"This must be a hard time for women," I say to my friend Anneke. "They have so many paths to choose from, and so many voices calling them."
"I think it's a lot harder for men," she replies.
"How do you figure that?"
"The women I know feel excited, innocent, like crusaders in a just cause. The men I know are eaten up with guilt."
"Women feel such pressure to be everything, do everything," I say. "Career, kids, art, politics. Have their babies and get back to the office a week later. It's as if they're trying to overcome a million years' worth of evolution in one lifetime."
"But we help one another. And we have this deep-down sense that we're in the right-- we've been held back, passed over, used-- while men feel they're in the wrong. Men are the ones who've been discredited, who have to search their souls."
I search my soul. I discover guilty feelings aplenty-- toward the poor, Native Americans, the whales, and endless list of debts. But toward women I feel something more confused, a snarl of shame, envy, wary, tenderness, and amazement. This muddle troubles me. To hide my unease I say, "You're right, it's tough being a man these days."
"Don't laugh," Anneke frowns at me. "I wouldn't be a man for anything. It's much easier being the victim. All the victim has to do is break free. The persecutor has to live with his past."
How deep is that past? I find myself wondering. How much of an inheritance do I have to throw off?
When I was a boy growing up on the back roads of Tennessee and Ohio, the men I knew labored with their bodies. They were marginal farmers, just scraping by, or welders, steelworkers, carpenters; they swept floors, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks, their forearms ropy with muscle; they trained horses, stoked furnaces, made tires, stood on assembly lines wrestling parts onto cars and refrigerators. They got up before light, worked all day long, whatever the weather, and when they came home at night, they looked as though somebody had been whipping them. In the evenings and on weekends, they worked on their own places, tilling gardens that were lumpy with clay, fixing broken-down cars, hammering on houses that were always too drafty, too leaky, too small. The bodies of the men I knew were twisted and maimed in ways visible and invisible. The nails of their hands were black and split, the hands tattooed with scars. Some had lost fingers. Heavy lifting had given many of them finicky backs and guts weak from hernias. Racing against conveyor belts had given them ulcers. Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on concrete. Anyone who had worked for long around machines was hard of hearing. They squinted, and the skin of their faces was creased like the leather of old work gloves. There were times, studying them, when I dreaded growing up. Most of them coughed, from dust or cigarettes, and most of them drank cheap wine or whiskey, so their eyes looked bloodshot and bruised. The fathers of my friends always seemed older than the mothers. Men wore out sooner. Only women lived into old age.
As a boy I also knew another sort of men, who did not sweat and break down like mules. They were soldiers, and so far as I could tell, they scarcely worked at all. But when the shooting started, many of them would die. This was what soldiers were for, just like a hammer was for driving nails. Warriors and toilers: those seemed, in my boyhood vision, to be the chief destinies for men. They weren't the only destinies, as I learned from having a few male teachers, from reading books, and from watching television. But the men on television-- the politicians, the astronauts, the generals, the savvy lawyers, the philosophical doctors, the bosses who gave orders to both soldiers and laborers-- seemed as remote and unreal to me as the figures in Renaissance tapestries. I could no more imagine growing up to become one of these cool, potent creatures than I could imagine becoming a prince.
A nearer and more hopeful example was that of my father, who had escaped from a red dirt farm to a tire factory, and from the assembly line to the front office. Eventually, he dressed in a white shirt and tie. He carried himself as if he had been born to work with his mind. But his body, remembering the earlier years of slogging work, began to give out on him in his fifties, and it quit on him entirely before he turned 65.
A scholarship enabled me not only to attend college, a rare enough feat in my circle, but even to study in a university meant for the children of the rich. Here I met for the first time young men who had assumed from birth that they would lead lives of comfort and power. And for the first time, I met women who told me that men were guilty of having kept all the joys and privileges of the earth for themselves. I was baffled. What privileges? What joys? I thought about the maimed, dismal lives of most of the men back home. What had they stolen from their wives and daughters? The right to go five days a week, 12 months a year, for 30 or 40 years to a steel mill or a coal mine? The right to drop bombs and die in war? The right to feel every leak in the roof, every gap in the fence, every cough in the engine as a wound they must mend? The right to feel, when the layoff comes or the plant shuts down, not only afraid but ashamed?
