After college, I take a newspaper gig as a rock critic. Most of the shows that come through town are heavy metal. The fans in front are young dudes with radiant hair and bleak prospects. They all drink too much and talk tough. They want to be like the glittering figures onstage—that macho, that powerful. At one of the first shows I cover, a couple of burly guys launch into a pattern of shoving predictive of a fight. Then they start swinging. I leap between the two and shout for them to calm down, but I’m not sure whether I’m trying to break up the fight or trying to put myself into the middle of it.
♦♦♦
A few years later I’m in Miami Beach, working for another newspaper. I make a right turn onto a main road, and within a few hundred yards a gold sports coupe cuts me off. I honk at the driver because I’m not going to let some dick do that to me. The driver responds by slamming on his brakes so that I’m forced to slam on my brakes. Then he does it again.
When we come to a red light, the guy glares at me in his rearview mirror, and I glare back. Then he gets out of his car—we’re in the middle of a busy street—and marches back to my car. He’s screaming about how I cut him off, evidently before he cut me off. I roll down my window, meaning to tell him, basically, Okay, calm down. I apologize.
But before I can say anything, the world swings out of focus, and then I’m staring at my car’s grubby carpet beneath the passenger seat, where, curiously, my glasses are lying. It takes a second to dawn on me: I’ve just been punched. Hard.
The guy hurries back to his car, jumps in, and burns rubber around the corner. Blood is tickling my cheek, from where the rim of my glasses cut into my skin. I pull up at the nearest shop, a pharmacy, and ask if they have ice. The girl at the register stares at me with her mouth open. I am bleeding onto the floor. “This guy sucker punched me,” I say. “Right in the middle of traffic. Can you believe that?”
I tell my friends that the cut on my face is from basketball. But I know the truth. I’m lucky the guy didn’t drag me out of my car, didn’t have a weapon, didn’t turn me into the sort of violent headline I might read about in the Metro section while imagining the victim as a pathetic wimp.
♦♦♦
For the next decade there’s always some guy I feel I should fight. The guy who throws elbows in our pickup hoops game at Flamingo Park. The guy who spends months baiting me in grad school. The guy who sells me a bag of fake pot and refuses to refund my money. I sit around for hours at a time, reliving our confrontations, wishing I had the courage to punch these dudes in the face.
♦♦♦
It’s tempting to blame all this on my father. That would be the safe move. Perhaps if he’d encouraged us to share our feelings rather than pummel each other, my brothers and I would have entered the world without fear and loathing. We would have become secure citizens, ready to talk things through. But that would miss the point, that masculinity has always been governed by aggression.
To put it more starkly: Aggression is the means by which boys learn to share their feelings. Not even the most loving father can protect his son from the playgrounds, the bars and parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and targeted, where fear becomes rage, and rage becomes violence.
♦♦♦
My wife is downstairs with our daughter. I can hear them playing with the new paint set. I’m upstairs working on my novel. Except half the time, I’m not writing at all. I’m trolling YouTube for old boxing matches, street brawls, ultimate fighting—the pornography of the bullied. I watch these scenes with a scalding, masturbatory shame. My fists twitch and flex. I’m like a Catholic kid frisking myself for that forbidden rush of adrenaline.
♦♦♦
Or maybe I’m in my car, immersed in the molten wrath of Boston traffic. This is where I indulge my other secret vice: talk radio. Limbaugh. Hannity. Savage—our maestros of rage, each a Joe McCarthy Mini-Me. Grievance is their siren’s call. “You are all victims!” they sing. “Are you going to let these [fill in the blank] kick us around? Fight back!”
These guys represent everything I despise. They’re vampires of the soul, feeding on the psychic damage of their congregations. And yet listening to them is a kind of seduction. It’s like tuning in to an emotional oldies station. The louder they wail, the deeper I descend into that primordial realm where nobody ever admits he’s wrong or uncertain or frightened, where sadism is the chosen means of eradicating shame. Welcome to masculinity stunted at age five.
♦♦♦
And whom does history commemorate if not those men most effective at marshaling their aggression to shape the world? For every Gandhi, a hundred Hitlers. For every Enlightenment, a hundred Inquisitions. For every treaty, a hundred wars.
What I’m asking here is, Do we ever outgrow our savagery? Is there any way to strip from us the masculine pathologies acquired over millions of years of evolution?
Let me put all this in a more personal light: How am I to protect my son from a world that lives inside of me?
I have plenty of fancy ideas about how this might happen, about what it means to be a good man, and I’ve spent many years trying to publicize my own glowing empathy. But the truth is I remain a prisoner of terror and rage, one minute puffing out my chest, the next cowering, dreaming of a power that resides in valor, in the ability to inflict physical harm. It’s horrible who I am.
♦♦♦
So now you know why I feared having a son, and why, when I gaze down at my newborn boy sleeping—he is three days old as I write this—I am sometimes filled with dread. I offer no happy ending here, no eleventh-hour homily about the rescuing powers of forgiveness. A quick look at the state of the world should dispel such mush.
All I can say is that I’ll do my best with the love I have. I’ll hope my boy becomes someone different from his father, braver in the right ways, less frightened. This, it seems to me, is the only reasonable hope fathers can offer their sons.
—
This essay is excerpted from The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood, free with a Premium Membership to The Good Men Project.
As usual, Steve, you’ve written about something deeply important from a place of honesty, self reflection, and true wisdom. Thank you.
