Feminism Doesn't Need Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris Needs Feminism

When we think of men’s health issues, we frequently put mental health issues as an afterthought or overlook them altogether. We think of prostate health, gym and muscle issues, track-and-field issues, and, predominantly, American football injuries. We are more likely to associate concussions with men’s health than therapy.

The modern American myth of masculinity doesn’t allow for the kind of soft, fungible weakness that mental health conveys, and to say that one’s feelings are hurt or that one’s sense of belonging is damaged is tantamount to emasculation. In America, men aren’t supposed to have tender feelings or belongingness needs. I’m reminded of the Chuck Norris NRA ad that reads, “Chuck Norris doesn’t join associations; associations join Chuck Norris.” I have even joined in the fun, making up my own Chuck Norris joke and playing along.[1] It’s lighthearted and amusing until we unpack it just the tiniest bit and see that all these Chuck Norris jokes [2] are one of the many ways in which we bring out the cult and code of masculinity.

Think of any of the Chuck Norris memes you have heard. One of my favorites in this vein is Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer; it’s a pity he never cries, but there’s also the tried-and-true statement that Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas, and that the universe is expanding because everything is trying to get away from Chuck Norris. The code of masculinity appears at the core of these ideas: No Sissy Stuff,  Be a Big Wheel, Be a Sturdy Oak, Give ‘em Hell: [3]none of these elements includes asking for help because all of these elements deny that a real man would ever need help.

But how isolating and sad is that?

All of us, as humans, are built as social creatures. We have belongingness needs at the core of who and what we are, and to act contrary to those is to inflict harm on ourselves and on others. We are all complicit in this, not only the men who deny themselves help or the needs that they are ignoring, but also the women who uphold this strong-but-silent-oak measure of masculinity, who impart it to their sons and brothers, their husbands and friends.

This is everyone’s problem to fix. Thankfully we don’t have to fix it alone, because it simply cannot be done in isolation. We need to fix this at the community level, with therapy and men’s resource groups, with voices and essays and posters. We need to have every man woman and child be aware of the problem, and it needs to be highlighted in every profession.

And we need to do it now, because there isn’t a moment to waste. Every day 117 Americans die by suicide; the overwhelming number are white men (seventy percent), with the largest group being middle aged white men (45-64). And for every successful suicide, there are twenty-five attempts. Silence about this matter is active violence for everyone, especially the men who are too ashamed and afraid to ask for help, or, worse, who think they don’t deserve it or that help is something for women and children, but never for them. We must bring mental health access to those who deny the need the most. Chuck Norris is counting on us.

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1. Chuck Norris knows who John Gault is.

2. Both of them. Only two are jokes; all the other sayings are simply fact.

3. Robert Brannon & Deborah S. David, The Forty Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, (Random House: 1976).

From Inmates to Democratic Sweethearts of the World

In order to break down the distinctions between home and the world and women’s place as of the home and decidedly not of the world, Floyd Dell finds “it will be necessary to break down all the codes and restrictions and prejudices that keep women out of the great world.” Notice that Dell writes all. Not some, not even most will suffice to accomplish our goals. All. This is not merely a suggestion or even an action plan; it is an indictment. Every single scrap and iota of the previously held dichotomy must go. It must be eradicated so that women can cease to be inmates of the home and be transformed, liberated to be the democratic sweethearts of the world with whom men initially fell in love and with whom they will craft lives of partnership and promise.

But as much as men might say they want it, Dell warns, they have to face that underneath it all they really fear women’s liberation from the home. They prefer to keep masculinity a mystery, a space outside mundane concerns, to make a haven of all things male and, by extension, to relegate all things not delightful to the realm of pedestrian household concerns.

In the end, feminism assures us, we will revel in having sweetheart partners, but yes, they will come at the cost of making profane everything masculine. We all deserve this, but men stand to lose much in it all. There are those among us who would make this transition as easy as possible, and I count myself among them. But I will not, nor do I think any among us should, allow men’s discomfort at shrinking privilege allow anyone to be an inmate.

If we are all free, then we will likely disagree more, and more loudly, and life might be messier and less comfortable overall. I am reasonably certain that all this will be our future. We will all of us see the mundane as more personally ours as well as the whole of the world’s stage. This is the price for being a fully inducted member of society, for being a citizen, for being an adult.

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Floyd Dell, “ Feminism for Men . . . in 1914,” in Okun, Rob, Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 215.

