So I'm lying in bed with my reading lamp at my shoulder, and I'm distracted from my reading by seeing silhouetted on the wall a frankly ridiculous profusion of my chest hairs, thinking, I'm totally a man these days.
But I don't feel much like one. I lay awake at night - every night - with the oppressive feeling that the day is over and I have not been a part of it. The past two years or so have found me, for various reasons, mostly in a state of general indolence, but when I was occupied with work or study, this feeling got far far worse, which doesn't really seem to make sense, but probably because I, like most people, am looking at it the wrong way round.
As much as cleaning the house and selling fast food and wrestling with bureaucracy are important, and as much as I don't do these things enough and would like to, they are not traditionally the things that fill you with self-determined, grown-up manly (or womanly) pride. They are, actually, the minor humiliations you have to and can go through, for the sake of the actual benefits adulthood brings with it.
Most instances of my feeling like an adult, like my own man, like a part of the world, have had to do with writing entries much like this one. Which isn't what immediately springs to mind when you think of responsible, involved and productive community-aware grown-upness. How people are actually affected by my behaviour has little to do with this feeling - that's a moral consideration - all my drive for adultness is about is having my voice heard.
Specifically, feeling like something should be done and therefore doing it. Motivated by the emotion. Writing entries, saving dolphins, jumping off buildings, killing nuns, getting an earring, learning belly-dancing, eating ice cream - anything so long as you're doing it less because it's sensible than because you're into it. Done in spite and by virtue of your being a responsible adult in charge of his own destiny. There's no point in being a functioning member of society if you don't get to do stupid shit just because you want to. Eventually philosophers will realise this is the apex civilisation has always been striving towards. I have a vague idea that Nietzsche already did.
Stupid shit is only a part of this, of course. While the world does need to hear your stupid statements about things, it also needs to hear your intelligent ones. If I think - no, feel - that Israel should open up its gates to asylum seekers and take care of them, I don't need to have figured out how to deal with the ensuing economic burden or stop the migration from becoming a massive influx before I express my opinion - sorry; feelings - on the matter. They need to hear I'm against it even before they hear why they should be too. In this case it's not even so much for the sake of the refugees as it is for my own basic dignity and sense of existence.
If my emotions have no clout with my behaviour, I have no clout with anything.
Showing posts with label manhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manhood. Show all posts
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Gender Politics
I'm probably barking up the wrong tree with this, but I'm reading The Importance of Being Earnest, and a short while back I read The Great Gatsby, and I'm getting a similar picture from both about what seems to have been a Victorian feminine ideal.
I call it the witty idiot. It's an intelligent, presumably capable woman, trying very hard to pigeonhole herself into a position inappropriate for her. Presumably all young women would behave like little girls - such is the fashion - but when these women go girly and faux-innocent, what I find jarring the Victorian man apparently finds attractive. Oooh, it's a 20 year old pretending to be 9! How charming!
We needn't necessarily stray as far as the Victorian era. I get similarly irritated whenever I have the misfortune of being subjected to Gilmore Girls. It's the same idea. Unusually intelligent and mature women behaving and talking like little girls -ostensibly for the sake of wit and humour, but the performance is pursued so relentlessly and comprehensively I just don't buy that that's all it is. It emits the sour reek of infantilization.
Why do I even care? I'm a man. Well, first of all, this might be a good opportunity to come out of the closet: I am a raving feminist. I wonder how many of my friends know that. However, I suspect that there's something more than a desire for social change driving me here. It seems to me that the same way too many women seem to be just girls with curves, a whole lot of men are just boys with muscles. That's where I come in.
It takes - or should take - more to be a man than just self-sufficiency. What women seem to lack in independence and accountability, men appear to lack in active compassion. I don't know what I'm basing this equivalization on but I'm going to stick with it. It's almost as if one sex manages the doing and the other the caring. I suppose there's an evolutionary logic behind this, but that doesn't really make it any less pathetic. Being an adult - here's that word again - means being an active, involved human being. In order to be active you've got to be able to stand your ground; in order to be human you've got to be able to want to for reasons other than your own advancement.
I'm getting ahead of myself. What upsets me is how little room I allow compassion in determining my actions. This isn't to say I'm a boorish, unthinking thug. I've just recently described how timid and ridiculously inoffensive I tend to be around people. But I'm almost never motivated by love in my actions. It's always a decision - sometimes with an "ethical" rationale - but never engaging people or taking an action towards them because I love them. It's like I don't consider it a good enough reason. I don't have sufficient respect for love. I end up a deficient man.
In other news, remember that plastic bag scene in American Beauty? I had a moment like that today. With an actual plastic bag. I was a little transfixed by it; so much that I didn't even bother to pick it up like I usually do, loyal citizen and civil servant that I am. I do genuinely believe that from the right perspective anything in the world can be dazzlingly beautiful, but in truth the incident itself wasn't so deeply moving as it was amusingly reminiscent of that awesome, awesome flick. And it's a good excuse for a clip:
I call it the witty idiot. It's an intelligent, presumably capable woman, trying very hard to pigeonhole herself into a position inappropriate for her. Presumably all young women would behave like little girls - such is the fashion - but when these women go girly and faux-innocent, what I find jarring the Victorian man apparently finds attractive. Oooh, it's a 20 year old pretending to be 9! How charming!
We needn't necessarily stray as far as the Victorian era. I get similarly irritated whenever I have the misfortune of being subjected to Gilmore Girls. It's the same idea. Unusually intelligent and mature women behaving and talking like little girls -ostensibly for the sake of wit and humour, but the performance is pursued so relentlessly and comprehensively I just don't buy that that's all it is. It emits the sour reek of infantilization.
Why do I even care? I'm a man. Well, first of all, this might be a good opportunity to come out of the closet: I am a raving feminist. I wonder how many of my friends know that. However, I suspect that there's something more than a desire for social change driving me here. It seems to me that the same way too many women seem to be just girls with curves, a whole lot of men are just boys with muscles. That's where I come in.
It takes - or should take - more to be a man than just self-sufficiency. What women seem to lack in independence and accountability, men appear to lack in active compassion. I don't know what I'm basing this equivalization on but I'm going to stick with it. It's almost as if one sex manages the doing and the other the caring. I suppose there's an evolutionary logic behind this, but that doesn't really make it any less pathetic. Being an adult - here's that word again - means being an active, involved human being. In order to be active you've got to be able to stand your ground; in order to be human you've got to be able to want to for reasons other than your own advancement.
I'm getting ahead of myself. What upsets me is how little room I allow compassion in determining my actions. This isn't to say I'm a boorish, unthinking thug. I've just recently described how timid and ridiculously inoffensive I tend to be around people. But I'm almost never motivated by love in my actions. It's always a decision - sometimes with an "ethical" rationale - but never engaging people or taking an action towards them because I love them. It's like I don't consider it a good enough reason. I don't have sufficient respect for love. I end up a deficient man.
In other news, remember that plastic bag scene in American Beauty? I had a moment like that today. With an actual plastic bag. I was a little transfixed by it; so much that I didn't even bother to pick it up like I usually do, loyal citizen and civil servant that I am. I do genuinely believe that from the right perspective anything in the world can be dazzlingly beautiful, but in truth the incident itself wasn't so deeply moving as it was amusingly reminiscent of that awesome, awesome flick. And it's a good excuse for a clip:
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