A Better Man Read online

  The third time was the worst, unforgivably bad, even though the actual level of violence was the smallest. Because your aunt Susan has Down syndrome, she’s always needed somebody to keep a careful eye on her. When we were kids, that duty fell to us boys. I was probably ten years old or so, and we were on summer vacation. Susan and I were the only ones home, so I was on Susan duty for a couple hours. The only adult nearby was Elaine, who was coaching her son’s Little League team at a field about a five-minute walk from our house. It felt unfair that I had to sit there on a gorgeous summer day and babysit my sister. Little League practice seemed to be going on forever and I was eager to go out and play. I waited for what felt like hours. I grew angrier and angrier. Why did I have to watch my stupid sister when everybody else got to play outside? I just wanted Elaine to get home so I could be released, but there was no sign of her. Finally, out of frustration, I slapped Susan in the face. I remember it so well. We were sitting together on our brown carpeted stairway, the house was still, and I slapped her. She looked so puzzled. I wanted her to cry. It took a couple slaps. Once the tears came, I left her alone in the house and walked to the ball field to tell Elaine that Susan was crying for some reason, wouldn’t stop, and that she needed to come home. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.

  I’ve never told anybody about that. Not Mom or my brother or the occasional therapists I’ve visited over the years. I’m telling you now because I want you to know I’m not holding myself apart from the worst impulses of other men. I have them, too. And, somewhere inside of you, so do you.

  When the #MeToo Movement started, a famous line began circulating: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” I was just a boy when I slapped my sister, but in that moment, I was one of those frightening men.

  One of the unspoken truths about being a man is that fear of men isn’t confined to women; men are also afraid that men will kill them. Everybody is afraid of men for the simple reason that men commit the overwhelming majority of violence. One half of our species does a lot of hurting and killing and one half does not. Why? Why are men so much more prone to violence than women?

  As I said, a lot of it is cultural, but part of it is almost certainly biological. The males of most species are more violent than the females. The similarities are especially striking in our closest relative, the chimpanzee. An article in Nautilus by Steve Stewart-Williams explains:

  Among humans, males commit around 95 percent of homicides, and are around 79 percent of homicide victims. Among chimps, on the other hand, males commit around 92 percent of “chimpicides,” and are around 73 percent of chimpicide victims. In short, the sex difference in lethal aggression in the two species is remarkably similar in size.

  On average, men are more aggressive than women. The same hormone that makes us so also makes us, on average, bigger and stronger than our female counterparts. That size discrepancy gives us a physical advantage over women. To offset our advantage, evolutionary biologists believe that women developed a more nuanced set of social skills to deal with men, such as negotiation, cooperation, and persuasion. How else would Mom convince me to go downstairs in the middle of the night to get murdered?

  Male violence, whether justified or not, is most often rooted in fear. Think of the types of fear as a pyramid. At the base is the fear of loss of life, your own life or the lives of those under your care. Above that is the fear of scarcity, which is the fear that somebody is going to take your limited amount of stuff, thereby endangering your life or the lives of those under your care; I think most hate-based violence lives in this broad area. At the top of the pyramid are two brother fears: the fear of diminishment in other people’s eyes, which is the fear we call “pride,” and the fear of letting others down, which is the fear we call “honor.” Activating any of these fears may move a man to violence.

  Another way of saying this is that traditional masculinity itself is rooted in fear. If Real Men are locked in a perpetual game of ¿Quién es más macho?, it stands to reason that our fear is a massive vulnerability. How many times have you seen some movie character spit into the dust and mutter something like, “I ain’t afraid of nuthin”?

  Son, I’m here to tell you, that man is a goddamned liar.

  The Real Man can’t admit his fears because doing so would leave him emasculated. If he admits to being hurt, then he is vulnerable to further hurt. If he allows his pain to show, he fears his enemies will attack him at his weakest. The Real Man is beset by enemies, always. Always there are others out there threatening to destroy him, to destroy his family, to take everything. It’s a bleak way to go through life. Here we men are, supposedly strong, yet not strong enough to tell the truth.

  The language of traditional masculinity is an endless series of smoke signals we send up warning the enemy we are not to be trifled with. “Here is a man,” we say in the way we drink our coffee (not the more feminine tea). “Here is a man,” with the pickup we drive, the clothes we wear, the curt way we nod to each other in the elevator. It’s every niggling, exhausting detail of our lives informing all who dare gaze upon us that we are men. Not because we are strong but because we are scared others will think we are weak.

  Most men are not going to become violent, but many do. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence says that 1 in 4 women (and 1 in 7 men) “have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.” It is not only men that commit domestic violence, but it is most often men. The next time some guy shoots up a mall or a movie theater or a school, you will find that he probably has a history of violence against women. According to The Washington Post, of 156 mass shootings between 2009 and 2016, “54% . . . were related to domestic or family violence.”

  We have heard so many women amplify their voices on this subject in the last couple years, women who have suffered at the hands of men, been overwhelmed by men, feel exhausted and defeated by men. Not all men, we say, stupidly. But when these women tell their stories, they are almost always about men. To say that men do these things is not to condemn all men, but from the perspective of a survivor, that matters very little. It’s you and me. It’s men.

