Refusing to be a Man

Essays on Social Justice

John Stoltenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135433949
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since its original publication in 1989, Refusing to be a Man has been acclaimed as a classic and widely cited in gender studies literature. In 13 eloquent essays, Stoltenberg articulates the first fully argued liberation theory for men that will also liberate women. He argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice. His thesis is, however, ultimately one of hope - that precisely because masculinity is so constructed, it is possible to refuse it, to act against it and to change. A new introduction by the author discusses the roots of his work in the American civil rights and radical feminist movements and distinguishes it from the anti-feminist philosophies underlying the recent tide of reactionary mens movements.

PART I

THE ETHICS OF MALE SEXUAL IDENTITY

RAPIST ETHICS

Stories have beginnings, middles, and endings. Ideas do not. Stories can be told and understood in terms of who did what and what happened to whom, what happened next, and what happened after that. Ideas do not exist in time and space that way, yet it is only through our apprehension of certain ideas that historical reality makes any sense at all. We interpret all the data of our senses—including characters, actions, consequences, even our so-called selves—according to ideas, concepts, or mental structures, some of which we understand, some of which we just believe.

Sexual identity is an idea. Sexual identity—the belief that there is maleness and femaleness and that therefore one is either man or woman—is among the most fundamental ideas with which we interpret our experience. Not only do we “know” and “believe in” the idea of sexual identity, but the idea of sexual identity largely determines how and what we know. With the idea of sexual identity in our head, we see things and feel things and learn things in terms of it. Like a sketch artist who looks at a still life or figure and sees lines to be drawn where in fact there are contours and surfaces that wrap around out of sight, we observe human beings about us and distinguish appearances and behaviors belonging to a male sexual identity or a female sexual identity. We say to ourselves, “There goes a man,” “There goes a woman.” Like the sketch artist, we draw lines at the edges beyond which we cannot see.

The idea of sexual identity, in fact, has a claim on us that our actual experience does not; for if our experience “contradicts” it, we will bend our experience so that it will make sense in terms of the idea. Other ideas—such as our belief that there is an up and a down and that objects will tend to fall toward earth—are supportable with much less mental effort. Gravity is a sturdy, reliable category into which most of our everyday experience fits without much fiddling. No one need worry their head that gravity will somehow cease if too many people abandon faith in it. Nor need cause us anxiety about whether, say, a dropped object will truly we contend with the occasional exceptions that could nag us and fall. The force of gravity would be with us even without our idea of it. Gravity just is; we don’t have to make it be. Not so the idea of sexual identity. Sexual identity is a political idea. Its force derives entirely from the human effort required to sustain it, and it requires the lifelong, nearly full-time exertion of everybody for its maintenance and verification. Though everyone, to some extent, plays their part in keeping the idea of sexual identity real, some people, it should be noted, work at this project with more fervor than do others.

We are remarkably resistant to recognizing the idea of sexual identity as having solely a political meaning. We very much prefer to believe, instead, that it has a metaphysical existence. For instance, we want to think that the idea of sexual identity “exists” the way that the idea of a chair does. The idea of a chair can have an actual existence in the form of a real chair. There can be many different kinds of chairs, but we can know one when we see one, because we have the idea of a chair in our head. And every actual chair has a degree of permanence to its chairness; we can look at it and sit in it today and tomorrow and the day after that and know it solidly as a chair. We believe the idea of sexual identity can have such a continuity and permanence too, in the form of a real man or a real woman. We believe that though people’s appearances and behaviors differ greatly, we can know a real man or a real woman when we see one, because we have the ideas of maleness and femaleness in our head. We think that when we perceive this maleness or femaleness in another person, that person’s sexual identity has a durability, a constancy, a certainty—to themselves as well as to us. We think that it is truly possible for us ourselves to be a real man or a real woman with the same certainty that we see in others. We think the idea of sexual identity is an idea like the idea of a chair, yet we can be dimly aware at moments that the idea of one’s sexual identity is sometimes in doubt, is never fully realized, never settled, never really “there” for any dependable length of time. We can observe that, oddly, the idea of one’s own sexual identity must be re-created, over and over again, in action and sensation—in doing things that make one feel really male or really female and in not doing things that leave room for doubt. To each person’s own self, the idea of a fixed and certain sexual identity can seem “out there” somewhere, elusive, always more fully realized in someone else. Almost everyone thinks someone else’s sexual identity is more real than one’s own, and almost everyone measures themselves against other people who are perceived to be more male or more female. At the same time, almost everyone’s own sexual identity feels certain and real to themselves only fleetingly, with troublesome interruptions. Chairs do not seem to have the same problem, and we do not have the same problem with chairs.

