What’s normal now (3)…The men question
Torrey
Orton
August
31, 2014
NB
– This is 9 months old and unfinished, but posting it may spur me to developing
it further. AT the moment it is an incomplete effort to specify the domains of experience
which have to be taken into account in addressing a question like the one
below.
What’s wrong
with men?
“We’re
redundant” is what I thought in the night as this question rolled around for
the nth time. And on seeing the morning papers I had my sense confirmed by
Camille Paglia’s reported fear that the West has lost manliness in its
engagement with late modernity (THE AUSTRALIAN 01012014). Undoubtedly I’m
overreacting to my sense of the state of men, but the depth pushes some warning
buttons.
If
you’ve ever been unexpectedly made redundant you know the experience makes the
word have a terrorising power, diminished only by overuse. Its cognates ‘in
excess of needs’, ‘position deleted in restructure’ and ‘superfluous’ often
mask a “constructive dismissal” more sharply capture the intent – to designate
a thing which has lost its meaningfulness in its context, a disposable, a
discardable, refuse, trash. This is violence, by the way. The experience is
only not experienced as an assault on the self if you discovered in the moment
that you really always wanted to get out of the place and they’ll pay you to
go!
Violence
When
I first started working on this article a month ago I took to my shelves and
found 23 books with ‘violence’ in their titles, not including William T. Vollman’s
eight volume suite Rising Up and Rising
Down (2003). The word feels male, though not only men violate. We just do
physical violence in undeniably larger proportions compared to women. And we
all respond to death threats with more alarm than to the multi-faceted
violations of social, financial, and stereotyped soul murders which proceed often
in deniable bite by bite, day in and day out.
A
violence footnote. Human violence is a continuous dimension within which
physical violences are but one class and only about 20% of the reported violations
the rest of which are normally grouped under headings like social, financial,
etc. The latter are tools of manipulation mastered by bullies and supported by
the fearful around them. The soul murder effect is that all violences are
attacks on the self which shrink the self, making it feel the author of its own
ills. Not surprisingly we feel the imminence of death with greater apprehension
than the slow burn of disrespect, so our virtual experience (mediated by news
systems) is surrounded with reminders of that end of the violence spectrum. It
sells to our already cued apprehensions.
Offending without intent
So
there arises, over and over again, the wonder: What’s wrong with us men? I
should have had a viewer warning classification before that sentence, knowing
that it will offend some part of the population which identifies as male, as if
90 to 10 (even though only percentiles) were not a winning score in anyone’s
games. Following on, all men are men and different, as are members of all
classes of organic, sexually reproduced beings, and all classes of anything
(not sure about all electrons, though!)…including the word ‘all’ of course.
Here’s
another such warning. My aim is to create enough of a picture of the male place
within the human world one to provide some perspective on the question ‘What’s
wrong with men?’ I claim no special knowledge about us (men) and my perspective
is undoubtedly shaped by its origin. Not my choice; just my fate. I always
wonder about being human, and am limited by my masculinity. I manage to do
alright with both male and female patients about being human, so that
limitation is not incapacitating so far.
And
a final limit: I’m mainly talking about the industrial or ‘advanced’ or first
world states in what follows. Shortage of material culture may increase the
rate of violence by nature, but not by inclination or spiritual deprivation. In
fact there’s some evidence that people with little or less material can be
quite “happy” as long as their material state is not seen as a personal failing
(as it is in our culture) and the gap between them and enough is not
stratospheric (as it also is in ours).
The biopsychosocio(economic)spiritual(cultural)
health model
Let’s
start with a relatively accepted version of what it means to be human – the
five categories of well-being common to the health fraternity (not that we
don’t squabble usefully about the contents and configuration of well-being).
These five categories are not mutually exclusive, nor are they intrinsically
male, though I’ll focus on their predictive impact for men.
Bio…
Men
and women differ in lots that has to do with the child making and upbringing
systems in all cultures, but neither can suffice alone to sustain the systems (unless
we move to a totally artificially inseminated system in which case we can
reduce men to the proportions held artificially by bulls and stallions in
domestic herds; apprehensions about early adopters hit the local newspapers recently. (THEAGE
mother-of-all-questions-do-we-need-men-at-all 20131211).
We
do not differ in intrinsic brain capacities, though neuroscientists of various
hues persist in trying to make a difference by promoting gender differences as
science of the brain. This has a long history of great profitability in the Men
are from…Women are from… genre. We’re all from earth and all trying to be
whole, but evolution (or God if you prefer) fitted us up for conflict by
dividing reproduction in two. After classifying us for biological purposes as
featherless bi-peds, Plato suggested 2300 years ago that humans were endlessly
in search of their other halves.
