Jackson Bliss sees how men have grown up seeing affection as sexual behavior, not social behavior. And that is one of the tragedies of our times.
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Once, just as I was about to step inside Union Station in New Haven, an old black guy with fuzzy grey hair and glasses stopped me on the sidewalk and asked me if I had a light. Though technically I’d stopped smoking when I’d started grad school, my bad habit resurfaced at the end of every semester because of the stress. It was reading, period, so I pulled out my lighter with a little guilt and tried lighting his cigarette. The wind was strong and erratic though, extinguishing the flame every time I rolled the flint. As I became impatient, I finally grabbed his soft, wilted old hand and cupped it with mine, lighting his cigarette undisturbed. He took a big puff and exhaled. Then he nodded his head, smiled at me and said: Thank you, son. By the time I was inside the train station, I was bawling.
The real issue buried underneath my grief was the fact that I rarely got the male affection I’d wanted as a kid. And the sad thing is, I’m not the exception either.
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At first, I didn’t understand where the tears were coming from. Maybe, I wondered, it was the anxiety of having to write three thirty-page essays in the next ten days or my secret dread of seeing my on-again-off-again girlfriend in New York who I fought with every weekend like a professional scrapper trying to dodge the first inevitable blow. Maybe it was the dreary Connecticut weather finally getting to me, weather that reminded me of Dante’s description of purgatory. Maybe I was sad because I was a poor grad student from Chicago who sometimes felt lost and out of place in New England. And maybe I was just really vulnerable that day. Whatever the ultimate reason, the tears poured out of me inside the station, on the escalator and even on the train where I looked out the window to avoid the sharp looks of commuters. The real issue buried underneath my grief was the fact that I rarely got the male affection I’d wanted as a kid. And the sad thing is, I’m not the exception either.
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My pops is a good guy, but he’s old school (which means he’s not very good at expressing himself). While he’s slowly learned to respect me as a man, we’ve never been very close. When we hang out in Chicago, for example, I’m almost always the one to initiate things. Because we’re different politically and professionally, we’ve had to strain to understand each other for most of our lives. When I was a kid, we never played in the backyard together (I played catch or soccer with my spunky obāsan). Because I was a latchkey kid, I only saw my parents for four hours a day max, most of our time spent in the kitchen and the TV room.
To be honest, I can’t remember my dad hugging me as boy nor do I remember him being proud of me growing up (except when I graduated from high school, which was really important to him). Even when I gave my MFA reading six years ago in nearby South Bend, I remember not being surprised that my dad didn’t show up. Now, I don’t point these things out an indictment because my dad is a good and hard-working person (and god knows I could be a rambunctious, argumentative and exasperating little punk). My dad helped me a little bit with my college tuition, paid for my final year of high school at my Jesuit prep school and remained emotionally devoted to my obāsan his entire life, even after my parents split up. He was a dad in the only way he knew how to be with me, slowly evolving once he remarried his second wife and had a third son (who he has a much more proactive and affectionate relationship with). It’s only recently that I’ve truly felt he’s proud of me for the man I’ve become, and maybe this is related to my stubborn professional aspirations as a fiction writer, to finishing my PhD and to marrying the love of my life. Maybe his recent respect for me has nothing to do with any of those things. As I’ve grown up and become comfortable with my self, I’ve learned to overcome the big issues I had with him, but I point out the scarcity of affection in my relationship with him because I think it partially explains why male approval was always so important to me growing up, why I still have a soft spot for male affection, why I still find myself seeking the respect of older men.
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One of the pernicious consequences of living in a country still struggling with homophobia, social verticality and patriarchy, is not just the rigid gender roles this system imposes on men (and obviously women), but also the way it prevents grown men from expressing love, gratitude and affection to each other (and often to their sons). Because of this, many boys grow up seeing affection as inherently unmasculine because their fathers never modeled affection and unconditional love as a constituent part of their own masculinity.
One of the major systemic tragedies for boys is the ongoing poverty of male affection in their lives. Boys grow up seeing affection as sexual behavior and not social behavior.
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Just as tragic, our system still punishes boys for expressing love and affection to each other (except in the case of sports) by subjecting them to social and sexual taboo, which means boys will grow up seeing affection as (hetero)sexual behavior and not social behavior, which is troubling. For many straight boys, affection will become gendered, the unique behavior of girlfriends, moms and female friends. While girls are victims of the system just as much as boys are, the system victimizes them in different ways at different stages (through slut-shaming, income inequality, domestic relegation, sexual objectification and ownership, for example). But one of the major systemic tragedies for boys is the ongoing poverty of male affection in their lives. As psychoanalytically unsatisfying as it is, for many grown men, there is a void inside us that was earmarked for our fathers’ attention and approval (which can often feel like signifiers of love). It’s a void we carry with us into adulthood, a void that only disappears (if it disappears at all) with friendships that are deeply communicative, supportive and unconditional. This void only disappears (if it disappears at all) with a lifetime of self-forgiveness for the emptiness we feel inside. This emptiness is not our fault, but if we deny its existence or pretend we’ve moved beyond the scene of our childhood trauma, we become victims of our own pathology, innocent bystanders in the crossfire of denial, unlovability and self-reproach.
