A Better Man

by Michael Ian Black

  Looking back, I think sex represented a space for me that allowed me to be a more open version of myself than I generally allowed myself to be. In those darkened bedrooms, I could be playful, tough, and vulnerable all at the same time. I could fully engage with somebody in a way that felt impossible in any other situation. My day-to-day life as a guy felt so closed off, sardonic, constrained. When I was with somebody, though, I felt as though I could be a fuller, more open me. Afterward, that more open person faded away as the same need for validation and acceptance that brought me to that person’s bed in the first place returned. My morning walk of shame wasn’t about doing something shameful; it was about being somebody I didn’t much like in the first place.

  What I’m offering here is, I hope, a more nuanced take on sex than you’re getting from the culture. Your sexual life is yours alone. You can do with it what you want. You can have as much or as little sex as you want with however many or few people as you choose. Especially in the beginning, though, I would advise you to go slow and to make sure you’re having sex with the right person for the right reasons. Let those reasons be based on something more than lust. And, for God’s sake, wear a condom.

  thirteen

  Everything and Nothing

  Be Humane

  A comedian I know named Michelle Buteau has a joke about never farting in front of her husband. “I’ve been holding in a fart for ten years!” she says. It’s funny because, duh, farts are funny. The reason the joke lands, though, is because her underlying premise rings true: women are often reluctant to display their fullest selves in front of their male partners because if they were to show the actual messy business of being a person, men would find them repugnant.

  Here’s a much more acidic version of almost the same sentiment. Journalist Talia Lavin once wrote, “Most men do not think women are fully human. And ‘most’ is generous.”

  It’s a startling and awful thing to say, and it really nagged at me the first time I read it. The more I’ve thought about it, however, the more I’ve come to believe she’s right.

  That being said, I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiment in the way that she framed it. My interpretation is that she’s saying most men view women as lesser creatures than themselves. I don’t believe that’s true for most men (although I’m sure an alarmingly high number of men think exactly that). Instead, I think men and women are raised to believe that we are slightly different species altogether, like black bears and brown bears. Both are bears, but they each get their own Latin name.

  The sexes are raised to regard each other as distinct. There’s even that little nursery rhyme about it:

  Snips and snails, and puppy-dog’s tails,

  That’s what little boys are made of.

  Sugar and spice and all things nice,

  That’s what little girls are made of.

  I mean, what is that shit? Girls are made from “all things nice”? You and I both know your sister. One of you got the lion’s share of snips and snails—and it wasn’t you. I say that, of course, with tremendous love and affection for your sister, whom I love nearly as much as you. (And now, of course, I have to clarify that I am joking about loving you more than your sister when we both know I love her more.)

  Lavin’s argument that men don’t see women as fully human isn’t new. In a 1792 essay “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” an English writer and philosopher named Mary Wollstonecraft made the same point, writing that men regard “females as women rather than as human creatures.”

  Which makes me wonder: If a woman isn’t a “human creature,” then what is she? Some separate category of being? Conversely, it asks and answers its own implied question: If a woman isn’t a human being, then who is? A man, of course, and only a man.

  Historically, this distinction has served us men very well. After all, if men are one thing and women another, it stands to reason that each should be assigned different tasks accordingly. Men are “logical” and “strong,” for example, while women are “emotional” and “delicate.” It doesn’t take much imagination to see how rigid ideas like these would, and could, be used to keep women subservient. The underlying message to women: you are not enough. In the end, this results in a terrible disconnect between the sexes, a disconnect that encourages us to think of others’ life experiences, their humanity, as different from our own.

  No wonder Michelle Buteau doesn’t feel like she can fart in front of her husband.

  I would ask some follow-up questions to Lavin’s statement: If men do not view women as fully human, how do we view other members of our own sex? Do men grant other men the same unconditional humanity that we grant ourselves? In other words, do men treat other men more humanely than we treat women?

  No.

  The word “humane” has an almost comic lack of self-awareness. We use it to connote benevolence and compassion, as if those attributes are closer to our true natures than malevolence and indifference. History and a casual perusal of the day’s news will tell you that isn’t the case. So what is the “true” nature of our species? Why do we so often behave one way with one group of people and an entirely different way with another?

  In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari explains that prehistoric people evolved to function in small groups, or “bands,” each band containing a few dozen people at most. Although different bands may have cooperated with each other at times, there’s no reason to believe they granted each other the same rights and privileges afforded to their own groups. In other words, they may not have treated each other as “fully human.”

