Becoming a Man
Negotiating gender roles and sexuality
Growing up male in this American culture of men poses many problems and many more questions. What is the function of a particular male-centered structure of beliefs to the person, to the culture? How do we learn to be or not be in our male bodies? Is it an experiment in social learning, culture-bound or something
biologic, a question of our genes? “If we were born male, we might have been enculturated with the following admirable ‘masculine’ personality traits: strong, independent, active, disciplined, objective, logical, and practical” (Park, 2003, p.1). These traits are implicit in the form, so much Foucauldian male signifiers, leading us to a culture defined by the exteriority of outward appearance and action (Groenewald, 1999, p. 4).
Constraints in the shaping of gender come from the culture; accepted practices specific to locality, wishes of the parents, peer acceptance, and even fashions (19th century France comes to mind here) all contribute to “stereotypically masculine …behaviors (e.g., nonverbal mannerisms, dress, occupational preferences, and interests)” (Lippa, 2001, p. 6). Once learned, these character traits become encoded in mind and musculature, reified and assumed to be innate, never examined. Within these traits are roles, albeit limited in nature, and attributes, along with patterns of embodiment and emotional expression.
Typical learned male enactment patterns, extero-referent, confine men into ways of interacting with the world; while providing a filter for expression, they become patterned systems of experience, “the lived practice of identity” (Harris, 1998, p. 44-46). My mother frequently told me to keep my head held up high so that people would always know how confident I am. My father told me not to let others push me around; he taught me to keep my chest out and my fists up. Other postures might include one foot (usually the right) out in front of the other, one shoulder forward, feet apart with hands clasped behind the back (parade rest in military terms), and chin forward. These postures reflect the male personality traits so prized in our culture yet never questioned.
Through competitive team sports, males are socialized to become macho men, inculcated with traits on the far end of the spectrum: tough, combative, violent, proud, competitive, and overly concerned with muscles and body-image. In addition, the military conditions traits such as belligerence, ruthlessness, sadism, cruelty, and a preoccupation with the toys of war (Park, 2003, p. 2). Each social realm has its own rules of engagement enacted in a distinctive musculature pattern, signaling both membership and exclusion. The body organization is defensively semi-permeable – the contact function meant more to deflect the surround than to allow in, while the male felt sense of the body becomes externalized to farthest regions of the body, the outer skin-ego farthest from the feeling heart center (Diman, 2003).
Conventional male enactment patterns also involve the interpersonal field, as in territorial and spatial contact with other men (Heath, 2000). Generally, the personal space of a male is different than a female, conditioned to match the character traits prized in the culture. I wonder, is freedom of choice really free for the male? The conditioned roles become reified and never questioned, locked in our minds as they are locked in our postures, limiting our freedom of movement and filtering our thinking; the reciprocal influence of each informs our very being. “Few people have considered the damage the male gender role has done to men,” (Groenewald, 1999, p. 3).
Nonetheless, there is more going on beneath the surface. In puberty, hormones rage as males struggle to define their being-identity in the world as “not female” and acquiring the requisite signifiers. This is a time when dualities of self and other become crystallized by the demands of self in the social context. “Subjectivity then, is a case of recognizing your sex (the figuring of difference [from other]) and accumulating its signifiers” (Groenewald, 1999, p. 4.). We are free to be male as long as….. I can remember shopping for dress pants at Macy’s a few years back. I had in my mind a look, something distinctive, textured. As I approached the Men’s department my eyes fell upon the wall of dress slacks, hundreds of makes and styles, all in the muted monochromatics of dark grays and blacks. I felt suffocated, bound by conventional ways of being male decided by “not me” to be embraced and digested.
There is an unconscious split between gender as identity, self as felt from the inside and how we construct meaning from “maleness”, and gendered subjectivity, gendered- being-in-the-world (Nielsen and Rudberg, 1993, p. 1). The social male is merely made up of cultural specific constructions, defined by our sexual identity (what is available) and interactions with other. I could say that we choose from limited shades of grays and blacks, and then externalize the male construct through practice in our interactions with other.
We believe that the body plays a central role in the development of both gendered subjectivity and gender identity. In fact, the body fulfills a double task within psychological development; it represents the integrity which is the basis for experiencing ourselves as someone, a separate self distinguished from others. At the same time, the body is the source of our passions, and it is only through the body that we can integrate sexuality with gender (Nielsen and Rudberg, 1993, p. 2).
So how then does an alternative sexual identity narrative become played out in the face of almost mind-numbing uni-polar socialization? Is it merely the Freudian view of developmental arrest, an unresolved Oedipal conflict, Bem’s ‘exotic becomes erotic’, or Sullivan’s idea of preadolescent chumship (Kimmel, 2000; Rivers, 1997)? It is currently thought that those that embody “uncharacteristic masculine or feminine gender role behaviors” may have more struggles integrating a resilient sense of their identity (Beard & Hissam, 2004). Both Troiden’s and Cass’s Identity Formation models include an aspect of identity confusion, characterized by elements of denial, avoidance, and projection (Troiden, 1989; Kort, 2004).
