Self-Made Man (31 page)

I got my answer.

When we arrived at the lodge, we had all been assigned to subtherapy groups of four or five. In these we were expected to convene over the course of the weekend to explore more intimately the things we'd discussed in the workshops. Corey and I were in the same group, and we hit it off right away. There was a Ping-Pong table in a small room behind the living room fireplace, and we'd played a couple of games together. He was likable and easy, not the kind of guy you'd think was haunted by self-loathing and doubt. But he was.

He shared his drawing eagerly. He'd called it “Solo Warrior,” and it was a picture of a guy who looked like a cross between Lancelot and Grizzly Adams. He was carrying a shield and a sword, and he'd been wandering in the forest for a very long time. He was out there, Corey explained, because he was an outcast, barred from entering the villages he came upon.

“Why can't he enter the villages?” asked Paul.

“Because he's not good enough yet,” said Corey. “He needs to perfect himself before he can join civilization.”

“And what's his Achilles' heel?”

Corey paused. “He's needy. He should be able to live alone bravely without help, but he can't. He wants love. He needs it.”

“And it's that very need that makes him too imperfect to enter the village?” asked Paul.

“Yeah,” said Corey.

Later, in our small group, Corey talked more about himself. Sharing intimate therapeutic time with him and the rest of these guys shattered for me another of the stereotypes I'd always harbored about men, the idea that they don't talk about their relationships, especially not with each other. I'd always assumed that they weren't nearly as concerned as women are with the minutiae of intimacy. But after listening to these guys I thought it was probably truer to say that most guys had simply never had the opportunity or license to explore the subject.

In our group we spent the bulk of the time talking about their relationships past and present. All of them were in relationships, and all of them felt concerned about and insecure in them. Especially Corey. He had a beautiful girlfriend, he said, but it sounded as if he couldn't enjoy his time with her because he was constantly afraid of losing her to another guy, specifically another guy who made more money, a guy of higher social status. Guys were always buzzing around her, he said, and this drove him crazy, partly because she indulged their attentions.

Here he was, the outwardly powerful masculine ideal, an outcast in his own life, excruciatingly insecure in his position, compelled to make a brave show of it on the outside, forbidden to show weakness, yet plagued by it nonetheless.

Thinking back on it, I wondered now how much I and every other girl in school had invested in worshipping guys like him from a distance, and how much sustaining our admiration, acting the part, had cost them. I suppose Corey symbolized a lot of what I thought I was going to find in manhood or had envied in it, so much of what I and the culture at large had projected onto it: privilege, confidence, power. And learning the truth about this pose, both firsthand as Ned, and secondhand through Corey's and these other guys' confessions, learning the truth about the burden of holding up that illusion of impregnability, taught me an unforgettable lesson about the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex's symbiotic role in it.

We needed men not to be needy, and so they weren't. But, of course, ultimately we did need and want them to be needy, to express their feelings and be vulnerable. And they needed that, too. They needed permission to be weak, and even to fail sometimes. But somewhere in there the signals usually got crossed or lost altogether, which often left both men and women feeling unfulfilled, resentful and alone.

Corey wasn't the only physically imposing guy I met in the men's group, and he wasn't the only guy who had issues about it, not just issues about vulnerability, romantic or otherwise, but specifically about body image.

Most of us who grew up on women's studies knew intimately the struggles that we and most of our women friends had been through on this front: body as battleground. Mutilation, objectification, violation. These were key words in the feminist vocabulary, and still are, and that vocabulary was built on verifiable female experience. We saw ourselves in it because most of us had been on crash diets in our teens, obsessed about our noses, breast and ass sizes, our leg hair, our pubic hair and our menstrual flow. Many of us had known or been anorexics or bulimics. Most of us couldn't think of a single female friend who hadn't been through a war with her own body. The truth of the claim was obvious.

But likewise most of us didn't know, or didn't think we knew, any guys who had the same problems. They ate what they wanted. They weren't ashamed of their fat—most of them had none—or their body hair or the way their jeans fit. We resented their insouciance. To us, body issues were a woman's problem imposed by the culture of fashion, by men's rapacious eyes and of course, by the insidious product of the two: the beauty myth.

Before I took on Ned, it had never occurred to me to consider whether or not men, too, had body image problems, except maybe about hair loss and penis size. Even as Ned I thought that most of the discomfort and inadequacy I felt about being a small guy had to do with being a woman trying to pass as a man. That and my own internalized “feminine” neuroses. But as with so many other things about male experience, I had my eyes opened in the group, and my assumptions challenged.

At my first men's meeting I met a guy named Toby. He was built like an English bulldog, with wide lats, burly shoulders and a tiny waist. Even his face, compact as his jarhead haircut, had that pushed-in pugnacious quality about it that made you assume, without a politically correct second thought, that he was stubborn and stupid.

Painfully insecure in my own “male” body, and certain in my residual feminist knowledge that there couldn't be any negative emotion attached to being the strong man, I made the mistake of calling attention to his brawn by saying with obvious envy: “How does it feel to be in
that
body?”

I had hit a sore spot. Toby said nothing at first. Then leaning over his lap with his fingers interlaced, his powerful forearms resting on his thighs and his head bent low over his knees, he sighed and said, “Objectified.”

It wasn't a word I'd ever heard a man use about himself.

“Every time I come into a room or a restaurant,” Toby continued, “especially with other guys, I can see the fear on their faces, like they think I'm going to hurt them. They assume I'm violent because of the way I look.”

