My article “What does it mean to ‘act like a man?'” first appeared in the Hamilton Spectator in the spring of 2014 in a shorter version. The subject is very relevant to both creators and audiences in all the arts, so here now is the complete text of the original.
“I’m glad you got yourself a man’s hat,” he said, deepening his voice into a growl on the crucial word “man’s”. It was odd to hear any such reference to masculinity from one widely considered the resident sycophant of the college where I worked at the time. Odder still was the cause of his outburst. I was wearing a new fedora in lieu of my usual beret, the latter being the traditional chapeau of choice among countless Frenchmen, Spaniards, and the military of many lands. What I heard, without question, was an unworldly individual very hung up about his manhood.
So what is a man? Is he the central-European husband of a neighbour who dropped in one day when I was a kid? Her eyes were puffed up, her arms blue with bruises, and her explanation was this: “A man who doesn’t beat his wife is not a man.” Is he the career-driven and wealthy executive I know who doesn’t bother to support or even communicate with his mentally underdeveloped son, perhaps because his son isn’t the man his father needs him to be?
Is he the persona created by Don Cherry, a man once seriously nominated as the “Greatest Canadian” in a poll later won by the very un-macho, articulate, and far more gutsy Tommy Douglas? We all know of Cherry’s demeaning, prejudicial, talk-tough non sequiturs that shield him from thought and contradiction. Is one of his many approving fans an acquaintance I call “the king of the sucker punchers” because he inevitably makes disparaging cracks about others and just as inevitably flees from the room before one can take him on? For that matter, is man the gang rapist who is encouraged by his culture to terrify, abuse and murder women? Is he one of the Ontario gang who raped a friend and, when finished, tossed her on someone’s lawn afterwards?
Can it be that a current version of man is actually a reversion to a more primitive state, one that is free of social obligation, rational thought, humility, subtlety, dignity, responsibility, or class? Is he one who gloats in being unreachable and immune to social standards of value and behavior, one who follows his own course and –free at last!- doesn’t have to do what he is told, even by a larger population to whom he is responsible? Do I hear the name Rob Ford, a man with a fan base of both men and, indeed, women?
Cultural observers note more and more how we live in a trying time for men. If the quintessential cowboy, John Wayne, was once the annual favorite male movie star, this icon of the strong silent type is no longer the ideal. It is now acknowledged that indigenous peoples were long cheated, humiliated, and murdered by the man with a gun and some of us finally call this not history but genocide. Bison were wantonly slaughtered to near extinction, for no reason, by men of the west once held up as heroes. Nowadays it’s a glaring irony that hunters, armed with high tech weapons, call their killing sport when, of course, their foe have no guns of their own to fight back. But some guys just like it that way.
Still, if the icon of the cowboy is kaput, the Stetson remains ubiquitous in Nashville, Calgary, and even on Stephen Harper’s head. However, although the leader of the Conservatives likes to play with guns, held by someone else, of course, and build prisons for those he deems bad guys, he certainly doesn’t embody the cowboy myth. He doesn’t face his rival, man to man in the dusty street at high noon, but, instead, prorogues the dual. He may talk tough on the international scene, but at home he hides himself in secrecy. Stetson or not, he doesn’t talk straight, and the folks in his town look over their shoulders when they speak his name.
At a reading, I once offered my short poem with the title A Mother Prays for her Son, a quip really, which goes like this: “Dare be strong enough not to become an ass”. A woman in the audience later gave me hell for being so down on myself as a man and, although she hadn’t considered that the poem could well apply to women too, she was right in a way. Like many, I am constantly troubled by the patriarchal stupidity, the uncontrolled cruelty, the smug smallness of spirit that emerges from some fellow men. It’s ironic that some men can frequent coming of age films but never grow up.
At the same time, however, I profoundly respect the everyday courage of men who make a dignified life for themselves and, in many cases, support families, albeit by working decades in spirit-numbing jobs. They are unspectacular and sometimes flawed human beings who know they don’t really matter to our system, know they’ll one day be discarded like garbage, but they still try to be decent and fair to others and, if lucky, to themselves.
A friend once remarked, “My wife always says I should open up, but when I do she doesn’t want me to have the feelings I have.” When I once remarked to another friend that “We all have problems” he, in turn, retorted, “Not me, buddy.” Obviously he had decided to “act like a man”, ironically in this time when men are supposedly becoming extinct. He did not want to reveal vulnerability to anyone, man or woman. Perhaps this attempt at self-preservation made sense, especially when I remembered that four people I once knew who were nastiest to women were women themselves, indeed articulate feminists.
But we are aware, of course, that women are confined to roles they play not only by men, certainly, but also by their cultures and by themselves. And what of the recent London Sunday Times article titled “Housewives happy to kill for Hitler” that noted “A new history of the Holocaust reveals that the supposedly weaker, kinder sex were just as capable of casual acts of horror?” The article made no note whether each killer from the feminine side was wearing a man’s hat or a woman’s.
Of course, none of this will matter when the earth speaks back to us with drought, floods, storms, hunger, disease and other ecological disasters that we brought upon ourselves and which we can no longer deny are imminent. And all because we were not man, or woman, enough to look into the mirror and admit how great the damage is that we continue to do, in part because of how insignificant we are.
“James Strecker of Hamilton is a writer, poet, consultant in human development and in Creativity, and author or editor of many books.”