Empathy and Working on Alternative Masculinities

 Interesting read over at rosiesays, as a guy responds to her piece on street harassment.  He spells out how he has felt as the guy doing the harassing:

Here is something you should know about me. I intentionally hurt people sometimes to make myself feel better.    Being in the presence of a woman can be anguish. It’s loneliness (and sometimes horniness), and all that other Freudian bullshit rolled up into mundane moments. Just walking down the street can make me feel helpless when I pass a woman sometimes. I can’t shake it. If I could shake it, I would. Trust me. It’s no fun. But this is the hand I’m dealt, so I roll with it. 

I have a lot of empathy for men, in part because I have experienced the alienation that can come in a culture where traditional masculinity is so important.  I also think what I call the supply-and-demand model of dating is pretty broken, for all involved.  But I think striving against traditional masculinity is one of the ways that feminism can help men.

Despite my predilection toward empathy, it's difficult for me to respond with compassion for this guy. Even though he is suffering (and I think that he is--suffering within the shackles of bs masculinity), lines like "If I could shake it, I would. Trust me," just don't ring true for me. There's this thing called the internet.  Take a look around, search for alternative masculinities. Let me google that for you.

Yes, the masculinity we are given and trained in is bullshit. So let's create another one, rather than harass women.

Emily, like many feminist women, understands that traditional masculinity harms men, as well as women, and she expresses some empathy for this guy:

Without minimizing the overwhelming perfect storm of body hating, slut-shaming, victim-blaming, mixed messaging media bullshittery that women face on a daily basis, I do think there’s a void for young men about what modern masculinity really means. This is a conversation we’ve sorta kinda maybe a little bit started in this country, but for guys like this writer, already in their twenties, there are few role models of “manliness” that don’t involve killing the bad guy and getting the girl.

 Yes, men (and folks of all genders!) are having to reconstruct masculinity in a way that is hopefully not harmful. Yes, this task is difficult. Yes, men are alienated because of (in part) traditional masculinity. (As far as role models go, there are many to be found, if you look for them.) But I respectfully disagree with her when she notes that women should do something about this day-to-day: Be nicer:

And this is not unidirectional. Ladies (in this imaginary all-hetero world I’m writing in at the moment), don’t be jerks to guys that try to talk to you (assuming they are civil), whether you’re interested or not. You can politely move on without rolling your eyes, turning away, sighing in disgust, or being a generally uninterested pretentious douchface.   

People, be nice to each other. Niceness is a awesome. Niceness doesn’t mean I want to bone you, and it doesn’t mean you deserve a date or a drink or anything of the sort. It means that shit is hard out there, son, and a little kindness goes a long way.

Compassion and niceness is great, in general (of course!), but this line of thinking tends to ignore the lived experience of so many women--politely moving on is something that isn't "allowed" oftentimes, inasmuch as men so often respond to it with aggression and anger. The more empathy people can have toward men who are caught up in bogus masculinity, the better, but I think the onus is mostly upon men to do lots more work in this area before we can ask for or expect women to take on even more in this regard.

Complex Masculinity Policing

I've been aware of the not-so-suble policing of masculinity for quite a while now--from adolescence on, men (and women) are taught to police men's masculinity in myriad ways. This sort of policing of masculinity includes anything from being ridiculued for one's haircut by bullies (I'm looking at you, Mitt Romney) to the looks and questions I get about my pink bike. Some of this policing is really overtly violent, either verbally or physically, or both, but much of it is more subtle. A glance, a snicker, folks staring when you don't match up with what they think masculinity should look like. And men are taught to police themselves in this regard almost constantly.

So it was kind of fascinating when I found myself having my masculinity policed in what was a fairly subtle, interesting way the other day. I was having dinner with my partner and some of her friends. Most of us at the table were cisgendered (look it up if you don't know what it means), but as is the case in my social circles recently, not everyone was cisgendered. An acquaintence of mine who is a transguy was there, and he was in a goofy mood; I found myself on the recieving end of some teasing by him--he was teasing me because my sideburns were mismatched. He, of course, had immaculate facial hair, including cute, well-matched sideburns. Little did he know that this version of policing masculinity was/is a button for me, and I wasn't able to play along and take it in the humorous way that I'm pretty sure he intended it. Of course, as with a lot of the more subtle forms of policing masculinity, "jokes" are often a way to make cruel statements socially acceptable, so the grey areas around such comments can be treacherous.

