Cameron Conaway on the taking and making of modern masculinity
Greasy pizza boxes on the floor, dog hair matted in the rug and an intense game of beer pong going on upstairs. There I stood inside the original “Animal House.” Within the next five minutes nearly fifty young men would unfold metal chairs or lounge on one of the couches or come down the long staircase to listen to what I had to say.
The Alpha Delta Fraternity was established at Dartmouth College in 1846. The problem, both insiders and outsiders told me, was that this new crew of Alpha Delta brothers wanted to uphold the tradition… of the Animal House movie their brothers in the 70’s had inspired.
Because my talk to these students was an off campus event, I was able to be as authentic and raw as possible. These guys have been intellectualized into the ground by “thinkers” who wanted to change them into better men. They’ve been bullied in an attempt to “scare them straight” into good men.
I shared with these young men the trauma I endured at the hands of my father, stories about my mentor Daryn Clark’s deadly battle with cancer and what I learned from his inspiring wife. I let tears drip down my face and looked through my clouded vision into the tears forming in their own eyes. I was told by the Dartmouth employee who attended that they’d never had a speaker come in and stand before them with naked vulnerability quite the way I did.
After all of that, we talked masculinity—what it is, the way it’s changed, what they take and make of it today.
“Masculinity is in the eye of the beholder,” said one student to kick off our conversation. “Look at the bygone days of cowboy movies. Masculinity then was controlling a horse, controlling a woman with few words, not complaining, smoking cigarettes and settling disagreements with your piece.”
“It still is, kinda,” another student chimed in. “Maybe not here in our safe haven at Dartmouth, but check out the news. Look at the shootings over simple disputes, look at the domestic violence rates, look at some of the problems that arise due to men not sharing their emotions. And in some ways owning a nice car has replaced the status symbol of riding a horse around.”
There was silence as the brothers all took it in. I thought of redirecting this moment but hell no. It deserved a breath or two to pulse its wisdom into the silence. One of the dogs, likely startled by the loudness of the sudden quiet, barked. And we resumed.
“So has masculinity changed or is it just wearing a new costume?” I asked.
“Both,” one student said. “Putting your head down and working hard for the sake of your family… I see that as both traditional and modern masculinity. My father worked 14-hour days, hard physical labor, and still found the time and will to drive me an hour each way to soccer practice. I got into Dartmouth because of a soccer scholarship. He gave me this opportunity. I see that as masculine. That’s the kind of man I want to be.”
“But my mom did the same,” said another student. “She was a single parent. I always saw her work ethic and caring for me as something I wanted to carry on. I never saw that as masculine. I just saw those certain qualities as awesome.”
Another student asked: “But what’s changing our idea of masculinity then? Is something challenging it?”
One student responded:
“It comes back to what the first guy said, about how it’s in the eye of the beholder. I mean… it seems to me that being your authentic self, sharing your emotions and actually sharing your feelings rather than hiding them… it’s a different kind of toughness. It seems like that’s the kind of toughness that many people think is more masculine today. Hiding your feelings used to be considered tough and masculine, but now it’s just considered stubborn. Other people might think the traditional cowboy stuff is masculine, whereas another person might think a gay guy coming out is masculine. It seems like the more open men and women become with each other, with gender roles, the less meaningful these definitions of masculinity and femi… femininity actually are.”
This discussion has been with me for months, and the part about masculinity being in the eye of the beholder surfaced last night when I checked out Pinterest.com and saw this on the front page:
Individuals decide what aspects they feel represent masculinity, and our collective society highlights these in movies and commercials. But what then when masculinity can be transposed onto a single mother? What then if one person sees masculinity not in the chiseled muscle of a man’s body but in the fine fibers of his hair color?
Maybe it means the time has come when the quibbling over the gendered terms takes a back seat to simply seeing “certain qualities as awesome.”
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–Photo: Alpha Delta, Dartmouth / AP
The Dartmouth students’ comments give credence to comments made by Camille Paglia in her recent interview in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920 When the question, ‘what is masculinity?’ is put to the students, they don’t respond with comments that are in anyway related to sex. Instead they speak of working hard, caring for your family, expressing emotion and the courage to come out as gay. Where all of these things are admirable qualities, applicable to all genders, they have nothing to do with masculinity. That is if you define masculinity as those characteristics that distinguish male from female. That is… Read more »
As an almost-blonde guy (not many guys stay full blonde into adulthood), I can’t tell you how many times I’ve noticed this in the marketing world. Every time there’s a couple, or a family, the guy has dark hair and the wife is blonde… I’ve seen it on appliance boxes, food boxes, commercials, it’s everywhere. Once I noticed it initially, I started paying attention, and then realized how regular it is. It has to be eighty to ninety percent… I started feeling a little marginalized. Why not a blonde guy, and a dark-haired wife? Does this look too colonial, or… Read more »
Tell me about it… Many women seem to be so hung up on the idea of “tall dark and handsome”, and USians are so hung up on the idea of blonde being for women and kids.. it’s amazing to me to see the difference in how I’m treated. If I get a short cut, my hair is much darker, I get treated differently. If I let it grow out, it lightens up as it gets longer and then suddenly I’m a loser.. There was a time of course when Robert Redford was the freaking biggest draw at the box office… Read more »
I might as well write an article that Blonde Hair = Femininity. Which is untrue when you consider that many brunettes with very dark hair are the epitome of feminine just as much as Charlize Theron and Cameron Diaz.
It’s not any more true with respect to men either. What about all those Scandinavian types? Chris Hemsworth not manly enough for you?
Apart from that, on that photo in the article … chest hair? Long time no see. 😀 If that means that the trend that anything except depilated baby skin is eeewwwww! has run its course, I’d be delighted. Please tell me it’s over!
Yes, thank you!
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