A Response to Guyland

A Student Response to Guyland

A woman, a white woman, at a feminist book discussion, once opined that all women, of all walks of life, have a common experience of female oppression. As the room nodded in agreement, one woman, a black woman, stood up, and said, ‘Well, no. What do you see when you look in the mirror in the morning?’. The white woman said, ‘a woman’. The black woman responded, ‘When I look in the mirror, I see a black woman. When you see just a woman, and don’t see your race, that’s what privilege is’. The one man in the room, meanwhile, had an epiphany- when he looked in the mirror, he saw ‘a person’. It was that day that that man ceased to be ‘a person’, and became a middle-class white man. That middle class white man was Michael Kimmel, professor of sociology.

That was the story with which Professor Kimmel opened his address today at Saint John’s University, the all-male Catholic campus in central Minnesota, in a lecture on his book, Guyland. His point was to get the audience to think criticially about their masculinity- and he did that. His speech was delivered to a room evenly split between Johnnies and the Bennies from our sister school, the College of Saint Benedict, whose all-women campus lies in the nearby town of St Joseph. In the hour-long presentation, Professor Kimmel deftly laid out his research and theories on the new stage of development that is ‘guyland’- the span from the ages of 16 to roughly 26, when men in our society remain not fully adult (by which he meant, completing your education, having a job, no longer living with one’s parents, and being married with children). In this age group, he asserts, men’s lives have been changed by the developments of the last half-century- developments such as less economic security, changing attitudes in the sexual revolution, and so on- and as a result, a new stage of development has emerged, in which we are no longer children, but no longer truly adults. We are waiting longer to get married, switching careers and jobs more often, staying with our parents longer, and generally keeping a state of adolescence around longer. He tied this into an analysis of the the ‘four rules for men’ (don’t be a sissy, be a sturdy oak, go for it, and always win), and the crowning statement of the bro code- ‘Bros Before Hos’, and all of its meaning in establishing both horizontal solidarity among ‘bros’ and hierarchy over ‘hoes’. Much of the talk centered on college men and frat culture and hazing (SJU has no fraternities, so although other party venues somewhat take their place, this was somewhat of a disconnect for some in the audience). He ended by calling for us to reject the masculinity built in insecurity and attempting to prove ourselves, and to embrace the positive aspects of old masculinity- responsibility, self-sacrifice, and hard work- while breaking free of the bonds of masculinity and allowing ourselves to feel, to have vulnerabilities, and to be nurturing. It was not, on the whole, a bad talk, and I found myself in agreement on a number of ideas he put forth. It did get me thinking. Unfortunately, it mostly got me thinking about where it failed.

Guyland was billed as a book and a lecture about masculinity. What I found, was an exploration of a hegemonic masculinity- dressed up as an exploration of all masculinity. Guyland as Kimmel describes it, is not so much ‘Guyland’ as ‘Uppermiddleclasswhitestraightcisgenderedphysicallyandmentallynormativeguyland’. Now, recognizing hegemonic masculinity is important- but it’s a lot more important if you recognize that it’s a hegemonic masculinity.

I am a man with Asperger’s Syndrome. We have an unemployment rate well over 80%, and a hard time with relationships that leaves most of us single and without children, often whether we want that or not. Not all people on the spectrum, even on the ‘higher-functioning’ end, do move out of their parents’ homes. Kimmel’s speech dwells on men delaying adulthood- but his adulthood, as he defined it, is a thing that I as a man on the autism spectrum may not ever experience. What about gay men who are not allowed to marry or who are barred from adoption? What about men who due to racism face chronic unemployment? Or infertile men? The metric of adulthood implicitly bars us.

Others aren’t being excluded from adulthood, but rather, excluded from the Guyland phenomena Kimmel wrote on. Before winning the scholarship that sent me to SJU, I went to an underfunded public high school. I can attest, that the idea that men these days are putting off working on careers, marriages, and children, and living with their parents, does not hold true for many, many of the men I went to high school with. I see them on facebook, and sometimes when I can break away from campus long enough to go into town. These are men with wives, children, and long-term jobs at 19 or 20. As the theology grad student next to me asked in the question and answers section, ‘Isn’t your analysis skewed towards wealthier people? What about working class masculinity? What about Townie masculinity?’. A long lecture on frat-house ‘hookup culture’ falls a bit flat for a man whose homosexuality makes him a target of those frat boys, or whose disability excludes him from the sexcapades, or whose transexuality leaves him both targeted and ostracized, or who can’t afford college or a post-college ‘bro’ lifestyle, or who finds that his skin color alienates him from the alleged brotherhood of young men’s fraternities.

For young men on the autism spectrum, this isn’t an age where we’re chasing after women, indulging in masculine brotherhood, and avoiding commitment to careers. It’ an age where many of us are torturing ourselves over our difficulty in relationships, feeling ostracized and excluded from the parties and the young men’s culture, and worrying about where we can find work as we either become one of the few autistic men who manages to be meaningfully employed in the long-term, or settle into a cycle of disability payment and dependency- most of my autistic male friends have fallen or are falling into the latter option, and I’m struggling to avoid it- a struggle I’m able to carry on longer thanks to to middle class privilege and access to higher education that those friends of mine don’t have. To me, Kimmel’s talk wasn’t on the real experience of masculinity I was having, but on the masculinity I could only imagine other men were having somewhere.

That  was the problem with the talk- it was as if Kimmel wrote it looking in the mirror at his social group- white, straight, middle class, non-disabled men. He held up that mirror for the world to see, and expects the men in the lecture to see the same picture he does- and many of them do. But for the men with disabilities, the men of color, the working class men, the gay men and the transmen? We interact with the hegemonic masculinity he holds up, but we’re not insiders. It doesn’t necessarily speak to our experience. What’s our relationship to masculinity? In Guyland, as usual, our experiences are made invisible.

PS Disclaimer: Forgive me if there were uncaught spelling mistakes or other strange idiosyncrasies in this post; myself and that theology grad student, a Catholic dissident, went to the pub after the talk to discuss his ‘Occupy the Church’ idea- well worth its own post, especially as contraception and sexual politics (lookin’ at you, Nienstedt, you eucharist-denying homophobe!) were a huge part of the grievances he had been hearing in his layperson interviews that inspired him to advocate the movement. We ended up significantly more intoxicated than we intended, having forgotten that ‘double hearted ale’ has significantly more alcohol than our usual drinks. But, I digress. I’m trying to type right, but I’m finding myself making frequent corrections.