The New Male Sexuality (4 page)

An important ingredient of the socialization of boys is the message “Don’t be like a girl.” Since females of all ages are the softer ones—the
people who express feelings, who cry, who are more people-oriented—not being like them is an effective way to suppress the softer side of males. Girls and women are allowed far greater leeway.
Tomboy
has nowhere near the derogatory punch of
girl
or
sissy
. Girls can participate in boys’ games, play with boys’ toys, wear boys’ clothes. But can you imagine what others will call a boy after the age of four or five who wears a dress or plays house or with dolls?

The primary focus of males and females is very different. Connection to others is the name of the game for females of all ages, even in their play. Dolls (the typical plaything of girls) are more conducive to intimacy training than the toy trucks and weapons boys get. You can cuddle a doll, comfort it, feed it, talk to it, sleep with it. But what can you do with a fire truck that has anything to do with relationships?

Ask little girls about their best friends, and this is what you get: “Janie is my best friend because we talk and share secrets.” Research shows that girls spend much more time than boys in one-to-one interaction with their friends, in what one researcher called “chumships.” Boys go in a different direction. They learn that the primary thing in life is doing or performing in the world out there, not in the family in here. When little boys are asked about their best friends, their answers usually are about activities: “Robert is my best friend because we play baseball and do lots of other things.” Much more so than girls, boys spend time in large groups, often playing games.

These separate emphases set the stage for huge problems in adult relationships. Both men and women say they want love and intimacy, but they mean different things by these terms. Women favor what has been called face-to-face intimacy: They want to talk. Men prefer side-by-side intimacy: They want to do.

In almost all societies, femininity is given by having the right genitals. Masculinity or manhood is not. It is conditional. Having the right genitals is necessary but not sufficient. As Norman Mailer put it: “Nobody was born a man; you earned your manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough.” In his book
Manhood in the Making
, anthropologist David Gilmore notes a recurring notion “that real manhood is different from simple anatomical maleness, that it is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation but rather is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds.” It is assumed that girls will grow up to be women simply by getting older, but boys need something special to become men. Thus, most societies have had special rituals, usually difficult and painful, sometimes life-threatening,
that boys had to go through before they themselves and the rest of the group considered them to be worthy of the name of men. The good thing about these rituals was that once one had navigated his way through them, one’s manhood could never again be questioned.

Western societies long ago got rid of these rituals. But in the process, something valuable was lost and men were left in a perpetual state of anxiety. Now one’s manhood is always on the line. One deviant act is all it takes for your manhood to be questioned. Maybe you really aren’t good enough or bold enough; maybe you don’t have what it took. This is why men walk the thin line I mentioned earlier.

Early on the boy gets the idea that he can’t be like the person who means the most to him, his mother. No longer is it acceptable to bask in her warmth and nurturance, except occasionally, and no longer is it possible to think that he, as she did, will someday give birth to babies. She’s a woman, and he can’t be like her or any other woman. In effect, he’s wrenched away from the closest relationship he’s had and may ever have. In most primitive societies, boys were also wrenched away from Mom, but they were entrusted to the care of one or more men who guided their development. In our society, there is no such arrangement.

There is only Dad, or whoever is playing that role for the boy. It is from him that the boy will learn his most important lessons about masculinity. Unfortunately, that relationship is rarely nurturing or positive in our society. Fathers are often not physically present and when they are, often are not emotionally present. Physical affection, emotional sharing, expression of approval and love—these are the human experiences that very few boys get from their dads. It is a tragedy of the greatest magnitude for men not to have been respected, nurtured, loved, and guided by their fathers.

Martial arts expert Richard Heckler recalls what happened when he was a child and his sailor father returned from a year-long cruise:

I felt proud of him, proud that he was my father, proud that after not seeing him for a year and not even sure what he looked like, I still had a father. He came up to me and extended his hand in his stiff, formal way. “Hello son. Have you been taking care of your mother and sister while I was away?” I was nine years old and I wanted him to hold me and have him say that he loved me. But he didn’t then or ever.

What boys do get from their dads, if anything at all, is reinforcement of macho tendencies and the necessity for performance and achievement. Therapist Terrance O’Connor relates this story:

I was struggling in my first year of high school. My father had just given me holy hell for the scores I had received on a standardized test. I felt terrible. In my room, I went over the results again and again.… Suddenly I realized that the numbers were raw scores. They needed to be converted. I was astonished. In percentiles, my scores were in the nineties. Vastly relieved, I rushed out to show my father. “Then why in hell don’t you get better grades?” he yelled. It was a dagger in my heart. Never a word of love. Never a word of praise.

This is not to blame our fathers, who were only doing what was done to them. Nonetheless, the wounds opened by this lack of care run deep and are rarely healed. If you want to see grown men cry, give them a safe setting and get them talking about their fathers. That’s all it takes.

Because the boy is wrenched away from his first real intimate relationship, does not get to experience one with his father, and is taught a body of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are not conducive to intimacy, he will arrive at adulthood quite unprepared for the requirements of a mature relationship. The point is simple and frightening: The socialization of males provides very little that is of value in the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships.

