Grow Up, Men (w/ Phil Christman)
Added 2023-06-30 16:00:30 +0000 UTCIn this follow-up to "What's Wrong with Men?, Matt and Sam talk with the essayist and critic Phil Christman about his 2018 Hedgehog Review article, "What Is It Like To Be a Man?"—an article that figured prominently in their conversation—as well as two posts responding to the episode published on his always excellent Substack, The Tourist. They discuss how the discourse about men has evolved in recent years, the darker and more deranged consequences of an "abstract rage to protect," some of the ways gender and class might relate to each other, and more about Matt's psyche than you might care to know.
Sources:
Phil Christman, How To Be Normal (2022)
"What Is It Like To Be a Man?" Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018
"Guy stuff. Boy time. Brosephery." The Tourist, June 11, 2023
"Manfulness. Hot guy stuff. Convening a bro-seph bro-dsky reading group." The Tourist, June 22, 2023
Leonard Michaels, The Men’s Club, (1981)
Rudyard Kipling, “If—“ (1941)
Comments
Really interesting discussion. I’ve been wrestling a lot the last handful of years with my own relationship to masculinity and trying to balance all that entails. My wife is very patient and has given me room for growth and discovery. I particularly related to Matt’s comments about class and the tension between being in an environment of above my station but wanting to assert myself and the urge for self protection. In bhuddism it’s taught that there is no inherent self and the kind of decoupling of the perception of self from everyday experience and that idea has provided me with a lot of ground to consider the role of social programming in gender. In any case I’m a non college educated working class person who recently made the jump from the blue collar labor side into a more white collar position in my job and I’m still parsing through what that means for me as a “man” with the working class background I come from and the values I was taught to respect vs the need to provide for my family in the best way possible. In any case once again thanks for a great thought provoking discussion.
Kevin
2023-07-28 19:25:14 +0000 UTCJust happened upon this lucid passage from Gary Wills’ ‘John Wayne’s America’: “Wayne is the ideal to which no boy’s father, or coach, or teacher, or scoutmaster, or religious minister can quite live up. Yet even the ideal figure is flawed, which offers a partial justification for the actual fathers, a way of understanding them. Newt Gingrich is almost a laboratory case of this effect. Too young (five years old) to take in the message of Sands of Iwo Jima when it appeared, he went four times to a revival when he was in his teens. Gingrich and his mother had been deserted by his natural father, and Gingrich was trying- not very successfully-to win the esteem of his step-father, who was a career Army man. Wayne was both an alternative to that parent and an excuse for him. If the Army toughens men only to make them survive, then to be affectless is to show the highest affection.”
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-07-11 05:43:05 +0000 UTCI think specifically “the sibling society”. You can more or less skip iron john.
Dan
2023-07-06 05:00:07 +0000 UTCI heard a lot of concerns about sons relating to their fathers, hardly anything about fathers to children. Those concerns were mostly those of early-middle-aged men. Cool. But still, a bit narrow. -- I'd really encourage you to cast your net farther out. Masses of dad books wallow in bogus chivalry and lachrymose vanity; they make your average sitcom dad look like the brainchild of Judith Butler.
Kent Miller
2023-07-06 00:22:57 +0000 UTCWhat a lovely discussion. Thank you all for this. In particular as a gay man who grew up lower/lower-middle class and wandered or fought into the privilege of whatever a fancy college gives you, Matt's landlord anecdote hit me hard. I keep thinking, wherever I am right now, it will fall apart tomorrow and that the likely scenario is disaster. I hadn't mapped that to masculinity and something like the abstract rage to protect (or defend in this case seems like a more appropriate word here?) but it makes a lot of sense through that prism. Anyway, thank you, I really appreciated it.
Ryan Erickson
2023-07-05 03:04:30 +0000 UTCWhich rules.
Adam Lewis
2023-07-02 22:25:04 +0000 UTCtotally agreed with the ending point about how the questions of “how to be a man” and “is masculinity/gender even the right frame for all this” have to go hand in hand somehow. I kind of wonder if the critique/attack on gendered discourses did actually have to come first, to fight on the field of definition and *then* be able to ask “how should i be a man” with a new baseline for what “man” would mean in that sentence. It definitely seems like that language of critique has hit a wall sort of, but I wonder if that’s because it hasn’t rly been applied as a transitional concept but instead an end in itself?
Andrés Emil González
2023-07-02 20:22:40 +0000 UTCI will say for the record though I am a woman who was born into the professional class.
don't come here
2023-07-01 04:40:09 +0000 UTCthe mentor/prof as boss thing too! Jesus Christ.
don't come here
2023-07-01 04:38:35 +0000 UTCgod that example about apologizing to the teacher for your performance--I've done that a dozen times and I never knew anyone else did
don't come here
2023-07-01 04:36:23 +0000 UTCHave you guys watched "The Ruling Class" with Peter O'Toole?
David Gillman
2023-07-01 00:34:06 +0000 UTCIt's still funny to me that we forgot the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by the mythopoetic men's movement.
genrepunk
2023-06-30 20:35:19 +0000 UTCSuch a good discussion. Don't want to focus on this but I still see an inverted hierarchy in some corners of my more social justice oriented hobbyist communities, where those at the top freely denounce those beneath them, and I feel an impulse to abase myself. Anyway, in the moment you raised finding a way to move forward in the conversation about being a man, I believe you already had. It's about all of who we are, how the particulars in our identity collide and interact. There's still a mental trap in that, a subtler form of totalizing where each aspect is seen as neatly separable to say nothing of unchanging and solid, sure, but recognizing that our unique pitfalls in how we perform masculinity are a function of who are and where we've been is key. At the same time identifying the pitfalls is different from answering how we ought to live. Being an adult, meaningfully caring for the people in our lives instead of striving toward some grand gesture, is as good a start as I've ever heard.
genrepunk
2023-06-30 20:33:27 +0000 UTCI’d pay you guys $100 to give an honest review on Robert Bly’s work.
Dan
2023-06-30 20:07:05 +0000 UTC
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