Real Masculinity has Never Been Tried
More info about this below, but I released a new short story on Itch called Soft Hands. It's about masculinity and weakness and sledgehammers. It's pay-what-you-want, so check it out here. On to the newsletter:
I love to write about men. Men with strange ideas and fixations, men who are bastards, men who are confused and unsure about what they want, all because the ongoing crisis of masculinity (and it is a crisis, but more on that later) provides rich literary material. These are people compelled to act in certain ways by forces larger than them, people caught between what they’ve been told to be and what they want to be, people who feel acutely the possible consequences of failing to live up to manhood as such.
All of this fun I’m having is made possible by what is commonly called the crisis of masculinity, or some other flavor of the phrase, which is the idea that our society has no incentives for healthy masculinity, and so pushes them either to become weak or to become monstrous. Some commentators would probably add a third option, that it drives them to become women, but having followed that path myself, I have to admit that while I tried to play the role of man for a while, it wasn’t a particularly credible performance. My own distaste for the role aside, we can say with certainty that there are men, and that some of those men are complete bastards, and this may or may not say something about masculinity in this current moment, even though a varying number of men have been being bastards for at least as long as recorded history.
But what is masculinity? I’m not actually going to attempt to answer that fully, because that’s the kind of question that takes a book to answer, but it’s fun to ask. Other people have tried, some so ambitious as to attempt to answer it in a single tweet (or Bluesky tweet), but it’s difficult to define, especially a healthy masculinity to pose against its toxic variant, is that the qualities one defines just sound like good qualities for an un-gendered person to have. Kindness? Gentle strength? Generosity? You don’t really need a beard for those.
This challenge arises because, for as long as patriarchy has been entrenched, the man has been the default person. Not just in terms of using “he” as a neutral pronoun in text or using “man” as a generalization for humanity, but for the longest time the man was the sole political and ethical actor, and the construction of masculinity over that time period reflects this. Now that this assumption has been broken down, men are a little bit lost in the woods and the temptation to walk the path backwards to return to familiar territory is to want to restore this assumption, to make men the only full people, which is how so many arrive at the (appallingly-named) “Manosphere.” This is a tragedy, though few regard those who fall into it with any sympathy.
Men are not the primary victims of patriarchy, and even many well-meaning men perpetuate it and benefit from it. How, then, to have compassion for men in this situation? The approach that many have taken is: don’t. Men are scum, testosterone turns you into a beast, and so on, and such is the path to political lesbianism. The implicit vision of this line of thought is that the best world would be one in which there were no men, but the world is a world with men and the best world we can create is one that has better men in it, not none. So, how to have compassion for them?
Excluding the men who aren’t overly deformed by patriarchy, the ones that are good and kind and not as rare as the fearful masses of true-crime addled minds suppose, we do, in fact, have cause to be sad for the men who rape, who abuse, who treat women as objects to possess and dispose of. They didn’t have to be this way, but were turned into monsters by a system of control that requires of them the role of dominator to perpetuate itself. Not that it was entirely involuntary, but neither was it entirely voluntary; little boys told from a young age, this is how a man acts, a woman is a symbol of the man’s status, both in terms of quantity and quality. Not everyone has the strength of will and the sense of justice necessary to resist indoctrination, and so a number of men who would otherwise turn out fine are poisoned, and we get monsters.
This reflects a curious fact about existing within history, which is that the individual isn’t totally responsible for the person they are, being shaped both by one’s larger historical context and individual circumstances—themselves shaped by historical context and if you can see the dizzying and endless back-and-forth this implies, great news: we have a beautiful word for it, and that word is dialectics— but each individual must bear total responsibility for who they are and their actions. Anything less and social order becomes difficult to manage. But this gap of responsibility is where the compassion goes.