  My dad’s wife Beth used to play an album of Kenny Rogers’ greatest hits all the time when we were kids. There’s a song on there called “Coward of the County” about a regretful father on his deathbed cautioning his son against the violence that ruined his life and the life of his own father.

  Pretty good advice from ol’ Kenny. Then again, at the end of the song, the son basically kills a bunch of guys in a bar fight for sexually assaulting his girlfriend. “Sometimes,” the son decides, “you gotta fight to be a man.”

  Here, outside the world of movies and videogames and country songs, you will almost never be in a situation where you have to choose violence, but when something goes bump in the night, whether you like it or not, it’s still your job to confront the danger. It’s what you do as a man for the people you love. Then, when you get to the bottom of the stairs, take a breath, and step into the darkness.

  nine

  Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

  Take Pride, but Not Too Much

  I once had a conversation with a former NFL player, an enormous man, maybe six and a half feet tall, and even five years into retirement still in tremendous physical shape. As you know, I’m not a big football fan, but I’m fascinated by the intense physicality of the game. I asked him about getting hit. Was there any way to give an approximation to somebody like me who has never experienced that kind of violence? He struggled to put the sensation into words, explaining that sometimes you could prepare for the hit, juke a little the moment before impact to lessen the force, use your own motion to offset the worst of it. But, he said, sometimes you just don’t see it coming. Sometimes somebody just knocks the shit out of you.

  “What’s that like?” I asked.

  “It hurts,” he said, and we both laughed.

  He said there were times
when he got hit so hard that he was knocked unconscious for a second or two. When that happened there would be a moment when he didn’t know if he could get back up. But, he told me, he did. Every time.

  “Didn’t you ever just want to leave the field?” I asked.

  “Naw,” he said.

  “Why not? What kept you getting back up?”

  He thought about it for a second before answering: “Pride.”

  Before his desire to win the game or earn his paycheck or anything else, pride. And it was easy to hear that pride in his voice. But I also thought I heard something else—and obviously I’m interpreting here—underneath that pride, I thought I heard just the tiniest bit of bafflement. It was like he knew the answer to a math question, but couldn’t explain how he arrived at the solution.

  Earlier in the day, I’d been with him, his wife, and some other people. We were talking about summer plans and somebody asked him about a resort where he liked to vacation. He described it but couldn’t remember the name. “I forget shit all the time,” he said.

  “It’s not from football,” his wife jokingly assured us, but the van we were riding in got quiet for a moment before the rest of us made our own jokes about memories failing with age. I know everybody was thinking the same uncomfortable thoughts about the effects of a long football career on this seemingly perfect physical being in our midst, and I found myself wondering about that baffling word “pride.”

  Pride can be great. When we achieve a goal, we take pride in our accomplishment. When a family member or close friend does the same, we may experience some reflected glory in their victory. I remember you telling me that you were the 236th best player in the world of a certain level of a videogame. You said it to me in an “isn’t this stupid” kind of way because it was such a silly and obscure accomplishment, but I could also tell that you felt a tiny amount of legitimate pride about it. And you know what? I felt proud of you, too. I mean, being 236th best in the world at anything is pretty cool because, hey, there are seven billion people out there. Most of us can’t claim to be the best at anything. The competition is so fierce and so unrelenting that when we manage to eke out a victory—or a 236th-place finish—it’s no wonder that we feel some measure of pride. On those occasions, I say, “Good on ya, boy.”

  The problem with pride is how, like strength, it can be so easily misapplied and abused. A lot of guys will do anything to preserve their pride. We’ll kill for our pride, and die for it. Our gender is based on measuring ourselves against every other member of our gender. The more we can do to stand out, even a little bit, the better we feel about ourselves, and the more pride we may take in our abilities or our good fortune. Without those prideful moments, we may feel as if we don’t matter at all.

  I used to play a lot of Scrabble. It’s a game where men and women should be equally matched, yet every World Scrabble Champion and runner-up since the competition began in 1991 has been male. In his 2001 book about competitive Scrabble, Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis notes, “More women than men play [Scrabble] competitively, yet the top experts are overwhelmingly male.”

  Men dominate the upper ranks of games in which gender should play no role: chess, backgammon, poker, pool, competitive Monopoly (yes, there is competitive Monopoly). Why do female players lag their male counterparts in these games? “Probably because they have lives outside of this shit,” said one male Scrabble competitor when asked this question in the book.

  I think that guy’s observation is exactly correct. Guys are far more inclined than girls to orient their lives around “this shit”—whatever that shit may be—for the same reason they do everything else. We do it to stake out our place in the world, to move a little farther up on the Infinite Axis of Manliness.

  It’s why a guy will literally memorize The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, as most of the top (male) Scrabble players have done.

  One top-ranked player is Joel Sherman, nicknamed “G.I. Joel” because of his frequent gastrointestinal problems. At the time of the book’s writing, he was unmarried, slight, asthmatic, and unemployed. He lived with his elderly father and brother in their childhood home in the Bronx. I think it’s fair to say he didn’t have much of a life outside of Scrabble. Winning the National Championship title, he said, “validated his existence.”