Psycho…
Forming
an identity is an early life demand and sustaining it over time among the ebb
and flow of life a persistent challenge. Identity pollution affects as all
differentially through the excess of options, denigrations and/or degenerations
postmodernity subjects us to. Uncertainty is the shared theme of our times.
There are a number of sources of identity: gender/sex, race, ethnicity, and religion
are given and permanently so. Others are given, but changeable – skills,
competences, interests, temperament, age, etc. And there are the settings for
realising ourselves – various attachments and affiliations with varying degrees
of choice in their composition.
Persistent
stress of a high order tends to regress individuals, groups and cultures. The
violent men who are the notional topic of this discussion will be shown to be
regressed by a variety of systemic pressures. For examples of groups, have a
look at sport and religious groups which do battle with competing groups at
levels of violence they would deny they are doing. For cultures which are
regressed try those with democratic processes where the systems are binding up
– here, the US, UK - and undemocratic ones (China, Russia…) which are becoming
visibly and consciously nationalist and social phobic.
Socio(economic)…
There
are reasons to think our socio-economic universe is seriously compromised in
ways which stress pretty much everyone including the incredibly, piggishly
wealthy who seem afraid someone’s going to take their excesses away. More
stressed of course are the bottom 20% of our societies who are getting
somewhere close to survival income or none at all but variations on the dole (a
combination of the unemployed, the under-employed and the quit looking and so not
reported in the government unemployment
stats used to demonstrate comparative rates of progress with the issue).
Then
there’s three systemic defects among our systems: the most outstanding of which
at the moment is the unwillingness of companies to share with the employed the
profits they are creating while the economy stays flat for them; and nearby is
the persistent stress on productivity which seems to mean reducing worker input
to outputs and reducing expenditure on worker conditions; and finally there’s
the persistent expectation that a redundancy cannot be far away. In fact we
should keep our portfolios packed. These effects are felt across all strata in
the employ of others. Small business is its own burden.
Cultural …
The
patterns and meanings of hierarchy are usually male, with female sideline
participation (except notably, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and Oz briefly, of late).
Within social/biological groupings there are the have mores and have lesses,
mediated by the placement of other groups outside the structure determined by privileged
attributes (gender, race, etc.). These provide someone else to disrespect with
certainty. The Others give the low power dominant group members an out for
their weakness within the group…often expressed with rage not expressible at
their own group’s dominant members (note Oz mateship’s decline). See the US for
the loudest demonstrations of this process in open view. Note Putin’s retro
cultural moves of adding homophobia to Russia’s chronic xenophobia, for a
non-democratic example.
The
incidence of bullying at all levels across all kinds of enterprise and activity
can be understood as just a side-effect of the power struggle in the
traditional hierarchies. Not surprisingly, they are extremely resistant to
change since every position holder in a hierarchy is a participant in the
system of dominance (which maybe is also unavoidable in many circumstances).
Spiritual …
It
would be hard to come away from a review of the major religions without an
impression that worldly and otherworldly religious leadership is male. Some
espouse this with blind certainty – the centres of the big two monotheisms and
the fringes of Judaism. Fringes seem to be especially male.
What’s wronged in men?
We
know from James Gilligan’s theory in Preventing Violence (1999) that
anger aggressively expressed is sourced from the material, psychological and
spiritual deprivations of endemic poverty with no perceived or actual hope of
exit for the deprived. But this alone is not enough. For violence is not only perpetrated
by men who are in the grip of poverty. “…the real cause of violence…is
overwhelming and otherwise inescapable and ineradicable shame.” …. “almost any
experience that can leave a man feeling ashamed does so by leaving him feeling
that he is something less than a man.” Have you been dissed lately, or worse
inadvertently dissed someone else?
Dissed
…
What
are the effects of dissing by others, or by life? Diminution of manhood. And
that’s what? Impugned ability to procreate; impugned ability to provide;
impugned ability to defend / protect one’s family; and, impugned ability to
work well (that’s vocation, or doing socially valued work, of course). This
fate may be that of the 20%.
How,
then, can those in objective power (our politicians and their
social/intellectual acolytes) also not feel powerful? Rather, they may feel
dissed by the world they’ve aspired to rule and been granted the opportunity to
have a go. Try this: they cannot control a bunch of peoples who they do not
understand and never had to before – Chinese, Indians, and Indonesian; they
cannot be saved from these peoples by The USA, which is having its own taste of
dissing by low power others; and our Economy is in disarray as mining falters
and farming flourishes into the hands of others…and on it goes.
