Conversations about Male-ness

[amandell]

Originally Posted by Porter Doran

My! I really have not been communicating well in this thread; I apologize.


3. That Western "malehood" was and remains abhorrent; so much that I'd repeat something like this about it:

"From preschool, all a boy’s cultural training is toward two tasks: murder and rape. At the same time, the cleansing emotions are systematically denied him: guilt, tenderness, fear, awe. By adolescence, a boy is sociopathic and psychopathic. When adulthood begins, he may be confronted by God’s teachers―love, the alien, tragedy―and they may pause him and partly save him or they may hasten him in his course. By middle age, he lusts or grasps or hates methodically and without joy. His blankness can be glimpsed, if he is caught between jollities and bluffs, in the deadness of his eyes. With the majority of his number he shuns church, lest, upon hearing that Christ was defenseless as a lamb or cradled John to his bosom, he feel ill. With old age, he resumes one infant emotion: petty anger. When, crippled and corpulent, he dies, he is not missed."

4. That the genders, and especially malehood, need desperately to be remedied: and that the end of such a remedy would be that each individual become a truly good person. He would become

loving, joyful, peaceable, patient, gentle, good, loyal, meek, and moderate

(pace Paul Envoy, Gal v.22f).

*

In support of which conclusion, I offered this small thesis: A desire to achieve "right malehood" may seem rooted in reality and a harmless desire, but I say that it is

A. a falsehood: because virtue has no sex or gender;

B. harmful, potentially. For:

1. I have again and again observed discussions of "right malehood" to culminate in lists e.g. "strong, a good leader, a just warrior" -- in short, and perhaps to their participants' surprise, in casuistry for some or all the existing excesses of the gender.

(Or, were discussions instead to react to such lists, it would still culminate in imbalance.)

2. I have often observed such discussions to fuel the constantly-growing middle-American hysteria surrounding who "is" or "is not" "homosexual". Examples of this hysteria that I overhear every day would be too numerous to post.

No doubt there are abhorrent versions in the west of what male-ness is. I grew up in the west and was exposed to great deal that runs counter your list under number three. I know more than a few males that were raised with very different virtues than that bleak run down. Yet these males are clearly of the West as much as anyone can be reduced to such a category.
Simply because most discussions of "right malehood" are full of foolishness doesn't mean foolishness is innate to the exploration of what maleness is but rather that our concepts are polluted and need to be reevaluated.

It is not that virtue has no sex or gender....if so it would be inhuman. Its that virtue has all sexes and gender shades. Any shade of maleness or femaleness can be done with honor and still let that particular shade of gender remain meaningful and distinct in a world that is beautifu because variety is real and nothing particular can be easily reduced or dismissed.

[Porter Doran]

What we call reality is ideality refracted. This Platonic truth is no less true for being forbidden by modernism and its inheritors. Always we will be surrounded by (as you call them) beautiful material details. But if we have no ideality to shine through them and inform them, then the côte-d'armes of our lives is the snake with the tail in its mouth. And what ideality we choose and that we see it clearly are vital, vital.

As I've said in a previous post, we must study ourselves, women, children, Jesus, and God and his idealities if we are to learn what to become. I suppose I am looking at the matter in a similar way to your post -- I mean, you too have mentioned these varieties of personhood -- but I maintain that your post is looking at shadows or images in a mirror.

Virtue is one as God is one as we, in the Kingdom, shall be one (Joh x.30, xvii.11, et al.).

[Porter Doran]

Originally Posted by nabsy

... Race is as much as (maybe even more?) a social construct as gender. Point blank, it doesn't exist. And yet I have often found that whenever people want to skip over the race discussion and jump to the whole "we're all just people" discussion it actually undercuts the process of trying to become more anti-racist. ...

By the way, I quite agree with this remark about race! The Mr. Limbaughs of the world often sprain ankles as they attempt to run away from considering the Black experience.

In a similar way, as you so rightly point out, there is a male and a female experience -- they are very different, they are very unequal, and to pretend anything else would be dastardly unfair.

However, were a discussion to be begun on these boards: "How to be good Whites?" (not, mind you, that Jared began an analogous discussion about men! it is just the discussion I, from experience, fear the thread becoming) then I would not hesitate to say (as I said in the present thread): "My largest concern for [Whites] is that we seek to learn not to be good [Whites] so much as truly good persons." The sum is not the same as the individual, the survey is not the same as the source -- reality is not the same as ideality -- and so I would not hesitate to say what I've said.

[brambonius]

you heretics... you all need a dose of Mark Driscoll before you all get chickified...

(I wish I could join the conversation, but I have to clean the house and wash the dishes now...)

shalom

Bram

[Porter Doran]

Originally Posted by brambonius

you heretics... you all need a dose of Mark Driscoll before you all get chickified...

Wow, I think I'd blocked this man out of my memory.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

[Implicating Ted Haggard's wife in his scandal,] Driscoll wrote, "Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either."