Men only heal when we surround ourselves with others who are engines of deep and uncontrollable love, people who are compassionate, affectionate, forgiving and open with their emotions. For me, the most recent source of affection, kindness and love has been my wife, who I love more deeply than any person I’ve ever known. In high school, it was my religion and English teachers. In college, it was my brother and my friends. Someday, it will be my own fatherhood, which will give me new emotional space for repairing the tiny broken parts of me and for expressing my endless devotion, explicit love and continuous affection for my baby. Even though he doesn’t exist yet, even though she hasn’t even been conceived, my love for him is already enormous, already bigger than myself.
Other articles by Jackson Bliss:
The Importance of Male Self-Love
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Photo: lenny montana / flickr
Why don’t you put the ACTUAL publication date of these old articles rather than dissembling?
Thank you very much for this text. It has made me hopeful for humanity. A sensitive man is the best man for the 21 century and the strongest.
It’s called: g0ys – spelled w. a zer0. G00GLE ’em.
Excellent article. Thank you for writing it. As a female I have to say that I also experienced a deprivation of male affection. Not only is male affection towards a male seen as homosexual in our culture, male affection is seen as sexual towards females, and neither example is ever seen any differently, always with that sexual charge. It harms us all, boys and girls, sons and daughters, men and women. We are human with individual differences and we all need that human contact that has nothing to do with sex.
Surrounding yourself with people who are full of love sounds to me like emotional parasitism. Eventually you will suck those people dry and then will leave exasperated and angry. It’s okay to get your emotional kicks from someone else but the main source of your emotions should be YOU. I grew up with a mother who was emotionally unavailable. I don’t go around sucking men for emotions which i didn’t receive in childhood from my mother…i try to seek it inside myself. Other than that, great article. I do agree men need to receive more affection from their fathers and… Read more »
‘… men have grown up seeing affection as sexual behavior, not social behavior.’
SO true and as such, it is easy to understand how women are objectified. We become objects to satisfy the human need for affection, but those efforts are most often of the sexual or sensual nature. Brilliant article that illuminates the necessity for healthy, non-sexual human touch for men to truly thrive.
I practically sobbed as you did on the commuter train. You have provided a beautiful and round-about window to naming the hunger we men face for each other. I run a weekly men’s group here in Washington, Missouri, near St. Louis that has a core of 24 men. At least a dozen and a half make it each week to share openly about our lives and to live in brotherhood – at least for an evening. It is beautiful to watch the physical and emotional outreaches of affection among the guys, many of whom didn’t know each other before. You… Read more »
Hi Paul,
I’d love to hear more about your group. Send me a message sometime if you don’t mind, [email protected]
My Grandfather on my father’s side died when he was 10 in an accident and as a result of my own fathers difficult job in the prisons I can very much empathise with how such men never learned to share their emotions let alone admit they had them. However much of what you say has to do with the environment in which men have been raised as opposed to any failure on men’s part. For instance, you write: …”the system victimizes them[women] in different ways at different stages (through slut-shaming, income inequality, domestic relegation, sexual objectification and ownership, for example)….… Read more »
You should be mad at the .001% of war profiteers, HMO’s, financial manipulators, and the prison industrial complex, not harping on hierarchies of oppression. The corporatocracy is using your readiness to resent women as a way to control you and keep you in “the learned helplessness of servitude in hateful jobs.” You’re letting your true enemy drive a wedge between you and the potential allies you need to improve your quality of life – what better way to do this than to divide the population in half? They do this with racism, homophobia, and religious intolerance too.
Appreciation… this closely related article on Elephant just rolled through again also: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/10/why-men-are-so-obsessed-with-sex-steve-bearman/
~ Heart
The essence of this article is so true. I grew up in an Irish-American family where men showed affection to each other only through teasing. I had five uncles, some of them more merciless than the others. The men in my family never hugged or kissed each other. Fortunately, most of my neighborhood was Italian-American. The men in these families hugged and kissed each other all the time. Most importantly, the father kissed their sons, as well as their daughters. As a child, I found this embarrassing, but as I started having children of my own, I starting kissing them–both… Read more »
What the hell is an “Obasan”? I really like this website but stuff like this is such a turnoff. If you’re going to use terms that are not broadly understood in your (supposed) demographic at least define them. Otherwise it comes off as really elitist.
Otherwise, excellent article. You’re central thesis is soooo important and, in my opinion, one of the top ways sexism hurts men too.