  It took winning a board game competition with little money or prestige involved for G.I. Joel to feel like he even mattered in the world. Which is, I’m sorry, a little sad. At the same time, though, how awesome that he even found something that could give him that measure of pride.

  I actually find myself a little envious of Joel Sherman. After all, I’ll never be the best at anything. Most of us won’t. I think I’m okay with that by this point in my life, but I’m not sure that I’m okay with it.

  Another game I’ve spent too much time on is poker. I’ve devoted thousands of hours of my life to playing and studying the game. In poker, the score is kept with money. The more money you’re winning, the better you’re doing.

  If you add up my winnings over all those thousands of hours, I’ve probably made close to zero dollars. That’s right, zero. I might even be a losing player over my life. So why keep playing? And why are poker rooms everywhere filled with men? (Yes, it’s almost all men.)

  In a word: pride.

  Not because we fool ourselves into believing we are better poker players than we actually are, although most of us do that, too. A friend of mine used to date a professional poker player. At the time, he was one of the best poker players in the world. I asked her once about his attitude toward the game—why had he devoted so much of his life to it? She said she thought he played the game because, on some level, he was trying to set right a disordered universe. It seemed like such a grandiose idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like she might be on to something. I think that’s why a lot of guys play games so intensely—a mistaken belief, stemming from pride (vanity, really), that we have it within our power to control uncontrollable outcomes.

  Games are such powerful expressions of traditional masculinity because they are self-ordering. At the end of a game, you know whether you have won or lost. You know your place. Games create status, however short-lived. When we cannot dominate with our muscles, we dominate with our Scrabble tiles. Or our poker chips. Or an amazing guitar solo. Or a perfectly grilled steak. Anything. Everything.

  In the end, of course, that’s hubris. No matter how good we get at anything, we cannot control outcomes. In the trailer for the movie Word Wars, a movie about competitive Scrabble, one of the competitors says, “In this game, you can beat God if you’ve got the right tiles.”

  Leave it to a dude to try to beat God.

  Which brings me to another rule of traditional masculinity: win. A Real Man wins. He wins and wins and when he is done winning, he wins some more. “You will get tired of all the winning,” our president promised when he ran for office. When he disagrees with somebody, his go-to insult is “loser.” In the minds of certain men, there is no greater shame than loss.

  Which is too bad because we are all doomed to failure. All people fail as much as, or more than, we succeed. That’s a good thing. We learn more from our losses than from our victories. Loss sets us back and propels us forward. But if our pride doesn’t allow us to accept failure, we get stuck. We get defensive. We get angry and arrogant. That’s why it’s so hard for some guys to say, “I’m sorry.”

  A better rule than “win”: approach your tasks with humility, not pride. Your life will be filled with wins and losses however you define those terms, and you will be immeasurably happier if you can accept both with grace.

  To be fair, you’re actually pretty good about accepting defeat and about apologizing. It’s your sister who has a hard time with both. If something goes wrong, the fault never lies with her. You’re the opposite: you always put the blame on your own shoulders. They’re both kind of the same thing, strategies for dealing with wounded pride. One person takes no responsibi
lity; one person takes too much. Mom is more like Ruthie, and I’m a lot more like you. I’ve always been like that. When my brother and I were kids, we got into a fight about something and he kept trying to blame me for whatever had gone wrong. Finally, out of frustration, I yelled back him, “Fine! It’s my fault! No matter what happens forever it will always be my fault!” And, all these years later, somehow it is.

  I’m kidding. Kind of.

  I think a lot of guys get into trouble when we confuse “pride” with “dignity.” Don’t fall into that trap. “Pride” and “dignity” are not interchangeable. “Pride” is something that comes from accomplishment or association. “Dignity” is inherent. It’s a birthright. Pride is something that distinguishes one person from another. Dignity is the glue between us. We all have, or should have, a fundamental sense of dignity, the sense that we matter not because of what we’ve done but because we simply are. You matter. The things you do matter, too, but who you are matters more. That’s your dignity.

  That same president who disparages other people as losers operates solely from a place of pride. Whatever dignity he may have once had is no longer apparent. One of the dangers of demagogues, though, is their expertise at manipulating your pride. Think about the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which has been used to twist national pride against itself by diminishing everything and everybody that doesn’t match the narrow definition of “America” that its advocates are trying to make “great again.” Or think about the terms “black pride” and “white pride,” which have nearly opposite meanings. “Black pride” is a term used to acknowledge and affirm dignity, whereas “white pride” describes a trait in those who tear down the dignity of others.

  I suspect men in particular are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation because it conjures the language of traditional masculinity. If you are “losing,” it’s because somebody else is “winning,” most likely somebody undeserving or nefarious. Most men are willing to take our losses, but only if we believe the game is fair. When somebody comes along and tells us that the rules are rigged, that some people are given special treatment or an unfair advantage, we may respond to that message because it validates the common nagging suspicion that the reason we feel ourselves losing is because, at bottom, we’re losers. Don’t fall for it.