I'm Having Male Problems

Dear Friends:

How are you, one week past this latest reminder of our country’s rotten core? I am better, finding my ways back into my life. Shenny, for instance. I was relieved publication day didn’t fall on the day after the election, which was for everyone I knew a day without words.

But words are very good at speaking into silences, and at speaking truth. We have a lot of silences to fill with truths coming up. Thank you for joining me here, in one way or another, where we can keep up that practice.

This Shenny’s about men and being sick of them.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Post-Election Coping Edition

1. Kaitlyn Greenidge’s ‘What Words Are For’
Last Wednesday morning, my friend Mike was the first to reach out and see how I was doing, and in our mutual consolation he sent me ‘What Words Are For’, an article Kaitlyn Greenidge had published that morning in Harper’s Bazaar that had helped him recenter himself. Greenidge tells her story of voting for the first time in 2000, a chaotic election the Supreme Court eventually decided. ‘I hope you girls don’t think this is normal,’ a friend’s mother told them. But then every subsequent election happened—each, Greenidge writes, ‘was the election of my lifetime. The final showdown between justice and tyranny. “Don’t worry, we’ll get them this time.”’ Year after year with so many people working overtime to deny our reality, what can writing even do? Who is it for? I won’t give away what Greenidge comes to understand, because you should just go read the piece, but Mike was right. The piece is a well timed gift in a terrible time.

2. Pointless Playlist Track-Hunting
In my college & gradschool days I could spend an hour no sweat riffling through record bins, flipping past album after album with a half-second scan to see whether it was worth considering. Now, it’s standing in a cluttered booth to find an interesting old thing to either buy or snap a pic of for a future Shenny. I haven’t had any antique shops at hand this week, so to soothe myself via whatever lizard-brain instincts this hunting-gathering soothes, I’ve been working on my Indie-By-Numbers playlist: a mix of songs that have a number in the title, sorted in order from 0-100:

I’m up to 60 as of this writing (with a few placeholders for later in the count). How is such a project going to help me fight the coming nightmare? Perhaps it’s a form of readiness. Nobody needs this mix but me, but if you have any suggestions for tracks that might fit or better fit what I have, I’m all ears:

I’m Having Male Problems

Last Wednesday, my mom called, and when she asked how I was doing I did my best to find some words. Mom had hers ready: ‘Are we ever going to have a woman president? People talk about Oh, will I ever see such and such in my lifetime.’ She had an ironic chuckle here. ‘So I wonder if I’ll ever see a woman president, in my lifetime.’

Mom is 77. Neither of us answered her question, but the answer we both knew hovered in the space between us—a space the size of our country, given that we were speaking from opposite coasts. I hope my mom lives long enough to finally see a president who looks like her, but that’s another thing it’s hard to have hope for anymore.

By now we’ve all sorted out who we want to blame for how the election went, which feels at times like how bigotry must, the mental acrobatics of attributing every problem to some hated other. But last week, a question came to me, Can men be funny?

I heard it as a joke, a kind of inversion of the old useless question about women being funny. But then I tried to answer, or think of a man I wanted to hear make jokes, and I thought, ‘Nope. Not anymore.’

In a patriarchy, any man making a joke is likely punching down in some way. Even making jokes about themselves as men is a punch down. Take, for instance, this sign I once didn’t buy in an antique store, which read, in folksy script: MEN ARE LIKE FISH, THEY GET IN TROUBLE EVERY TIME THEY OPEN THEIR MOUTHS.

Put the letters ‘w’ and ‘o’ at the start of that sign, and you begin to see how men can be the butt of a joke without any real threat.

These days, when a man opens his mouth to speak, it feels like we’re all in trouble. An ancient and bad idea is likely going to come out. This, at least, is where my mind went in the days after men put a criminal man back in office. My trust in men to be good and do good is waning.

Which is a weird feeling to have when you love men.

To say nothing of being one.

In 2019, I was given a sabbatical, and as I didn’t have anyone to be presentable to, I didn’t shave for a while, and then when I did, I left behind a mustache.¹ I wanted to see how it looked and how it felt. Here’s a picture of me from that time:

At first I kept trimming it with a guarded electric razor, maintaining a stubble, until I learned to wait and use scissors only once the hair got too far past my lipline. I liked how this looked on me. I liked having facial hair, finally; there’s a reason we call the gal a closeted guy dates ‘his beard’ and not ‘his Adam’s apple’ or ‘his penchant for violence’.

