A Better Man Read online

  A child doesn’t recover from losing a parent. It ends your world, yet the world doesn’t end. It’s the strangest sensation to lose somebody you love, a pain inevitably compounded by the realization that not everybody shares your grief, that somehow life continues, largely indifferent to your loss.

  The poet Eileen Myles wrote a memoir about their dog, Rosie, a dog that Myles said represented the longest adult relationship of their life. Early in the book, Afterglow, a vet puts the long-suffering Rosie to sleep. Afterward, Eileen sits with her, flowers decorating the dog’s neck: “The world was outside the door. It was Saturday morning. . . . The world out there now on the other side of the wall. In here, just us.”

  That’s just how I felt.

  Even before Dad died, I sensed part of myself separating from the world. I suspect every person eventually feels themselves becoming untethered from the world and all the people in it at some point in their lives. Maybe that’s what adolescence is, the discovery that everything seems one way, but we feel ourselves to be another. Perhaps maturation, then, is just the slow process of reattaching ourselves to the world and holding out a hand for those still out there in space, alone.

  I think my own sense of isolation and detachment happened earlier than most, and I think it took me longer than most to recover my footing. Some of that had to do with my particular living circumstances, and part of it, I think, had to do with my own fuzzy notions of what it meant to be a man. Although I knew that I would one day become a man myself, the boundary between my boyhood self and the men I observed appeared to me impermeable. There was boyhood and there was manhood, and no obvious way to bridge the two.

  Mom and Elaine didn’t help. They considered themselves avid feminists, but their version of feminism took on a particularly acrid odor. They regularly denigrated men in front of the three boys living in their care. Men were arrogant and condescending and unreliable. They were “male chauvinist pigs,” always less capable than the women beside them. Men would betray you. A movie came out called 9 to 5, which was a feminist revenge comedy about three underappreciated female employees who kidnap their sexist boss and run the business in his stead, thereby proving that women can do the job of a man better than he can. Mom and Elaine saw the movie, and then took us boys to see it. The movie was hilarious, its message unmistakable: men sucked.

  It was a message I took with me into my teenage years and early adulthood. I favored the company of women to men. I had male friends, but my relationships with females always felt more intimate, which was probably the reason I had girlfriends before so many of my male peers, and probably why those relationships lasted longer than typical first romances.

  I also suspected the message was incomplete. Yes, men sometimes suck. Yes, we could be all the things we stood accused of being, and worse. We could be dangerous, and especially dangerous to women. But men, I thought, were more than that, just as those women in the movie were more than what their boss saw.

  I worried that I carried some of that male suckiness with me, worried that there was something wrong with me simply for being a boy. But I liked being a boy. And I wanted, one day, to be a man. To do that, I had to understand them. After my dad died, I didn’t know how I ever would.

  To my kid eyes, men seemed as if they possessed some secret magic. They seemed confident. They knew “things” about “things.” They understood women and cars and rock ’n’ roll. They could fix stuff. Men could conjure up seemingly unknowable facts from the air the way my uncle Larry would pull quarters from my ear. Men, I thought, understood the whole of the world. How did they learn so many things when, from my experience, they did so little actual communicating? The men I saw around me barely spoke at all; I thought their grunts and smirks and nods were a language just beyond the range of my hearing. One day, I figured, my father would pass these fraternal secrets to me, an intriguing alchemical mixture of aftershave, carburetor fluid, and tits.

  He never did.

  Just as I wonder what your relationship with him would be like, I wonder how he would have felt about today’s world. Maybe he would have grown stodgy and bitter as he got older, the way so many white men of his generation have turned against the culture. Or maybe he’d already absorbed the shock of change in his younger years, and would have accommodated a new and potentially confusing way of life. I can tell you that even I find myself confused much of the time. When something as previously reliable as pronouns becomes a source of cultural contention, I can understand how somebody might feel bewildered.

  My dad was a conformist right down to the marrow of his bones. I don’t say that as a put-down. He grew up the son of a cop. Rules mattered, and the rules worked for my dad. There doesn’t seem to be much sense in breaking the rules when they are to your benefit. Back then, the rules worked for most white men. I don’t think he thought too much about problems beyond the ken of his own surroundings. That’s not to say he was indifferent to the sufferings of others, but I don’t recall him ever speaking to us about social or political issues.

  What was it like for him when my mom left him for a woman? It would have been such an unexpected turn of events for a man who’d played by the rules his whole life to be confronted with a woman openly defying them for the first time in hers. To his credit, he never spoke ill of her in front of us kids, but I got the sense that he felt doubly betrayed by her adultery and its nature. Maybe that experience would have made him less receptive to the cultural changes we’re experiencing now, or maybe it would have helped him better appreciate human complexity. I don’t know. He was still a young man when he died, still knocking the tent poles of his own life into place.