There are more than a few good men, and there is no reason to believe that your son will not be among them.
Steve, you have nothing to worry about, raise your children to the best of your ability and all of the things you are anxious about will be experienced but learned as lessons that will benefit them in the long run because they have a good background and support
Great, great piece, Steve. You are so very right. BEING a loving father/man is easier said than done. Nobody is perfect and we have never asked to be the way we are. We just deal with it in the best way we can and we can’t do more than acknowledge our mistakes and learn from them so as to avoid making the same mistake again. I admire you for your openness and your honesty. The weak can never be honest. Honesty is the attribute of the strong. So, reading your piece I would say you are one of the strongest… Read more »
Their are very few people who wold only want a girl child and no boys as women don’t give their life for Husband, friends or any one else but they are also not bothered about their parents as I have never seen a female taking care of her parents in their old age even though there are umpteen examples of boys voluntarily living far humble life just because all their income goes towards maintaining their parents, this is never recognized by anyone and people live in myth that girls love there parents more than the boys whereas the fact is… Read more »
Hi Steve,
any chance we can have a talk about it, like on skype or via email? I`m EXACTLY in the same situation at the moment, and I can`t believe they why you could articulate MY feelings in such a clear way.
thanks
gimbo
Thanks. I’ve never read anything that addresses this idea before. It hadnt occurred to me that others might think about things in this way too. Just thanks.
I can’t take all this self-loathing. Perhaps you have heard of Mahat Ma Ghandi or Martin Luther King or Jesus Christ or St. Augustine or Sir Thomas More. All men of peace. They died seeking peace. Perhaps you have heard of Phoebe Prince, the 15 year old girl in South Hadley, Massachusetts who was relentless and mercilessly bullied by 6 female classmates to the point that she hung herself. Or maybe you have heard of The “Angel of Death, Beverley Gail Allit, is one of Britain’s most well known serial killers. Working as a pediatric nurse, she is responsible for… Read more »
Both genders may have a hard life ahead of them, it’s just different issues that come up. Girls bully differently than boys but it’s still destructive. Girls have body image issues but so do boys. And both have societal pressures and expectations. Parenting is rough
A simple gender flip reveals quite a bit here:
Imagine how a woman would feel if you wrote a piece saying how disappointed you were that you had a daughter instead of another son. Justified righteous indignation would be the order of the day. That’s how many men would feel upon reading this piece.
If it doesn’t pass the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” test, then there’s something wrong with it.
And “justified righteous indignation” would prevent us from seeing what the author is really saying, which is to examine the problems with what masculinity means to him and why he is afraid of failing his son. If we really want to be able to discuss this sort of thing openly, we need to allow space for people to share their honest feelings, even if we may not like or agree with what they have to say. Trying to police what people can and can’t express is harmful, and prevents people from being honest with their stories. After all, isn’t part… Read more »
Ah, there’s that famed male empathy I keep hearing about. Good thing he didn’t reveal his problems to a mean ol’ woman who’d just take advantage of his vulnerability.
This is excellent stuff, Steve. Excellent writing.
You certainly have more self-control than I. If someone gets out of their car in the middle of traffic, I’m already on my feet and anxious to meet them.
It is good to dispel mush. I’m sure your son will turn out just fine.
Best of luck with fatherhood.
To put it just as starkly: Aggression is the means by which girls learn to control their feelings. Not even the most loving father can protect his daughter from the playgrounds, the bars and parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and targeted, where fear becomes rage, and rage becomes violence and violence becomes rape.
Hey Steve, don’t worry so much. If you’re a good dad your son and daughter will turn out fine. Give them a good sense of self and good values and they will get through life just as you have. I was a small, studious kid and I got picked on growing up. I got my ass kicked, kicked a few and lived in terror of some of the big, tough guys. When all was said and done I ended up in a better place with a better life than the punks who pushed me around. I have two daughters, 17/22… Read more »
Wow, this has certainly given me a new perspective. Steve, you already got a leg up on your own Dad. You recognize the perversity in ideals about what masculinity means, even if you still feel that thrill from out right violence. And because of that, your son is guaranteed a different childhood then you were. You’re Dad was just doing what he thought was best as a father. And you have enough foresight to see how that affected you. And that’s the key here.
Are you kidding me? You’re worried about bullying and your son? Girls are WAY more apt to bully each other than boys. And they’re meaner too. Phoebe Prince anyone??
I hoped and hoped and hoped for a boy and I was rewarded. I don’t have a daughter (I have one on the way but we don’t know the gender) and I hope I never do. Body image problems, ultra-mean bullying and other female issues are not something I look forward to at all.
“Sean Mulveyhill, Austin Renaud, Kayla Narey, Ashley Longe, Sharon Chanon Velazquez and Flannery Mullins are all charged in connection with Phoebe Prince’s death.”
Those aren’t all girls.
Also, pretty sure boys can have body image issues–steroids?
I don’t think it is a contest about who is meaner, I think that bullying and violence in all forms need to be addressed.
Girls and bullying is certainly a mounting problem. But It’s not strictly just a female issue. Recently in my own state of NJ, a gay male college student Tyler Clementi commented suicide because of another student, his roommate’s, bullying. If you are worried about situations like Phoebe Prince and your children, then you should also be worried about these kind of situations as well. “Meanness” happens on both sides. I also think there is an issue with parents not teaching their children to deal with the fact that not everyone is going to like them and that’s okay, in combination… Read more »