A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway

Let’s start this rant with a reminder that Hemingway, a man’s man in the expat days at the freewheeling turn of the twentieth century, was a mosaic of the masculinity narrative: a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, gun-wielding, suit-wearing, elephant-killing, womanizing force on safari and rolling through the salons of Paris, casting his personality into all the nooks and crannies around him, filling the space and sucking out the air. But for all his seeming success, prowess and power, he was a deeply unsatisfied man, one who would eventually face a firing squad of his own making as he shot himself, ending a life that had become too painful to continue.

If not even white men with enough privilege to leave home, live off the income of their families while carousing in foreign lands can stand the message we are all of us supposed to live and uphold, what chance does anyone of the rest of us ever have?

The contemporary art and literature are rife with discontent and disgust at the modern, pre-crash era, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to any number of works decrying corporate man, to the newly crafted voice of fear and uncertainty that is science fiction and all the mistrust of the dehumanizing elements and aspects of technology that the genre allows us to explore. The twenties wasn’t just fast and loose in the dance hall or on Wall Street; in Chicago and New York, the Italian mob was fighting tooth and nail for power over turf and transit and taxes, the usual purview of governments from time immemorial.

After the crash, those in power, most notably the FDR’s brain trust, the advisors who helped craft the New Deal, saw that traditional American adherence to the hands-off capitalist model, more narrative and rhetoric than actual policy or procedure, had taken the whole of the country from bad beginnings to worse ends by leaving too many holes and not providing any safety nets. The frontier was closed by the department of the interior in 1890 and the era of Industrialization was officially king, but within a generation, policies that favored the factory and its owner were decried as downright un-American, a callous framework for abuse and neglect that were actively sought to be ferreted out by the New Deal.

Today, we have again been seduced by the narrative and rhetoric of self-sufficiency and every man for himself, only now our society provides even less support for the corporate man or the manufacturing Joe. If we do not quickly reverse our course, it will again take us from bad beginnings to disastrous endings, and the writing is on the wall in the blood of black men, police officers and elementary school children of how destructive a path this is.

“Healthy masculinity means hope for the world in places where we have long felt only hopelessness.” One wonders if Hemingway would have liked more options. For all that he succeeded in a society where Wilde was condemned and imprisoned, it seems that Hemingway was the least happy and satisfied of his gang, the most interesting people in the world, while Wilde was vaguely bemused by everyone else’s confusion. While he may well have lost sleep and worried privately, Wilde certainly managed to hold the public veneer of one who was far removed and likely above the fray of common concerns such as adherence to the social code that others crafted long before he was born and to which he had never subscribed.

Oliver Wilde’s weapons remained, as ever, his words and his kind, unflappable demeanor in the face of hostility, confusion, fear, accusation and incarceration. Ernest Hemingway, steeped in the masculinity narrative that expressed itself through guns, wars, knives, domination had little in his toolbox to deal with his life off the page. Failed marriages, lost friends, rejection of family and country doesn’t disappear with a pulitzer, and he ultimately turned to the only tool that made any sense to him.

We absolutely must stop shooting. Ourselves, as well as each other. We need to stop the war on men, the war on women, the war on the poor, the war on the weak, the war on the old, the war on children. We need to stop. One century is long enough.

#StopShooting.

Wall Street, Wealth, and Masculinity

Salon recently ran an article on Sam Polk, a noted insider of Wall Street, who is decrying the greed as wealth addiction and laying a fair chunk of the cause at toxic masculinity. This intrigues me. I can completely see how toxic masculinity would express itself through extreme wealth, and especially on Wall Street. What if other highly competitive, high-powered positions? I'm thinking of attorneys in particular, who make a high-dollar sporting arena of people's legal issues. For a fine example of a woman playing this role, see Annalise Keating's (played masterfully by Viola Davis) character in How to Get Away With Murder, or Patty Hews (gloriously brought to the small screen by Glenn Close) character in Damages. Both attorney and stock broker are high octane power dealers, making the rules conform to them, leveraging the playing field at every turn in the pursuit of more. Portrayals of high-fuel politicians come to mind as well, especially Frank Underwood in House of Cards.

Does feminism have a role in looking at the types of carrier paths we consider as individuals and that we value as a society?

What We Gain With Healthy Masculinity Is What We Need the Most

Michael Kaufman writes that there is “no such thing” as healthy masculinity. I get where he’s coming from; I really do. But there is healthy masculinity, and finding it will go far to giving us, as a society, what we need the most.

