The End of Manhood

Parables on Sex and Selfhood

John Stoltenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135366889
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this practical follow up to Refusing to be a Man, John Stoltenberg uses a combination of case studies, autobiography, checklists and discussion points, to speak directly to men about how the social construction of manhood operates in everyday relationships and to show how these same dynamics drive the behaviour of gangs, race-hate groups, and international imperialism. Readers will find here new perspectives on intimacy, gender, and violence and be pushed to re-examine their ideas of manhood and gender identity generally. Stoltenberg's new introduction sets the book in academic context, summarising the game theory of gender which underlies all his work.

1
HOW CAN I BE LESS AFRAID OF OTHER MEN?

All humans who grow up to be a man are raised to pass tests of loyalty to manhood. These tests can be routine ones; these tests can be episodically treacherous. However great or small, these tests have one thing in common: they cancel out some loyalty to selfhood that the human being might have felt before.

This may have happened to you in one of the most common tests of your loyalty: when you are confronted by another man who intimidates or scares you.

In the moment of the confrontation—when another man’s threat rears up, when his opportunity to hurt or humiliate you becomes clear to you both—no amount of mental or physical preparedness seems to prevent your falling for the test and somehow attempting to prove your loyalty to manhood. Naturally you wish to save your neck. But more important, you wish to pass the test of your loyalty to manhood, which another man may have impugned. At the flash point of confrontation, it is unlikely that your mind has time to reflect on the fact that this test of your loyalty to manhood also tests your disloyalty to selfhood. But consider these next ten points—and consider them as if you are but a heartbeat away from some escalation in such a confrontation. Perhaps you will find yourself recalling an event from your life, a specific moment in which you were faced with another man’s anger and potential to hurt you.

Ten Things to Remember When You’re Faced With Another Man Who Intimidates or Scares You

1. You learned to fear other men very early, when you were a child. So did he. You both had to figure out how to be more threatening than threatened.
2. What you are getting from him now—in this edgy encounter—is how he’s acting like a man so you won’t suspect it’s all just an act for him.
3. One of the main reasons you’re frightened is that his behavior makes you feel he suspects that you haven’t got your manhood act together as well as he has.
4. He seems to be testing you, challenging you, passing a judgment on your manhood. He wants you to be afraid of his manhood because then he won’t have to be afraid of yours.
5. Though he is trying not to be afraid of your manhood, he is trying to stop feeling another fear as well: his fear you’ll find out that he’s just acting at manhood himself.
6. He is trying to confuse you into thinking that he is his manhood act. He does not want you to suspect he isn’t who he seems.
7. You do not want him to suspect that you are not who you seem either. You may in fact be afraid or ashamed that your manhood act is inadequate, or even bogus, especially compared with his.
8. He can succeed at making you think that he is his manhood act only if you believe that you can be yours too.
9. For him to succeed, it doesn’t really matter whether he is better at his manhood act than you. It only really matters whether you both agree that the manhood act is important— and whether you both believe that if you don’t have a convincing manhood act, you don’t have a life.
10. If, however, you personally don’t believe that the manhood act is important at all—if you don’t pretend to be yours, if you don’t pretend to be synonymous with your manhood act, and if in fact you honestly don’t care how he or anyone else judges your manhood act because your manhood act is nowhere near who you are or would like to be—then you are in a position of inner strength. You already know this game is not worth playing. You already know you have a life—an authentic selfhood—that is not your manhood act. So you cannot be so easily frightened by someone else’s.

No one growing up to be a man gets taught how to think that fast—or with that much self-possession—in such a confrontation. No one growing up to be a man learns to read and comprehend what’s going on in terms that will help stabilize oneself, center oneself, remind oneself completely that one can remain loyal to human selfhood—one does not have to fall for such intimidating tests of manhood. Quite the contrary, almost everyone growing up to be a man learns to respond to such loyalty tests as if by “reflex”—spontaneously, “involuntarily” without thinking at all. And what happens next? Generally, someone challenged to pass the test of loyalty to manhood tries to do so by acting like a man in response. Immediately, that’s when actual human reflexes mix in with the manhood act, and the combination is potent: it can lead to certain combustion.

