We are constantly bombarded with different messages of how to “be a man.” The phrase “Real Men do _____” is often used to shame men who don’t conform to this ideal. The fact is that we are making this up as we go along, looking to those who came before.
There are no shortage of fictional role models, whether it’s Don Draper (for the smoking and drinking to be sure, but also the existentialist cool) or the male Avengers (who may not be the most functional guys to emulate). But real-life heroes are a far more personal thing.
If we’re lucky, we have male role models in our life from an early age. I learned a lot from my father, mostly about to judge a good story (odd, since he’s a mathematician). But this is about other role models,men I’ve never met who nonetheless make me want to be a better men.
Listing your heroes can make one a little self-conscious. I could name larger-than-life figures like Jesus, The Buddha and Abraham Lincoln, but these mean so many different things to different people as to lose any meaning. It’s like calling The Beatles your favorite band.
Starting in chronological order I would say Oscar Wilde (1854-1900 influenced me greatly. Growing up all I knew about Wilde was that he was a) gay and b) funny as hell. The latter made him interesting, but the former (in the still fairly homophobic 80s) made him dangerous. Now, I think Wilde should be reclaimed as bisexual (I see nothing to convince me that he did not love his wife Constance) and find his writing essential. But Wilde’s greatest contribution to the culture has to be his aphorisms, many of which are as paradoxical as Zen koans (“Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow,” “One can resist everything but temptation.”) Wilde has shown me that something as frivolous as humor can be a powerful tool.
Nowadays, Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) is best known for the overly sentimental “What A Wonderful World,” but it would not be an exaggeration to say that he helped create not just jazz but modern pop music as we know it. Armstrong helped create the language of improvisation that informs most modern music, as well as popularizing the form. He can even be credited with one of the first “crossover” hits: 56 years before Run-DMC met Aerosmith, Armstrong recorded “Blue Yodel #9” with “Father Of Country Music” Jimmie Rodgers. Armstrong was accused in his time of being an “Uncle Tom,” but he also criticized President Eisenhower for not doing more for desegregation. I’m not a musician, but if I was I wish I had even 1% of the talent and insight that Armstrong had.
Thich Nhat Hanh (born 1926) is a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and poet. He is best known in North America for his books combining Zen with psychology for a mass audience. But he has done much more – opposing the war in his native country, earning him exile from Vietnam and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination (from Martin Luher King!) Seeing his practice as grounded in the real world, he has championed Engaged Buddhism for decades. From Thich Nhat Hanh I have learned to appreciate the spirituality of day-to-day life.
It’s hard to imagine what people thought of Andy Warhol (1928-1987) when he first appeared on the art scene in the 1960s. A slight, extremely pale man in a silver wig (he had lost his hair due to a childhood illness) making paintings of consumer packaging was no one’s idea of what an “artist” was, but he changed that. As much as The Beatles or Madison Avenue, Warhol created what we now know as “The 60s,” and later redefined (for better or worse) celebrity culture. He was also a queer trailblazer, painting homoerotic imagery when other artists were still closeted, and using actors from across the sexual spectrum in his movies. From Warhol I learned, ironically, something similar to what I’ve learned from Thich Nhat Hanh: how to find the beautiful and strange in the mundane. He also loved cats, which along with his technique of repurposing ought to make patron saint of The Internet.
Last but not least is Jim Henson (1936-1990), someone I’ve been aware of my whole life. I have learned so many things from this man, starting with how to read via Sesame Street. But Sesame Street and even more so The Muppet Show had stealth missions to bring anarchic comedy to the masses. Most importantly, Henson showed me how to deal with people in a decent manner without sacrificing yourself. While Henson was known as one of the most gentle people in all of entertainment, he was also a shrewd businessman who parlayed his syndicated show (that was turned down by every network) into a media empire. Whenever anyone says you have to be a ruthless jerk to succeed in business (let alone show business), I point to Jim Henson.
These are just some of the men who inspire me. They may not be yours. The point of this article is to start a dialogue. Who are your avatars of manhood?
I remember when I was a young lad, my hero was Stephen Hawking. He’s really got everything you want in a role model, I think: excellence in his own field, renown outside of it through his popular works,and of course a truly heroic story of beating the odds–the doctors told him he had only a short time left, but instead he lived on and became one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists. I idolized him most when I still thought I could be a physicist (this was in middle school, before math started getting hard) and as my interests shifted… Read more »
I forgot Roger Ebert, notwithstanding that recent dumb Mother’s Day article. Also, Rasputin.
I am the hero of my own story…
I hereby call upon the names of Nicola Tesla and Rudolf Diesel as two of the foremost designers of what we call the modern era.
Tesla is also my personal inspiration for everything good and decent in the face of corporate giants.
@Ozy: Well, of course. You’re awesome that way. 🙂
Glenn Greenwald.
Alan Turing and Kurt Godel. To a lesser extent Georg Cantor and Paul Erdos. Anybody who knows who all four of those men are without looking them up can guess my area of expertise.
