The Last Good Man: Killing Masqueraded Masculinity
Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.
“Hey dad, look.”
I was in a spacious Chevy aerovan, sitting in the back back while a few of my teammates were in the middle.
“What, son?” The coach asked in a deep baritone voice.
“It’s a mobile home.” The player pointed to the side of the overpass, his finger angled at a man who appeared to be homeless.
The player and his good friend laughed heartily, and the coach smiled, chuckled slightly, and “reprimanded” his son.
“Son, it’s not right to tease the less fortunate,” he corrected all while fighting back a grin.
This was an example of hegemonic masculinity. This is an example of why women wonder where all the good men have gone.
Fast forward a few years. I was waiting after high school late, as my mom worked there and a staff meeting was going long (and I hadn’t gotten my driving license even though I was 17 and a half, passive masculinity which I’ll describe later).
There was a new kid at school, and being an insecure teenager, I was vying for newfound friendship with him without being too forward or excited about it. We chatted about our lives and the daily grind of teenage-ing near the school gym/showers.
Alas, two girls joined us in our wait after school with us, both of the pretty variety. Efforts at establishing friendship suddenly stalled into a form of mating competition.
They left soon afterward and he beckoned me to come close.
“I’d love to ‘accidentally’ see them in the shower.”
My moral radar was tingling, obviously. Yet I’d be lying if I said at that time that the prospect wasn’t appealing. We moved on to a new topic of my pick, though my heart yearned to speak up (and to check my own lust).
This was an example of reinforcing toxic masculinity. This is an example of why women wonder all the good men have gone.
More fast forwarding, more confusion of being manly. More masquerading masculinity.
I got my first girlfriend. Finally. After a self-imposed forbidding of romantic involvement throughout high school, this crazily suppressed guy had opportunity to taste and see intimacy and closeness.
Yet for me, truth be told? That meant figuring out specific ways to act out sexual fantasy. I sure as Hell wasn’t told anything at my private Christian school about how to be a sexually whole person, let alone how to fulfill their bizarre and impossible notions of purity and chastity.
I was isolated, confused, and sexually mad.
And I’m not alone.
Although the crisis is real concerning the absence of good men, I’d argue this mythos of the death of the good man is actually a good thing.
Why do I believe such a thing is a myth and myth worth losing? What do I believe ought to take its place?
The rise of “true men.”
After the continued fallout of the men perpetrating the hundreds of #metoo accounts from various women, it seemed, if for a second, that radically different portraits of men would be shown, not only in media but also in everyday ordinary life. Perhaps we would put to bed assumptions involving (but not limited to): dating roles, male isolation, mansplaining, predatory dating behavior, hierarchical competition between men, and fierce suppression of male emotion excluding anger.
And yet, whether you land in a more traditional mold of understanding masculinity or this new reimagining experiment (kind of outlined, but I still don’t see specific models of “neo” or progressive masculinity), women are still getting assaulted by men. Stalked by men. Confused by men.
And much less insidious but still very damaging?
Ignored by men.
Several factors have brought the rise of the seeming “ignoring” of women by men. Digital addiction has exacerbated what already was lacking.
Where our fathers fathers pursued career, status, and endless accumulation of material over emotional connection with women (and other men), now any sort of connection with women is dwindling. The sins of our fathers fathers still plague us, if less so, but our new idols are no less dysfunctional.
With online anonymity and subsequent ghosting tendencies becoming the norm, more and more women dodge the sins of previous patriarchal standards of behavior while surviving the new quasi “progressive,” quasi patriarchal norms of today in men.
Where we had men flippantly joke about looking up a woman’s skirt and sometimes actually doing so, now men follow women on Instagram and objectify them privately. Where we had men catcall women on the street or tell them to smile abrasively, now men send explicit photos to anonymous women and pay money to elicit women for self stimulation online in the comfort of their own home.
Whether it’s the old masculinity or new, something isn’t clicking. Women are still being slighted, just in different capacities and in evolving confusion.
Men still live in shame due to standards of masculinity they are either explicitly encouraged to embody or implicitly influenced to embody.
What sort of masculinities are embodied? Or, as I’d like to argue, are masqueraded?
Well, let’s dive back into the examples I used earlier.
When my high school basketball teammate ridiculed a man for his homeless state, that is a case of hegemonic masculinity. It is ascribing a sense of social hierarchy with himself being placed above and the other man below.
Examples of hegemonic masculinity, or “men tearing down other men in twisted forms of status “one-upping’” (not so clinical of a definition) are commonplace. The classic place this occurs is sports, whether it be professional, college, and even casually amongst other men, but it is not only present here. Vocational ascension, material accumulation, sexual “conquest,” and almost any aspect of life as a guy are potentially grounds for proving worth as a man, specifically by being perceived as ahead of other men. I myself have struggled with having to prove my intelligence as “ahead” of other male peers. Only within the past few years have I not, casually or otherwise, torn down men around me for grammatical inconsistencies in their speech or teased them for faulty logic or shallow thinking.
