender specific maturity dichotomy, rather than in a gendered dichotomy: the opposite of “Real Man” is “boy,” not “girl”.

Still, the Real Man language strikes me far too much as “Don’t worry guys, you can be a decent human being without being weak like a girl.” In the general culture, the opposite of Real Man is woman (or maybe girl), not boy. I think Hugo’s use is an attempt to change that, but for me it doesn’t work that way. It just seems (at a gut level) like an affirmation of the same old shit.

It may be possible to turn ‘being a real woman’ from all that old shit about femininity and love of men, but I doubt it, and I doubt the need. Possibly because of not growing up with any particular aspirations to be a ‘real woman’.

Boys don’t emerge fully formed from the forehead. If they feel that there’s some barrier of risk or strength or whatever that they have to cross in order to be respected and to respect themselves, and that it’s a distinctively male thing, it’s because they’re getting it from their environment.

I think it’s a real problem that we have an idea of a static sort of point. If being a man is something worth preserving, it shouldn’t be about, today I became a man and now I’m one forever because I’ve proved my good qualities, but rather, every day I strive to be a man. But of course that striving part sounds like weakness and admitting failure, as opposed valiant efforts to be a good *person*.

Anyway, I suggest, “Be a mensch!”

Western culture is full of stories and myths about how boys become men by performing feats of physical and/or moral strength. So, boys become men by actively proving themselves worthy, while girls passively become women via the magically transforming power of the penis. Also note: while men make themselves, women cannot come into being without men.

(and I figured that one out all on my own way back when I was a Young Thing in college–Yay Me!!)

As to the whole question of “Real Men”, it makes me uneasy, too. For all the reasons cited above, including the fact that it presupposes the existence of “Real Women”. Now, the definitions eventually worked out may be positive ones, but the fact is that once you define, you are also prescribing, and that I do not want, as like many here, I reject the entire concept of gender roles. I think we can make a definition of what makes a Decent Human Being or Decent Adult, but to try and divide characteristics into “proper” Man-or-Womanhood gives me the creeps.

Further, our ideas of what it means to “become” a man (or woman) are predicated not on biology but on myth-making, both ancient and modern. Allen’s post above is a key example that usually flies under most radars.

Allen pairs two images together as if they were indeed fact, objective at that when he says:

“While girls have a certain point in their life at which their mother takes them aside and explains that, like it or not, they are now a woman, boys have no such experience. ”

and…

“Boys have a strong desire to have something, anything, to strive towards, and pointing them in the right direction is better than letting them choose a bad direction on their own.”

This is a modern myth! The menarche-aged girl is “taken” aside and told “like it or not” that she is now a woman. The sheer passivity of this image makes me naseous. What Allen is saying (and he might not know he said this, b/c again we’re talking about a socially supported myth) is that when a girl becomes a woman, she loses agency. For a girl to become a woman she must accept that she is to be acted upon for the rest of her life.

Now pair this with Allen’s statement about boys. Boys have a “strong” “desire” to “strive” for something. Apparently men don’t take them aside, but rather are psychically beside or behind them to “point” the way. And even though men don’t want boys to make the wrong “choice”, the fact that in the transition from boyhood to manhood there is even a choice to begin with is key in the mythologizing (?) of Manhood and by extension Real Men.

Allen paints boys as active, striving, strong, full of desire. He paints girls as losers who have to succumb, like it or not, to adulthood.

Just my $.02

in my opinion, prostitution should be decriminalized, but being a john should be a frequently-enforced felony

Why? If you believe prostitution is a bad thing, it makes little sense to try to deter it by criminalizing the demand side but not the supply side. And why is prostitution a bad thing, anyway?

It’s no coincidence that countries with progessive laws on sex more generally also tend to be the same countries where prostitution is legal.