But that’s not what made me keep the mustache. I kept it because of the attention, and respect, I started getting from other men.

Strangers in public would do this thing where they ran a finger over their lips and gave me a thumbs up. N’s cousin, married with kids, said to me at the lake that Fourth, ‘Dave rockin’ the porn ’stache!’ Well-known, well-regarded, well-awarded queer writers I followed online slid flirtily into my DMs for the first time.

I ate it all up.

Page Dr. Freud if you want: in my house growing up there was an abundance of female attention and a dearth of male. (I even looked like my dad in his 40s, when he’d grown a mustache.) But this attention felt like access, and I wasn’t about to lose it.

Access to the patriarchy, I should clarify. It’s a place, or is it a thing?, I’d felt excluded from my whole life. I was stunned by how good it felt. And then, as with everything, I wondered what that meant.

When I use the word ‘patriarchy’, I mean the belief system that says male attention and respect is rare and thus something we should appreciate, and maybe even fight to win. Patriarchy says that the father, a man, is the head of any family, and thus should be the head of every state. Patriarchy says there’s a certain kind of way of being a man, and that it’s men who get to decide how that goes. Patriarchy says men make good leaders, and good protectors, despite thousands of years of history showing otherwise.

Not one of these things is true. Each is contingent on our deciding to believe it. And after last week, I’m done believing in any of it, if I ever did.

So what to do with men, being one, and loving them as I do? The question harkens back to 1970’s radical feminists’ charge of sleeping with the enemy, or how I put it in a chapter of my memoir: ‘The feminist in me always wants to barf at how lusty the gay male erotic imagination gets for patriarchy.’ Masc-4-masc tags on app profiles. Daddy-boy porno scenes. The fetishization of married (to a woman) bi or straight men.

And yes, #notallmen. And yes, women pulled out their own boners for fascism again last week. I can smell the stink of my irrational thinking just as much as anyone. But here’s an example of the patriarchy at work, from Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (2013), written by a gay man:

When it comes to sexual harm in particular, what’s harmful to one person not only is completely harmless to another but may even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive. If the supermodel Kate Upton were to walk into my office right now and tie me to my chair before doing a slow striptease and depositing her vagina in my face, I think I’d require therapy for years.

Therapy, clearly, is already called for. This is played as a joke; I think the writer thinks he’s punching up, given that he’s gay and Upton is a wealthy heterosexual, but the way it assumes we’re complicit in connecting vaginas with harm makes him a patriarchal stooge. Also a fool; he doesn’t even realize he means ‘vulva’,² and not bothering to know the difference is another way the patriarchy tries to control women’s bodies.

It’s possible that every woman you’ll ever meet is smarter than you in some way or another, and stronger, and not so much deserving of your respect as always already having owned it for herself.

For help, I went to bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love:

Only a revolution of values in our nation will end male violence, and that revolution will necessarily be based on a love ethic…. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity…. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.

I liked this notion of starting with love, but trying to extract maleness from patriarchy is like picking up water drops with a set of tweezers. Any attribute I might pluck out—strength, rationality, etc.—applies to people of any gender. So I come to biology, the male body, but even this is less concrete when you understand (dear author of Perv) that some men have vaginas.

So maybe antipatriarchal thinking begins when we understand there’s no such thing as men. There’s only every man, every person opting to don that gender. Loving men means never assuming you know what you’ve got in any single man, never assuming some bro-y connection exists by nature. But then always understanding some connection is possible once you can see this person—male or otherwise—as they are.

Weeks ago, cuddling up to N. in bed one morning, he made a sound I love to hear and called me his ‘handsome guy’. I laughed and mentioned offhand that I’d been thinking about shaving the mustache—assuming from what he said that it formed much of the basis of any handsomeness. ‘They’re so trendy now. Every white guy on the street seems to have one.’

‘Oh don’t,’ he said. ‘I like it.’

So I’m keeping the thing. Not because of what men think of it, but because of what this one does.

This week’s thing I did not buy from the antique store is this Oppenheimian monogrammed box:

1. I’d done this once before, back in grad school, and when I showed up at the bar that night, a friend took one look and said, ‘A mustache?’ ‘It’s ironic!’ said I, a total ball of insecurity. ‘What does that even mean?’ he rightly asked.

2. Also, FWIW, patriarchy is at work in Wikipedia’s deciding that its vulva page should cover human and animal vulvas, but that the human penis should get a page of its own, separate from the animals.