Dominance and aggression – what could go wrong?
Andrew Sullivan wonders what the point was.
I read with some interest Peggy Orenstein’s long essay on what’s wrong with boys. An in-depth study of a hundred boys, analyzing their problems and issues, seeing what makes them tick, seeing how the culture has changed them: It’s a fascinating topic. I kept reading and reading in the hope of discovering the point. I’ve now reread it and still can’t figure it out.
Orenstein reports the following facts drawn from her meticulous research: Boys brag to each other about whom they’ve had sex with and compete for girls, they boast about how they screw around on girls, they tend to admire jocks and athletes and mock those less active in sports, they try not to cry in public. They admire “Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).” Teenage boys may react to the notion that they should become vegans by saying something like, “Being vegans would make us pussies.”
More earth-shattering revelations: Boys find it hard to talk about their feelings, especially with their fathers. They tend to talk about these things with women — girlfriends, sisters, mothers. Many are jealous. One immediately broke off an affair with a girl when he was told she was cheating. In the locker room, male teens can be really gross: “It was all about sex,” one sensitive teen boy complained. “We definitely say fuck a lot; fuckin’ can go anywhere in a sentence. And we call each other pussies, bitches. We never say the N-word, though. That’s going too far.” These boys also saw socializing as instrumental: “The whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it.”
Sullivan’s reaction is “You don’t say.” Boys are like that, boys have always been like that, tell us something we don’t know.
This, Orenstein implies, is some kind of crisis. But it’s only a crisis if you find the very idea of male culture as it has always existed somehow problematic.
Yes, there are downsides to this kind of maleness. There’s a reason men tend to die younger than women.
I can think of some other downsides that Sullivan doesn’t mention, like misogyny, rape, the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, domination, aggression…that kind of thing. Sullivan, weirdly, talks about everything but that. He seems to get so close to it but he never arrives.
What if so much of what she abhors — admiration of strength, envy of others’ ability to have sex with women, aggression, nonverbal forms of interaction, stoicism, risk-taking, mutual mockery, bawdiness — is intrinsic to being male?…[Y]ou’re left with the sinking feeling that the essay is really simply a lament: that men are men, that they are different, that their world can be alien to women, and that their rituals and discourse and company are somehow inherently problematic in a way that women’s simply could not be.
Not “somehow inherently problematic.” It’s not mysterious. Male rivalry and aggression all too often centers on domination and ownership of women, and that’s not great for women. It did its work on Sullivan himself, apparently: he can’t even see the problem.
Yeah. I do.
Why would we assume it is? There is an enormous amount of time and energy spent in bringing up those boy to be boys – the media, the parents, the school, other boys, and the internet all get into the action. There is a lot of policing done of boy’s behavior (just like there is of girl’s, but with a different goal).
And, if the default state of men is to be dangerous to others, particularly women, and to be smug little assholes, then, yes, there is something wrong with men. Thing is, I don’t think it is. I think it’s a huge part of so many cultures that we assume it must be that way (and, oh, look at chimpanzees! And lobsters! Male dominance! Never mind that we are neither chimpanzees or lobsters. And we don’t pick lice off each other and eat it, either).
FTFY Mr Sullivan.
Poor unrealized adult Sully has to glorify the hyper-masculine culture he was raised on the fringes of. He must have had wicked crushes on the jocky boys at his boarding school. Listen to him:
See, that’s not it at all, and the fact that Sully describes it as such suggests that he can’t tell the difference. The boys aren’t bragging about sex, let alone love (in the article, one describes dating a girl as “gay”). They are bragging about using girls. They have sex like tourists visit cities: they don’t learn about them, they “do” them. And what counts to them is not what they share with their sexual partners, it’s what they share with the boys. Bros before hos.
Yeah, that’s a shitty version of manhood. No, it’s neither eternal nor inevitable. It may be good enough for Sully, but it’s not good enough for me. Or for my son.
Or the other possibility – what it is is socialised? If the former, then there is no hope trying to change male behaviour; but if the latter, then there is. Sullivan is throwing his hands up and giving up by choosing the former.
Maybe he’s simply feeling protective of his Purity of Essence and Precious Bodily Fluids.
And what if those traits “intrinsic to being male” have a wide range of expressions? There are reasonable and admirable ways to exhibit all these characteristics, just as each one of them can become toxic and dangerous. Maybe that’s where civilization can step in with its civilizing effect.
