Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man

Psychoanalysis and Masculinity

Donald Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415604918
• eBook ISBN: 9781136255984
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Images and ideas associated with masculinity are forever in flux. In this book, Donald Moss addresses the never-ending effort of men—regardless of sexual orientation—to shape themselves in relation to the unstable notion of masculinity.

Part 1 looks at the lifelong labor faced by boys and men of assessing themselves in relation to an always shifting, always receding, ideal of "masculinity." In Part 2, Moss considers a series of nested issues regarding homosexuality, homophobia and psychoanalysis. Part 3 focuses on the interface between the body experienced as a private entity and the body experienced as a public entity—the body experienced as one's own and the body subject to the judgments, regulations and punishments of the external world. The final part looks at men and violence. Men must contend with the entwined problems of regulating aggression and figuring out its proper level, aiming to avoid both excess and insufficiency. This section focuses on excessive aggression and its damaging consequences, both to its object and to its subjects.

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Man will be of great interest not only to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, but also to a much wider audience of readers interested in gender studies, queer studies, and masculinity.

Chapter 1

Masculinity as masquerade¹

In the Hollywood summer flick Nacho Libre, the main character, the hilariously unfit Jack Black, assumes a secret identity, affecting the costumed excesses of a caped, macho street wrestler. By day a menial in a monastery, by night he wants to win matches, money, and a woman. In the film’s signature moment, Black reassures his protégé, a young boy who has spotted him surreptitiously dressing up, that “it’s okay because sometimes a man just goes into his room and puts on stretchy pants and has a lot of fun.” This declaration is meant to mollify the boy’s uncomprehending, and suspicious, gaze, to reassure him that his adored older friend, regardless of the stretchy pants and what used to be the forbidden “feminine” posturing in front of a mirror, remains what he always was: the incarnation of an admirable, straightforward masculinity.

It seems to me that many of us psychoanalysts occupy a position resembling that of the astonished boy of Nacho Libre. We can feel ourselves located slightly behind the advancing femininity/masculinity curve, waiting to see what’s next, readying ourselves for the necessary adjustments. Over the past few decades, for example, we’ve been bombarded with well-warranted correctives—from heterosexual feminists, from gays, lesbians and transsexuals—to what, in retrospect, now seem outmoded ways of interpreting femininity and masculinity and the putative bedrock on which they once seemed to stand.

For the moment, let us treat Jack Black’s instruction to “have fun with stretchy pants” as though it might contain a cardinal feature of all emerging masculinities— something audacious and rule-bending. What’s “fun” about the “stretchy pants” is that they self-consciously defy the regulatory norms that seem integral to the boy’s—and our—sense of what “masculine” means. That is, “masculinity” meant, in this case, the repudiation of “stretchy pants” as a means of fun. So here, then, Black’s “masculinity” takes one step forward; it repudiates a repudiation.

This seemingly daring repudiation is the marker of what I mean by an “emerging” masculinity. As it takes this one step forward, it leaves behind a repudiating predecessor. This predecessor, of course, had itself once left behind a repudiating predecessor of its own. Emerging masculinities, then, looking back over their own shoulders, will spot the traces of ever receding, ever surpassed, always anachronistic, old-fashioned masculinities; a historical trail, each advance marked by a repudiation of a predecessor. No longer repudiating what their predecessors had to repudiate, emerging masculinities will necessarily claim that they are, by self-definition, freer, stronger masculinities, in fact, more masculine masculinities.

Nacho Libre exemplifies and applauds an emerging masculinity that, in having fun with stretchy pants—in flirting with the marker of a once-repudiated “femininity”—is repudiating its previous repudiations. The film pokes fun at men still retrograde enough to take seriously and, therefore, to still comply with yesterday’s repudiations. With this act of defiance, the film and its hero make their advance into history. They move forward; they turn themselves contemporary. This, I think, is the organizing tactic characteristic of all emerging masculinities: the repudiation of the repudiations of their predecessors. (Crucial to notice in this tactic is that the strategy of repudiation, per se, is not repudiated. Masculine identities remain tied to successful acts of repudiation; masculinity’s leading edge rids itself of suddenly devalued erotic currencies while taking on suddenly valued ones—for example, stretchy pants.)