One of the reasons it really got to me, I think, was that I don't tend to hang out with guys who joke in this way--or, at least, I don't hang out with acquaintances who joke in this way. Close friends can tease me like this and it doesn't seem to affect me much, because they know me, know my complex relationship(s) to masculinity, and are often joking "ironically" with me in a way that actually makes me feel accepted. Acquaintances who make jokes about masculinity in this way just don't tend to stay acquaintances with me for long--the spaces I hang out in simply aren't full of men who police masculinity in this way. So when I ran into it, it hit me hard. On the one hand, I have a sort of flip emotional response to it, which can be summed up by something like, "Hey, man, you'll get bored with facial hair after 25 years, too." The same part of me that feels this flip response also wants to say, "Hey, way to go. You can now be recognized as having joined the ranks of men-who-police-other-men's-masculinity!" But I'm also just fascinated by the fact that, clearly, policing masculinity as a man is learned behavior--it's not something that we have to do, it's not something we do because it's "innate"; rather, it's something that we learn to do as we grow into men, just as my acquaintance has learned to do as he has grown into a man.

Confidence Without Jerkiness

UPDATE: The following post assumes that we're all on the same page about Nice Gusy(tm) vs. nice guys, a la Feminism 101's definitions. Now, back to the post...


I'm really glad that Dating (and/or Fucking) While Feminist has become an popular topic. Whatever you think about love and romance, and wherever you are in your love life, chances are that if you're a feminist, you've had to struggle with some of the things that other folks are struggling with. From Jaclyn Friedman's Fucking While Feminist interview to Jill Filipovic's wonderful rant Single White Female Seeks Passive-Agressive Misogynist over on Feministe, there is a lot to think about, and, since this is the internet, lots of folks have strong opinions about it all.

I think there are a lot of things a feminist (or pro-feminist) man can say about all of this (after all, some of us are dating/fucking while feminist as well), but I don't want to take that head on just yet. Instead, I'd like to talk about a tangent of the discussions dealing with the idea that it's sometimes difficult to grow into a confident and/or assertive man who is also on board with feminist ideas and actions.

Over on Jill's post, commentor Bagelsan responds to a guy who is taking the oh-so-boring-and-common line of thought that women (all of them!) like jerks. The guy says:

“Girls really do like jerks, though. I mean they don’t like jerks but they like certain qualities that come with being a jerk. Like the confidence and ambition and assertiveness.”

And Bagelsan responds with a hilarious bit of wordplay about dolphins-with-Hitler-mustaches:

Some girls like certain qualities that “come with” being, say, a dolphin too, though. Like swimming ability? Or qualities that “come with” being Hitler — like being a compelling public speaker, or getting along okay with (certain) children. Doesn’t mean guys should all start cultivating wee mustaches over their bottlenoses though.*

More to the point, qualities like “confidence” exist independent of jerkishness. (Just like there are kid-loving swimmers who aren’t Nazi porpoises.) So why in the world do Nice Guys think they have to be jerks to be confident, etc?

*I may or may not have used this somewhat tortured metaphor entirely in order to describe this image. :p Bagelsan

Bagelsan's (likely rhetorical) question is what got me to thinking: So why in the world do Nice Guys think they have to be jerks to be confident, etc?

The trite answer is something like "Because that's mostly what we see. Examples of confident jerks abound all around us." This is no excuse for bad behavior, of course--just because bad examples abound doesn't mean we have to follow them. But the prevalence of them does supply a partial answer to Bagelsan's question. And even boys who eventually learn to be men who are confident-but-not-jerks have an uphill battle in at least some ways; look at how much Barak Obama gets chastised for what amounts (in my mind) to a quiet confidence.

There is a culture of traditional male masculinity which encourages a particular type of cocky confidence, and that traditional type of masculinity is something that boys and men have to come to terms with as they grow up and grow older. We have to discover other kinds of confidence that are not as often presented as options. I've learned a lot of that confidence from the women in my life--women who have learned that they can be straight-forward without being jerks (though there are problems there, of course, that come with being a confident woman; confident women are seen as "bitches" when confident men are seen as...confident). I've also learned about other forms of confidence from other men. The men involved in the Men's Story Project are an amazing bunch of men who have a lot of confidence, and little jerkitude.

Where did you learn to have confidence without being a jerk? Who are your role models in that regard? How long did it take you to learn the lesson that you can be confident without being a jerk?