“Since our culture demands heterosexual attraction and behavior, it is the relatively rare person who can be expected to transcend the stigma and threatening punishments of the culture and allow himself or herself to behave and feel homosexually” (Maneker, 1999, p. 6). I never saw images of men below the waist, no men’s genitals in the skin magazines of my father’s, and certainly no men touching other men. This taught me that it was forbidden to look, perhaps shameful to gaze upon another man, yet it only served to reinforce the wanting, to look lustfully, to feel the rough skin and smell the man scent. I became excited at what I couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, wanting it even more. As an adult I see that this could be a metaphor for the closeness and holding I yearned for with my father, yet an inner sense of tells me that it is much more, something deeper, more instinctual.
It is after 11:00 pm on a hot summer Thursday evening and my parents are in bed. I am 16, almost an adult, yet still tied to the fond memories of my youth. I feel restless and unsure of myself, moving toward wanting to be treated as a man, but afraid of what that might mean. There’s an aching, indefinable unknowing that sits in my chest and stomach, something that’s been there a long while, it seems, waiting for acknowledgement, intensified by the tick-tick-ticking of the family clock on the wall above the family photos, the pull of reminders from the past. I turn on the TV to fill the silence and growing unknowing. I flip the channels and rest on the local public television station beamed over from Canada. The images catch my eye and my curiosity: an effeminate English man in his seventies narrating a story with flashbacks to the Forties and Fifties, a seedy life made up of hurried sex in the back rooms of bars and alleyways.
My heart is racing now; the sweat from this humid Detroit evening mixes with my own arousal. I feel strangely transfixed by the images of men having sex with other men and repulsed at the same time. I glance over my shoulder furtively, not wanting to be caught viewing something so unusual, yet not wanting to turn away. Could this be me? Certainly not. How pathetic to have to hide your sexuality from others. Yet, there is a certain pride in the narrator’s manner, a pride at having lived through the worst of times and the best, of being different and distinctive. He speaks about the archetype, enacted in a dream sequence, of “the great dark man” and I feel it viscerally. It is all he ever wanted, to be desired, admired and accepted.
Later that evening I tossed in bed thinking of The Naked Civil Servant and Quentin Crisp, his story, his needs, and eventually my own as I danced between the aching in my hard cock and the image of who I might be, as if on the edge of a great precipice. What did I want to become and what was I willing to do to find out? Would I be willing to make the choice? I felt internal stirrings of the changes that were occurring in my body; I was finally making choices that were my own, that weren’t my parent’s. Several months passed living on this edge, into my 17th year; the sense of urgency was palpable. I decided that I would take the risks to live my own life, no matter the cost, so I bluffed my way with an acquaintance at work and maneuvered a male to male sexual encounter. This is where I learned about the difference between sexual desires - the fantasies of something exotic, sexual behaviors that serve to define us, and sexual reality. Sadly, the reality was far from the exciting, lustful encounters I’d fantasized about alone at night. Yet, the feelings stirring inside my body were not dissatisfaction.
I lay awake later that night feeling excitement, elation, surrounded by images from my youth plastering the walls. Suddenly this room that has held me for so long has become smaller, confining. I toss and turn, feeling the rapid beating in my chest and I want to scream with joy, a joy at knowing in my heart that I can love a man and a woman. In this moment I realize that the world has just opened up to me, has embraced me – the whole world and not just a segment of it. I know at once that I am bigger than my body, that something inside of me transcends my skin, my bones, this shell. My heart feels as though it will burst in my chest with joy and wonder. It is the first time I can remember feeling something, anything like joy in my life that wasn’t connected to my parents. This moment is mine and I cherish it; the sensations are almost beyond my ability to tolerate, an ecstasy that is beyond my new-found erections and orgasms. The price I would have to pay for this choice is far from my mind.
This paradigm shift in thinking and feeling shattered the gender split, and while moving away from the male self as outside (a projection) I began to feel something as yet unnamed, the self beyond gender, to see behind the masks we wear and the dualities we embody. Out-of-gender became less about polarities of male vs. female and became more about the feeling itself – love (Dimen, 2003). Despite the shift, confusion became a filter toward an integrated sexual self identity. As a young man I could see and feel that I was an anatomical male, yet the male as other was inculcated from images in the media and the high school gym shower room. What was wrong with me? Why could I not be bigger in stature, more muscles, or have more body hair – all of the male signifiers that are so prized in this culture?