  I know that sense of dislocation. It would be hard for anybody living today not to. To say that we live in “an accelerating culture” has become a cliché; it feels more apt to say that speed is the culture. Most days I just want to keep up, but I don’t want to be so anxious to keep pace that I end up losing what’s worth preserving from the past. Sometimes it’s not easy to distinguish between the things that have value and the things that don’t.

  I’m hoping you and your sister can help me. Your generation is going to have a lot to teach mine. The ideas I’m giving to you now are the best I can do now. I hope you’ll tell me where you think I’ve fallen short. I hope you’ll remind me to stay open and available and receptive to new ideas. Maybe the last job of parenting is surrendering the lead and letting our kids guide us forward. We’re going to need the help.

  Does manhood mean something different today than it did ten years ago? One hundred years ago? Was it different for my dad than it is for me? Will it be still different for you? Or is manhood as steadfast as the moon, and it’s only our perception of it that changes when the light shines from a different direction?

  What does it mean to be a man?

  three

  Skate or Die

  You’re Not Toxic

  There used to be this T-shirt that had a graphic of a penitent-looking little boy with his hands folded in front of him. The caption read, “I know I’m somebody ’cause God don’t make no junk.” As a kid, I used to think about that slogan in terms of my sister. And as the child of a lesbian, I also used to think about it in terms of my mom and the fight for gay acceptance. (Forget actual gay rights: when I was a kid, we just wanted to keep our house from getting egged.) Now, though, I also relate it to the struggles of boys. If traditional masculinity is no longer working, I want to make clear it’s not the fault of our biology. God don’t make no junk, but people certainly do.

  It’s why I don’t like the phrase “toxic masculinity.” To me, the term implies that there’s something inherently wrong with men, some poison baked into our Y chromosomes. Bullshit. You’re not toxic, although I admit, you don’t always smell so great after track practice.

  I worry that the term “toxic masculinity” is a little like the phrase “New Jersey native.” Both are impossible to hear without feeling a little defensive. I don’t want you to feel that
way about being a guy. Yes, be aware of certain bilious—and worse—behaviors men sometimes display. Yes, be sensitive to women’s concerns for their safety and well-being. Yes, do the steady work of self-improvement. But I worry that continuously describing male expression as toxic has the cumulative effect of denying the goodness in men. Although men bear responsibility for so much of what’s wrong in the world, we also provide some share of what’s right. We work hard and provide for others. We are helpers and friends and nurturers. We sacrifice. We inspire.

  Most of us have a hard enough time talking about our masculinity without also being subject to an immediate pejorative affixed to our sex. I worry that too many guys will reject the topic out of hand if the only time they hear the word is when it’s linked to the worst impulses of our kind. I grew up feeling defensive about my gender after hearing my mom and Elaine belittling men. I don’t want the same for you.

  (You may not appreciate the irony of my concern about men feeling belittled for their gender, but women will. It’s what men have been doing to them forever.)

  Why has traditional masculinity found itself in the crosshairs?

  When you kids were little, we used to wrestle a lot. You and Ruthie would try to pull me off the couch or the chair or some other stationary object from which I did not wish to be removed. Because you two were little and I was all-powerful, you rarely got very far in these efforts. That essentially describes every power structure humans have ever lived with. Somebody’s on top of the heap and somebody else tries to knock them down. Might has always made right. Until very recent human history, the people with the most might have almost always been men for the simple reason that men, on average, are physically stronger than women. It’s embarrassing that something so stupid should be so fundamental to the way we learned to organize ourselves as humans, but it’s the truth.

  Proto-government systems were basically just the strongest dude of the bunch ordering everybody else around under threat of getting their teeth knocked out. Nearly all the governments that came after, whatever form they took, were based on this same premise. Do what the guy in charge says or get your head impaled on a spike, your limbs ripped apart by horses, or your innards pulled from your stomach. Powerful men have always figured out creative ways to impose their will on the unwilling.

  Over the centuries, the idea of what constituted a “powerful man” evolved. Kings weren’t necessarily the physically strongest people. Their power largely derived from their wealth—maybe accrued through inheritance or battle or a perceived one-on-one connection with God—which bought them the loyalty of the armed men at their disposal. The duties of these men mostly involved accumulating more wealth for their king in exchange for securing their own futures. Yes, women sometimes ruled in monarchic dynasties, but they were the exception. Their advisers were almost always men, the armies who defended their rule were comprised of men, the clerics who legitimized their rule through religion were, by and large, also men. In nearly every civilization across time, those who held power were of one sex.