Dissing others
So
they give themselves vigorously to dissing the powerless or low powerful –
legal asylum seekers, LGBT couples, the unemployed - and label any question of
misdistribution of social product as “envy politics” and “class warfare” even
where the distribution gap is egregious by anyone’s count of the published
numbers. Again, why the anger if they have the power? The rich certainly have
the numbers, so one can only imagine they are ashamed, too. (For an articulate and privileged view of our emerging diss
culture see Tim Winton’s “The C Word” in The Monthly Dec. 2013).
Maybe
that’s why there are so many angry men on the front bench – Scott Morrison, Corey
Bernardi, Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott, George Brandis, Christopher Pyne (a
longhaired Chihuahua – large bark, little bite and aware of it, who’s in danger
of becoming a throw rug due to uncontrollable mouthing the ankles of his
master’s clients), Andrew Robb …all in power and wielding it angrily, as if
their power is in doubt and they are offended by the fact. They, too, seem to
feel diminished, to actually be powerless when they are at their most powerful.
Or,
for another example, what do you make of Scott Morrison’s resistance, smirking
mixed with teeth showing, to questioning by Leigh Sales on 7:30 Report, as if
to be questioned puts him in the face of an unveiling – his own. The theme of
information restriction which has dominated government approaches to the public
stems perhaps from the same fear - that of being revealed.
Let’s
be clear, as the record of exclusions from federal parliament make it, that the
other guys are no better. Albanese is second fiddle to Pyne’s first for being
tossed out for outrageousness…all in the name of holding on to their turf. So
you can do the same dog tagging exercise for them to be fair. And both parties
have, with for all purposes equal intensity, vilified the weak (asylum seekers)
to deprive them of their legal legitimacy and denied the different (LGBT).
Redundancy’s revenge?
In
between the criminal end of violence (the males who make up the newsfeeds of
daily publications) and the public darlings above are the middling mass of men
who sport the embellishments of anger and aggression, most obviously the prematurely
bald head and, in a lower but not scarce number, the buff body which exceeds
the needs of the normal office suit. Add on the prevalence of permanent body
painting and a message of deep superficial confusion about the self emerges,
now both his and hers.
These
are often carried in vehicles of military mien ranging from the Subaru XV and a
host of rough lookalikes both 2 and 4WD with a “T” on the power pack signage
over the dual to quad exhausts to the Hummers which need no description – the
ultimate sign of power is a standalone name. This design – a scrunched down
butt sticking up at vehicles following pulled by a bared teeth grill – seems
pretty international and price independent.
Bauman’s liquid fear
In
Liquid
Fear (2006) Bauman talks about “derivative fear” as “a steady frame of
mind that is best described as the sentiment of being susceptible to danger; a
feeling of insecurity…and vulnerability…” It is created and sustained by
experience threatening our core functionalities in environments like:
(1) free ranging consumerism, (2) invasive
technologies, (3) mutually contradictory “evidence-based” discoveries, (4) productivity-driven
organisational reconfigurations and (5) spontaneously intruding natural
disasters (volcanic, seismological, hydrological, meteorological and so on)
visit upon us from near (try headlines in papers and news programs for
excitability quotient levels) and far (if there’s no disasters near then
they’re imported from afar, especially those similar enough to us to be
considered almost seamlessly us – to incite sympathetic feelings, comforting us
with the manageability yet pathetic nature of our afflictions compared to the
inconceivable ones of other places where the scales of disasters are often
inhumanly large for us as in Indonesia, Philippines, Japan: ah, those
uncontrollably different others, again, too).
At this point fear embraces most of us, gathering us up
in the folds of the neoliberal mantra – profit is primary and all to the
shareholders and damn the world. Maybe the various rages (road, shopping,
neighbourly….) are lead indicators of this underlying despair?? They’ve
actually been around for a decade or two. And the binges – eating, drugging –
are ways of covering hurts, too.
I know this is not everyone’s experience, but even some
of those for whom these are the most personally exciting of times can
acknowledge it ain’t necessarily so for many others. And in this country the
story’s about to get worse, so everyone’s telling us (suddenly it seems, but
not). Perhaps
the American diseases are for us, too:
“…Profit, not equal rights or freedom of religion or any of the other
high-minded principles we seize to bolster our selective outrage, is the real
coin of the realm. And, as if you didn’t know, it quacks like a duck.”
Kathleen Parker, Washington Post 251213 discussing the latest
American culture war storm, Duck Dynasty.
Redundant, my tail feathers!