Three Things That Usually Happen If, When You Feel Threatened by Another Man, You Act Like a Man Back

1. Your fight-or-flight reflex kicks in. You breathe hard, your heart pounds, your muscles clench, your eyes glare. Your body comes equipped with many involuntary ways of responding to fear, hazard, and peril—and these are all quite useful in situations where you have to defend your life or someone else’s. These reflexes are built in for human survival. But defending your gender is not the same thing as having to defend your life—and just because he thinks it’s the same doesn’t mean you have to. Humans raised to be a man learn to perceive another man’s fight-or-flight reflex as if it’s his manhood act—because this involuntary reflex ap parently boosts anger to a “more manly” dimension, and it quickly intensifies threatening gestures and inflections and facial expressions. You have probably learned to interpret the conspicuous signs of this reflex as a warning: DANGEROUS MANHOOD ACT IN OPERATION. You may not have learned to interpret the effects of this reflex as indicating that someone is defending his gender as if it’s his life. You may not have learned to sort out your own reflex reactions in this regard. The more you do, the more adept you’ll be in reading other men’s.

2. Once both humans’ fight-or-flight reflexes have kicked in, and once both of you take this challenge to your manhood seriously, the confrontation becomes a contest. Once you disclose that you are willing to defend your gender as if it’s your life, then you are ineluctably locked in a kind of combat and predictably…

3. It escalates, in one way or another, to one degree or another: shouting and gesticulating, insults and humiliations, swearing and threats, maybe shoving and hitting, maybe knives and guns, maybe missiles and warheads. It’s a sliding scale. And a very slippery slope.

There are two kinds of reflexes going on here: one that really is instinctive—the reflexes of our autonomic nervous system— and one that we had to learn—our “gender defender” behavior. They are not the same reflexes, though they may sometimes feel alike because they seem to kick in simultaneously. But they’re actually quite different and they can be sorted out. The inborn reflexes cannot be modified. The learned ones —fortunately—can be.

Sorting out the difference between these inborn reflexes and these learned reflexes begins with sorting out the dramatic structure of a typical confrontation when one feels that one’s gender is being endangered (as distinct from one’s human life). For instance, there is a classic dramatic plot line that occurs virtually every time two humans raised to be a man—flush with fight-or-flight fury—decide to lock horns, go mano a mano, “step outside,” or do whatnot in order to pass the manhood test. The plot is so familiar, it would be utterly boring if not for the emotional investment so many men have in it—and if not for the high stakes for various offstage human beings whose fate may hang on the outcome of the duel at downstage center. This is how the drama goes when you’re a featured player in it:

The Three (and Only Three) Possible Resolutions When You and Another Man Are in Combat Defending the Manhood Act

1. You lose. He manages to humiliate you or he manages to hurt you in such a way that he comes off more manly.
2. He loses. You manage to humiliate or hurt him in such a way that he will have learned not to mess with you.
3. You both agree to put down or pick on someone else. You end up in a truce, a tacit treaty that must have a third party—someone you both agree has a relatively inferior manhood act or someone who is simply female. With (and only with) that third party for contrast, you both become comfortable enough to concede that your mutual manhood acts pass muster.

The sellout of selfhood begins exactly here, in this truce, this pact between men trying to prove to each other that they are loyal to manhood. Once this agreement is struck—once someone offstage has been betrayed or disparaged in order that the curtain will ring down on two former combatants taking a bow arm in arm—something has drastically altered in the character of each human who played out the manhood act in order to convince another player. Once the would-be duel becomes this particular deal—once this gender bond between “men” is forged at the expense of someone else who is “less manly”—each human’s loyalty to selfhood has been abandoned, for the sake of loyalty to manhood. Therein lies an age-old and everyday tragedy. It is the story we must find the courage to rewrite with our lives.

Why Does the Manhood Act Exist, Anyway?

Some random speculations (maybe true, maybe false) about the origin of the specious—the manhood act we fear:

Maybe there was a time when the manhood act had evolutionary and survival validity.

Maybe there was a time when the manhood act served to make male Homo sapiens willing to be suicidally dispensable and go to war in defense of the tribe.

Maybe there was a time when the manhood act served to dupe males into taking idiotic risks in order to hunt down vicious beasts for food.

Maybe there was a time when the manhood act was driven by DNA, so as to get spermatozoa to as many ova as possible, so as to keep everyone fruitful, lest there not be enough fucks and therefore not enough folks.

Maybe there was a time when only mothers ruled; therefore they favored their daughters, the future mothers; and so petulant sons rose up in revolt, becoming predatory fathers.

Maybe there was a time when the manhood act got divine authorization, through made-up rituals and mysteries (kept in the custody of certain males who were not themselves especially good at the manhood act but who were clever enough to protect themselves by clothing themselves in priesthood or shamanism and mouthing myths for the gullible of manhood’s grandeur and wrath).

