Manhood in the Making

Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity
272 pages
© David Gilmore 1991

What is it to “be a man”?  Manhood in the Making  reviews various ethnographic studies that focused on sex and gender roles, throughout the world.  In it, the author argues that despite the general variety of specific male roles, there’s enough overlapping expectations that a ubiquitous – if not universal – vision of man emerges. Common to all is the belief that Manhood is earned,  not assumed.   Preindustrial – that is, traditional – cultures prescribed rituals to graduate mere young males into the canon of Men,  and these rites were not mere words spoken with gravity. Rites of passage often demanded trials in the wilderness, or trials of pain administered by their elders. Strength was demanded: strength in body, strength in character. Strength in character manifests itself slightly differently based on the culture, but a commonality is the ability to endure pain and hardship.  This stoicism does not extend to social interactions, as perceived insults are responded to forcefully. Aggression,  both against one's fellows and against women -- by trying to seduce them --  is a given. Even in societies that were not militaristic, like agricultural tribes, men were still expected and required to be active -- to spend their leisure time in the public sphere, competing with other men.

  In some societies, to be a Man was not a permanent achievement, but a temporary status that could be imperiled by shirking. The most common image here is of one as man the warrior -- defining and enforcing borders,  risking his life to procure food in the wild or resources from other tribes.  The author's conclusions are drawn from a survey of global cultures: around the Mediterranean, several spots in Africa, India, Japan, China, South America, and various islands.  The author notes that some island cultures are outliers, with no perceptible gender roles; these societies also seem to lack strong perceptions of personal boundaries or property, freely allowing visitors to roam their houses and flirt with their partners.   The author doesn't speculate whether this is purely cultural on their part, but an interesting comparison may be drawn from another isolated group of social primates, the bonobos: they, too, are not nearly as aggressive as their chimpanzee cousins across the river.  Gilmore pans evolutionary/biological  explanations in general, favoring a Freudian interpretation that all society is role-playing, and that the role of the aggressive Leader is one most pre-industrial societies promote for their men. 

Although there's not a strong evolutionary psychology component, the survey in general indicates that manliness is not a cultural veneer that can be scraped off or dispatched, but an elemental part of the male character.  I appreciated the connections Gilmore drew to gang cultures and traditional male behavior, as well as the ambiguity he pointed out as far as manly character goes. For instance, while many societies measure men by how much alcohol they can consume without falling over,  or by how many women they can pursue, other moral cultures abstain from alcohol and restrict sexuality to the pair-bond.  As  the technological mass state continues to develop,  this authentic if volatile part of being human remains, and will go increasingly against the grain.


Related:
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham

Save the Males

Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care
© 2008 Kathleen Parker
215 pages

It's not a man's world any more. Far from it, Kathleen Parker writes: in America, men have not only been dethroned but imprisoned by a culture hostile to them.  In Save the Males, Ms. Parker elaborates on the many ways in which the nature  and contributions of men are scorned, abused, and discouraged by the prevailing culture, influenced as it is by 'third wave feminism'.  The first wave feminism gave women the vote, second wave got them careers and divorces, and the third wave made them porn stars.  Save the Males is less about men and more about the abuses of that third wave, which the author sees as not pro-women, but anti-male, and by virtue of the sexes' interrelatedness, anti-human.  She raises a series of fair points, but the book's focus is wobbly.

Parker doesn't detail a campaign against men, but rather has a list of complaints about the various ways men are emasculated. Education is entirely girl-focused, she says:  boys are forced to spend all day listening to soft-spoken women and denied rambunctious games of tag at recess. Women can merrily abort babies without ever consulting the fellows who contributed to the cause, divorce and child custody laws are outright malevolent to the male sex, and then there's porn!  It...puts pressure on them to perform, or something.  The list of attacks against men drifts into a list of ways society is degrading midway. As wretched as porn can be (and if you have doubts, read Chris Hedges'  Empire of Illusion),  the fact that it hurts men is somewhat tangential.  More thoughtful are her remarks about women in the military: despite the fact that women can push buttons as well as men, we have yet to civilize warfare, which -- after plans go to hell --  is still an area where brute strength, testosterone-fueled ax-crazy risk-taking are needed.  The desperate, primal struggles which erupt in Afghanistan and Iraq need frenzied, mighty men to deal with them.  Even when women are tucked away into noncombat roles on the front,  the unpredictable nature of war means they'll still get caught up in it -- and that's just not right. Regardless of our well-intentioned idealism, men and women at war are still men and women. Even if women weren't so physically inferior to men, says Parker, injection of sexual tension into combat zones would suggest keeping the military from being feminized.  The tribal mentality that resurrects itself so mightily in combat will derail combat units' effectiveness when the men start worrying about their ladies being shot and raped.  Given that the  US has recently done away with its barring women from combat roles, that tension is worth pondering.

I'm not particularly convinced by Save the Males that we of the beard are in great need of saving, though Parker does raise a lot of points worth thinking about -- divorce, military policy, and to a degree, parenting. (Parker's assertion that boys need men to teach them to be men, and girls need women to teach them to be women, and thus that test-tube babies born to single mothers are deprived of half of their necessary gender acculturation, is at first glance intriuging: I'd never considered the idea  that fathers teach boys how to act appropriately around women, and vice versa, but then I realized they don't, really, at least not outside 1950s sitcoms.  And besides, who says we need to be taught to be men or women?  If there are authentic gender roles, shouldn't they be as natural to us as breathing?)  These ideas deserve more serious consideration, however, than they find here, in a book which contains one chapter on nothing but how women worship their vaginas.

