http://www.joe-perez.com/archive/2004_10_01_soulful.htm#109678896576252996

I wouldn’t have a problem with what he says (nor with what Joe Perez says) if he could just stay away from talking about women. When he talks about women while trying to describe real men, he slides further and further into sexist nonsense, ending with the women can be strong but in different ways from men passage that led me to think of Newt and the giraffes.

I think that becoming a real man (and let me just say for the record that I am much more of a manly man than Amp, so I have very different manly issues to deal with than he does) is something more like this (and I reserve to myself the right to talk absolutely as much nonsense as anyone else in the world): imagine you are a wolf, and imagine that your right, front leg is caught in a trap, and imagine that you have been told for so many years that your right from leg is the essense of manhood, so you start to chew below the trap so that your right front leg will be able to get free.

Now imagine you realise that actually you aren’t your right front leg, and that you have to find some way to get your leg out of the trap (because it is useful) so that you can save your whole being.

Becoming a real woman is like being that same wolf, but it is your front, left leg that is caught in the trap.

For me, masculinity is that front, right leg, and feminity is that front, left leg. Not one of us is mostly either a front, right leg or a front, left leg, and furthermore, all of us wolves have both.

Going back to the manly man point, Amp knew all his life that if he was supposed to be a front right leg, he wasn’t a very good one, and therefore had an easier time figuring out he had two back legs, a head, a tail and a left leg. I made a passable right front leg, so it is harder for me to remember that I am not just a right front leg (although I didn’t make all that good of a right front leg). Hugo seems to want to say that I should integrate that right front leg with the rest of my body (on which point I agree), rather than just chewing it off above the trap, but then he wants to say that women don’t really have a right front leg, and that I don’t have a front left leg. He also seems to still want to say that that right front leg is the essense of my being (or maybe that is just Joe Perez who wants to say that).

I still can’t figure out where the giraffes come in.

It’s hilarious that Hugo speaks of feminists and quote Tipper Gore. The usual “I didn’t think so until I had kids” - there, another level of “realness” as ideal, people who have kids know something more than people who don’t. Er, no, cos we’ve all been kids, and unless we’ve had a lobotomy, we know what it was like. Besides, what if you have a son who is more introvert and polite and quiet and dislikes aggressive competitive games, while your daughter is an hyperactive extrovert loudmouth who gets into fights and just won’t sit still for a minute, are we supposed to think of the boy as girly, and the girl as manly, and for some reason think it’s something gone wrong that we should blame on the mother who smothered the children and deprived them of a masculine role model? I mean, seriously, how is this view supposed to be different from archaic notions of masculinity and femininity?

Of course there are differences but there’s more that are cross-gender and at individual level, I don’t see how we can extrapolate a fixed “real” notion of manhood or womanhood if not by projecting it onto people.

There’s something I find a bit dodgy about the Bly stuff and all related movements spurred by that. Like the whole wild men thing where guys go in the woods to connect to their mythical manhood or something. And the whole enactment of rites of passage thing. What’s so innovative about that? Sounds a bit like a masonic lodge only without the politics.

There’s a level where this archetype of masculinity that all men should connect with gets taken a bit too literally. Symbols are not meant to end up like that. What if you’re put off by the whole new warrior imagery and the notion of rituals and ancient myths, does that mean you’re not a real man? What if you’re less aggressive than your girlfriend, is it her fault? People are just different from one another. We define things arbitarily as “feminine” or “masculine” but it’s reductive, they’re traits that can be present all across. If only there were less generalisations and projections, maybe these things wouldn’t be a problem and it’d be easier to grow up as individuals. But I guess they need to be made into problems so that ideologies can be offered as solutions and books sold and stereotypes upheld and so on and so forth.

Gosh, the patronising. So he’s decided that “plenty of exceptions” are just a marginal thing, not something that maybe complicates the statement that the Tipper Gore experience is universal and differencs are “real and profound” and precisely identifiable like that. “Plenty of parents” who agree with Tipper Gore count more than “plenty of exceptions”, case closed.

Why should his own special view make gender theory? Just because it’s more common and traditional?

This kind of thinking is not “frigtening”, it’s just simplistic, it’s not useful, it can be taken to levels of conditioning that confirm exactly that assumption, and it’s not a good thing, for boys as well as girls.

Also like someone said in the comments there I find the notion that role models can’t be gender-independent real reductive. We’re humans before being male or female. Values of what makes a good person are universal. Why should a kid not be inspired by someone just because it’s a different gender?

This is just the same old pap, only re-dressed to pretend it’s progressive. Give me a break.

The exceptions damned well better make gender theory. A gender theory that only tries to explain a stereotype of the plurality isn’t a gender theory I would want anything to do with, particluarly one that is essentialism with a twist of “special circumstances.” Hugo’s gender theory throws out butch women and femmy men and androgynous people of all sorts and transsexual people and transgendered people and everyone but the warrior men and the mothering women.

It isn’t even that that isn’t a feminist gender theory, that just isn’t even a gender theory.