Many attempts have been made to locate a basis in material reality for our belief in sexual identity. For instance, it is claimed quite scientifically that people think and behave as they do, in a male way or in a female way, because of certain molecules called hormones, which with rather circular logic are designated male or female. It is said, quite scientifically, that the prenatal presence or absence of these hormones produces male brains or female brains—brains predisposed to think gender-typed thoughts and to act out gender-typed behaviors. In fetuses becoming male, it is said, allegedly male hormones called androgens “masculinize” the brain cells by, among other things, chemically connecting the brain-wave pathways for sex and aggression, so that eroticism and terrorism will ever after be mental neighbors. It is also said that in fetuses becoming female those androgens are absent, so those two circuits do not fuse. The scientists who study and document such phenomena (most of whom, of course, believe their brains to be quite male) claim to have determined that some female fetuses receive an abnormal overdose of androgens in the womb, an accident that explains, they say, why tomboy girls climb trees and why uppity women want careers. The gist of such theories—and there are many others that are similar—is that behavior follows sexual identity, rather than the other way around.

If it is true that behavior follows sexual identity, then the rightness or wrongness of any human action can justifiably be judged differently depending on whether it was done by a male or a female, on grounds such as biology, the natural order, or human nature. The cross-cultural indisposition of able-bodied males to do dishes, to pick up after themselves, or to handle childcare responsibilities, for example, can be said to derive from their hormonal constitutions, which were engineered for stalking mastodons and which have not evolved for doing the laundry.

Nearly all people believe deeply and unshakably that some things are wrong for a woman to do while right for a man and that other things are wrong for a man to do while right for a woman. This faith, like most, is blind; but unlike most, it does not perceive itself as a faith. It is, in fact, an ethic without an epistemology—a particular system of attaching values to conduct without the slightest comprehension of how or why people believe that the system is true. It is a creed whose articles never really require articulation, because its believers rarely encounter anyone who does not already believe it, silently and by heart. The valuation of human actions according to the gender of the one who acts is a notion so unremarkable, so unremittingly commonplace, and so self-evident to so many that its having come under any scrutiny whatsoever is a major miracle in the history of human consciousness.

Oddly, at the same time, many people cherish a delusion that their ethical judgments are really gender-neutral. In popular psychobabble, for instance, one hears the words “give and take” in countless conversations about interpersonal relationships between men and women. The catchphrase evokes both the ideal and the practical possibility of a perfectly reciprocal dyadic relationship, in harmony and equilibrium, exchanging back and forth, like a blissfully unbiased teeter-totter. Men and women alike will swear by it, extolling giving and taking as if it were a first principle of socio-sexual interaction. The actual reality beneath “give and take” may be quite different: for her, swallowed pride and self-effacing forgiveness; from him, punishing emotional withdrawal and egomaniacal defensiveness. Or per haps they will trade off tears for temporary reforms, capitulation for a moment’s tranquillity, her subordination in exchange for an end to his threats of force. They will speak of this drama, embittering and brutalizing, as “give and take,” the only form they can imagine for a love across the chasm that keeps male distinct from female. They may grieve over their failed communication, yet they will defend to the teeth their tacit sex-specific ethics—by which men and women are held accountable to two different systems of valuing conduct—and they will not, ever, comprehend what has gone wrong.

