Received an email recently noting that my favorite authors are “white men.” (The emailer found a list of author-mentors on my website.) This, I took the liberty to infer, was an accusation. It put me, a white man, in a circular conversation with other white men, who have historically held and wielded power. This might put me out of sympathy for minorities. The emailer asked if I ever read women or people of color?
It was news to me that I was under particular obligations as to my reading material. I wanted to know, first, if my writing showed signs of an unsympathetic white man, to which I received no response. I had thought that these white men would be some of the most thoughtful, such as Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez and John Steinbeck, all of which have written insightfully about the downtrodden. But never mind. I have read Ernest Gaines and Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin and a few women and homosexuals.
Well: I cannot speak for minorities because of the limits of my experience, which is middle class and standard-model-white-man. I could apologize for my whiteness, but my race is not my fault and hope means that we believe that all people have the capacity to be kind and just and good. I could apologize for my manhood, but it is unclear how I would apologize for attempting to mature and take responsibility for myself. I have no death wish. What to do? Am I doomed? We care about people of color, natives, women, animals, but the white male is like a telephone pole or a cliche: so visible and so commonplace that we just don’t see them. The only organization that really cares about them is the IRS.
So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an adult male. I’m not bleating for respect, which some have said is all we need. For one thing, it’s tough to respect a sap. Second, it puts the responsibility of men’s crises on someone else, which is convenient for the men. It also means a man’s self-worth and well-being are dependent on someone else’s gift to them, which might put this respect too far into the future to be of use.
As women have pushed into the spheres where men formerly inhabited, we discovered that women can be CEOs, they can successfully start and run businesses, and they can work a day job and make lots of money. This providing and leading and boldness that formerly defined manhood was taken from us, made us insecure about it, and so we have reacted into increasingly absurd shows of maleness to protect a form of manhood that still harked to an image of manliness as something with muscles and facial hear. Whatever you women can do, you can’t grow a beard like this.
The feminist critiques have, or can, produce two responses. We can shrink up and let them take care of it, or we can over-identify as a man and develop the aforementioned absurd manhood. A preoccupation with identity degenerates the identity into a stereotype, and when we start reverse-engineering stereotypes the quality of our manhood or womanhood is directly related to the quality of that stereotype. Once I start doing man things because that’s what men do, I have begun to slide into over-identification, into the individual pursuit of manhood that leads me away, and not toward, my family.
So we have lifted our trucks and inflated our biceps, grown our beards, only to make us boys with more body mass. Duck Dynasty built their empire on the stereotypical absurdity of modern manhood: lifted trucks, big beards, a little redneckery and self-induced risk. It is all safely right-wing, a little self-righteous. A little bit of Jesus always helps. We celebrate our manhood by burping and farting and eating pork chops with our hands.
Several years ago I was working in a customer’s home. Someone had forgotten to turn off the television. There was a cartoon on. All day it played to an empty house, which is, I suggest, the best audience for such programs. I watched as I came and went, loosely first, then with increasing interest.
The inciting incident went something like this: the vacuum broke, the family needs to clean the floor, so self-righteous, handyman dad decides to fix the vacuum. The wife, wanting to avoid the drama of such campaigns, pulls up her phone and makes two swipes. This whistles up a drone that delivers an automatic vacuum, a new and improved version that charges itself and goes about its business without human intervention. Why fix the old when the new is only two swipes away? (A clear win for consumerism.) This infuriates the dad, who has aligned himself with some old-fashioned principal of repair and thrift, who then yells, “Get that mechanical disgrace away from me!”
The dad then goes on a conquest to fix the vacuum. The son is along as a spectator, looking in on the anthropomorphic Roombas living in a cage at the hardware store (which he thinks are very cute), and trying to keep his dad out of trouble. The vacuum has become secondary, because the wife’s simple consumerist fix has thrown the dad into an identity crisis.
His failures raise his ire and voice, make his movements frantic. He encounters obstacle after obstacle, which heightens the farce and leads him on an odyssey to repair a mere vacuum. He leaves a wake of destruction for people to clean up behind him. (Most of the people cleaning up and saving this dad from self-destruction are women and children.) This is what we mean by “dad”: the middle-aged male with a beer-belly, who watches too much football but breaks out his Black-and-Decker tools to build a crooked deck onto the back of the house in a last ditch effort to salvage his manhood. The women and children must protect him from himself.
Don’t be like that, the cartoon intimates. Become a feminist or a gay or something, but don’t become a dad. Whatever you do, hire a professional to do your work. Better yet, throw it away and have Amazon Prime deliver a new one.
I’m a dad now, too, and this means I lie on the floor playing with baby dolls and magnetic tiles, and have become aware of the inescapable practicality of a minivan. When I see cartoons of this nature, I quiver. What if I am the incarnation of this? I admire competence in all its forms and fear incompetence more than death. What if my children grow into adulthood with an incompetent father? Let the mom take care of it. She has Amazon on her side and maybe Pinterest and no inhibitions about consumerism.
In Wendell Berry’s essay “A Few Words for Motherhood,” He writes of the joy of attending to the lambing barn in February. He admits that he belongs to these animals, and to his family, and that he cannot imagine being used up by anybody else.
It is visions like this that give me hope that another life is possible. Woman and men alike have asked that we be left alone, to not belong to anybody, to be free of the drudgery of being owned by another person. We men have always had that problem, and now it is worse, because we cannot belong to the women and they cannot belong to us. We become a kind of planetary household, with men and woman orbiting through it but never fully occupying the same life. It is in this idea of being owned by other people, that I find the coherency, the limits, and meaning of manhood.
Family is the most coherent sphere of meaning surrounding manhood. And womanhood, for that matter. This might include the biological offspring of two humans—it is the fastest and most sure way of bringing you into it—but it can also be the integration of people into a shared space and work. In family, it means that you do whatever is necessary for the flourishing of the household.
To be available for the flourishing of your people, a man needs to develop self-mastery, competence in at least one field of work, and the practical ability to translate higher order wisdom into daily goings-on. We’ve got to have something to give, or we will be infantile dependents, also known as boys. What am I? What are you? It is hard to say. It is easier to say what you are by who you have around you.