To be a Man is to Resist Temptation
Navigating life for heterosexual men is materially easy but morally demanding.
My first romantic relationship was with a victim of childhood sexual abuse. What’s more, I have met her abuser and gritted my teeth silently as he glided through life with impunity. I hesitate to say any more for fear of giving away too many identifying details. Parents prepare you inadequately for life even in the best circumstances but in my cultural backdrop you are actively stripped of the means to respond to anything in the vicinity of sex. It felt like an extraordinary situation but, as the years would show, the truly exceptional situation would be to meet a woman who had spent her life untouched by sexual, emotional, or physical abuse at the hands of a man. The banality of male abuse frightens me of my own self; what if tomorrow I attain my “true” form as a man and perpetrate extremes of harm on someone else?
Hilary Mantel, in an essay on the lives of women canonised by the Catholic Church, wrote that ‘Men own their bodies, but women’s bodies are owned by the wider society.’ However, men cede agency over their minds to gain dominion over the bodies of women. We become foot-soldiers to the patriarchy in exchange for the spoils of dominating the second sex.
For heterosexual men it is impossible to locate oneself without understanding the relational position one occupies to the suffering one directly or indirectly inflicts on others. Our instinct to repress stems, arguably, from the original denial of the patriarchal oppression we are, at a minimum, accessories to. I cannot say with certainty when denial was no longer an option for me. Was it when I saw the bruises left on my mother after my father struck her repeatedly? Was it when I learned of my ex’s sexual assault? Or was it when I learned about another ex’s sexual exploitation as a teenager by her coach? But I know this: I discovered my manhood at the altar of female suffering.
All the unimaginable harm wrought upon people so near and dear to me while being unimaginably distant from anything in my experience disoriented me. One imagines being told secrets to be like a fun game, where you learn ultimately benign, embarrassing facts about someone else. But it felt like being taken into confidence by a woman was to become privy to unimaginable woe. Nevertheless, that was when manhood really began for me. Not when I first drove a car, not when I grew large during puberty, not when I opened a bank account or got to keep my passport in my own possession, or when I first kissed a girl (at the ripe old age of 22). Manhood, ironically, began when I was exposed to the rawness of female suffering.
It was inescapable that, despite all pretensions to heroism, I shared something fundamental with the villains of these stories. It begged the question: what else of me is shared with them and what else of them with me? In her most recent book ‘On Violence and On Violence Against Women’, the academic Jacqueline Rose suggested that feminism cannot succeed if men were inherently savage misogynists and that any feminism that assumed all men to be a threat was “on a hiding to nothing”. It was a strangely encouraging idea to read in a book that detailed very grim realities for women. It is therefore I concluded that to be a man is to constantly resist temptation against that other, synthetically naturalised nature. Men live a life weighted with sin you could say; sins that are always in our peripheral vision; that demand our attention and call us to action; which the vast majority of us succumb to. Occasionally some of us show that this need not be fait accompli.
Men must exchange something for regaining their psychological agency from the grip of patriarchal conditioning. In the case of trans women, the cost is all too physical. In attempting to relinquish the poisoned chalice of maleness, trans women are physically and mentally degraded often to the point of suicide. But for a comfortably cis-het man, its not so simple to discern what someone like me has to give up. My body feels my own and nobody else’s. Perhaps it is another insult to the injuries piled upon women, that when men begin to comprehend themselves, they do so at no cost at all, thereby experiencing a more complete life. But there is a cost.
One comes to mind immediately. The asymmetry of relations between myself and every woman I would ever meet. Naturally, a strange man is a threat until proven otherwise, and even then a cause for suspicion. There is no password bestowed on enlightened heterosexual men that grants them the privilege to bypass the fraught process of trust building with guarded women. Over time, you feel like you occupy a vacant interstice: unable to really feel part of the fraternity of men and barred from the sorority of women. A voluntary exile from one and an unwelcome interloper within another.
Despite the tremendous progress within social mores, most of us still live within the confines of our stereotypes (willingly or unwillingly). We all play to an archetype, a role, a niche that we think fits us. For all the emphasis in modern society on originality and authenticity, the consequence of converging on the same objectives leads us into breathtaking uniformity. Originality and authenticity come, in fact, with heavy social penalties. In my case, trying to act in opposition to conventional male stereotypes has often made me feel bereft. People’s responses to my behaviour were pre-conditioned; unprimed for interpreting someone struggling with being a better kind of man. And even though I could explain this behaviour it did not make it radically easier to live with. It only accentuated my loneliness.
The reflexive disdain we express towards non-normative, counter-cultural self-expression is a case in point. People who visibly present as “freaks” are treated like, well, freaks. The people who get face tattoos, extreme piercings or similarly unusual body modifications, dress in a particularly unconventional manner are all voluntary outcasts from what we may consider polite society. Nobody presumes such people to be philosophers yet they may well be. We respond to bodies and skins just as much as words and deeds. When some people make their bodies an instrument of expressing their non-conformity, most of us react with typical revulsion. That is not right.
Simone de Beauvoir said that one is not born but rather becomes a woman. Some may interpret this as saying that only women are made while men are born men. But why is that a natural assumption? What if there is an implicit corollary in her statement that just as one becomes a woman, one must therefore also become a man. Who is born to shape another after all?
Being a man is hard. This should be read as it is written. Too often, the instinct of men (and a few women) reading this sentence is to read it as “being a man is hard-er”. We do carry much greater moral responsibilities simply by virtue of the powers vested in us. That we fail repeatedly in fulfilling these responsibilities does not imply women, if vested with similar powers, would fulfil them any better. As Beauvoir remarked on another occasion:
“The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”
I cannot physically fight every man that chooses to hurt a woman or anyone that does not meet their standards of manliness. And the fantasy of combat is itself a terribly misguided reflex conditioned into me. I cannot persuade every man to embrace the virtues of their softer side either. I can hardly get a man to express genuine vulnerability in front of me. At the very best, I can win one contest with variable consistency and that’s the one that rages perpetually within me.
The weight of the terrible things I have seen or heard, the pains of my own life and the incapacity to confront the feelings they evoke because of my maleness, and, the hardest of them all, to not give up the hope that all this struggle has some unknowable significance. That my ability to sit and listen to people express their emotions, to give them comfort, kindness, and sincere advice has some value to others. No matter how much I speak or write, I feel strangely unheard and I don’t know why and I don’t know what could be done to resolve this feeling.
Regardless, every man ought to wrest control of his own mind from the clutches of the conventions of manhood that prevail around him. Immediately after the question arises of what we should do with this newfound control. Many of us are tempted into solipsism. Others succumb to narcissism.
If and when we win this internal struggle (and it is always a contingent victory) the world around us behaves exactly as it did before we stepped outside the gates of its conventions. Facing the permanency of the struggle, and that too alone, tempts us occasionally to take our own lives. Unable to be men as we are demanded to be and unable to become the men we want to be, liminal existence becomes a curse we seek to shed alongwith our mortal coils. Women, for all their misfortunes, never get so many temptations to choose from.