In other words, men can have a ‘male culture’ without being dicks about it.
So much this. Not that I have always personally succeded. Same goes for ‘female culture’ also, but I’m not about to start whataboutering..
It baffles me that seemingly educated people aren’t aware of other cultures, and other times. In our own culture not that long ago it was women who were seen as sexually aggressive. In Tibetan culture (visiting an exhibit of Tibetan art was a formative experience for me) ‘female energy’ is aggressive, violent, impulsive and dangerous while ‘male energy’ is peaceful, serene, calm and passive. Hard to make an ‘intrinsic’ argument if you’re aware that other cultures exist.
Does Sullivan think gay-bashing and locker-room rape (as in the current scandal in Texas) are just Normal Boyhood as well? Is he so lacking in empathy that he can’t even draw upon his own experience?
Wasn’t the ‘N-word’ a normal part of everyday speech for generations? Intrinsic to being male and white.
This seems to be rather like all the evo-psych sexism that’s spewed all over the manosphere. Take any currently observed behavior and make up a Just So Story about how its God’s Will, or Just Human Nature.
Seriously – it’s so Colonel Blimp. Harrumph! What’s all this nonsense about reform and change and doing better?! The old way was good enough for my ancestor Lord Blimp of Blimp Manor and it’s good enough for me!
Sully still hasn’t gotten over his grammar school letting girls in when he was thirteen. Spoiled all his fun.
Well apart from the sexual jealousy – the problem with a lot of these isn’t inherent to the traits themselves, so much as those who demand such traits be considered intrinsic.
Admiring strength can be useful enough when you need to build a team of people with different strengths. Being too afraid to pick people who are better than you at certain things for your team isn’t a great idea.
A degree of aggression is required to assert yourself and get things done. An understanding of body language and nonverbal communication can clue you in to things people can’t say, being at least a little bit stoic about things is the key to tolerance and the basis of a lot of good manners, risk is a part of the risk reward ratio for a reason, sometimes you’ve got to laugh at stuff and sometimes it won’t be all that appropriate.
The thing is when you say these traits are intrinsic to men, that encourages them towards their worst interpretations. Aggression becomes bullying, admiring strength becomes piling on, nonverbal communication and stoicism become non-communication of problems, risk taking can become self destruction, mutual mockery can just become viciousness and bawdiness can become laddism.
If they are intrinsic then when these worst interpretations become serious problems being a man goes from a simple fact of nature to being an excuse. You don’t have to reign in your support for the fascist dictator because you’re a man, you don’t have to use your words, you’re a man, you don’t have to take responsibility for engaging in high risk activities and fucking up, you’re a man, you don’t have to unclench your fist – you’re a man etc…
As a man, to be honest I’d much rather take some responsibility for myself than get patted on the head and told, “Don’t worry, its because nature gifted you with a penis that you act like one.”
I don’t think anyone seriously would claim that women don’t have problematic “rituals and discourse and company” in our culture.
The main difference (or similarity, depending on how you view it) is that the problematic aspects of male culture are primarily* directed at women, while the problematic aspects of female culture are primarily* directed… at women. I’m thinking of things like women tearing each other apart over beauty norms. Of women reinforcing the culture’s directive that women be meek and mild and unassertive with men, which hurts women in the workplace and in relationships.
*– As the saying goes, patriarchy hurts men, too. My college dormitory was originally the first co-ed dorm on campus, but at first that just meant the men lived in one wing and the women lived in another. By the time I got there decades later, half of the floors were co-ed and half were single-sex; within just a few more years, every floor would become co-ed. It was by popular demand — both men and women preferred to live on co-ed floors, until soon there were so few people who wanted single-sex floors that they could be accommodated in one of the other dorms. It wasn’t anything to do with finding people to hook up with or date. Male students generally didn’t like the macho, frat-boy atmosphere of all-male floors, and preferred the moderating influence that women seemed to provide. Women students reported that all-female floors could be (sorry, but this is the term I heard a lot) “catty” and socially vicious.