Like Monica just said, it’s just the same old pap.

How else to explain his support for same-sex parenting? If boys need male role-models and girls need female role-models, why should same-sex parenting couples be validated? As piny asked before, if Hugo really believes all that, what does he think of transexuals parenting either sex? Surely, Hugo thinks that being a transexual doesn’t invalidate piny as a parent, right? But how does his simplistic gender theory given in these posts allow him to give that recognition?

I remain puzzled.

Just for the sake of argument, it is said (and before someone calls me a Newt lover, please… do yourself a favor and don’t. I don’t care for the man and that’s an understatement), what exactly is wrong with what Newt said? Seems to make logical sense.

Just curious, you know. ;)

You really can’t figure out from the rest of this thread what I find wrong with Newt’s statement?

What makes it somewhat unfair to compare Hugo’s statement to Newt’s is the absolutism of Newt’s statement and the bizarrity of suggesting that men have a poor attention span from being bred for hunting giraffes. The standard trope would be hunting antelope or gazelles. The idea of giraffe hunting being a major part of human evolution crosses from the dumb to the bizarre. The idea that a) hunting large mammals was restricted exclusively to men and played a large role in human psychological evolution and b) hunting doesn’t involve long periods of tensely waiting and doesn’t involve keeping a group of people in line is simply standard nonsense trotted out to prove that women aren’t agggressive. If he hadn’t felt like ceding the point of women being capable of command positions and spatial skills (for the moment, in this particular statement) as long as he figures the task is boring, he would have trotted out other aspects of hunting to prove women couldn’t do that easier. Man the hunter is the greatest cheap tool for sexists, particularly since it relies on 19th century British fantasies of hunting, rahter than actually paying attention to what we know from actual hunter-gatherer cultures (super broad brush of my own: hunting isn’t that important for most cultures, men and women both tend to hunt, although generally not together).

Also, the misogyny of the idea of women being unfit for warfare because the get infections (presumably vaginal and urinary tract infections, since all soldiers tend to get infections of wounds and feet, it is the major soldier killer pre-antibiotics) is impressive and not really present in Hugo’s statements. This is so obviously a fear of women’s genitalia contaminating the sacred male act of killing people in warfare that it is simply embarrassing to witness. Have vaginal and urinary tract infections in women proved to be a significant problem in the current war?

Besides that? Just the essentializing of gender difference with a broad brush.

If everything has an effect on a child, a position with which I wholeheartedly agree, can we include chromosomes too? How about testosterone levels?

People seem to be more attached to their beliefs about masculinity, even more than femininity (like I said in the responses to Hugo’s post…there’s been quite a change in the image of women). When we women “barge in” on the last bastions of maledom, some (like Newt) take it very personally…they’ll fight tooth and claw to keep us out, even to their own detriment.

And that’s just not helpful…

Yes, there are differences between men and women. Besides the obvious anatomical ones, there are statistically significant psychological differences. Men tend to be more aggressive and to want more sexual partners than women, for example. As others have noted, there are plenty of exceptions (lots of unaggressive men and lots of promiscuous women), but the statistical differences do exist.

But, obviously, “different” doesn’t mean “better” or “worse.” So I’m still trying to figure out what the fact that men and women are different has to do with your defense of the terms “real men” or “real manhood.” Presumably, “real manhood” is supposed to be a good thing. Presumably, it’s better to be a “real man,” or at least to strive to be a “real man,” than not.

So what, exactly, are you saying that “real manhood” is? What does it mean to be a “real man?” Are you suggesting that men should strive to be aggressive, promiscuous, etc., since those are characteristically manly qualities (at least in a statistical sense)? Or what? You say you want to rescue the language of “real” manhood/manliness/men from conservative anti-feminist religious moralists, but I still don’t understand what you mean it, or why you think it’s useful.

On the other hand, if we start with the trait first, and say that a trait is either masculine or feminine, and that one who possesses masculine traits is a man, and one who possesses feminine traits is a woman, we can run into some rather obvious physiological inconsistencies.

The point is that, while inborn tendencies to exhibit one characteristic or another probably do exist to an extent, whether or not those tendencies are determined by sex exclusively has not only not been conclusively proven, but is probably unprovable. Therefore, to determine that one characteristic is masculine while another is feminine is, in substance, meaningless. That’s not to say that it doesn’t make for an interesting literary/symbolic/intellectual/linguistic exercise, of course.

Oh, and when I say trait or characteristic above, I am referring to social characteristics only, rather than physical.

The first question relates to the issue of what the opposite of a Real Man is. Is a fake man not like a male person in that he doesn’t have a sufficiency of masculine characteristics, or is not like an adult in that he doesn’t handle his mixture of masculine and feminine traits like a mature human being (and all of the other dimensions, since only a small part of being human can even arguably be divided out into masculine and feminine)? Can a woman be a Real Man? Can a man be a Real Woman? Can a woman fail to be a real man because she is puerile and doesn’t handle her mixture of masculine and feminine traits in a sufficiently mature manner? Is a Real Man simply the name that we call an adult with a male identity who handles his mix of masculine and feminine traits in a mature manner?