What are we to make of this emerging stretchy-panted figure—still masculine, but now the object of our uncertain gaze, and with that gaze, like Black’s protégé, perhaps also of our uncertain identifications? How can we figure out a reliable way to think about this figure? More pertinent still, how can we figure out a way to listen to him, to do something other than merely believe or disbelieve him, tout court, when he says, with a wink, that our once shared problem with stretchy pants no longer exists; that he has, as they say, moved on.

The same nest of questions hovers over this delightful self-report from another man who has, apparently, “moved on.” The report comes from Sebastian Junger’s 2010 book, War. Junger lived for months with a group of American soldiers in Afghanistan. His book is a chronicle of that time and of those men. Junger writes of this man:

Bobby claimed a kind of broad-spectrum sexuality that made virtually no distinction between anything, and as the months went by that expressed itself in increasingly weird ways … Bobby wasn’t gay any more than he was racist, but a year on a hilltop somehow made pretending otherwise psychologically necessary. And it wasn’t gay anyhow; it was just so hypersexual that gender ceased to matter. Someone once asked Bobby whether, all joking aside, he would actually have sex with a man up here. “Of course,” Bobby said. “It would be gay not to.”

“Gay not to?” O’Byrne demanded. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Bobby launched into a theory that “real” men need sex no matter what, so choosing abstinence can only mean you’re not a real man. Who you have sex with is of far lesser importance. The men knew it made no sense—Bobby’s weird brilliance—but no one could quite formulate a rebuttal.

(Junger 2010: 224–225)

“No one could quite formulate a rebuttal.” Indeed. Emerging masculinities leave behind a trail of puzzled witnesses in states of reluctant admiration, no one quite able to formulate a rebuttal. The power of such masculinities resides in their refusal to comply with the repudiations of their predecessors. For Bobby, only non-masculine men—men he refers to as “gay”—comply with norms that gratuitously restrict their choice of sexual object. To submit to yesterday’s repudiation would not be masculine. Only “gay” men would comply with the regulation that bars heterosexual men from having sex with other men. By way of this hilarious reversal, Bobby nails a central feature of emerging—masculine—masculinities: their right, even their obligation to “have fun” with stretchy pants, or with other men. Emerging masculinities take pleasure with what their restricted predecessors had to renounce. Like Jack Black, Bobby catches masculinity’s extraordinary plasticity, and, therefore, its fundamental absence of integral, authentic features.

In this play of shifting repudiations, nothing is being created; no new idea, no new form emerges. Instead, pre-existing elements emerge in new combinations. The once repudiated is now embraced. What was once outside is taken in; what was taken in is now expelled. Emerging masculinities seem to repudiate previous repudiations and to renounce the premises on which they were based. Certain definitions of the masculine are no longer defended; they are instead subverted. Emerging masculinities taunt the limitations of their predecessors.

In this they mimic emerging theories: surpassing, with an often self-satisfied backward glance, the old-fashioned constraints of their predecessors. There may well be structural links and congruencies binding our notions of the masculine and our notions of the psychoanalytic. What if, for example, psychoanalytic thought, like Jack Black, continuously aimed, in effect, to have fun with stretchy pants, to reconsider its own repudiations? And what if, in doing so, it fancied itself protecting and advancing its own psychoanalytic/masculine competency, moving stride for stride with parallel “advances” in the masculinities surrounding it? If such parallel developments were taking place, our capacities to think about the one while holding the other steady would be necessarily, and seriously, taxed. For instance, contemporary psychoanalysis has tended to repudiate its previous repudiations of homosexuality. Ostensibly less anxious than its predecessors, contemporary psychoanalysis, newly open to homosexuality, now permits itself, in effect, to wear stretchy pants rather than to interpret them. What once had to be interpreted now can be worn.