I was slow to understand the deep grievances of women. This was because, as a boy, I had envied them. Before college, the only people I had ever known who were interested in art or music or literature, the only ones who read books, the only ones who ever seemed to enjoy a sense of ease and grace were the mothers and daughters. Like the menfolk, they fretted about money, they scrimped and made do. But when the pay stopped coming in, they were not the ones who had failed. Nor did they have to go to war, and that seemed to me a blessed fact. By comparison with the narrow, ironclad days of fathers, there was an expansiveness, I thought, in the days of mothers. They went to see neighbors, to shop in town, to run errands at school, at the library, at church. No doubt, had I looked harder at their lives, I would have envied them less. It was not my fate to become a woman, so it was easier for me to see the graces. I didn't see then what a prison a house could be, since houses seemed to be brighter, handsomer places than any factory. I did not realize-- because such things were never spoken of-- how often women suffered from men's bullying. Even then I could see how exhausting it was for a mother to cater all day to the needs of young children. But if I had been asked, as a boy, to choose between tending a baby and tending a machine, I think I would have chosen the baby. (Having now tended both, I know I would choose the baby.)
So I was baffled when the women at college accused me and my sex of having cornered the world's pleasures. I think something like my bafflement has been felt by other boys (and by girls as well) who grew up in dirt-poor farm country, in mining country, in black ghettoes, in Hispanic barrios, in the shadows of factories, in Third World nations-- any place where the fate of men is just as grim and bleak as the fate of women.
When the women I met at college thought about the joys and privileges of men, they did not carry in their minds the sort of men I had known in my childhood. They thought of their fathers, who were bankers, physicians, architects, stockholders, the big wheels of the big cities. They were never laid off, never short of cash at month's end, never lined up for welfare. These fathers made decisions that mattered. They ran the world.
The daughters of such men wanted to share in this power, this glory. So did I. They yearned for a say over their future, for jobs worthy of their abilities, for the right to live at peace, unmolested, whole. Yes, I thought, yes, yes. The difference between me and these daughters was that they saw me, because of my sex, as destined from birth to become like their fathers and, therefore, as an enemy to their desires. But I knew better. I wasn't an enemy, in fact or in feeling. I was an ally. If I had known then how to tell them so, would they have believed me? Would they now?
- Scott Russell Sanders, The Paradise of Bombs, 1984.
This is for the men out there like my father, who has sweated for twenty years underneath houses riddled with rats, animal feces, black widows, and staggering heat to build homes for the big wheels of the biggest cities in America. A man who has to deal with the insolence of the aforementioned architects, presenting M.C. Escher plans that physically cannot be built and then tolerating the backlash from his clients when they insist on its production. A man who has gotten staples in his skull--twice-- from attempting to sate an unruly autistic child and a co-worker smacking him in the head with a two-by-four. I love my daddy for everything he's provided for us, and that even at sixty years old, his grueling effort still continues.
This man paid for the taxes that allowed all of the kids in my sophomore geometry class the ability to purchase Sidekicks and studded name-plate belts and sixty dollar earrings with inset gems. This man raised his daughter to be herself and do what she likes and wear what she wants, and has raised her to be tolerant of the price range she has to adhere to in expressing herself. So when I tromped into class in the only pair of pants I had, Freak And Frolic camouflage-hemmed rave pants, and received the blows from the engorged tick of a female in the back of the room, I had to explain that I could probably afford a socially-acceptable pair if the bottom-feeding leeches in the room hadn't been sucking my father dry. So they could declare their womanhood and liberation in wearing clothing that labeled them as "bitch", "brat", "apple bottom", "princess", "angel", "juicy", and such other morally empowering terms.
My father had bone spurs removed from the slipped disks in his spine so that you could finish college, become a teacher, and preach to me about how he insinuates a racist world simply by being a white man. Because, after all, by being a white man, any of the tribulations he had to face simply pale in comparison (see what I did there?) to those of minorities. Because of his outer appearance, he has privilege.
I'd agree, considering his outer appearance consists of a haggard body speckled with pockmarks of burned off skin cancer, scars, cuts, bruises, scabs, wrinkles, and graying hair. He has privilege because he worked for it. Black, white, brown, yellow, it doesn't matter: we all turn fucking gray. |
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