Exiting the Center: The Unmarked Default and What To Do About It (Healthy Masculinity, Part 4)
Angelo Monticelli’s design of the Shield of Achilles (1820) — a representation of the whole of lived experience, represented on the surface of something designed to protect that lived experience.
I’ve talked a bit about how I’ve been planning on returning to the series on Healthy Masculinity for a while now, and so here it is, though this is a bit more of an explanation for why it’s necessary to develop a Healthy Masculinity. It’s not uncommon to claim that there’s a crisis of masculinity, but I think that people misunderstand where this crisis comes from.
Our contemporary Crisis of Masculinity – the mass shootings and widespread opioid addiction in the United States, the reactionary turn in world politics, etc. – could be traced to the fact that “masculinity” doesn’t actually mean anything sensible anymore. Masculinity and Maleness are seen as the same thing (a...dodgy proposition, in my opinion. I’ll get to that in a later piece) and the masculine is seen as the default. So there are no real “men’s clothes” – there are just “clothes”. Something positioned as “men’s work” is largely kept that way due to internal pressures from a male workforce: any man willing to enter the world of “women’s work” (teaching, nursing, caregiving) is lauded as brave and usually gets shuffled into a position of leadership (consider: when you think of a “teacher”, how common is it to think of a woman? When you think of a “professor” or “principal”, how common is it to think of a man? Now imagine the position of someone from thirty years ago – what answers do you think they would have to those questions?) In short, these boundaries only exist because of male behavior, and are enforced as the default.
One of these days, I’m going to translate Beowulf and my junk-drawer-level knowledge of Old English will pay off.
For an extremely long time, Masculinity has been positioned as a default in society. I think this happened far more recently than people believe. For example, “Man” in old English simply meant “person” – “wifman” meant “female person” and “werman” meant “male person” – often these were shortened to “were and wif” to mean “man and woman.” My grasp of linguistic history makes it difficult for me to judge where the word “man” fell in Middle English, but by the time of Shakespeare it seems that the term was solidly masculine.
So, by the Early Modern Period, the term that had meant “person” now had the sense of an adult male human being. I have no evidence, but I have a suspicion that the high-water mark of witch burning during this period might be related to this (for exact reasons, we can read the 1484 Papal Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, which listed as one of the crimes of witches “cause perish the offspring of women” [i.e., abortion]. There is some belief that many of the witches were, essentially midwives and proto-pharmacists that enabled patients to abort unwanted or unsustainable pregnancies – in short, the witch burnings of the early modern period can be thought of as a widespread eradication of an effective folk medical tradition that enabled women to control their reproduction.)
This shift is why, when we were in a university library earlier, the gender and sexuality books had their own section, which covered gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender topics, sexuality in general, women’s studies, families and marriage, but no books on masculinity. We discovered those on accident later on in the philosophy section: because the lived experience of women and LGBTQ individuals are marked, while the questions around masculinity are considered deep, philosophical issues.
The exact nature of this shift is less interesting to me than the fallout of it, because my theory is that the efforts of proto-feminist and feminist movements have half fixed the damage of this move, but it’s very difficult to understand the second half.
In short, maleness has been positioned as the default, but part of the problem with this is that every default is an empty set. It quickly leaks out all particulars and so people who identify that way are robbed of a particular identity. This is exacerbated when society moves (rightly, I add!) towards a more equitable distribution of prestige and power. All of a sudden, being the default, being located at the center, doesn’t mean anything.
Many people have commented on this – the loss of privilege feels like an intolerable attack, when actually it’s just resetting the scales. While I want to emphasize that this is just and should happen, a problem does arise: masculinity becomes an uncentered empty set, the socially constructed equivalent of a ghost town or food desert. There’s absolutely nothing attractive about being there, but I and a number of other young men (okay, I’m in my thirties. I’m not that young,) might feel like someone who inherited a house in said ghost town or food desert. We’re locked in, but there’s nothing attractive about being there.