Since so much of male training is in opposition to female qualities, males come to believe that these qualities, and therefore femaleness as a whole, are strange and inferior. The result is the development of a habit of not taking women seriously. Although a man may dearly love a woman and want very much to be considerate, fair, and respectful, he has years of training pulling in the other direction. Women are icky, weird, and disgusting; they’re weak and dependent rather than strong and independent, as he’s supposed to be; they’re overly emotional and not logical; they’re at the mercy of their hormones; and, well, they just don’t see things the way men do. Since the boy had to break away from his mother and feminine ways to establish his masculinity, there’s also a fear of once again coming under the domination of a woman. To be in this situation is too much like childhood, when he was a non-man. The last thing any man wants is to be “pussy-whipped” or “henpecked” because that’s a clear indication that he’s not man enough to keep “the little woman” under control. This, too, often leads men, no matter how much they love their partners, to be not quite able to treat them as full human beings with equal rights. This inability to take women seriously can cause much friction in adult relationships and negatively affects sex itself, as we will see later.

Since strength and self-reliance are the primary goals we have for our
males, they are trained to mistrust and dislike the more vulnerable and expressive side of themselves. Boys are rewarded for “toughing it out,” “hanging tough,” not crying, not being weak. By the time my son Ian was four, he was using the words
tough
and
strong
in an admiring way. By the time he was five,
wimp
and
sissy
had entered his vocabulary as negative terms for males. Sometimes when he was angry at me, he would explode, “You’re just a wimp.”

Part of being tough is not getting or needing the loving touching that all babies get. Parents stop touching their boys early on; it seems somehow feminine or treating him like a baby or sissy. Girls, on the other hand, continue to be touched and hugged. We end up with women who understand touch as a basic human need and like to touch and be touched as a way of reinforcing contact and demonstrating affection; men, in contrast, lose sight of their need for touching except as a part of roughhousing or sex.

Boys learn that competition is an aid in proving oneself. If you’re as good as or better than other males, then at least you’re some kind of man. Most of us experienced no choice: We had to demonstrate our masculinity no matter how ill equipped and ill prepared we felt. In his essay “Being a Boy,” Julius Lester captures the agony so many of us felt. Comparing himself to girls, he says:

There was the life, I thought! No constant pressure to prove oneself. No necessity always to be competing. While I humiliated myself on football and baseball fields, the girls stood on the sidelines laughing at me, because they didn’t have to do anything except be girls. The rising of each sun brought me to the starting line of yet another day’s Olympic decathlon, with no hope of ever winning even a bronze medal.

Competitiveness turned out to be one of the uglier manifestations of male upbringing. First, few of us could win and therefore feel good about ourselves. After all, how many boys can excel at baseball, basketball, and football? And what are the others supposed to do? Countless men have stories to tell about how humiliated they felt as boys when they weren’t successful on the athletic field, couldn’t even do well enough to be chosen when teams were selected. They felt bad not only because they didn’t get to play, but because their very personhood or manhood was questioned.

Second, competition is antithetical to intimacy. As psychologist Ayala Pines points out, in competition the question is “Who’s on top?” or “Who’s in front?” In intimacy the question is “How close are we or do we
want to be?” Closeness is tied to openness, how much we can share of ourselves. But it’s difficult to be open if you have a competitive mental set, for the fear is that what is revealed can be used to the other person’s advantage.

Because of the emphasis on strength and self-reliance, men have trouble admitting to unresolved personal problems. It’s not that problems don’t come up, but you handle them, solve them, master them without help and without complaint. That’s a large part of what being tough and independent—of being a man—means.

Like so many of the other ideas that men learn, this one puts them in a bind. What is a man supposed to be when he’s confused, when he’s frightened, when he needs help? Almost by definition, if he acknowledges his confusion or fear and asks for help, there’s something wrong with him. He’s not as tough as he ought to be. If, on the other hand, he doesn’t acknowledge what’s bothering him and get help, he may literally make himself sick and do worse at the task he’s working on. On a mundane level, this belief results in the ridiculous behavior of men driving around endlessly in their cars because to stop and ask for directions would suggest they need help, which they do.

Not being able to talk about problems works against intimacy. As linguist Deborah Tannen points out, women use such “troubles talk” as a way of getting support and maintaining connection. But men aren’t used to expressing their own problems or having to deal with anyone else’s, so while troubles talk can be a wonderful way to maintain closeness between two women, it often doesn’t work very well between a man and a woman.

Another consequence of being unable to express problems is that men often don’t get what they need. They are slow to admit to illness and other physical problems, and they are even slower to admit to emotional distress. And the idea of needing to go to an expert for help in dealing with personal or relationship problems is anathema to many of them. Men are changing in this respect—more men, for example, are coming to therapists’ offices—but the change is slow, and men are still nowhere near as willing as women to admit to personal problems.

It’s not easy for boys and men. It’s not easy to give up the warm, tender side of themselves. It’s not easy to squelch feelings of dependency, love, fear, and anxiety. It’s not always easy to be posturing, pretending to be more knowledgeable, more self-reliant, more confident, and more fierce than you really are. There are many times when a man feels fearful or defeated and wants nothing more than to be held and comforted, just as his mother held and comforted him long ago. But he can’t get it. He can’t
admit his feelings, and he can’t ask to be held. And that is very sad. Like some men, he may choose to drown his feelings in alcohol or sex; at least in sex he will get some body contact and a distraction from his feelings. But neither the alcohol nor the sex is the same as real physical and emotional comforting. Too bad he can’t get what he really needs and wants.

It’s not easy to always have to perform and succeed, whether on the athletic field, in the boardroom, or in the bedroom. Although the whole process has been romanticized, the fact is that boys and men often make themselves sick and crazy in getting ready to perform. It’s not unusual for athletes to throw up in the locker room before competition (romanticize that if you can) and to get themselves into a murderous rage that under any other circumstances would rightfully be considered psychotic. This process, by the way, is often called “getting it up.” It’s not easy for a man to go into a sexual situation believing that everything rides on how well he performs (especially with a part of himself that he can’t control), but what else is he to do?