On this subject, I think often of the trans men I’ve known, the ones who have had plenty of experience in their lives of the downsides of masculinity and chosen it anyway. Some of them are gentle and kind, others are gregarious, and some others choose to be misogynist, but on the whole it seems to me that they’re the ones figuring out what a good masculinity can look like. So I’m going to keep writing my stories about men who find themselves in an excess of situations and leave the hard work to them. It’s man’s work after all.
What I’ve been Writing
Speaking of my stories about men, I’ve recently released one on Itch.io called Soft Hands. It’s about an enclave in the center of the city where people have fled to escape an army of men who are demolishing every building they see with sledgehammers. Only a few men are allowed in, among them Arno, on the basis of seeming weak and soft enough as to not potentially be a threat, but once in safety, Arno falls in with some men who are seething about having been seen as weak and want to prove to everyone that they’re just as dangerous as the men outside. Here’s the first page or so:
Every day the men came with their sledgehammers, their bright orange helmets, their sun-scarred and shirtless bodies covered in unglamorous muscle. When and where they arrived was no surprise. They worked from the city limits inward, demolishing one block a week. Most residents took the hint and evacuated beforehand, but occasionally they would knock on a door– politeness, more than anything else– and a young woman with a baby on her hip would open the door, tears staining her cheeks and the baby smiling, and ask, “Well, where am I supposed to go?”
Whichever of the men stood at her doorstep, as he offered a finger to the baby, would turn his head theatrically behind him, where steel and brick and concrete and glass and even bone–the men were conscientious, but imperfect as all people are– had been shattered beneath the hammer until they became the sand of a glittering beach with no ocean, and after regarding the fruit of his and his colleagues’ labor, he’d turn back and say to the mother, “I wouldn’t go that way.”
Those that wandered away from the demolition took as their North Star the tower at the center of the city, even though it was so full that the only way you could get in was to convince an existing resident to share their bed. Arno, whose previous apartment was at that moment being pummeled into dust, waited in line at the checkpoint established at the half-mile radius around the tower.
At the break in the chainlink fence ahead of him, the police checked the hands of all incoming men for calluses, in case the men had changed their approach and decided to try to establish another demolition front in the center of the city. A man ahead of Arno got kicked out of line. He pleaded with the officer.
“No, please. These are just from rock climbing. I didn’t even like it, I was just trying to pick up girls at the gym. I’m not one of them, I’m not.”
It’s pay what you want, so please read it! I’d like to get enough readers on this that it remains a viable pressure release valve for when I don’t feel like trying to find a lit mag for my work.
What I’ve been Reading
I’m partway through Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, which is slow going but after being told by a couple people that they got bored in the first two hundred pages, I’m mystified as to how. It’s got messiahs and deathless old women and Jacob only takes a hundred or so pages to show up. Maybe my enthusiasm for Tome Time is clouding my judgement, but I find it thrilling to watch a book as large as this one start to gather momentum in its first couple hundred pages.
I finally read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. It’ll surprise no one to learn that I loved it, given that it’s a book that I’ve been told I’d love a hundred times, each time conceding that of course they’re right, of course I’ll love it, and finally I read it and loved it. I think people expected me to enjoy the surreality of it, which I did, and the off-kilter but charming characters, which I also did, but no one told me about the structure! When the structure is unusual, I need to know about it!
This is a story that kind of spins out, ending in a burst of strange confetti. The concerns that end the book bear little resemblance to the ones at the start of the book, but that in itself isn’t too unusual. Unreality is introduced bit by bit until the reader is the fully-boiled frog. Except that’s not really how it happens in this one. In the middle of the book there is a long story about an Abbess who possessed some of Mary Magdalene’s oil, who goes searching for the Holy Grail, and who is working for some gods very different from the God of the church. In most narratives, this story would reveal some critical backstory that would inflect the main story, maybe operate in thematic resonance with the main story. No big deal. But The Hearing Trumpet is completely transformed after this story. It exits the story of the Abbess as if electrified by it, and immediately dives into total surreality. This, the story-within-a-story not as a diversion, but as a crucible, is what I find myself thinking about long after finishing the book.