He had a point. Was this really any less insulting than presuming every blonde to be a bimbo?

You could tell he fought against this prejudice every day, sitting there carefully, deliberately translating the hurt into language, while people stood there expecting him to lash out like a dumb brute.

He told us that he felt trapped by the judgments people made about him from afar. He said he was a soft, emotive, thoughtful guy in the body of a boxer, and why did everyone think it was okay to look at him like that, like an ape at the dinner table?

He was stuck just as fast as everyone else in the role the culture had assigned to him. He didn't come to the retreat, and it was too bad. I would have liked to have seen his drawings.

 

Other guys at the retreat shared their drawings, and a pattern started to emerge. Two guys had drawn their heroes as Atlas, holding the world on his shoulders. One of them was a family man. He said he was going through a rough time in his marriage. He was really feeling the burden of being the safety net, the breadwinner and the Mr. Fix-It of his household.

“I'm tired,” he said.

When Paul asked him to explain more about the significance of Atlas he said, “I guess I think that if I hold it all together, if I take care of everything and everyone, that eventually I'll be loved. But the price is my life. I'm trying to do the impossible. So I guess I'm really Sisyphus, too.”

It was an insightful combination, and perhaps the perfect depiction of modern man at his most beset and wasted, taking the world on his shoulders and rolling it uphill. Being the man in charge brought with it a whole host of burdens and anxieties that seldom if ever occurred to me or the feminists I knew. We saw it from our side, and from there it seemed pretty damned good to be in power, make decisions, have choices, to escape the home-maker's gulag. For ambitious women, having a career was a lot better than changing your millionth diaper or staring at the yellow wallpaper. When you're feeling trapped and disenfranchised, it doesn't register that being the working stiff in the gray flannel suit isn't any picnic either.

The other guy who had drawn his hero as Atlas emphasized this aspect. Beside his Atlas, in the margins of his picture, he had also drawn Hercules, the more expected hero. When Paul asked him what that meant he said, “Well, you know Hercules is going for the golden apples, and Atlas is envious. He says, ‘I've got a real job.'”

You couldn't put it more succinctly. To these guys, going to work and supporting the family was a man's job. Still. And it was hard. There was no vacation in it, and you weren't going to get many women to see or admit that. Worst of all, holding up the world in this way wasn't just painful and tiring, it was also one of the most vulnerable poses a man could assume. And this is almost certainly something that would never occur to a woman.

“See,” said the guy, “Atlas can't protect himself in that position. Anybody could just walk right up to him and kick him in the balls.”

There it was again—the fear of conflict in vulnerability, the assumption that even your most basic job in life made you weak to enemies and contained within it the invitation to attack. And all of this was built into the mission of a man's life, his sense of his own masculinity.

As always, women were an integral part of that conflict. To these guys being Atlas didn't literally mean supporting the world. It meant supporting their little piece of it. Being Atlas was about being the guy who takes care of all the pesky logistical (and often fiscal) hassles so that daily life can run smoothly. It meant worrying so that the wife and kids didn't have to. And that alone was burden enough for any man. He could have been a carpenter, as one of the Atlas guys was, or a corporate mogul. It didn't matter. It was still the same feeling.

The guys felt profoundly responsible for the women in their lives, to give sustenance primarily, but more importantly—and yes, in this sense, chivalry is most emphatically not dead—to “take the pain so that she wouldn't have to.” The drive among these guys to save and protect women—and this drive was truly visceral—astounded me. Something impelled them inexorably to shoulder women as their burden, and it was that drive and its cultural impositions that they came to resent. Then, of course, ultimately they came to resent the women themselves.

Another of these guys expressed the same feelings about his inner hero when he drew himself as what he called “the wounded man.” His job was to save women, to take the blows and the bullets in her stead. Still another guy drew himself as “the saver.” The guy who could build fires and fight fires and carry women out of them.

Yeah, in part, it was Victimography 101. But it was also a very real part of these guys' sense of themselves as men, and a fair complaint. Ask some of the breadwinner guys you know what they think about it and if they're honest they're likely to say: “I work my ass off to support my family and yeah, I'd like a little credit for it.”

Both sides have their gripes.

Many women worked and still work tirelessly as homemakers and child rearers to support their families, too. But a whole generation or two or three has given voice to those complaints and offered the alternative—enshrined it even in law. And a lot of enlightenment has come along with those voices and those laws. We knew better, for example, than to let Hillary Rodham Clinton get away with a snide remark about staying home and baking cookies, because we know that homemaking is hard work. We also know that she, like every other female member of Congress, owes her Senate seat to the feminist movement and the employment equity it forced. But do we know enough to call somebody on a cheap jab at the company man, whom we all too often presume to be nothing more than the continual beneficiary of inveterate male privilege? Do we understand his hardships?

What's more, do we know, as feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote, that “our [women's] blight has been our sinecure”? Being the second sex imprisoned us, but it came with at least one sizable benefit. We didn't have to carry the world on our shoulders.

The feeling is officially mutual. Women thought they held up the world and made it go, and for that service deserved a vacation. Men, it turns out, think the same thing. And we're both right. But it took being Ned, especially being Ned among these retreatants, who drew the same pictures again and again, to really see this clearly from the inside out.

 

The most jarring expression of the man's burden came from a guy who drew himself as the wolverine's claw. “It's the meanest animal on earth,” he said. “His message is
‘Go Away.'
He fights his male rivals and enemies to the death, especially his father.