Where, I ask, did you learn this? They look a bit confused. Eventually, someone will say, ‘Well, it’s everywhere.’ And he’s right. It’s Shakespearean, Homeric. It’s the air we breathe. Pretty much everyone agrees that this is what it means to be a good man, learnt through osmosis in our respective cultures. Of course, this is what it means to be a good person. But you might be surprised how gendered men feel it to be.
I then say: ‘Do any of those ideas or words or phrases occur to you when I say, ‘Be a real man!'' The guys look startled. ‘No, wait, that’s completely different,’ they shout. So I ask what it means to be a real man, and this is what they say:
- Never cry
- Be strong
- Don’t show your feelings
- Suck it up
- Power
- Aggression
- Win at all costs
- Get rich
- Get laid
When I ask, ‘Where did you learn this?’, they say, in order: my father, my coach, my guy friends, my older brother.
Being a real man isn’t something internal, but something performed – for other men. Other men judge us, police us, and decide if we are doing it right. Masculinity is therefore ‘homosocial’ – other men judge the effectiveness of our performance of it. In turn, we want to be a man among men.
So, here is the lesson I hope men will draw from the exercise: there are times in every man’s life when he will be asked by other guys to betray his own values, ethics, or idea of what it means to be a good man in order to prove he is a ‘real man’. They will ask – no, insist – that we sometimes do the wrong thing, fail to stand up for the little guy, behave dishonourably.
If this is true – and pretty much every man reading these words will have had some experience in which he was asked to betray his own values to prove his masculinity – then this is the story we must tell our sons. That we have been there, that we know the pressures they face.
The task of the father, the uncle or grandparent, the teacher or counsellor is not to help a young man become something other than his toxic self. Our jobs are more about how we can support young men to listen to their inner voices, to strengthen those voices – in short, to support young men in becoming more authentically themselves.
Michael Kimmel is one of the world’s leading experts on men and masculinities. He is the SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University.