I was talking about this with Edgar earlier. They suggested that what should happen is that more markers of femininity need to be moved into the “default” – something that I generally agree with, but which works by accelerating the process instead of redirecting it: placing everyone into the unmarked default instead of removing people from it. It doesn’t address the issue I see as pertinent, which is that there are spaces that are socially walled off in a sense for women and transgender people, but cisgender men don’t. They don’t because the public square was their space for centuries, and they made it that way – but I think the loss of control over this public square is why they (I say “they” even though I’m one of them – it’s easy to Other the violent,) are lashing out.
It isn’t right that cisgender men have dominated society for so long. But in undoing that domination, a walled social space needs to be created for men in general. For the Crisis of Masculinity, with attendant shootings, reactionary politics, and overdose deaths, to end, this space needs to be created.
I’m putting forward the concept of Healthy Masculinity as the nature of this enclosed space – but it’s difficult, because it can’t be an enclosure of a preexisting social space; it can’t be the levers of power recaptured by the people who once held them; it needs to be something new, built by the people who want to inhabit it. Importantly, I think the constitution of a new masculinity needs to be anegoic, if not completely anti-egoic: it seems to me that the pursuit of status for the sake of status is poisonous, and it’s largely – not solely, but largely – a vice constructed as part of masculinity. This is where the fragility and volatility of traditional (toxic) masculinity comes from.
Or, to frame it another way, in language more readily understandable by people who hold on to more traditional modes of masculinity: it’s embarrassing to worry about your position in the pecking order; it’s something to be ashamed of.
An example of someone who lived this ideal would be Lee Jun-Fan (Bruce Lee), pictured here in a still from his last movie, Game of Death (1973).
Instead of trying to be the best so people think you’re tough or strong or smart or good at something, try to be better at something because being better is valuable in and of itself. And if this means that a woman, or a gay man, or a nonbinary person is better than you...give them respect for it, because they did that on a harder difficulty setting than you did, and you could learn a thing or two from how they did it. Refusing to learn from someone like that, if they’re willing to share what they learned with you, is more shameful than anything else.
The pursuit of excellence, however, isn’t really a solely masculine trait, but it is better than egotism, which I tend to think of as a negative trait of masculinity. I think that emphasizing the pursuit of excellence over the pursuit of status is a solution to that – because the pursuit of excellence requires humility and the ability to assess yourself with clear eyes, both of which would be an improvement.
Of course, I don’t think that the pursuit of excellence to the exclusion of everything else is the solution to toxic masculinity. I just think that the pursuit of excellence could be a component of a healthy masculinity.
This idiot can’t even figure out that attacking the actual rescue workers on twitter is bad.
Also, this is the only picture I’m ever going to use of Elon Musk, because he looks like a College Freshman discovering weed.
And, again of course, looming over all of this is the real reason for the fragility of toxic masculinity: the fact that men tend to police the expressions of masculinity that they see from other men. I’m not about to say that shame is necessarily a bad thing – I have a lot of thoughts on it, and I think that there are certain people that should definitely feel shame (Elon Musk should definitely feel shame for wasting everyone’s time with a submersible to rescue those children trapped in a cave in Thailand, for example.) However, I don’t think that anyone should feel shame for lacking in masculinity.
Another good rule to follow is to emulate the characters in this iteration of the “buff guys help out nerdy kid” meme — which generally fits what I’ve been talking about in its more “wholesome” iterations.
Instead, I think that the policing of people’s expressions of gender should be replaced by fellowship – by this, I don’t mean that there should be unquestioning solidarity between men. That’s how rapists escape justice. Nor do I mean that people who do wrong should be shamed out of a community and shunned: I mean that everyone has a duty to encourage prosocial behaviors and do their best to inhibit antisocial behaviors.
So, to put this in layman’s terms: if you have a buddy that acts creepy towards women, consider trying to stop him from doing that. But remain friends with him and try to encourage him to behave in a more acceptable way. Try to encourage him to be a good person – because if you cut him off, he’s just going to stay bad and become someone else’s problem.
When a member of your social circle goes bad, you have a duty to try to correct them. I would argue that this exists for every person, but I would also argue that – given circumstances – it’s very important to keep in mind when building a healthy masculinity.
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