In no arena of human activity are people more loyal to that sex-specific ethics than in transactions involving overt genital stimulation. When people have sex, make love, or screw, they act as a rule in conformity with two separate systems of behavior valuation, one male and one female, as if their identities or lives depended on it. For males, generally, it tends to be their identities; for females, often, it is more a matter of their lives. Behaving within the ethical limits of what is wrong or right for their sexual identities becomes so critical, in fact, that physicalized anxiety about whether one is “male enough” or “female enough” is virtually indistinguishable from most bodily sensations that are regarded as “erotic.” For a male, the boundaries of what he wants to make happen in a sexual encounter with a partner—when and for how long, and to whom he wants it to happen—are rarely unrelated to this pivotal consideration: what is necessary in order “to be the man there,” in order to experience the functioning of his own body “as a male,” and in order to be regarded by his partner as having no tactile, visual, behavioral, or emotional resemblance to a not-male, a female. The anxiety he feels—fearing he may not be able to make that happen and striving to inhabit his body so that it will happen—is a component of the sexual tension he feels. For many females, deference to a male partner’s overriding identity anxiety can know no bounds; for her, the fear is that his precariously rigged sexual-arousal mechanism will go awry, haywire, and that he will hold her responsible and punish her somehow for turning him off (Or is it for turning him on to begin with? That part is never clear). To avoid that fate, that can of hysterical worms, no sacrifice no matter how demeaning can be too great. In such ways as these are most people’s experiences of sexual tension due in large measure to their anxiety about whether they are behaving within the ethical parameters of what is wrong or right conduct for their putative sexual identities. The sexual tension and the gender anxiety are so closely associated within everyone’s body and brain that the anxiety predictably triggers the tension and the release of the tension can be expected to absolve the anxiety—at least until next time.

This, then, is the nexus of eroticism and ethics—the hookup between the eroticism we feel and the ethics of our acts, between sensation and action, between feeling and doing. It is a connection at the core of both our selves and our culture. It is the point at which gender-specific sexuality emerges from behavioral choices, not from anatomy. It is the point at which our erotic feelings make manifest the fear with which we conform to the structure of right and wrong for either gender, a structure mined on all sides by every peril we dare imagine. This is the point at which we might recognize that our very sexual identities are artifices and illusions, the result of a lifetime of striving to do the right male thing not the right female thing, or the right female thing not the right male thing. This is the point, too, at which we can see that we are not dealing with anything so superficial as roles, images, or stereotypes, but that in fact we have come face to face with an aspect of our identities even more basic than our corporeality—namely, our faith that there are two sexes and our secret and public desperation to belong to one not the other.

The fiction of a sexual identity becomes clearer upon examining more closely the case of male sexual identity. What exactly is the set of behaviors that are prescribed as right for it and proscribed as wrong? How does someone learn to know the difference? What is the difference between the male right and wrong and the female right and wrong? And how is it possible that someone who has successfully attained a male sexual identity can feel so right in doing an action—for instance, rape—that to someone else, someone female, is so totally wrong?

That last question reduces, approximately, to Why do men rape? As a preliminary answer, I propose an analogy to the craft of acting in the theater:

There is a theory of acting, quite common today, that to achieve recognizable naturalism, an actor must play a character as if everything that character does is completely justifiable; so, for instance, an actor playing a villain ought not “play” villainous ness, or the evilness of that character. Only an untrained or amateur actor would ever try to portray the quality of maliciousness in a character who does morally decrepit things (the roles of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third and Büchner’s Woyzeck come to mind). Rather, according to this theory, the actor must believe at all times that what the character is doing is right, no matter what the audience or the other characters onstage may think of the goodness or badness of that character’s actions. The actor playing the part must pursue the character’s objectives in each scene, wholly believing that there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing so. Although in the eyes of observers the character might commit the most heinous crimes, the actor playing the character must have prepared for the role by adopting a belief system in which it makes moral sense to do those acts.