He later posted a defense and explanation after widespread protests. "There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity."

Damn the man.

[Porter Doran]

(And, by the way, I'm not in "the team" Mr. Driscoll so gratingly takes for granted. If being a man puts one in a "man's team", then I am not a man. This serves as one example of the blithe assumptions about "manhood" that I've been trying to reject in this thread.)

[jaredh]

wow. this thread got away from itself.

how about anyone interested in this conversation message me. we'll go from there...hopefully productively and creatively.

[Mark_W]

I'd say that being a real man or being a real woman is essentially being the same thing...ie being a real person.

Thoreau outlines this in his essay on Civil Disobedience. Who cares about gender differences? Before we are male or female, we are human beings.

[BackAlleyRadio]

Jared, thanks for bringing up this issue. I've been thinking a lot about it myself, for years now really. i don't think this thread got away from itself. I think that this is where the conversation needs to start. We can't jump into identity work without understanding the context in which our identity is built. Not that you are asking us to, but...
I'd like to chime in to say that gender and sex are, in my understanding, culturally constructed. It is easy for people to attempt to make the distinction between gender and sex as a way to validate on or the other, but they are intricately tied and simply cannot be separated. Sex itself is a gendered category. I'm reading a book (gender trouble by judith butler) right now that puts it better than my tired, hungover self can right now...

"Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural conscription of meaning on a pre-given sex, gender must aslo designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which 'sexed nature' or a 'natural sex' is produced and established as 'prediscursive,' prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts."

Anyway, point being that any discussion of male-ness has to take into account what male-ness means, to state the obvious. A radical critique would ask about origins, where did our concept of male/female binary come from? Is it a universal phenomenon, how does it differ among cultures, how does it differ among pre-civ people groups? It is too quick of a jump to make a blanket statement about how we should be people and not genders, as if that is some sort of fast answer, but I think that is the final goal.

I'd love to have more of this conversation. I ussually hate discussions about male-ness cause I identify much less as a male that culture says I should. But this being the premise, I'd love to talk about it....

peace

[glasshaus]

I don't think we can classify gender as a social construct. I can't speak for race. I've only ever been one. But I transitioned from female to male (all those hormones and surgery that Rob talked about) and I can say very definitively that I'm a very different person on testosterone than I am when I'm off of it (there have been periods that I've been off for health reasons.) The biological factors cause differences not only physically and mentally, but emotionally and even spiritually.

Even so- before I ever went on testosterone, there was something in my identity (which defied my social prescription) that urged me into transition.
And I think that to distill gender into a social construct is to disrespect the gender not only of trans people, but of everyone.

Jared wants to discuss what it means to be a man and how to remain virtuous in that context. I think it's a good discussion, because the male experience naturally leans heavier in aggression, libido, and insensitivity (at least those areas become more pronounced in me when I am on testosterone.)
I think the whole "just warrior, good provider" model of manhood comes from trying to capitalize on the natural accents of the male temper and channel it into seemingly positive characteristics, but it isn't a practical statement of what we can best do with 21st century manhood.
What is a practical statement? I don't know.
-Claven

[Marja]

There are some other dynamics involved. I recall reading, somewhere, that rape culture is the sexual culture of straight men. And it is. How often will men together joke about raping womyn? How often will they reduce things to questions of which men own, and use, which womyn? The ideas they spread among themselves are precisely the ideas which encourage rape.

Testosterone has some pretty strong effects, too.

The combination of masculine culture and male biology complicates the problem.

[Porter Doran]

(A note: I have been using "sex" and "gender" to signify, respectively, biological difference and cultural difference. But I see that not everyone is using them non-interchangeably. Nor should they! Yet we might find it useful to notice when the words are used in differing ways, from post to post.)

[Pilgrim]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNCoevpt5TE

Eye opening...

[Marja]

I wonder what he thinks of the finger technique...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urination#Female_urination

[Porter Doran]

Originally Posted by Pilgrim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNCoevpt5TE

Eye opening...

Another Ted Haggard in the offing?

[glasshaus]

Originally Posted by Pilgrim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNCoevpt5TE

Eye opening...

What a weird sermon.
-C

[Quaker Dan]

"Merry Christmas!" says God to Adam and Eve. "I have presents for you but I can't decide who should get which so I'll just tell you what they are and you can decide. The first is the ability to pee standing up"
"ooh! ooh!" says Adam "I'll take that, that sounds excellent."
"Alright" says God "The second is multiple orgasms."

[KillerTOFU]

Originally Posted by Quaker Dan

"Merry Christmas!" says God to Adam and Eve. "I have presents for you but I can't decide who should get which so I'll just tell you what they are and you can decide. The first is the ability to pee standing up"
"ooh! ooh!" says Adam "I'll take that, that sounds excellent."
"Alright" says God "The second is multiple orgasms."

Damnit! hah!

[brambonius]

so this is a green anarchism discussion?

[lostboy]

Originally Posted by brambonius

so this is a green anarchism discussion?

ha.