  To understand the history of men in our country, you have to understand the special role that white men have played in it. Our system of power is rooted in, and is still largely based on, white male dominance. This persistent “might” has led to feelings of supremacy. If you don’t like that loaded term, you can just think of it as the status quo.

  Acknowledging that fact is different from labeling all white Americans as “racist” in the sense of believing in, and advocating for, white supremacy. For most white Americans, I don’t think that’s the case. But—and this is a big “but”—even though most of us would never describe ourselves as racist, all Americans are born into a system built upon racism. It is as impossible to separate ourselves from that system as it is to separate the design of our bodies from our DNA. It’s who we are. Our nation was built on the backs of black slaves. The institution of slavery ended over 150 years ago, but its effects remain with us in powerful and palpable ways that continue to inform every aspect of our American lives.

  I’m telling you that because so much of the current American anxiety over “toxic masculinity” in the culture starts with the role of white men. The reason this conversation is happening now is because, for the first time, the traditional power structure is under threat. Here in America, that power structure has always been as male and white as George Washington’s bare ass.

  Why is our white male power structure under threat? The white part is easy to explain. As a percentage of the population, there are fewer white people than before and our numbers are decreasing. Fewer white people means, literally, less white power.

  These demographic shifts are why some (white-skinned) people are working so hard to prevent (black- and brown-skinned) immigration, to disenfranchise so many (black- and brown-skinned) voters, and to concentrate the votes of as many (black- and brown-skinned) citizens as they can into grotesquely gerrymandered districts. New demographics may be destiny, but the status quo is doing everything it can to forestall the inevitable.

  As for why the male part of the power structure is now under threat, you have to go back several steps. I could pick any number of places to start, but I’m going to begin on July 19, 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. There, a thirty-three-year-old abolitionist delivered a talk entitled “Declaration of Sentiments” to a crowd of about 300 women at the event she organized, the first Women’s Rights Convention. She wrote her speech as a counterargument to the Declaration of Independence, beginning:

  When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

  The language is genteel, but make no mistake: Elizabeth Cady Stanton is throwing fists. Women, she’s saying, are sick of occupying a secondary place “in the family of man” when the “laws of nature” entitle them to equality. They are therefore “impelled” to chart a new course. The petticoats are coming off.

  She then turns the original Declaration’s most famous phrase against itself:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  Adding “and women” to the famous line about certain truths being self-evident creates a radical new understanding of the Declaration of Independence because it makes readily apparent that the government of the United States, in declaring its separation from England, has treated a majority of its people in the same injurious way that England had treated its colonists. A few million enslaved people could have told you the same thing.

  Stanton and other white women were beginning to see the parallels between slavery and their own second-class citizenry. She asked an obvious question: how could a nation founded on the notion of equality hold women in subservience to men?

  (By the way, you can’t separate Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s advocating for women from the question of race in America. Stanton’s work on women’s rights grew out of her work with the abolitionist movement. She and her husband, Henry Stanton, were prominent abolitionists. In fact, they were so devoted to the cause that they used their honeymoon to attend an anti­slavery conference in London, which doesn’t sound like the most romantic way to start a marriage, but who am I to judge?)

  So you had this new “women’s rights” thing going on at the same time that America was undergoing another, more fundamental change. According to sociologist and writer Michael Kimmel in his eye-opening book, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, for much of our early history, men and women both provided for the family, sharing in the lab
or of family farms and small, family-run places of business. Then, the Industrial Revolution upended everything.

  The small local family farms and businesses that had provided goods and services to their communities couldn’t compete with cheaper, machine-made wares. Work began moving from rural areas to factories in cities. Families abandoned their old ways for a new, urban life in which men assumed responsibility for earning money while women took on ever more responsibility in the home. This created a starker delineation between the work of men and the work of women. What emerged is the relatively modern idea that men are solely responsible for providing for the family, the so-called “breadwinners.”

  Millions of men became “wage slaves,” those whose survival depended on the industrialists to whom they rented their labor. Even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who freed himself from slavery, came to compare the average working man’s salaried existence as not much better than the one he had left behind, saying that the experience of working on salary “demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”

  That’s a hell of a thing for Douglass to say: the jobs required for men to survive in this new age were only “a little less galling and crushing” than slavery. Yet these jobs, as physically demanding, repetitive, and dangerous as they might have been, were still a man’s best option for gainful employment. Better awful work than no work at all. The men who got these new jobs, white men, fought to keep them restricted from non-whites, who they feared would drive down already low wages. They did the same with women who wished to work beside them.