It is a space where though I’ve seen growth, I desire further gains.
Though similar in meaning, toxic masculinity is a further intensified form of hegemonic masculinity. When my peer hinted at potentially predatory behavior toward women, and assumed I would say nothing (which I did for days before my conscience won out), this is a clear example of toxic masculinity.
We need not look far to see examples of this in media or in real life. The ongoing fallout of Harvey Weinstein, the flippant and openly crass comments of 45, and the dozens of male pastors falling from grace often due to sexually predatory behavior, toxic masculinity exists openly but also subtly. Even my beloved Star Wars, under closer examination, reveals a creepy if “charming” Han Solo exploiting Leah in that famous and “romantic” kiss scene in Empire Strikes Back. Women may be able to detect openly misogynist men, but toxic masculinity can work itself out even amidst “nice guys” and within passive masculinity. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Finally, my own case “under the knife” so to speak, has examples of the two masquerading masculinities along with the third I'll describe in deeper detail. By mixing lust with love in my first relationship, I placed myself on a hierarchy of needs, or hegemonic masculinity, deeming my desire to act out fantasy as more important than loving my partner well and placing her needs ahead of (or at least on equal ground of) mine. Further, this was toxic masculinity because I learned quickly how to elicit responses from my partner that had nothing to do with caring for her and had everything to do with self satisfaction and self preservation.
And here, upon mention of self preservation, can we describe passive masculinity.
Harder to define and challenging to show example of, passive masculinity is, in a sense, on the opposite end of toxic masculinity.
Whereas toxic masculinity has to do with over-identifying with hierarchical standards of assumed maleness, passive masculinity has to do with dormancy, a kind of male “falling asleep.” For fear of being ‘that guy,’ many passive men are ‘no guy,’ opting out not only on dating and pursuing women but often in pursuing life.
This concept hits home for me. For years and years, to some extent, I fell asleep. And I am definitely not alone.
While many men, due in part to personal disposition, cultural upbringing or other factoring, perform hegemonic and it’s uglier cousin toxic masculinity openly without fallout and with a lot of reinforcement, many men opt to “sit in the back of class” and allow life to occur to them. The opposite of the ambitious, corporate go getter who burns the rest of his life down in purity of being the “man’s man,” the passively masculine man neither has the desire to be the man’s man nor to pursue anything which might threaten his protected and specific maleness.
We see this in the rise of online dating & ghosting, vocational complacency, and self-determined bouts of isolation prevalent in men. Many might be quick to blame video games, blame porn, or blame some other kind of numbing and coping behavior, but the truth is more nuanced than that. These men, the guy writing this now, do not have capacity to consistently embody hegemonic or toxic masculinity, and this isn’t necessarily due to a higher, more moral ground for passive men than misogynist. The other two forms of masculinity are more task oriented forms of performing maleness: working 50+ hour weeks, ascending corporate ladders, aggressively pursuing romance with women, etc. These forms are more about what supposed “real” men are supposed to do, yet have no answer for they are to be. However, passive men often perform how “real” men are supposed to think or feel. By numbing out from life and suppressing emotional exposure, passive men perform the “real” maleness of thinking about big topics/interests including sports, video games, cars, and other blue collar skill knowledge, while minimizing deep topics, like introspection or emotional well-being. Meanwhile, the “real” maleness of feeling is through expressing anger about those “damn liberals” or “damn conservatives” via social media ranting or by lambasting strangers through online gaming about their proposed skill efficiency and the strangers proposed deficiency.
What we find, universally, is that all of these masquerades inform men to deny who they really are in favor of either who they are supposed to be or who they are not supposed to be. For every openly misogynistic man belittling, berating, or assaulting women, there is a passive man operating primarily by not being a misogynist, who still objectifies and hurts women by inaction. They both land on some form of performed maleness and they both leave men with fragile egos, wounded hearts, and compartmentalized souls while leaving women confused at best and reeling at worst.
The answer is not for men to become “good.” Many of the “good” men we have all looked up to have had some sort of deficiency uncovered and their hero status shattered due to their zealous if misguided attempt to be “good” men all the while denying their faults.
It’s the system that’s failing men, not men who are failing the system.
Whereas in biblical narratives we have compelling if often troubling accounts of men struggling to become who God intended them to be as men, we now have sets of mythological male traits that some men fight tooth and nail to acquire (and will crush anyone in their way in the pursuit) while others give up on early and dwell instead into seclusion (because they know they will not crush anyone in their way in a pursuit they could never attain).
Which brings us, finally, into why all of the haters of The Last Jedi are wrong. And why Luke Skywalker, upon his second viewing of the twin suns, perfectly exemplifies a “true man.”
Here is Part 2, The Rise of the True Man. Enjoy.