Masculinities for Everybody Pt. 2 – On Leadership

Dear Friends:

It’s been a week of synchronicities. A father and son who left the doctor’s office twenty minutes before I got called in ended up, an hour later, checking out in the same line ahead of me at Safeway, far on the other side of town. I dreamt in a dream starring N that we were in a dream, and I told him: ‘Oh this is a dream, none of this matters.’ N woke up and told me he’d had a dream where he realized he was dreaming. I moderated a panel of MFA alumni, where one of them mentioned this perfect Sister Rosetta Tharpe performance:¹

And I needed a song to round out a mix I’m working on of songs from the 1950s.

This will end, as all good times do, until it comes around again. Where is your week turning?

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Copi’s The Queens Ball
At Booksmith last month, I judged this book by its cover:

That’s Copi there on the front, a promotional shot from one of his plays I believe. I’d never heard of Copi before, he was an Argentinian writer and cartoonist living most of his life in Paris, in queer scenes that seem as transgressive if not more so than anything we see today, this was the 1970s. The Queen’s Ball is about a writer named Copi who needs to deliver a novel to his publisher, but his lover Pietro/Pierre is causing too much drama and distraction. The novel is wild, mad, violent, funny, and astounding. I love it for its sex scenes especially:

I lie [sic] him down on his back, lifting my skirt, and I sit on his cock, which tickles my asshole with that gentleness definitive of Pierre’s entire charm, his elegance. Together forever, he whispers, sempre insieme! Sempre, sempre, sempre! I sob, cumming. My sperm rains down upon his hairy torso, I use it as lubricant on his bellybutton, sticking three fingers in, and he shouts in his baritone, vengo! vengo! And he cums, at last, I feel his little cock stirring around inside me like a teaspoon in a cup of coffee, while I move multiple fingers inside his bellybutton, it’s like a mucous membrane corkscrew, I push my entire hand inside, my bicep begins to spasm and, for the first time in my life, my right arm has an orgasm. In his belly, my hand is like a fish in water, he contorts, screaming, Miracolo! Miracolo! then collapses, bloodless, pale, hardly breathing, a strand of drool falling from the corner of his mouth.

Equally silly and beautiful, fun and dangerous—that’s sex in Copi’s imaginary. If I had more time, I’d get into how one of the treats of mid-life has been watching me get turned off by fixed rigidness of gender roles—tho this applies well to this week’s Main Matter so fuck it, it’s my Shenny.² Yes, I find masculine men hot, but they’re always hotter when they can be femmey on the spot. Masc men who fear the feminine (not getting manicures or wearing pink, never sitting with their legs crossed ‘the wrong way’ etc.) seem like boys to me, circle jerking in a tree house they should’ve outgrown: NO GIRLS! Copi’s fluidity is in his very grammar, which makes him a must-read.

2. David Sedaris’s Diaries
And speaking of fixed ideas about genders: I’m not loving A Carnival of Snackery as much as I did Theft by Finding. The title alone of that earlier volume tells you you’re in for more complex and darker material. This new one is mostly the jottings of a rich celebrity writer baffled by people less wealthy or famous than he is. (It’s no wonder Sedaris now has a codgery Andy Rooney–style gig on CBS Sunday Morning.) But what I love in the new book is how well he renders heterosexual ignorance. Like Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin all calling homosexuality a choice, and Sedaris struggles to recall that moment of choosing: ‘What with the excitement of choosing my blood type, I guess I blocked it out.’ One of his drivers asks if he’s married, and hearing no, says ‘Maybe you can find a girl who likes to read. Maybe you could let her read your writing and give you comments.’ Another woman’s co-worker clearly presents as gay and she’s aghast by the suggestion: ‘When would he have the time?’ She mentions his working for the Drama department and the glee club, and a chorus he sings with on the weekends. ‘To me it was like saying, How can he be a vampire when he’s shut up in that coffin all day?’ Straight people don’t even see queers unless we throw ourselves in their faces, then they complain about how we’re so ‘in your face’.

On Leadership

Here are some words of wisdom I heard recently:

It’s better to go for what you want in life and get rejected than have the shot and not take it. We have one life.

Good to remember. Now, those words of wisdom were given to me by this person:

And quickly we come to our first problem of leadership: Who the hell is trying to tell you what to do?

Here it’s Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of one of the most masculine men on the planet—if you see masculinity as achieving a certain body shape, or a certain set of roles you play in movies. Or rather, the above wisdom isn’t Patrick’s, but the role he’s playing: Saxon Ratliff, a rich straight white Southern shithead who’s never really had to consider other people.

Saxon (another of Mike White’s subtleties) says the above to his brother in an episode of White Lotus 3, which was ultimately as disappointing as the first two. The line comes right after this:

Confidence—that’s how you get people to do what you want. Because most people don’t know what they want, and a lot of them ... here’s a little secret: they just want to be used. They don’t have the vision. They’re just sitting there waiting for someone to come along and tell them what to do.

Saxon is bad at a lot of things, but here he shows himself to be terrible at leadership.

In this Shenny I want to figure out why.