Can we be certain that this taking in of the once repudiated represents an enduring advance, that the resulting restriction on interpretation will be stable? I think not. I can easily imagine developments to come in which the original repudiation might be restored, and stretchy pants again be placed in the category of the interpretable. Such a restoration would not necessarily be regressive. It might, in fact, mark another newly emerging, stronger theory, this one insisting on its right to interpret the stretchy pants its predecessors felt compelled to wear. Just as a continuously developing masculinity’s central features cannot be fixed, neither can those of a continuously developing psychoanalytic theory.

If we are to think about emerging masculinities, linked or not with our emerging theories, we need to reflect on the role of ideology as it infiltrates both of these potentially linked zones of expression.

On ideology

Much of psychoanalytic theory and practice over the past hundred years has been deformed by ideology transferring itself onto theory. There seems widespread agreement among psychoanalysts that a stabilizing, long unnoticed convergence of theory and ideology served to underwrite what, only much later, was revealed as a degraded conceptualization of gays and lesbians, of women and femininity.

By and large, the deformations in our theories of masculinity have appeared indirectly, structured as the silent complement to our more direct, and more directly deforming, theories of femininity. Masculinity has served as a strong and silent anchoring point, the presumably non-deformed referent against which all of these deformed categories meet their measure. Gays and lesbians—women in general— were thought deficient precisely to the extent that they lacked whatever “masculinity” possessed.

Our theory has made substantial advances. Across the board, we are less ready than we once were to offer up uniform standards of sexual competence and integrity. With each advance, in effect, we try on those once derided stretchy pants, hoping, in the effort, to untangle an expanding theory from a restrictive ideology. But, no matter how untangled our theory gets, we can still sense, with near certainty, the ideological critique-to-come.

Ideology invariably infiltrates theory. We need to both know and not know this. We need to not know it so that we can protect our theory from skeptics who doubt its reliability. And we need to know it so that we can join those very skeptics in an effort to dismantle and shore up its reliability.

Our first move toward including the once excluded stretchy pants will be informed by a sense that, if we want to stay current with the culture that surrounds us, this is what we ought to do. And yet, once done, we can restore the boundary that separates us from that same culture and take our own—psychoanalytic—look at the stretchy pants we’re now wearing. We submit to ideological forces, taking in what we must. And with that, we buy the time, the clinical and cultural opportunities, to think psychoanalytically about what we’ve done and where to place what we’ve contingently taken in. A state of permanent flux characterizes the passage of items back and forth across the threshold joining the domains of psychoanalysis and ideology.

The following two sentences from Proust (1913) demonstrate the difficulty of separating any notion of masculinity from its imbedded ideology: “‘That’s no way to make him strong and active,’ she [the grandmother] would say sadly, ‘especially that boy, who so needs to build up his endurance and willpower’” (p. 11).

We know the grandmother is out to support the boy’s masculinity, but we also know she is saturated with local ideology. In effect, she is insisting that he get out of stretchy pants.

“Strong,” “active,” “endurance,” “willpower”—how do we chart our movement away from these masculine signifiers that give force and meaning to this ideologically loaded sentence?

Whereas we would no longer write that sentence, we would, I think, still support the grandmother in her efforts to help the boy … do what? To somehow become masculine, by teaching him to repudiate; in this case to repudiate “passive” forms of pleasure.

Can we theorize the grandmother’s effort; can we write it, with particulars, in such a way that we can feel confident that those particulars are immune to a lurking ideological critique? I don’t think we can, not with confidence. All the particulars that make up today’s required repudiations are potential targets. The act of repudiation itself endures, in principle, indifferent to shifts in contemporary particulars.