The problem of portraying character in the theater is one that Aristotle dissected in his classic fifth century B.C. text Poetics. His points are still central to acting theory as it is practiced today:

With regard to…characters, there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, they must be good. Now any speech or action that manifests some kind of moral purpose will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good. The goodness is possible in every class of persons. Even a woman may be good, and also a slave, though the one is liable to be an inferior being, and the other quite worthless. The second thing to aim at is appropriateness. There is a type of manly valor, but manliness in a woman, or unscrupulous cleverness, is inappropriate. Thirdly, a character must be true to life: which is something quite different from goodness and appropriateness, as here described. The fourth point is consistency: for even though the person being imitated… is inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent.¹

The impersonation of male sexual identity in life bears several striking resemblances to the techniques by which an actor portrays character. Paraphrasing Aristotle’s admonitions from twenty-five centuries ago,one can generalize that to act out convincingly a male sexual identity requires:

• an unfailing belief in one’s own goodness and the moral rightness of one’s purposes, regardless of how others may value what one does;

• a rigorous adherence to the set of behaviors, characteristics, and idiosyncrasies that are appropriately male (and therefore inappropriate for a female);

• an unquestioning belief in one’s own consistency, notwithstanding any evidence to the contrary—a consistency rooted, for all practical purposes, in the relentlessness of one’s will and in the fact that, being superior by social definition, one can want whatever one wants and one can expect to get it.

This much, we can assume, Aristotle meant by “true to life,” for in fact in life this is how male sexual identity is acted out,and this is how “maleness” is inferred and assessed—as, fundamentally, a characterological phenomenon. Most people, whether as spectators of real life or staged life, regard as credible and laudable someone’s convictions about the rightness of what that one is doing—no matter what, at no matter what cost—when that someone is a male, operating within the behavioral choices of male sexual identity. A “he,” being a he, can get away with murder—figuratively, and sometimes even literally—simply by virtue of the fact that he dissembles so sincerely, or he uses up someone’s life with such single-minded purpose, or he betrays someone’s trust with such resolute passion, or he abandons commitments with such panache. When men are held to account for what they do in their lives to women—which happens relatively rarely—their tunnel vision, their obliviousness to consequences, their egotism, their willfulness, all tend to excuse, rather than compound, their most horrific interpersonal offenses. Someone female, however, is regarded very differently. What is expected of her is hesitancy, qualms, uncertainty that what she is doing is right—even while doing something right. She should, as Aristotle might have put it, play her part as if in perpetual stage fright, a comely quality befitting one as inferior as she. And when she is called to account—which happens relatively often—not only is there never an excuse, but her lack of appropriate faintheartedness may be grounds for yet more blame.

Blame, of course, figures prominently in what happens when a man rapes a woman: The man commits the rape, then the woman gets blamed for it. If rape was a transaction where gender-specific ethics were not operative, that assessment of responsibility would be regarded as the non sequitur it is. But in rape that illogic is believed to explain what happened and why: If a man rapes a woman, the woman is responsible; therefore the rape is not a rape. What is the meaning of that nonsensical blaming? And how does it illuminate the structure of sex-specific ethics?

According to the tacit ethics of male sexual identity, one who would act out the character of “a man, not a woman” will necessarily believe that the series of actions appropriate to that character is right and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing anything in pursuit of the character’s objectives. Rape is, of course, such an action in that it is committed almost exclusively by those who are acting out the character of “a man, not a woman.” Rape is not the only action that is congruent with the tacit ethics of male sexual identity. Wife beating, for instance, is another. So, for that matter, are any number of things men do every day that are faithless, heedless, irresponsible, or humiliating in relation to women—things men do with impunity and women suffer silently because “that’s just how men are.” If ever a woman decides not to suffer such an offense silently—if, for instance, she decides not to tolerate being treated as if she is less of a person than he—and if she decides to confront him on terms that come close to exposing the gender-specific ethics in what he has do...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Revised Edition
• Preface
• Part I: The Ethics of Male Sexual Identity
• Part II: The Politics of Male Sexual Identity
• Part III: Pornography and Male Supremacy
• Part IV: Activism and Moral Selfhood
• About the Essays
• Notes