There is always a point beyond which Andrew Sullivan, who is not an unintelligent man, is unable to think, and it always seems to come down to knock-down and ineluctable empirical ‘facts’ about human nature, or something passionately felt that has to be true because he feels passionately about it. Testosterone & male-ness. Intelligence as charted in bell-curve diagrams. The treachery of those who opposed the Iraq War (though, to his credit, he has apologised for this; but his attitude during those days made me fundamentally distrust the man). This ‘bedrock’ is what he likes or wants to believe. He has, too, the journalist’s trick of swimming with the tide while pretending not to and promptly and optimistically acquiescing in whatever fait d’accompli transpires – as in his remarks on Boris & Brexit after the recent election. There is also, in his personal bedrock, a large stratum of self-pity, apparent in the remarks quoted above about male adolescence, about boys being unable to express their feelings, and about men not living so long as women.
I liked Screechy Monkey’s remarks about co-ed dorms very much. I was sent to an all-boys school (in England), but do not recognise at all the bragging among boys about ‘hooking up with girls’, etc. that Sullivan goes on about as though it were some natural and inoffensive activity that all males indulge in, and always have indulged in. Perhaps some boys indulged in it, but I never across any who did. Nor did I come across it among the young working-class men with whom I became friends when after leaving school at 17 I spent some years working as a labourer on farms, in factories, and on building sites. Nor did I find it among my friends at the co-educational Welsh agricultural college (with separate dorms) that I went to for a year. So I find quite understandable and correct Screechy’s point about male students generally not liking a ‘macho, frat boy atmosphere’ – an atmosphere that seems more a fairly recent cultural product; the question is, I suppose, why and how it came about and why it is so important to some.
Tim Harris, that’s interesting, because my husband also lived in an all-male dorm (it was before co-ed dorms became a thing). He didn’t experience, at least among his circle, the frat boy atmosphere, bragging machismo, the constant discussion of sex and exploitation of women. Theirs was an intellectual dorm, with discussions of history and politics, philosophy and art. You were more likely to hear talk about Nietzsche and Napoleon or Whistler and Picasso than about who the guys had sex with. Am I to assume from that they were not really men, but were, in fact, girls? No, of course not.
I think things are worse now, and a lot of it is the Internet. Guys who may not lean toward laddism (I like that word; it isn’t what we say here in the states, but I think it sums things up nicely, so forgive my usage of it) but may not be wholly immersed in the culture surf the net and find themselves up to their ears in ‘male culture’. Their mild tendency is reinforced, and becomes a defining thing for them. They may join in a pile on or two just for fun, because that’s what guys do, right? Get on the Internet and call women names? It makes you a man? No, it makes you a juvenile, but on the Internet, there is no one to explain that to them. Well, there is, but they don’t visit those sites.
It’s sort of like trans. You have a sad on, maybe even clinically depressed. You know something’s wrong, so you google your symptoms, and what comes up? A trans site. Oh, my, you were born in the wrong body and that’s why you feel this.
The Internet is a great big echo chamber where everyone can get exposed to other people who will stoke their worst impulses. It can be a good thing…and is in many ways…but the total anarchic nature of it leads to a swamp, a cesspool, where too many people swim in shit.
I remember, after the fuss about the smirking boy in a MAGA hat watching an old Native American man with a drum (and I realise things were not so bad as they appeared at first), seeing a video on the internet about the catholic high school he went to – Covington. What a dreadful place! Belting out ‘school-spirit’ songs, a ‘tradition’ on game-days of painting their bodies black, and at other times other colours, and belting out en masse together with various choreographed movements those ‘school-spirit’ songs. It looked like North Korea. And there are those New Zealand rugby schools where students perform the haka all the time, not only before rugby matches with other schools but at school assemblies. I did not enjoy my time at school for various reasons, but although we had in those days the Combined Cadet Force, the school never sunk to those depths – the atmosphere was pretty civilised and you were not thought of as some sort of malleable and excited mass of masculinity, but as individuals – though of course there were always those sad types for whom their schooldays were the happiest days of their lives and even after leaving could not give up their infantile attachment to them.
And, yes, I warmly agree about the internet. And there is of course the appeal to male self-pity by such as Jordan Peterson, who in his lobsterish way has been ridiculously influential.
Dear Mr. Sullivan,
The essay was pointing out the problem with a particular segment of male culture being raised to regard the female half of the human race not as being people, but as being objects. Since it seems that you were raised in the same culture, you are also unable to see women as people, which is why you are quite unable to see any point to the article.
Try re-reading it, but this time from the point of view of a human being who is a person despite being female.
You’re welcome.