Repudiate weakness, say, and perhaps we might join with the grandmother in an effort to help the boy develop, that is, become less weak, less childish, more … well, masculine? If so, we would be linking weakness to non-masculinity, grandparents and psychoanalysts to development. Both links are immediately troublesome. The moment we want to lead the boy from where he is to where we want him to be, we seem to be courting trouble. Or, are we? After all, isn’t that the proper setup joining adults to children? The one that helps boys become men? Isn’t it? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps, instead of expelling weakness, we want to expel the grandmother here, repudiate her self-righteous norms. But isn’t she looking out for the boy’s long-term interests? If so, perhaps we want to keep her. Or, maybe we want to expel her and take in the boy’s weakness (his version of stretchy pants). Each choice has its own coherence. The interface is vibrant with choice and vibrant with uncertainty. The choices are neither purely scientific nor purely ideological. It’s like a conceptual estuary here, a mixed zone where psychoanalysis meets ideology, where regulation meets defiance, and where each element in each contesting pair assumes its own integrity.

Here’s the second sentence from Proust, easier perhaps to position ourselves against, but nonetheless equally difficult to loose from its ideological moorings: “My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he liked meteorology, while my mother, making no noise so as not to disturb him, watched him with a tender respect, but not so intently as to try to penetrate the mystery of his superior qualities” (p. 11).

We can confidently locate, and expunge, much of the ideological freight residing in “the mystery of his superior qualities.” But how would we now write that moment? How would we theorize what the mother sees—some feature of the father that seems to provoke her love? She wants to maintain an attachment to this feature, whatever it is. She wants it left undisturbed. The feature seems to suggest that masculinity, no matter how ideologically saturated, is “the mystery of his superior qualities.”

How would we theorize a masculinity whose cardinal feature is that it be the object of idealization? One has the sense that both mother and father share in the idea that they are living amid his unnamed “superior qualities,” the mother as a believer, the father as a carrier. Might not their shared silence represent an effort to preserve a belief in these qualities, a kind of piety? Certainly here, and perhaps more widely, it seems that the very idea of masculinity might depend on a community of believers. This may be an enduring characteristic of masculinity— that it houses the unattainable—that, in that sense, it stands as both parallel and in complement to feminine “beauty.” (This line of thought, by the way, is directly indebted to Lacan’s theorization of the “signification of the phallus.”)

No matter its particular ideologically mediated forms, then, masculinity, as an object of belief, might enduringly resist capture by reason. When cornered, say, masculinity, like beauty, would, as an integral feature of itself, repudiate reason, renounce it. Masculinity, like beauty, would stake a claim on special rights, “superior qualities.” It would locate a possibility, an aspiration, a point of ongoing, and enduring, resistance to regulation. There seems something rogue about masculinity, simultaneously destructive and hopeful, our enduringly present “bad boy.” Such ideologically mediated idealization of masculinity and of beauty would leave the carriers of both, especially to the extent that the carrying task was experienced as a necessity, burdened by lives of brittleness and fragility.

Clinically, our work on masculinity (and, for that matter, on beauty) aims to reframe, and thus to lighten, this burden. The burden is bundled into ideologically mediated packages. Perhaps the best we can hope for in this work is to reveal the shape and content of our predecessors’ packaging and to await descendants who will expose our own.

Requirements of the masquerade

In order to think a bit further about “masculinity,” let us consider for a moment the following quick, and confusing, view of another couple. A wife is speaking of her husband: “Even though he was a man, he was more like a woman…. He was so nice and tender. He was very feminine. I couldn’t tell the difference whether he was male or female. So I never begrudged having to feed him” (New York Times, July 17, 2006: A4).

Here, in Marado, South Korea, in a village of women who bring in the money by diving in the sea and men who tend the house and raise the children, we hear of another man being spotted sporting another version of stretchy pants. He “was so nice and tender,” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Alan Bass
• Prologue
• 1 Masculinity as masquerade
• 2 Immaculate attachment vs passive yearning: thoughts on being and becoming a man
• First aside: Ted
• 3 On neither being nor becoming a man
• 4 Two ways of looking back
• 5 Psychoanalysis and male homosexuality/the ideal of neutrality
• 6 Internalized homophobia in men: wanting in the first-person singular, hating in the first-person plural
• 7 On situating homophobia
• 8 Freud’s “female homosexual”: one way of looking at a woman
• Second aside: Little Richard
• 9 Looking at a transsexual
• 10 War stories
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index