  As we’ve developed language, technology, and organizational structures, he argues, we’ve gone from small groups in which everybody personally knows each other to massive, global groups in which hardly any members have personal relationships. A Muslim in Syria is unlikely to know a Muslim in Indiana, but they will recognize each other as belonging to the same “band” known as Muslims. Or a Nike employee in Holland may not know one in India, but both draw their paychecks from the same company, and both have an interest in that company’s success. Every single one of us belongs to dozens, maybe hundreds, of these kinds of groupings. Often, the way we treat each other depends on how close or far away we view the other person’s band from our own. Your allegiance to the other members of your band can grow greater or more tenuous as you zoom in and out.

  For example, you and I are both Americans. We’re likely to have an affinity for other Americans. Because of this affinity, you’d expect that we would treat other Americans in the same way that we would expect to be treated ourselves. But there are innumerable and obvious ways that we Americans create distinctions that limit the ways we practice equality. We may say we believe that all Americans are entitled to the same rights, a sentiment literally written into our founding document. Yet our history has shown us time and again that this isn’t—and never has been—the case. Instead, we reserve certain rights and privileges for people of a certain gender, skin tone, and level of wealth. Every American understands, for example, that a poor black woman has fewer resources to petition her government than a wealthy white man. She has fewer opportunities for educational advancement, medical care, and financial stability than her wealthier white male peers. That is the nature of our American culture, a culture that says “all men are created equal” but does not fulfill the promise of that slogan.

  We live in a power structure that, traditionally, values men over women, and certain men over other men. When we talk about whom we treat as fully human, I agree with Lavin’s broad point, but I think she could extend her point to include two other categories that explain who gets afforded “equal treatment” and who does not.

  The great feminist thinker and writer bell hooks (she spells her name with lowercase letters like e e cummings) talks about how our American system is not purely, or even primarily, about sex. Instead, she talks about the “interrelatedness of race, sex, and class oppression”—or what you and your classmate
s call “intersectionality”—as the organizing principles around which our culture revolves. I think she’s right, and I think she’s right to order it in the way that she does.

  The people at the top of our power structure are wealthy white men. Although these men have always dominated the upper echelons, they’ve always been accompanied by (almost exclusively) white women. Most of these women have been spouses or family members. Although the women may not have had as much power as the men, they certainly possessed far more status and power than men of lower social classes. As the culture opened up in the last half century or so, more women found themselves moving up the power structure independently of the men in their lives. These women continue to be predominantly white. While there are far more of these women than ever before, the top ranks of our system continue to be occupied mostly by white men.

  At the bottom of our social system, we find a preponderance of people of color, especially African Americans. Often women. Always poor. What we see is that it is far more difficult for people possessing the “wrong” color skin and gender to move upward in this power structure. Think about the opening lines from Hamilton in which composer Lin-Manuel Miranda asks how a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore” from an obscure Caribbean island grows up to be a hero and scholar, “the ten-dollar Founding Father.”

  The answer is that it’s always been easier to overcome low social class than skin color or gender. Hamilton’s story is unlikely, yes, but at that time he could not have risen to such heights if he’d been a black man or a woman. Again, think of our structure as based first on race, then gender, then class.

  Does the example of Barack Obama belie this ordering? Perhaps. After all, if race were the primary determinant of our choices, we would have expected to see a white woman elected president before an African American man. True enough, but I think it’s important to recognize that what is generally true isn’t always true. Consider how often over the centuries white women have been privileged over non-white people. Consider how much more extraordinary Barack Obama was—and had to be—compared to so many of the men who held the job, including the man who preceded him, George W. Bush.

  When a (white) woman finally secured the Democratic nomination for president, it was fascinating to look at the way women voted. During the 2016 presidential campaign, political analysts assumed that women would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump because they thought female voters would prioritize their gender over other considerations. To a certain extent, the analysts were correct: 54 percent of women did vote for Hillary Clinton, but that number is the percentage of women overall who voted for Clinton. Donald Trump actually received the majority of white women’s votes.

  It’s kind of startling to realize that a male presidential candidate credibly accused of sexual harassment, assault, and misbehavior by two dozen women won more votes from white women than the female candidate who spent decades working on specific issues related to women’s health and economic empowerment.

  Why?

  Why would white women vote for a candidate who seemed to embody the awful, boorish behavior so many of them have been subjected to throughout their lives? Why would they vote for somebody who seemed to be actively working against the best interests of their sex?

  It starts to make sense if you keep in mind hooks’ ordering of the power structure, which places race at the top. You know how the singer Michael Bublé takes old musical standards and repackages them for a new audience? That’s what Trump did with racism. After launching his campaign with the racist “birther” smear against Barack Obama, he then based his winning presidential campaign on dehumanizing Spanish-speaking and Muslim immigrants. It worked well enough that white women prioritized their racial fears over whatever gender concerns they may have had about Donald Trump.

