The Sad Sweetness of Masculinity
I go to the gym every other day if I can, usually around 11am, when it’s nothing but me and old retired guys. Which means I frequently have the experience of standing in a locker room crowded with old men with wispy, deflated wieners and horrible gnarled nuts ravaged by time and the concurrent loss of elasticity, which by comparison makes my junk look like the fucking platonic ideal. My penis feels majestic around these old men. I think everyone should get to feel like his or her genitals are majestic once in a while. I bet there’d be less war.
It’s tricky, feeling good about your dick. When a woman feels good about her vagina it’s empowering, when a man feels pride in his dick he sounds like one, and sometimes ends up on a watchlist. Probably for all the obvious political/historical/cultural reasons, as in dudes have generally swung their shit around like wrecking balls for the last couple centuries while women have had to pretend there’s just mist between their belly buttons and feet.
I guess I’m thinking about this because I just watched Fight Club for the first time in a couple years. The movie blew my mind when it came out. 1999, I was 18 years old, which is the perfect age to have your mind blown because when you’re 18 you go around all day hoping something will blow your mind. I was a feisty, frustrated kid, and it’s a movie with specific ideas about why people are feisty and frustrated and what they should do about it. I still love it, but seeing it now, having read twenty-six thousand student papers on gender roles in the last few years, having been exposed to more feminist theory on social media than I had the last time I watched it, the movie’s ideas about masculinity struck me differently than it had before.
Or maybe it’s not that what the movie had to say struck me as much as it struck me that I’m just not that interested in gender, besides that “masculinity” is kind of a creepy word. “Feminism” sounds like a cool call-to-arms, “masculinity” sounds like a sex crime committed in a crowd.
Probably I haven’t had to think about this much because I’m a white straight man. I get that if you’re from a group that’s been traditionally picked on by my group it’s a big deal, and I support your whole thing, I swear. I’m not taking anyone’s struggle lightly. It’s just not something I’ve worried much about, personally, because I haven’t had to.
Not thinking too much about gender issues as a straight white guy is so much better than being a straight white guy who’s hung up on this stuff. Those are the guys who go around beginning sentences with ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ and then saying the most thoughtless, racist things imaginable; who make a lot of rape jokes with a wink and a gleaming canine tooth. Those are the aggressively heterosexual guys who brag about having a ‘man cave’ in their house, oblivious to the fact that ‘man cave’ sounds like a euphemism for butthole.
I googled “traditional masculine traits” to see what comes up, and it’s everything you’d expect. “Thinking about Spider-Man all day” is not on the list, sadly. “Competitive nature” is, though. I’m pretty competitive. To the point that I avoid games of all kinds because I’m a terrible loser. “Able to fix things” is on the list. Recently I had to replace the headlight bulb in my car. I found a video that walked me through it—took the guy exactly one minute from start to finish. Took me literally an entire day. It’s all I did that day, replacing that bulb. And the way I did it involved way more kicking than depicted in the video. But, you know, it’s in there now. Really, though, anything that tries to define masculinity seems to exist just to be refuted. A man is capable, competitive and emotionally resilient. Well, they don’t have to be, that’s old world thinking and it’s limiting. Okay, so what then? What’s it mean to be a man?
One thing that Fight Club nails is that being a straight white man at this point in history is unarguably a leg up, but you’re also coming in right at the end of the empire. Fight Club is all about, I think, that shameful feeling a straight white guy gets when he’s frustrated that he wasn’t born earlier, not getting to cash in on the privilege without the accompanying guilt. And as much as the movie seems to be about channeling frustrated masculinity into primal aggression, watch those fight scenes now and tell me it isn’t really about masochism. Maybe there’s some euphoria involved early on, like when Brad Pitt and Ed Norton first start punching each other in the parking lot, but before long all the fights are depicted as ordeals where even winning is horrible.
It’s got to be one of the most misunderstood movies of the last couple decades, right? I remember coming out of the theater back in 1999 thinking, “There’s two ways to take that movie, and one of them lends some philosophical edge to that shit my pals and I have been doing in the garage…”
Years ago this friend of mine, let’s call him W., came to me at the beginning of the summer and told me that he’d paid for a trainer, that he was going to work out at the gym every day all summer long and then on Labor Day he was going to fight me and he was going to win. Okay, I said. We shook hands on it, and then W. proceeded to work out with his trainer maybe twice that summer. Unless, that is, his trainer’s advice was to take mushrooms and watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Labor Day came around, and he’d told enough people about the fight that he had to go through with it or he’d lose face. I tried giving him an out, I swear. But he was determined. So a bunch of people came around to watch, and they stood in a circle with us in the middle and W. said, “Two rules. No kicking, no punching in the face.” I agreed, and turned around to walk to my corner, and he kicked me in the back. When I spun around to respond, he punched me in the face.
I beat the hell out of him, and when I was done we hugged, relieved it was over with and we could move on with our lives.
And then we went to a party. And at some point everyone was sitting around and someone mentioned that W. was missing– he’d gone to get a drink of water and never came back. I went looking for him and found him lying facedown on the floor in the kitchen, praying out loud. He didn’t notice me, so I held back and listened. “God,” he said, “please don’t let me die here. Save me, God, and I promise I’ll never smoke weed again, ever, I promise, God. I swear.” He paused, I think I bit my hand to stop myself laughing, and then he said, “God, that’s a lie. Nothing’s going to stop me from smoking weed. I love it too much. I’m sorry for lying, God. If you have to kill me now for lying, I hope you don’t, but I understand.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. I’ve laughed at that over and over through the years, whenever it’s come to mind. I always thought it was the saddest, sweetest thing I’d ever seen. Bargaining, lying, apologizing, and finally accepting his fate. But maybe, thinking about this masculinity garbage, there’s something admirable about the scene, or at least a lesson to be taken away. Yeah, maybe admirable is too strong a word.
Maybe the agreed upon traits and expectations placed on both genders in every situation exist just to be refuted. Maybe that stuff is out there just for us to grind up against, to define ourselves in opposition. W. got beat up because he wanted to live up to these masculine expectations—that he be physically imposing, that he win a competition. It didn’t work out. He thought he was going to die. He lied to God. But he took responsibility for the lie right away. The mistake people make about Fight Club is thinking that it advocates imposing your will on the world or ripping the world apart, when really at the end it’s all about Ed Norton taking responsibility for his life. I guess that’s what I see as—maybe not typically masculine behavior, but in some ways ideally masculine behavior. Or, you know, to hell with gender divisions. Ideal human behavior. If you fuck up for whatever reason, take responsibility for your actions and their consequences.
And if you find marijuana working its way into your prayers, get treatment.
The Tusk 
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