First Year Courses & Programs

Basic Writing (ENGLWRIT 111)

Unit 5
Language and the Construction of Gender:
Being Male

Work Schedules / Exploratory Writings / Related Sites

A pluralistic civilization can only be built with a great amount of tolerance, and the kind of tolerance that comes from people who believe in the cosmic certainty of their truth (and theirs alone) is both limited and patronizing. You can only become truly tolerant of other people's realities by having found some new way to inhabit your own. (Walter Truett Anderson 178)

Frank Pittman, M.D., author of "The Masculine Mystique," is a practicing psychiatrist as well as writer.  Like so many other writers today, Pittman seeks to resolve the "boy crisis."  To that end, he defines and explores the phenomenon from which his essay derives its title.  "The problem is not masculinity," Pittman writes, "but the masculine mystique: the veneration and exaggeration of all that is masculine."  While we like to believe masculinity is natural, its manifestations - its signs and symbols, rules and codes - are cultural and historical, varying, Pittman says, "from time to time and place to place."  As boys practice their masculinity, practice, that is, displaying the signs and following the codes that prove them members of "the boys' team rather than the girls' team," they are cheered on by "an invisible male chorus" of role models, including their fathers, buddies, coaches and cultural heroes.  Of all these role models, the father or father substitute is most important, Pittman claims.  Without this primary figure's calming approval and acceptance, he warns, a boy's search for masculinity becomes the "mascupath's" alienating quest for the "masculine mystique."

With "The Outsiders," journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc takes us deep inside the world of Pittman's "mascupathology" and the "masculine mystique."  It is a world we all know well: school.  Here the "invisible male chorus" becomes visible in the bullying and battling of junior high and high school cliques within what LeBlanc calls "a brutally enforced teen-age social structure."  While "The Outsiders" may recount all too familiar tales, an intriguing contradiction emerges from its pages as the specific acts of intimidation and harassment LeBlanc records highlight Pittman's description of male efforts to prove themselves members of "the boys' team rather than the girls' team."  All the bullying, beating and bulking up, she observes, is driven by a "fear of sissifying boys" and aimed at boys proving themselves not girls.  Underlying today's standard of masculinity, then, is the devaluation of femininity.  That is clear.  But what is less clear, less firm, is the underpinning of today's masculine identity, which seems to define itself, not by what it is, but by what it is not.

New York Times writer Stephen S. Hall brings into sharp focus the contradictions imbedded within LeBlanc observations.  His essay "The Mirror" explores the "body-image disturbances" behind the bulk and cut of today's male ideal.  Through his research and interviews, Hall discovers disturbing irony: over the past decade, men's and boys' intensifying efforts to increase muscle mass have been accompanied by a rise in the number of males suffering from "extreme body-image disorders" and a sort of "reverse anorexia nervosa."  In other words, men's and boys' efforts to set themselves physically apart from girls have been accompanied by an obsessive pre-occupation with body size once considered a female complaint.  What is more, Hall points out, the impulse behind "bulking up" is often the determinedly heterosexual impulse to prove oneself not-girl and, often with equal ferocity, not-gay.  Yet today's male ideal is also a product of media and especially advertising campaigns that treat women and now men alike as objects, that objectify women and now men alike beneath the viewer's gaze.  That gaze, turned on women, has been traditionally male; now, turned on men, it is decidedly homoerotic.

Jazz musician Billy Tipton embodied all the disturbing and joyous ironies of gender, and journalist Dinitia Smith reveals them for us in "One False Note in a Musician's Life."  In 1989, Tipton, 74, collapsed and died.  The paramedics arriving at the scene made a startling discovery: as Smith writes, "Tipton, who most people had assumed to be a man, who had had at least five wives and had adopted three sons, was in fact a woman."  The news of Tipton's sexual identity shocked almost everyone, including Tipton's former wives, children, and fellow band members.  We may ask ourselves, How can this be?  What truth can be more natural and obvious than our gender?  But the real question raised by Tipton's life and death is something different: Where is gender?  In our bodies or in the stories we compose for ourselves and the roles we play within them?   Or is gender finally in the eyes of our beholders?

"Stories are all we have; in a sense, they are all we are."  With this concluding essay, we return for a last time to Walter Truett Anderson and his call not for a new story but for "A Story about Stories":

A pluralistic civilization can only be built with a great amount of tolerance, and the kind of tolerance that comes from people who believe in the cosmic certainty of their truth (and theirs alone) is both limited and patronizing.  You can only become truly tolerant of other people's realities by having found some new way to inhabit your own.In order to develop true tolerance, he goes on to say, we must "develop a story about stories, a perspective on all our values and beliefs."  This emergent perspective is, according to Anderson, a constructivist world view, which respects the search for truth, knowledge, and values yet considers what we find not some universal or eternal absolute but "the truth and knowledge and values of people--of people in our time."  Anderson is quick to remind us, however, that while "the constructivist world view is a story about stories . . . it is also a story."  Other stories are now possible; other stories will probably in the future be told--"hills beyond hills."