I have decided to talk about some of my favorite books about men and masculinity, the books that have shaped my viewpoints on what it is to be a masculist.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahuinick is, of course, the classic of alienated twentysomething white-boy masculinity. It’s a very incisive portrayal of the emptiness within success object masculinity (the Narrator), violent and destructive hypermasculinity (Tyler) and even Sensitive New Age Guy masculinity (Remaining Men Together). Ultimately, all of them, even the most prestigious or badass, turn out to be hollow, because as it turns out being a stereotype of masculinity is not a substitute for being a person. Entire gender studies dissertations can, and have been, written on this damn novel.
From a gender egalitarian perspective, I absolutely love the portrayal of Marla Singer. Despite the sexist narrator who essentially treats her as an objectified vehicle of homosocial competition with Tyler, Marla clearly has agency. The glimpses we get of her past are fascinating. That is how you write a damn female character, people. Also, Fight Club is really fun to read, so there’s that.
Shira Tarrant’s Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power is my favorite anthology of feminist thought about men and masculinity. True, there’s not much competition for the title, but this is definitely one of my favorites. Yes, there are some extremely problematic essays (I think my least favorite is either Robert Jensen’s or an extremely gender essentialist “humorous” piece about the perils of feminist dating). However, all of the essays are extremely thought-provoking, even if the thought in question is, in fact, OMGWTFBBQ.
One of the things I liked most about the collection was the obvious effort put into finding a diversity of perspectives. Intersectional issues were clearly covered: classism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc. Conventionally masculine men talk about the synthesis between their masculinity and their feminism; conventionally unmasculine men discuss the struggles of growing up “sissies.” The essays are on topics ranging from surviving sexual assault as a man to being a man in a women’s studies classroom. It’s a really excellent introduction to some intelligent thinkers about masculinity.
bell hooks… well, just read everything by bell hooks. Feminism from Margin to Center, Feminism is for Everybody, All About Love: New Visions, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Woman and Feminism… bell is really a remarkably good feminist thinker, insofar as she mostly refrains from saying really stupid shit, a talent rare among the feminist cognoscenti. (Someone really does need to teach her the word “kyriarchy,” though, because “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is a hell of a mouthful.)
However, for masculist purposes, I think her best work is We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. With her usual sensitivity and insight, bell considers the intersection of gender and race. She talks about the kyriarchy’s dehumanization and domination of black men, and the way it keeps them from becoming full human beings. I particularly like the chapters on the abuse of black boys and her recognition of the fact that many abusers have been abused themselves, and the passages that discuss the relationship between the myth of men as a success object and the economic reality that black women tend to succeed more than black men.
So, what books influenced your gender egalitarianism and thoughts on masculinity? What would you recommend other people looking for masculist insight read?
I really appreciate your posts, but you’d probably be more readable if you didn’t pay out feminists so much.
@Hugh Tipping: speaking of Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness is of course the canonical book about gender and genderlessness. It’s usually counted as a feminist work, although this is odd given that literally no characters in it are female. Definitely one to pick up if you’re looking for ideas of what it is to be a man versus what it is to be a person.
Eh… I think that with stuff like gender (ie. social contructions and cultural patterns) I think fiction can sometimes be more helpful than non-fiction. I’m thinking particularly of things like Ursula le Guin’s “let’s fiddle with a single aspect of a cultural construct and see what happens” short stories – things like that. One of the books I found really *interesting* (not necessarily the same as useful, but close) from a gender perspective was The Illuminatus! Trilogy. One of the many things it pulls the rug out from under in the third act is the fairly unreconstructed view of sex… Read more »
Feeding the tangent: (cause I don’t necessarily think Ozy meant fiction books here): Superglucose…I have to second your shout-out to Animorphs. You have three men and two women (plus an alien) developing differently in the face of really crappy bad stuff happening, and in addition to being entertaining fiction it is interesting to consider from both masculist and feminist angles. Although in a way Cassie’s decisions actually saved humanity.
/Tangent
Basically, bell hooks 4ever. Her work is amazing. I think the first time I ever thought about the whole issue of men being expected to act and dominate in order to be men, about the stigma against men just “being”, while reading this essay: http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2295&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=0 This: I wrote how I had to change my sexist thinking about the penis— letting go my erotic fetishization of the hard penetrating dick, to embrace an eroticization of the penis that was more wholistic. My penis passion was enhanced when I stopped thinking of it solely in relation to performance, to penetration. I enjoyed… Read more »
So I wanna delete the first half of my comment because I was just being a jerk. ” if you’re looking for books that I have read that really promote a sense of egalitarianism between the genders? The Animorphs by K.A. Applegate. You get to watch five children grow up absurdly fast and while they have genders, their genders are almost unimportant. Rachel’s gender, for example, expresses itself in shopping, Cosmo, being blonde, tall, and beautiful… but my god you do not want to be Rachel. Trust me. Plus it has what I’ve never seen in any book or series… Read more »
No books influenced my view on gender and/or sexuality, at least directly. I look around at the world and see how things are and compare them with how they ought to be. I can’t blooming stand the large majority of “literature” out there on subjects like this: overarchingly they tend to be preachy and annoying. Egalitarianism isn’t something I was “taught” so much as it was a conclusion I reached for myself by myself… and even then not so much. People who are sexist against women will say that women can’t do X or Y, and my thought will always… Read more »
@ozymandias: “and the economic reality that black *women* tend to succeed more than black *women*.”
Typo?