What is achieved in men’s resource groups around the country is the idea of a self that matters, of identifying privilege when we carry it with us into a room, of comporting ourselves as beings with responsibility and accountability in equal measure, deserving to be the role-models we have been deemed.

We need a masculinity that is seen as power and voice. In a world focused on force, this is a little mind-crackingly foreign, but hear me out. This voice can be had by anyone, man or woman, and it harkens more to the original greek idea of phallus, that of power as opposed to penis.

When we value power over force and ultimate come to see force as the enemy of power, the agent by which power is destroyed or shattered or given away, we can come to see ourselves as the truly powerful beings that we are. Once we recognize our own power, we can begin to cultivate power in others. This self-awareness of power and its employment in meaningful ways is itself a healthy masculinity, while I see the nurturing of that power in one’s self and in others as deeply feminine, and giving rise to a far healthier femininity than any we have seen lately.

These ideas of masculine and feminine are not rooted in biology but in spirit, and harken to eastern ideas of balance. Perhaps meditation and t’ai chi and yoga every day won’t save the world, but would it be so disastrous to try? What if we taught balance in schools alongside math, that the idea of personal choices and balance was no different than two trains leaving different stations, and possibly that solving the choices problems were more important than the trains one?

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Michael Kaufman, “Any Gender is a Drag,” in Okun, Rob, Voice Male (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 363

#BeAMan

in Bosnia, a group formed to coach war-raised men different ways of being - can we start the #BeAMan club in the Roanoke Valley? How do we make such a club an invitation and not a condemnation?

Tough Guise

Wow. I watched the documentary Tough Guise, and it left me with so many thoughts, not the least of which is: Where has this movement been in the past seventeen years? I know that my friends and I talked about this back in 1990, (and I was mostly ridiculed, but that's what friends do), but I had no idea that there was a Real Voice out there, making noise and yet being ignored.

I'm really excited by the fact that we have an opportunity to start crafting a twenty-first century feminism, one which encourages all of us to step away from the narrative of competition and the dichotomy of dominance and submission, to interrupt the violence inherent in the hierarchy presented by the patriarchy and to embrace, nurture and share the path of cooperation. But this leads to a very real dilemma: How do we do that? How, when conditioning starts so early (I'm thinking of the images of the young boys flexing their muscles), do we avoid telling the men in our lives who and what they are supposed to be? How are we supportive of their journey to discover and possibly create from scratch an identity that accords with their inner selves, and what do we as their community members do while they are in flux on this journey?

The twentieth century model of manhood diminishes the spectrum through which men can experience the world, so it not surprising that when faced with an opportunity and encouragement to "be authentic," conditioned men might feel adrift, or possibly even insulted. Certainly the dominant culture doesn't want the parameters of masculinity to change, and society has reacted violently when it was threatened. I'm thinking most specifically of the case of Malcolm X, the leader of the Black Power movement who shifted his stance from one of violent disruption to peaceful cooperation and was gunned down for his new position.

If we no longer define success as a function of physical prowess, how do we define it, and how do we achieve it together?

I absolutely loved this documentary. The image of 70s Luke vs. 90s Luke will be with me forever. Nota Bene: though Katz used the words inconsistently, I think now is a good time to point out that "male" is not a noun and "man" is not an adjective. We have come a long way in the last couple decades as we get comfortable with the terminology of gender issues.

"A Gun Buying Death Spiral"

We, as a nation, have collectively lost our minds when it comes to guns.

Commentators suggest Americans are now trapped in a gun-buying death spiral, where mass shootings spark talk of lax gun control measures, prompting many to believe they need to go out and buy more guns. Then there’s another mass shooting, and on it goes.

How many guns do we need? Well, that's getting harder and harder to figure, since the fear is getting larger every day. With guns, as with money, it's hard to know how much is enough. Brent Nicholson's hoard in South Carolina is confounding police.

“This has completely changed our definition of an ass-load of guns,” said Chesterfield County Sheriff Jay Brooks. Six weeks after the discovery, officers are still cataloging the weapons, many of which have proved stolen, and the final tally is expected to be close to 5,000. “I don’t know if there’s ever been (a seizure) this big anywhere before,” Brooks says.

Gun violence is persistent, pernicious, and pervasive, with over 355 mass shootings this year alone, more than one a day. The conservative right, speaking on behalf of the NRA, wants us to believe that the answer to this insane situation is to make guns easier to buy. Last month we used guns frequently, but not necessarily wisely.