  (By the way, I’m not knocking Michael Bublé. Mom thinks he’s terrific. By law, all middle-aged white women from Connecticut are required to like Michael Bublé.)

  That’s the status quo. We call this ordering system a bunch of different things, some of them more neutral-sounding than others. “Americanism” sounds a whole lot better than “patriarchy,” which sounds a whole lot better than “white supremacy.” Whatever you want to call it, this system instituted race as the animating force of American life. Happily, and inevitably, as our demographics shift, those racial conventions are changing. More men and women of color are rising through the power structure. Women, racial minorities, members of the LGBTQ community—all have made tremendous gains over the last few decades. But yesterday’s progress takes a long time to become today’s status quo.

  Lately, there has been strong resistance to any change in the status quo. We’re seeing attempts to roll back civil rights gains on every front: from voting restrictions, to reproductive constraints, to the ban on transgender troops serving in the military, to an overreaching “Muslim ban,” to punitive immigration policies. All of these regressive steps are designed to protect a recalcitrant status quo.

  Will the regressive voices succeed, or will the long arc of the moral universe continue to bend, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, toward justice? And what does all of this have to do with you, eighteen years old, one foot out the door?

  Everything. And nothing.

  Part of the reason it’s so hard to talk about how to be a better man is that our manhood doesn’t exist in isolation from our race or our social class. This is why the conversation about masculinity gets so difficult. Because when you talk about one thing—how we become better men—you almost immediately have to talk about everything else. You have to talk about class differences and racism and misogyny. They’re all so deeply entwined that it’s impossible to disentangle any of these from the others.

  Slavery was an economic decision, for example, which attempted to justify its inhumanity through racism, which, in turn, leaned on pseudoscience and religion to bolster its legitimacy. How do you separate any of these things? You can’t.

  Power seems to have its own gravity. It accrues bits of this and that through the force of its own mass. Eventually, we walk along its surface without even realizing that it’s holding us down. That’s the situation we currently find ourselves facing. We’re so ensnared by this vast power that many of us don’t even recognize its force. Why would we? For people like you and me, it may even feel like a force for good. After all, we’re housed and fed and warm. Our family is generally treated with respect. I make money. You spend the money I make. We do okay.

  But for others, patriarchy is a crushing force that doesn’t allow them to rise up as far as they might go. Many people have to work so much harder than those born into fortunate circumstances just to have the chance that you and I assume is ours by birthright. White, middle-class kids born into this system are granted far more opportunities than their poorer black or Latino or Native American counterparts.

  The racial component is as enmeshed into this system as the gender component. So when I talk about becoming “a better man,” I am specifically talking about becoming a better white man because I feel a responsibility as the beneficiary of this system to do what I can to expand opportunities within this system. And I want you to feel this, too. Your privilege ends up being a double-edged sword. You have been given as many opportunities as anybody could hope to have, but the tradeoff is that you must use some of that privilege to help other people. That’s a responsibility you inherit along with the color of your skin. I don’t mean just donating money, although that can certainly be helpful. I mean, in your life, choosing to participate in the sometimes uncomfortable work of confrontation and resistance. You may not want to. You may hate to do it because those who would rather you just kept your mouth shut might give you the stink-eye. I’m telling you, though, you have to do it.

  Although you are only half Jewish, your Jewishness also carries with it some special responsibilities. One of the interesting aspects of being Jewish is feeling, on some level, that you are part of the white American class, but als
o slightly apart from it. It’s like, we pass because they let us pass, but our “whiteness” always feels conditional. In fact, it’s an anti-Semitic trope that Jews aren’t white at all. Whenever some Nazi wannabe sends me trash like that on Twitter, I don’t know whether to feel offended or flattered.

  Jews have always struggled with our place in American culture. We’ve worried about appearing too Jewish for fear of standing out. It’s why I changed my name from Schwartz to Black. When becoming an actor, I didn’t want people to think of me as “Jewish” from the moment I walked into a casting office. I wanted something more neutral. Actually, more “white.” Since “schwartz” means “black,” I decided to go with it. I used to have a joke in which I said I changed my name because I was “ashamed of being Jewish,” and there was definitely a kernel of truth to that. It’s the same reason I feel a little worried when I see groups of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, their peculiar and defiant dress and style standing out against the contemporary city backdrop. Part of me can’t help worrying whether they’re standing out too much, drawing too much attention to themselves, and that, in doing so, they put all of us at risk. That’s what two thousand years of paranoia will do to you.

  Yet here we are, largely accepted in the most powerful country in the world. We have made outsized contributions to that country relative to our numbers. We’ve done this, I suspect, to attempt to make ourselves indispensable, to prove that we belong.