Talk of leadership always makes me feel like I’m at a corporate retreat, or staring at a poster I hate:

But lately I’ve come to see that Saxon is half-right: Most people prefer to be led. To test this theory, here’s a quiz. When texting with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, which would you rather hear?

1. We should totally grab a drink sometime!

2. There’s a preview screening of the new season of Poker Face at the Vogue next Thursday. Want to join me? I made a reservation at Garibaldi’s afterward if we’re hungry.

I’m a #2 guy all the way. Almost as much as moving and listening to complaints about this administration, I hate having to pick a place to go to. I’m always grateful anytime someone comes with a plan.

That’s all leadership is: You make a plan to suit everyone and have the resources, ability, and tact to carry it out.

You know, like a mom.

That men make more effective leaders than do women is an old, dumb lie. Look at our president and tech CEOs. Just fucking look at them: anxious, frothy, fearful little boys making things worse for everyone but themselves.

It may be true that masculinity is a more efficacious leadership trait than femininity, but not having bothered yet, in these series of posts, to define (or even really write about) femininities, I don’t trust that assertion either. I think part of the problem is the undue status we give leaders, as though they’re somehow better or more desirable people. What stories do we tell of good followship? But a leader is just a person the rest of us have given a job to; all we should ever need from them is the ability to execute a considerate plan.

Instead, we seem to conflate leaders with role models, people to look up to, admire, emulate, dream of becoming. A fatal mistake, if only in how folks have poor imaginations becoming someone of a different gender.

In such a muddle, we tend to dismiss, or flat-out disdain female leaders—witness the average public school teacher’s salary. Such is the mindset political scientist Yoshikuni Ono found in his work on perceptions of female leadership. For the first 18–22 years of their lives, young men look around (at schools, mostly) and see women leading. Women lead the classroom as teachers and the school as principals. Ask those dudes about the percentage of women in Congress, as Ono did, and they tend to give wildly overestimated answers.

This finding makes me think of another from the Geena Davis Institute, which looked at crowd scenes in Hollywood movies and found that, on average, women comprised 17 percent of the faces in crowds. When men look at such crowds, they see 50-50 representation; when you up the women to 33 percent, they believe they’re seeing more women than men.

I’m straying from my topic here because I can’t get past these numbers. It’s like men look at women and see something extra, something beyond reality, and fearful. There’s a too-muchness when it comes to women that must make the thought of them in charge seem like a threat.

Rot and nonsense. Let’s wrap this point up by reminding ourselves good leaders see the world as it is.

Driving a car, I have a single goal: Get to my destination as quickly as possible. I swerve around slow cars that seem to be trolling for parking spots. I crawl through every stop sign and ‘run’ red lights—after first stopping, and there’s no one around, and it’s not a busy time of day. I tailgate people going under the speed limit, because how else to indicate they’re fucking up?

Oh, so you’re an asshole driver, you may be thinking, and fine: you may be right. But my point is that in driving, I’m a terrible leader.

Ask N or anyone who rides in a car with me: they don’t feel safe. I’m in full control of the car—I’m watchful, aware, deft with timing, I don’t get in accidents—but from their perspective, it doesn’t feel like I’m in control. I don’t explain my lane changes or prepare them for sudden surges of speed to pass, and so their experience of being in that car with me is one of disarray and recklessness.

Note: in control of the car, I’m in my kind of control, for my ends. A better leader³ is in control for others’ ends, which in this belabored driving metaphor means a ride of comfort and meaninglessness for those in the car.

So back to Saxon’s ‘Confidence—that’s how you get people to do what you want.’ This is bad leadership. It’s rape-y. Cult-y. Capitalist. Toxic.

Good leadership uses confidence (et al.) to get people to do what they want.

(Oh no. Maybe I don’t hate that poster above as much as I thought.)

If the patriarchy is going to insist that only men make good leaders, or on cleaving leadership qualities to masculinity, it seems we have (at least) two choices:

1. Fight the patriarchy’s anti-feminine perceptions about what makes good leadership

2. Teach healthy masculinities to girls and boys and enby kids, to help them get to power and dismantle the patriarchy

I haven’t had time to expand my thinking about masculinities since our last post, so I’ll recap its main takeaway—i.e., that patriarchal cultures tend to identify masculinity through three traits/roles: (a) provider, (b) protector, (c) creator.

Technically that last one was ‘procreator’, but—and this is another post for another time—it’s crucial we free these roles from anything resembling the family or tribe.

So: what do leaders create? A vision. A new idea to put out in the world. Then they provide the plan or means to achieve the vision, all the while using their granted power, status, and privilege to protect the folks working to make it happen.

That last bit is the troubling bit. Leadership these days seems directed at protecting only leaders—which is, again, rotten, impeachable leadership. In this void, women ‘don’t make good leaders’ if you don’t grant them the power, status, and privilege to make their leadership good. Tell that to your relative the next time they say, ‘I just don’t see [female candidate] as presidential.’

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this book about the patriarchy:

1. If this were in the U.S., my money’s on the crowd clapping on 1 and 3, and not, as these Brits are wise to do, on the 2 and 4.

2. Sorry: it’s our Shenny.

3. I’m open to the idea of this also making a better driver, but that’s a harder road to hoe.