Taking Real Man as the example, if someone who has a large number of masculine traits requires a role model who likewise has a large number of masculine traits, is there any reason to think that either the modeler or the modelee needs to have a male identity? Can’t a more masculine than average woman role model healthy masculinity to a more masculine than average man? Does the role model merely need to be more masculine than average, or does the role model need to be at least as masculine as the modelee? Does the role model need to be deficient in feminine traits, or only abundent in male traits?

I guess this boils down to a much simpler question: if some people need or want to be role modeled by people of the same sex, and need or want to be taught to be a mature adult by someone of the same sex, is this really a result of some essential failing of the opposite sex, or is it a trait of the person who has this restriction? Is this restriction one which should be celebrated and highlighted as how people should be, or should it be recognized as a failing and a flaw in how we teach people to be?

I work in a university, in the sciences. Within my school, there is a significant program to try to provide mentors to teenage and pre-teen girls, to help get them interested in the sciences, to help maintian that interest, and to show them that women can be scientists. This program is very clear about the fact that it needs both male and female mentors, since the point is to show the girls what they can do, not just to show them that women can do this.

Our society teaches young men that they should not view women as equals, that they are better, stronger, more aggressive than women, that they are men. I can understand why it is necessary and useful for male mentors to work from within that system to try to change the meaning of Manliness for young men, but I think that there is a danger of becoming trapped within that system, of thinking that the system is right, that it is just that the boys haven’t learned the niceties of being manly, the addenda that say “Despite everything else society has taught you (Men want sex, Men take what they want, violence is cool and the essence of manliness, verbal communication is less valuable than communication by displays of aggression), real men don’t rape.”

The system is not right. The system is rotten and poisonous.

I say this as someone upon whom the system worked fairly well. I am pretty well indoctrinated into my gender, I score as clearly male on most questionares, and I hate it.

Perhaps all this is irrelevant.

Joe, perhaps the systems that you buy into and are working from are actually beneficial. Perhaps they construct a masculinity that is not poisonous and rotten, a femininity that is not poisonous and rotten.

But if that is so, I utterly fail to understand why it matters to you that your core traits are masculine, not feminine. Surely, you understand that there are millions of women out there who are more masculine than you, who ought to be part of your Warrior system. On this axis, those women have more in common with you than they do with Amp, or with my spouse, who is neither particularly masculine or feminine, and you have more in common with them than you do with Amp or possibly with me.

The only thing that you and Amp and I share that you don’t share with more masculine women is the experience of being raised a boy in this culture. If you based being a real man around dealing with being raised a boy in this culture, then I could understand your desire to use the term. I could accept that you meant mature-adult-human-and-male, not male-not-female. But when you base your ideas around masculinity, as a thing that belongs to men and not to women, then I simply don’t see how you avoid buying into the toxic culture of manhood that I grew up in, and that I suspect you grew up in too.

I am interested in understanding. Being a-decent-human-being and male is something that I struggle with, so I am interested in how other people try to solve this puzzle as well.

My comment on your blog was written after this comment. Re-reading your earlier comment, and your newest comment (on your blog), I think I understand your position much better now, and I think you have answered much of my questions. Your position now seems solidly distinct from Hugo’s to me, and the above questions probably relate better to Hugo’s concepts than to yours. If you have any insight into the answers to these questions (or anyway, if you would be interested in presenting your answers to these questions), I would definitely be interested in hearing them, but I don’t think you should take the post above as the scathing interogation of you that I probably intended it as.

On the other hand, I still stand by my interogation of Hugo’s position, although I should probably try much harder to be less scathing. This is not a topic in which I think anyone says much of use or interest once they feel their back is to the wall.

Except there is no absolute certainty of how exactly and how much chromosomes and hormones influence behaviour in such precise ways than can be categorised as “masculine” or “feminine”. Hormones have a physical purpose, like reproductive organs. How far does the influence on psychological behaviour extend? Which organ is bigger and more important for determining behaviour, the brain or the uterus/penis? Which organ develops with interaction with the outside world? (no jokes intended)

No one is denying the reality of biology. But there is a difference between influence and biological determinism. I don’t know if around you all men tend to behave like a herd of sheep, all the same, all manly masculine, whatever that means, but normally everyone in their lifetime experiences that the individual differences from a man to another man, and a woman to another woman, are far bigger than their common gender. What do David Bowie and Saddam Hussein have in common? Seriously, why not give the human mind a bit more credit?

So what’s the point of trying to define what behaviour or trait is supposed to be masculine and what is supposed to be feminine, outside of poetry and myths? Why be so literal and categorical about things when reality is far more complex and interesting, I don’t know.

(all this talk of “real man” reminded me of an aftershave ad from the 70’s - “Real men never need to ask”, with a real male naked chest where a real woman’s hand with real red fingernails crawled after he splashed on the aftershave, ah, the golden age of advertising…)