Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  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 worl
d 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.

  And what was his Achilles’ heel? Pussy, of course. “The fight,” he said, “is about pussy.” Protecting it. Possessing it. Needing it. That was his whole life right there.

  This guy was angrier than any guy I met in those meetings. He just stewed wherever he sat, as if the demons were so strong in him that he was afraid to move.

  The rage and the pain were consuming and they were colored by the imposition of a masculine role, a role whose blatant symbolism Paul had had us draw on paper and thereby expose as the crude crayon scrawling that it was.

  That was the lesson in the exercise. Drawing your hero wasn’t quite as dumb as it sounded. You weren’t reinforcing an idiotic image of yourself as the man god. You were drawing your cartoon self and exposing it as such, then tearing it apart for good measure. You were learning to stop being a straitjacketed man, bouncing off other men’s manhood, and trying instead to be a person who could respond to the world without scripts of conflict or defense already written in your head.

  It was different for every guy, and that is what Paul had really meant that first night when he’d spoken so assertively about the ego. Each man’s journey of self-discovery was his own. He had to do it himself, to know and to actualize himself from the inside out or be lost altogether. It was his alienation from himself, his capitulation to “masculinity,” that had led him into despair in the first place. Respecting his own and another man’s ego wasn’t about walking around puffed up and pugnacious, every man a king among kings. It was about treading lightly around the other man’s singular vulnerability, being present and available for contact, but not intrusive. It meant that it might be possible to look another man in the eye without intending to fuck or kill him.

  The spirit dance happened on Saturday night. It was the pinnacle of the weekend, or it was supposed to be. It was the time when you were meant to enact and thereby resolve or dispel all the buried conflicts you had unearthed over the previous day and a half.

  This was where the weapons came in. This was where guys like the bereft businessman chopped up their wives, and where guys like Corey could playact the humiliations of their relationships and achieve at least a partial catharsis in the process. Over a Ping-Pong game late Saturday afternoon Corey had told me what he was planning for the dance.

  “I think I’d like to have some of you guys pretend to be those other guys who are always hanging around my girlfriend. Maybe you could pretend to flirt with her and insult me and then I can work through this.”

  I said I’d be glad to help.

  I in turn told him what I was envisioning and asked him if he might help me. I asked Corey if he’d be willing to cut me.

  Yes, you read it right. I asked him to cut me.

  Even now just seeing those words on the page is hard. Explaining them is harder still.

  Why, you may ask, after having spent the past few weeks worrying about whether these guys might attack me, would I then of all things turn around and invite one of them to cut me?

  The answer is complicated.

  By this point in the weekend, and in Ned’s unraveling life, I was drowning in guilt and Paul was the focus of that guilt, partly because we had become closer, but mostly because he was the founder of the group. It was his baby, and in deceiving the group I felt that I was deceiving him the most. I suppose I would have asked him to cut me if part of me hadn’t still been afraid that he might take me up on it. Corey was a safe substitute. Obviously there was a very skewed logic at work here, but I thought that if I paid some penalty, some physically painful penalty for lying to Paul and everyone else, then everything would be paid for, not just everything there in the group, but everything throughout the project.

  The idea of undergoing pain at these men’s hands had possessed me by then subconsciously, and it surfaced all at once in my conversation with Corey. Punishment was the thing I thought I needed to enact in the spirit dance. My ritual, my pseudohero’s trial, was expiation. I suppose in a way it should come as no surprise that my envisioned penance took the form it did, since I had just spent three weeks in a monastery surrounded by icons of the tortured Christ. Like I said, once a Catholic always a Catholic.

  The only history I had as a man was one of deceit, and with these guys it went deeper than anything before. Their safe space was carefully carved out, and I had found my way into it through a lie. I knew their secrets, albeit secrets that would remain anonymous in my telling of them and, with luck, bring perhaps some women and men closer to an understanding of one another’s struggles. But, and this was something I had addressed directly with the monks since leaving the abbey, how do you reconcile genuine interpersonal connection and potentially valuable insights into human behavior with false pretenses?

  At the time I couldn’t reconcile them. Not without some grisly form of absolution, or so I thought.

  Even as I was asking Corey to cut me I didn’t realize how wacko this scenario had gotten in my mind, or how crazy it would sound coming out of my mouth.

  “What?” Corey asked. “You want me to cut you for real?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I want you to take a knife and cut me slowly in stripes on my arms and legs until I tell you to stop.”

  “Why would you want me to do that?”

  “Because it’s what I need to do. It’s my conflict. I can’t explain it any better than that. Isn’t that what this thing is for?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, still incredulous, “but man, you don’t wanna do that. I’ve felt a lot of physical pain in my life and believe me it doesn’t do anything for you. It’s just pain.”

  “Where did all this pain come from?” I asked, trying then to steer the conversation away from the alarming request.

  “Injuries, mostly from sports. I’ve had a lot of injuries. Man, pain is just pain, that’s all. You don’t need that.”

  The two of us were like a travesty of man versus woman, standing there talking about pain in such opposing terms. He, a typically athletic guy whose relationship to the physical world had been smash-bang probably since junior high. Me, a typical female looking to turn abuse on herself.

  Corey reminded me of guys I’d dated in college, football players especially, who had talked about the aggression and need for violent physical contact that the testosterone infusions of puberty had engendered in them. I thought, too, about the guys on MTV’s reality program Jackass, or the teenage skateboarders you see on street corners, throwing themselves headlong into scrapes with concrete, testing the boundaries of physical space without fear.

  Then I thought about self-mutilators—people who cut and burn themselves ritually—and how 70-some percent of them are women. Pain for them, and now apparently for me, was like a bath, a relief, a penalty paid and a release ensuing. I’d never cut myself before, or binged on cigarette burns, or anything like that. But now it seemed like the only way to free myself from the guilt. Talking about it this way with Corey, I guessed I was showing my colors. He thought I was really weird—as well he should have—a guy with a really odd relationship to pain.

  I thought in this context about the guys who spoke about saving women, taking the pain so they wouldn’t have to. Pain was something they took out of duty or in necessary conflict. Most often it was the by-product of something else entirely. But most women weren’t expected to face pain to prove themselves. It was in us, part of our monthly cycle, our first fuck, our physical design to give birth, but it wasn’t part of our outward cultural definition, never a manda
tory rite of passage. Everybody has a relationship to pain. Too often women’s is intimate and self-inflicted, and in extreme form, that is what mine became.

  Though I didn’t know it then, my time as Ned was ending prematurely. I had planned to go to the men’s meetings for another few months, but what began as a fantastical notion of bloodletting in the woods became in the coming weeks a dangerous obsession with purgative torture. Asking Corey to cut me was just the start of that devolution.

  I was losing it and Ned was coming with me.

  But losing it, or at least going mildly ape was something guys had done before at retreats. That’s part of what the retreats were for. Loss of control was something that Paul and the other retreat organizers had anticipated. They had taken steps to prevent serious injury. Giving sharp weapons to rage junkies was a disaster they knew enough to avoid.

  Finding this out the way I did was rather funny in the end. The night of the spirit dance I painted my face black with charcoal from the fire. It was another form of cover and my own boyish jab at spooking it up for the dance, where all the ghosts and demons were meant to surface.

  The men had cleared the dining room for the festivities and set up an array of African and other drums in the corners so that various members of the group could provide the soundtrack for the evening. The room was aglow. They had lit candles all around and turned out the overhead lights. It was then that I saw all the weapons and implements lying on the long dining table, which had been pushed up against the windows out of the way.