Maybe there was a time when the manhood act just felt good—like a high, like an adrenaline rush— at least until you got killed at it, and then you didn’t feel anything, so what the heck.

Whenever that time was—if ever that time was—it certainly is not now. The manhood act has become obsolescent. The manhood act has become an impediment to human harmony— perhaps even hazardous to our species’ health. The more seriously anyone takes the manhood act, the more dangerous it becomes. Yet we cling to it still.

Sometimes, if you look really, really closely at a human raised to be a man, you can detect quick glimpses of an actual human being behind his manhood act. Now and then, in instants, you can sometimes recognize when someone inside a manhood act lets it drop, or lets it slip, or quivers or blinks or shivers or tears up because the mask doesn’t fit and the pose is quite impossible. You see it mostly in boy children, when they are being scared out of their wits into wearing the mask of manhood. Then, as such traumatized children grow into tense young men, you tend to see it less and less, and sometimes one will go years or decades without letting you see so much as a peek, and then sometimes his human-beingness peeps through again only when he is old or seriously ill or facing death. Sometimes love lets his human-beingness show through, intermittently, until it flees for refuge behind the mask of manhood. As a deer caught in speeding headlights freezes in stark terror, the human being behind a manhood act cannot withstand a knowing and caring gaze for long.

Sometimes a human raised to be a man never risks perceiving the human being behind another’s manhood act. It seems to take too much courage to let your own human-beingness show through. This becomes another agreement between men—not to relate to one another’s selfhood, not to relate from one’s own— but only from behind a precarious mask of masculinity.

Sometimes it’s very hard to tell whether there’s a human being left inside at all.

Ten Ways You Can Fake It If You Fear Your Manhood Act Is Shaky

Believe in a very butch god.

Start a war.

Rape someone.

Lynch or gas someone.

Force someone to have a baby.

Whack off to a picture of someone being hurt.

Whack off inside someone you’re hurting.

Hit or have sex with a child.

Leave a mess.

Laugh at a guy’s joke.

Everyone raised to be a man fears his manhood act is shaky at some time or another. We “bargain” with that fear; we promise not to do awful things to fake it—things you do when you’re just insecure. Such pathetic ways of proving manhood just go to show that a man’s got an unresolved need to prove it, we say to ourselves; and all he really needs is a good relationship or a good job or some counseling or something else to perk him up.

Yet the fear of other men’s judgment never goes away. The premonition lingers that something will still need proving somehow, now and then, at times when least expected. We harbor doubts that we don’t really have our manhood act together. We make choices to avoid situations where our so-so manhood act might be vulnerable to ridicule. We try to remember our “gender successes” from one to the next. Yet try as we might to maintain within us a constant sense of being a real-enough man, we feel challenged at times to prove it—especially in confrontations with other, all-too-real men.

Learning to honor one’s loyalty to selfhood will mean learning to accept that one’s manhood act is shaky, and that’s OK. That’s not as simple as it sounds, but these ten poin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Revised Edition
• Prolog
• An Author’s Note to Women Readers
• 1. How Can I Be Less Afraid of Other Men?
• 2. How Can I Be Closer to People— In Friendship and In Love?
• 3. Why Can’t We Tell Our Truths As Men, Man To Man?
• 4. How Do We Know What Manhood Really Is?
• 5. How Can We Have Better Relationships With the Women In Our Lives?
• 6. What Must We Learn About Manhood from Dad?
• 7. What If My Father Didn’t Love Me?
• 8. What If I Feel Like a Fatherless Son?
• 9. Isn’t There Some Way That Manhood Can Be Redeemed?
• 10. Isn’t Manhood Something Basic That We Really Need?
• 11. How Can I Be Anybody If I’m Not a Real Man?
• 12. What’s Supposed to Turn a Real Man On?
• 13. Why Can’t I Feel OK to Be Me?
• 14. How Can I Get Along Better With My Men Friends?
• 15. How Can I Get Women to Trust Me?
• 16. Why Do Communications In My Love Life Break Down?
• 17. Why Can I Feel Nothing When Someone I Love Feels Pain?
• 18. How Can I Tell the Difference Between What’s Right and What’s Wrong In My Most Intimate Relationships?
• 19. How Can I Have Better Sex?
• 20. Looking Really Turns Me On-So What’s the Matter With That?
• 21. I Like Hanging Out With Just Guys a Lot—Is There Some Kind of a Problem With That Too?
• 22. How Can I Be Close to Men and Not Feel Like I’m Queer?
• 23. If They Take Away My Porno, Will They Take Away My Manhood Next?
• Epilog: The End of Men
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• About a Related Video Series