Looking back over that strange, cramping process of learning to be male in a society that puts aggressive competitiveness and getting ahead above intimacy and mutuality, what disturbs me most is the residual power of an adolescent imagery to persist beneath rational argument.
In trying to do something about old patterns of sexist behaviour in myself (mostly forged in that gradual shaping of gender identity) I come up against obsessive images of lofting towering sixes, of scoring goals from impossible angles, as well as the Playboy variety. The skewing of adolescent desire seems to have resulted in the freezing away of certain past, key moments that still wield a strong, unacknowledged influence over our lives. Beneath our progressive chat we are often unconsciously locked into images of sporting success, sexual bravado and other ego-tripping performances that gained a temporary applause.
It's as if learning to be male was really about learning which kinds of appropriate activity or performance a leap-frogging society rewarded and gave greatest prestige to. Fragile male egos were shored up by these images of scoring. To go all out for the chequered flag was a legitimate way, in Britain of the 1950's, to gain approval and reassurance for some insecure boys and men.
Take my own early childhood, for instance. Intellectually I might reconstruct it as a series of awkward, sometimes tender friendships, or I could fake it out as being about small moments of classroom achievement - like the time when I was given the beaming, yellow moon for my best handwriting, or the moment when I produced the bright, orange, curly Q (an example of Medieval, illuminated script) and had it pinned up on the wall for Open day. But if I did I would be deliberately misleading you. No, the time that really stays with me is the apparently inconsequential one of scoring in playground football. It was a lunch-time game with a tennis ball on the Boys' only upper court. I am pursued still by the brief moment of glory when I connected flush with my instep (in open-toed Clark's sandals as well!) and the ball flew half the playground and whacked high up on the opponents' painted air raid shelter goal.
Or again the incident at Secondary school when I played for the first eleven soccer team against Sutton High school down at Plymouth. I usually had difficulty in lifting a water-drenched football, but the exact moment looms up again and again in my dreams when Gordon Rowe rolled a free kick in front of me and I ran forward a few steps to bend the ball a full twenty yards into the top, right hand corner of the goal.
In learning to become a man these memories reverberate in a special way. The continuing accent on strenuous achievement at almost any cost, the ever wary eye on peer group response to my performances and the constant measurement of my achievement in relation to possible rivals - all these moments helped to develop a male consciousness that fitted me into accepting the expectations of a fiercely competitive society. Like many other men I tried to grow a toughened carapace that would shield me from fists and jibes about my obviously vulnerable nature. But there was always an uneasy hollowness at the heart of the performance.
The need to see myself as somebody capable of scoring (in a wide, metaphorical sense) has kept me on the capitalist hook. The more I become aware of the trapped, 'feminine' aspects of my makeup the more I want to hide away in performances and gestures that would gain Buddy-boy approval. As shown in another incident from Secondary school, involving a friend of mine.
| 'I AM PURSUED STILL BY THE BRIEF MOMENT OF GLORY' |
In an authoritarian regime in an all boys' school the impulse to score against the system was a powerful one. So the unofficial competition to be the 'Clown of the class' was always a strong temptation to play to the gallery, get one over on the teacher and grab the limelight through being laughed at. An opportunity presented itself when 'Chippy' Carpenter, a hopelessly inadequate supply teacher, came to teach us Maths.
One of Chippy's unfortunate habits was that flecks of spit used to form in the corners of his mouth and these flecks used to spatter my friend and other pupils sitting in the front desks. Fed up with this and wanting to gain star attention for himself my friend appeared in class, sitting in the front row seat directly in front of the teacher's desk, with a navy-blue mac pulled up over his head. Chippy fell for it and asked him what he thought he was doing in a Maths class. 'Keeping myself dry from your spit!' fired back my friend in a flash.
Wisecracking is an important component of this Buddy-boy circuit. Many men have been conditioned to find sincerity too earnest, and express their suppressed need to be close to other men through a deformed kind of intimacy. It seems to offer an innocent, playful escape from heaviness but usually works as a defensive screen, often preventing more open men from being able to admit their vulnerability in that context. This is how macho culture sustains itself, working on men's needs to put group approval over honest exchange.
This early training in goal-seeking and narcissistic performance puts many men at a peculiar disadvantage within sexual relations. Instead of loving reciprocity, there is often a need to go for the chequered flag at the expense of your partner in heterosexual contacts. So that penile performance ('Was I any good?') is arrogantly asserted over women's perceptions, longings and needs.
Of course it's more complex than this. On some levels men are scared out of their wits, not knowing how to satisfy, relate to or connect with women. But, more bleakly, some men have created a gender identity that uses the sexual act, through their erections and their inevitable movement towards orgasm, 'to feel their own power and presence', as Andrea Dworkin suggests. So that instead of sexual activities being a part of reaching out to another person, they can become a way of reflecting male pride, glorying in the sense of being on top.
Culturally learnt habits of scoring and getting your own way also directly affects men at work as well, especially within business/military/academic public power contexts. 'Bureaucratic machismo' Richard Barnet calls it. We all recognise Sierra man overtaking in the fast lane, making it to the top in the cut-throat world of advertising. Likewise the Generals, the Police Chiefs arguing for yet more money to be spent on their patch, their manpower, their Trident programme. Or the world of the academic, power-tripping through the published article or book, and the spotlight grabbing performance at the conference.
Our sense of ourselves is often built up upon these flawed, work images of physical and metal prowess that help to shore up a cracked, masculine role. To turn our backs on more nurturing roles and depend on ego-bolstering images of work achievement, makes us peculiarly susceptible to fitting in to the dehumanising structures of patriarchal culture. So eagerly do we desire defensive confirmation that we give up on the struggle towards some kind of alternative living and settle for the usual, exploitative ways of staying on top.
In the end these goal-seeking habits petrify us from becoming fully human.
David Jackson
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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