Just gonna list some dudes here. I’m pretty into the design work of Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, and Vidal Sassoon. And the art of Yves Klein, Alexander Calder, and Ansel Adams. If I had unlimited amounts of money, my home would be full of their work. (and my head would have a Sassoon bob)
In terms of an inspiring life, Frederick Douglass. Just… Frederick Douglass.
Doug: *I* know who both of those people are. 😛
Here’s a couple of relatively obscure names: Eliezer Yudkowsky and Chris Avellone.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4g/eliezer_yudkowsky_facts/
Enjoy Doug S.
I submit Nick Bostrom and Max More (both philosophers!) and Kurzweil and FM-2030 (visionaries) to your list of thinkers that have inspired myself and others of our persuasion.
I consider my other heroes to be Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Anaximander, Democritus and Sam Harris.
When I was an army brat we moved to Germany, and we stayed in the BA Hotel waiting for housing. I walked down to the tv room, there was only one American station, and Carl Sagan was on. Telling me about the universe. I was nine, and that was the start of my love for science and math.
Pedro Martinez, David Foster Wallace, Sarah Vowell, George R.R. Martin, Sady Doyle, Thomas Pynchon, Pink, Pauline Kael, Thom Yorke.
Many boys of my generation grew up with John Wayne as their masculine role model. My parents were more into musicals so I tend to think of Howard Keel as my model of traditional masculinity. But I always identified more with Danny Kaye.
A few of my heroes, both male and female: Caspian, from the Narnia series. He’s in danger of his life, with pretty much no allies. Then he befriends beings who should be his enemies and overcomes the odds to become a wise, benevolent leader of his people. Mara of the Acoma (Riftwar series), for pretty much exactly the same reason. In fact, name pretty much every fantasy hero/ine who fits that storyline. I must have read a thousand variations of that same story, and it never fails to impress me. Ford Prefect, who makes it through all kinds of unusual… Read more »
Jonathan: they don’t have to be men. I focused on men because I felt the need to celebrate men, or at least show that we don’t just “learn to be men” from the obvious examples of masculinity, I.e. macho movie stars and athletes.
I’m sorry if that’s limiting. It just seemed that men are so often on the defensive that I wanted to write something nice about the men I admire.
Ah, were they all supposed to be men? Oops.
Dunno about “Heroes” but I did a blogpost on “Inspirations” a while back. These were: Eddie Izzard, Vicky Lee, Richard O’Brien, Julia Grant, Ian McKellen, Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, Riki Wilchins, Dorothy Allison, Patrick Califia, Stephen Whittle — for various idiosyncratic and personal reasons (see http://malefemme.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/inspirations.html).
My first “real” boss, who told me that it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as they are discovered and corrected before the report is released. 🙂
Ironically, in New Zealand, Archibald Baxter is more famous for being the father of James K Baxter than he is for his pacifist activism. Probably because pacifism is kind of out of fashion in NZ, while wooly pseudo-mystical indigenous-esque nationalism is very much in vogue. If you do want to learn more about Baxter and his place in the conscientious objection movement, a very good (although critically panned) book was released about New Zealand during World War I a few years ago, called “The Great Wrong War”. It’s not specifically about the conscientious objectors, since it’s intended to be a… Read more »
Herroyaldingwall: I will have to learn more about Archibald Baxter.
In terms of pacifism, I admire A J Muste, who was a major influence on MLK.
While not a pacifist, General Smedley Butler was one of the first to expose the Military Industrial Complex. He thought the only route to ending war was to remove the profit, a radical but interesting idea.
Note: i decided to only include men because I wanted to write something positive about men, and show that “being a man” can mean different things: queer, celibate, married to a woman, manly, dandyish, creative, tough, gentle, etc. I wanted to move beyond war heroes and sports stars.
If I were to list my female heroes, they would be Dorothy Day, Pauline Kael, Simone Weil, Mahalia Jackson, and Diane di Prima.
As to heroes and heroism, if you bristle at the word choose role model instead. I just wanted to widen the scope of the men we look up to.
ooops. On the female heroes side, Jeri Ellsworth. She MADE TRANSISTORS! IN A GARAGE!
As far as actual role models, I don’t think I really have terribly good ones. The role models I really wish I COULD emulate are all fictional. But the real life ones would be my two engineer grandfathers. I follow in their line. Heroes are a bit easier. (Incidentally, while some heroisms such as ‘serving your nation is always good even if you know it is misusing you’ are bad I reject aheroism as naive and undesireable). I’d say the ones that come to mind best are Plato, Beaumarchios (the writer of the plays that the operas Marriage of Figaro… Read more »
Norman Borlaug, often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was an American agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate who has been called “the father of the Green Revolution”. Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books. His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System. Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers during his lifetime.… Read more »
I don’t know if you’d call them “heroes” exactly, and I probably wouldn’t use that term to describe them, but during my older child/teen years I looked up to Albert Einstein and Alan Turing (I’ve always been of the intellectual sort) and had sort of a crush on actor Harrison Ford.