A book dedicated to men, with a woman on the cover, and which is mostly about women.  

Alrighty then.

This Week at the Library (10 October)

Fall arrived rather suddenly this week, although I imagine the cooler temperatures won't stay for too long. October 3rd was 'der Tag der Deutschen Einheit', or the day of German Unity. As I did with the United States and France in July, I planned a set of German readings. I'm not quite done with that, partially because Five Germanies I Have Known is denser than I expected and because I keep getting distracted by other books. Here are a few:

In certain remote areas of the United States, there are churches which believe the Bible encourages the faithful to take up poisonous snakes. In Salvation on Sand Mountain journalist Dennis Covington explores their world. Although at the first he seems like an objective investigator, as the story takes on a manifestly personal light as it unfolds. Covington's own family history is connected to the snake handlers, and despite disagreeing with their theology he's entranced by the practice, and is seduced by it to the point that he "takes up the serpent" himself.  The reader is thus partial witness to an intense 'spiritual' experience; Covington retains enough clarity to describe those moments of holding death in his hands as a way of experiencing transcendence  a losing of the self.  It's a disturbing work, but it does shed some light into a dark corner of the fundamentalist mind.

Guyland takes as its subject the extended adolescence of middle-class young men, who instead of assuming the rights and responsibilities of manhood right out of high school or in college, are instead deferring it until their late twenties. In this expansion of boyhood, they spend their time loafing around in college or in dead-end jobs, when they aren't drinking themselves into stupors,  "hooking up" with girls, and staying up all night playing video games. This youth culture is somehow rooted in the Guy Code, which emphasizes being  tough (drinking until you puke is so manly), repressing emotions,   and using women.  Kimmell is sharply critical, but he doesn't quite demonize his subjects, who act like badly behaved chimpanzees, raping and pillaging: they're just as miserable as their victims. There's a lot to consider here, but in the end I'm impressed by one central weakness and one really engaging idea. The weakness is that he tries to address the culture of American young men in general based on the lifestyle of the guys he interviews here, who all come from relatively privileged backgrounds. Of course they're depraved, selfish, and obsessed with entitlement; they've nothing to work forward to. But a recurring theme caught my eye, that of homosociality. Every aspect of the youth culture examined here eventually circled back to how guys relate to other guys, even dating women.  I'm interested in this from an anthropological perspective: how deeply rooted is that behavior?

Fiction has been nowhere to be seen in recent..er, months, but just a couple of days ago I read Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov. It's a bit unusual in that the story isn't Asimov's: it was a movie he was asked to produce a novelization of.  I've not seen the movie, but the novel  is supposed to have removed plot holes and bolstered the scientific content  The story is one of scientific adventure and political espionage, combining the cultural norms of the 1960s with technology beyond today's imagination. In the world of Fantastic Voyage, the globe is still polarized into the NATO and Warsaw camps, and the peace of the Cold War is kept by stalemate: neither side can gain a decisive advantage over the other quite quickly enough. That may change: for years, both have maintained experiments in miniaturization technology (that is, shrinking things), but the technology hasn't proven militarily useful yet because of restrictions. A Soviet scientist has found a way to get around those restrictions, and he has defected to the United States. Astonishingly  the Soviets weren't just willing to let him desert without offering a goodbye kiss, so now he's in the hospital with a blood clot in his brain threatening death or dementia. The American solution is to shrink a submarine to the size of a bacterium, and use it to eliminate the clot with a laser. Unfortunately, one of the crew is a traitor, and so the book's hero, Grant, must ferret that individual out while the ship navigates the perilous world of the human body, a world which must be survived but not fought because fighting it might mean the death of the defector.

It's rather like The Odyssey: what was supposed to be a simple run from the neck to the brain turns into a prolonged and dangerous trip through the entire body, where something goes wrong at every turn. Here the monsters are white blood cells and antibodies, not cyclopes; and here the obstacles are the beating heart and lymph nodes, not Scylla and Charybdis.  The decades since this book and the movie's publication have seen a lot of works inspired by it, like the Magic Schoolbus trips inside the body I watched as a kid, but this original exploration of the body is still fantastically interesting, even  considering the cold war context where a female scientist is an oddity.

Oh, and there's The Lolita Effect, which covered the same material as So Sexy So Soon, but not as well.

Reviews are pending for Hamlet's Blackberry and Gone Tomorrow, and by pending I mean they would have been posted last week had they not gotten deleted accidentally.

This next week...

I'm just about to finish Jesus for the Nonreligious, by John Shelby Spong, and am thinking about doing a few more religion reads. Specifically, lately I've been thinking a lot about the origins of Satan. Ever since 2006, I've been interested in the evolution of Judaism, and how parts of it were transformed into apocalyptic Christianity, with Satan as Mr. Evil and a fallen rebel instead of God's quality-assurance agent, as he was in pre-christian Judaism and is now.  Also, I am considering a book on the plumbing side of waste management.