You’re already on the internet, is a google search really that difficult? Is learning something small really that much of a turnoff?
Lovely article and spot on. Tragic because it is so true. I think your premise that internalized and social homophobia is at the root of this issue is correct. Homophobia hurts us all, not just ‘TEH Gays’.
Well-written, to say the least! Precisely what I felt with my mother, I would say. She is a strong woman, to put it mildly. Life away from the luxuries she enjoyed as a youngster, post-marriage, shook her up and transformed her into a tough-talking, no-nonsense character with a sharp mind and even sharper wit. What she perhaps lost, in the process, was a little bit of affection, which she was rather unwilling to part with wherever I was concerned. With my younger brother, though, she seemed to have no problem showing affection – but that could also be attributed to… Read more »
Maybe this was addressed in other comments, and, if it was, ignore. As a female, I kind of relate to all of the struggles that you experienced as a male. While, perhaps, the struggles are more pertinent or common for males (I will not pretend that I know how the experience may possibly affect me as a male) I want to point out that some of what has been addressed has does happen to females. My father showed me what it was like to be a weak woman. My vulnerability was showcased and outlined through his inability to be emotional.… Read more »
What on earth are you talking about?
Nice job, Jackson. I related to your emotion after you walked away from the old man you helped.
My regret of little affection growing up is being replaced by strong relationships with other men full of verbal and physical affection. My own brothers seem to be the ones with the most hesitation to change!
Thanks for the great article.
Jackson, don’t lose that “soft spot” for male affection. It’s the emotional game changer that makes you a better man. Your insights and openness have gained this older man’s respect.
Great article. Definitely one that I can relate to in many ways. Thanks!
My dad has always been hardworking to make sure that my brother and I always had a house to live in, good food to eat, and an education to carry us through into the future. However my dad has always been a reclusive man. He lacks the ability to express emotions, and I wonder if he actually even understands his own emotions let alone mine. His reclusiveness has built a massive wall between us, and deprived me of the fatherly affection that would have built my self confidence and self esteem that I needed especially through the rough high school… Read more »
I think this is prevalent in most western cultures, but latin countries have it better in many ways (although worse in many others). I’m Brazilian, and I’m always amused with foreign people who got surprised with our “warmness”, since we talk with strangers in every place (really, every place), touch a lot, and don’t even have the concept of “personal bubble” (took me a while to understand it when I first heard about it in a movie). So, it’s routine for men to hug and kiss each other, and for fathers to get very physical in their relationships with sons.… Read more »
I don’t know what Jackson Bliss is talking about. My Observations: I see heterosexual guys hugging and even kissing each other on the chick or neck, and telling each other, I love you, you are my brother. “I would do every thing for you” even holding hands like girls do.
Disclaimer: It only happens when they are drinking together. LOL
That is why I do not drink. Too macho here. LOL
Brilliant article. I can relate to your experience in many ways. Thank you! Earlier this year my father told me he loved me for the very first time in my 37 years of consciousness. It touched me deeper than anything that I’d experienced before. It’s something I yearned to hear even though my mother always assured us that my father loved us. We need to break the cycle and learn to communicate with both sexes on every level including showing affection. This article gives me hope that there are others out there thinking and trying in a similar way to… Read more »
ctrl + f “suicide” 0 of 0.
While the article and comments touch an important topic, I feel like the elephant in the room is being ignored here. I don’t see the value of discussing this topic without while ignoring some of it’s greatest effects, like the 3+ to 1 gender disparity in suicide rates. Statistical evidence is part of how you move from sharing stories to changing systemic inequality.
Jackson,
Thank-you. My dad worked two jobs in order to raise 5 kids. I wish there was more physical affection but I came to cherish the attention and time he devoted to me. Though exhausted and beat, he never turned me away. Our father’s absence or lack of affection may have something to do with the competitive nature of our productive lives. Dads who can remain affectionate in the face of this pressure are truly heroic. I wish you were to receive an appreciative hug.
What a beautifully written piece – thank you! I think it’s a generational thing – we’re becoming a lot more in touch with our emotions now (thank god!). You say “for many grown men, there is a void inside us that was earmarked for our fathers’ attention and approval” – i think this is the case with so many grown women too, including myself. I only started emotionally connecting with my father about 2 years before he passed away. The years I have spent trying to get approval from men have literally wasted me and worn me out. And if… Read more »
Tried to get approval from society, your bosses, and co-workers can waste you and drive you into the ground.
Jeez but I live in a strange corner of the universe. two weekends ago i went to the baptism of the son of one of my proteges… I’ve known him since he was 14, when his Dad, a real old school guido laborer, would bring him to clean up sites on holidays and weekends… My boy. despite my best efforts, still makes too many fag jokes as do his brothers… I got to the church and hugged and kissed 4 different men. At the reception were a few more guys whom i hadn’t seen in a while and we all… Read more »