Male Studies: Looking Forward

Men’s studies gave us three decades of self-conscious, guilt-soaked sociologists’ apologies for being male.  That field is now on life support.  Each of a band of best-selling male cheerleaders of feminism (whom feminists themselves have rejected as unnecessary and found to be an embarrassment, since women are quite able to speak for themselves), have had their fifteen minutes of fame. And now, at last, we can anticipate a fresh look at our species, male and female.

Much of the wasted paper of men’s studies was authorized by the self-indulgent, autobiographic theorizing of postmodern critics, who having bitten into their own tails are at last mercifully in a tailspin to oblivion. To modernize the famous observation: Those who cannot do, teach: those who cannot do or teach, become critics. Without their support, however (as the credits roll), the program of men’s studies could not have been brought to you.

Now in a post-feminist period (as acknowledged by feminists themselves) and after postmodernism, we may admit to what we do not know with an acceptable degree of certainty about our species and set about the difficult work of careful research required to fill in the many gaps in the portrait of who and what we are. This implies the careful study of the experience of being female—and of being male. Both areas of scholarly work will be welcome as the euphemism of gender—the brainchild in the 1950s of John Money in his study of intersexual human beings—is abandoned along with its promotion in the early 1960s as a social issue by the British zoologist, Alex Comfort, who is certainly going to be best forgotten for his Joy of Sex, rather than his sociological supplement to poorly understood psychoanalytic theory.

We may leave it to the visionaries and reformers to out-guess the future (or, at our peril, plan it) or to busy themselves rewriting history. There is a certain danger, of course, in both of these ventures, but we can rest assured that fashion comes and goes while the bodies it covers remain the same, unless they have been surgically or cosmetically altered. The time it would take evolution to produce new kinds of human bodies is surely longer than we will last as a species.

That leaves us, apart from a few anomalies, with two sexes to understand in terms of an individual’s experience of being male or being female. Above all, we must be concerned with how the two sexes relate to each other, since until technology advances to the point that reproduction involving pregnancy is no longer necessary, how males and females meet, relate and live together raising the next generation will be of pressing interest. As the social matrix for raising our boys and girls is being redesigned, we will still have to look after them if we have made them.

Here, then, my critique of men’s studies ends. I propose instead that those who are female explore the experience of being female and tell all of us what they have found, and that those who are male explore the experience of being male and also tell us what they have found. Celia Lashlie, the too little known New Zealand author, cautions again and again in her discussions of boys and men that she is by default in no position to speak for them. Her insight, candor and integrity are exceptional. As a female, she writes, she may speak from embodied experience about being female, but she repeats again and again that it would be presumptuous of her to claim to do that on behalf of males. Instead, while she awaits what males will have to say about our own lives, she speaks in admiration of the “gorgeous” boys she has worked with and talked to, as a mother, a prison matron (the first female in New Zealand to work in a prison for men), and as an observer of the system of schooling.

Other women who have spoken with authority about being female include Simone de Beauvoir (who knew nothing of the notion of gender) and Helene Deutsch, the psychoanalyst. I mention them (and could add to the list) because to date we have no males who have done something similar on the theme of being male. One of the goals of male studies is to produce a body of work of the quality of The Second Sex (not The Second Gender) (1949) and The Psychology of Women (two volumes, 1944-45).

The multidisciplinary approach of male studies will include what has been learned only in the past decade or so about the deep biology of being male, a literature that is evidently too soaked in the ideology of science to have deserved the attention of “students of men.” But what these studies of the body report on is as real as the hand and eye and genitals and structure of the brain, which we can clearly see to be different in males and females.

Genetic and hormonal differences are indisputable. They are bedrock, even though it is clear that at a certain point in a male’s life, a choice may be made to deny the body. It happens, but it is always difficult to do as ascetics have told us for millenia. Few choose to such a thing to themselves. The hidden work of constructing the body that is basic to the person who is that body and in being that body has certain motives and may make certain choices goes on without regard to any theorizing.

Up to a point, which is quite late in our long period of development as human beings, predispositions are formed which can be overridden with only the greatest effort. Perceptions of one’s body can effect changes in these dispositions; it is true—but only up to that certain point. Briefly, just as the confusion of tongues leads to babble, a confusion of perceptions leads to an incoherent image of one’s body. Thought to be the way to liberation from the limits of anatomy, for most who are implicated in such adventure it means a lifetime of suffering as the father of gender recounted in Man and Woman, Boy and Girl (1972) and later works on his favorite topics, the perversions or paraphilias.

While the curiosities of the sexual sadist and the transvestite are of interest, as are the great difficulties faced by parents of infants born with ambiguous genitals, altogether the total population of such individuals is very small. Similarly, those males and females whose disposition is to see a member of the same sex as physically attractive and arousing also constitute a minority. A really interesting question about men’s studies (and its source of inspiration gender studies), then, is why this minority group of human beings have preoccupied the field’s followers to the extent it has. One answer, of course, is that it was assumed we knew all there was to know about most males. Feminists had made it clear in women’s studies that, indeed, very little was understood about being a woman and went about correcting this. How this field came to in a sense betray the experience of most females is ironic—but that is another story. But—again, not to linger in that field littered with abandoned properties—the important work to be done in male studies is in response to the clear understanding that we know practically nothing about the experience of being male.

Here  I refer the interested reader to the splendid essay “Alien Territory” (1993), by Margaret Atwood, whose account of the need for the exploration of male experience is more eloquent than anything I have come across. Nor should we forget that recent students of the experience of boys and men are as often female (Christina Sommers, Peg Tyre, Celia Lashlie, Louann Brizendine) as male (Leonard Sax, Richard Whitmore, William Pollack, James Garbarino). These women know that females have as much to lose when boys are lost and men are losers.

This is a difficult time for boys and men—but it has to be an energizing time for those of us who care about this experiment in self-conscious life called the human being. There is much work to be done. Data must be collected from diverse sources about what we know of the deep biology, deep psychology and social phenomenon of being male. These sources include genetics, psychoneuroendocrinology, psychoanalysis, paleoanthropology, the stories of men’s lives in their memoirs and novels, and the developments in Western culture that are toxic for boys and mature males, including especially the effects of changing economic conditions, laws, and representations of lads and men in the media.

We will count on super-specialists to translate into accessible terms the findings of laboratory research, the results of psychoanalytic investigation, and the subtleties of the language of economics and the law. Above all, we will count on people with courage to challenge political correctness and expose ideology masking as data. We—males and females—will learn from each other in the effort to understand the experience of being male, whether we are ourselves male or whether the male we want to understand is a father, a son, or a partner in sex or in love.

Miles Groth is a professor of psychology at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York

Tags: male studies, men's studies