Days later it dawned on me that I could never go back once I had bitten the apple. I would never see men in the same way again; I had learned how to see men as object, not only as other, but as desire. I pushed away that sinking feeling in my stomach as I moved away from those familiar times from my past: hanging out with friends, cruising in cars every night listening to loud rock music, trying to pick up girls and usually failing. There was a whole new world that only came out at night and I needed to find out more, about myself and this new life.
Menjo’s – a stranger in a strange land. This building on the wrong side of Detroit looks like any other building, yet it is much more: A fairyland, a land of fear and promise that offers everything and nothing – this night it is all so beautiful, exhilarating, forbidden and tantalizing, driven by hormones, the smell of sweat and maleness tactilely close, beats thump, thump, thumping a dance of attraction and lust. So self-conscious, others watch me and I can’t look back, only look around, nervousness mixed with excitement, frozen-deer-in-the-headlights stance. Too afraid. Sympathetic system full on says run away yet I stay rooted to the spot in my sweat and my joy. I try to take in the room and the men and the lights and the music and the dancing just as they are taking me in, drinking me in, inviting me in. My somatic reactions are foreign, almost as if I am in a movie being watched by hundreds.
How does being looked at transform me, how I am in my body, how I move, how I hold my self? How do I change my body because of this? More importantly, how would I learn to let other men in, past the armoring, past my need to protect myself emotionally? My body/self had never been an object before this – I had always been the initiator, the transgressor in my heteroexplorations with women. My skin, then, this shell of maleness-gayness-notgayness projected outward, became the mediator for the ego to the outside world. Yet, a part of me knew this role, of surrender and capitulation, so familiar in my home life and school. How could this happen here? Is this what women feel? The feelings of yielding confused and frightened me. This stage is congruent with the second stage of Troiden’s model of homosexual identity formation called Identity Confusion (1989).
At the age of 17, I experienced a splitting of the sense of self somatically; Dual identities, each with their own significance in their respective sphere of influence. My straight self lived with my parents, held a job, had many straight friends, and dated the junior varsity head cheerleader. This included a held pattern of moving in my body, a practiced casual nonchalance to attract women and a don’t even fuck with me posture toward other men. In the straight paradigm, my chest was defended because other men were my competitors; I wore aloofness in my body and language. My disowned self was out exploring in the seedy areas of Detroit trying to find myself. This split was discernible in not only an outer manifestation but also an inner embodied way of a conflictual moving toward yet feeling afraid of becoming.
My body became the boundary to this new world of sex as pleasure, as object, where objectification was the rule and feelings came second. This brave new world included codified ways of dressing, walking, speaking, and even dancing. The clothes were tight fitting, contouring the male animalbody, at once recognizable in any social setting. There were also ways of being single in the bars, of standing alert and ready, alluring yet indifferent, wanting to draw others in but annoyingly discriminating. The music here was distinctly different than any I had heard before, contrasting from the rock music from my hetero cruising days or even the soul rhythms beating out time on the local Detroit radio stations. The driving rhythms and eroto-sensual lyrics, very much a part of the gay identity, beat out the tempo of a new narrative.
Exposure engendered congruence; I slowly moved from confusion and comparison (me, not me?) to identity tolerance, and finally acceptance and group alignment (Troiden, 1989). Yet within integration was also confusion about identity as other – how do I label myself within a greater context? “The narrow categories of identity politics are obviously deceptive. They hide the complex, multifaceted nature of human beings” (Maneker, 1999, p. 2). I adopted the dress and attitudes of young gay men at the time, embracing the label of gay or queer to denote inclusion, however after awhile I needed to distinguish myself from the subculture, to define myself as unique within the whole. The labels had less of a salience for me; the staticity began to feel like the rigid male patterns I rebelled against.
Gradually I learned how to hold/be in my body as a gay man, to attract other men. “It is thought that those who possess both feminine and masculine gender-role behaviors are more likely to display adaptive behaviors, high self-esteem, and identity” (Beard & Hissam, 2004). The archetypal feminine traits of surrender and yielding allowed me to access a part of the world that was previously inaccessible to me while opening doors to my own masculinity. This opening helped me to see and feel where I fit in as a gay man within the culture, within the whole, integrating the best of the gender identities into who I am and how I embody self.
The American male culture has a way of deciding what is other, not me, not us. The price to pay for being individual and unique, against the cultural narrative, is to become other, as in Tronick’s “variability as error” (2001). This living, breathing ‘error’ becomes a blank screen that society projects it’s unacknowledged and disowned self onto, a sacred vessel for all that is intolerable and vile in the culture. In Queer theory, gay people are thought to serve a societal need or, in a Darwinian sense, we would not have survived. Is it merely to hold what is unacceptable for the other as other, or to truly point a way toward transcending dualities? Groenewald writes that, “masculinity is more defined by its absences than presences” and that “in order to be masculine, one cannot be feminine” (1999, p.4). Perhaps the transgression of gay as other is what hegemonic masculinity is most fearful of – the union of those split off parts of all males.
References
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