Self Made Man

A sermon preached for the congregation at Eliot Unitarian Chapel

in St. Louis, MO by the Rev. Dr. Daniel Ó Connell on February 24, 2008

We like to believe a variety of things about ourselves: that we are masters of our fate. That we choose our identities freely. That we are in control of how people perceive us.

But there is social pressure for men and women to dress in particular ways. Why? So it is easier to figure out what sex a person is.

This begins when we are babies, and again when we have babies. New parents feel a tremendous pressure to dress their new tyke in pink or blue, so that people won’t use the wrong pronoun– saying, “isn’t he cute” when referring to little Abagail, or “what a lovely daughter” when referring to little Henry.

We want to spare someone’s feelings for having guessed wrong. And we don’t want to have to keep correcting people.

Of course, the babies don’t care– its’ the adults. I think that’s why some parents put earrings in infant’s ears– you can instantly guess it’s a little girl.

Later, when they’re older, we can try giving blocks and trucks to girls and we can give dolls to boys, but even little children– most of them, begin to cling to things that we can traditionally associate with boys and girls.

Then when children hit puberty, everything comes apart and has to be put back together again.

There is a TV comedy show called Saturday Night Live, and one year they had this ongoing skit about someone named Pat, and another person down the hall in the apartment building was constantly trying to find out if Pat were male or female, and couldn’t figure it out. The embarrassment was hilarious.

If people can’t figure out your gender, they freeze. As author Norah Vincent puts it:

if they don’t know what sex you are, they literally don’t know how to treat you. They don’t know which code to opt for, which language to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you physically, whether or not they should smile and how. In this we are no different than dogs– with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone’s sex. 224.

And there are other people’s expectations. Like when a man slipped his car in front of a woman’s in a parking lot, just before she got there. He’d gone the wrong way, and deliberately jumped ahead of her. “Be a man about it!” she said, when he tried to pretend nothing had happened.

This idea that you could or could not “be a man” is a little strange.

The first clash between “who I am” and ‘what manhood means’ came at a young age for me. There was a bully at my elementary school who decided he would beat me up one day for reasons he could not articulate. He was bigger than me.

Following the advice of my parents– and what I learned in UU church school– I attempted to reason, to wheedle, whine, cajole, intimidate— anything to avoid fighting this guy.

It didn't work. But after a few blows I did manage to escape him and ran like a rabbit through the woods, all the way home. I was a little proud of having partially avoided a prolonged fist fight, one I would have lost had I stayed.

When my father came home, he lost it. He yelled at me for being a sissy (that word still rings in my ears). My mother stood helplessly by as my father let me know I had failed an essential test of manhood. I learned that afternoon that manhood was a quality, and that I might never possess it— I might never “become” a man.

How could that be? I had been taught to avoid fighting. I was doing what my parents and teachers had taught me. But those same people then questioned my masculinity. At age 10, for crying out loud.

Of course, that was way back in the late 20^th century. We are more enlightened now. I do recall that my sister went through an entirely different set of challenges as she went through adolescence. She had difficulty with things that were a breeze for me, and vice versa.

We had difficulty understanding the other’s problems. It seemed so straight forward for the outside observer. But so scary for the person in the middle of it.

And even now, it seems like men and women live in parallel worlds. We don’t necessarily experience social reality in the same way.

As a way of trying to get a glimpse of how the “other side” lives, author Norah Vincent spent a year posing as a man. She is not the first woman to try this. There is a long & storied history to this.

There are plenty of fictional and real stories of women dressing as men. From the American Civil War to the movies Yentl and Mulan.

If you’ve seen both movies, you know that the protagonist, a young woman, is able to keep up the persona of a young man for quite a while. But even then, someone of the opposite sex usually begins to sniff them out.

In Yentl’s case she wants to study the Torah, and in the story, women weren’t allowed to do that then. She falls in love with a fellow student, who begins to fall for her, but represses it.

In the case of Mulan, in the Disney story, her lame father is called up as a volunteer to help protect China from the invading Huns. She knows her aging father will be killed if he goes, so she steals his armor and sword and goes in his place.

Mulan changes her name to Ping, and joins the army. She falls in love with her platoon leader, and has to keep her feelings to herself. But she can tell her platoon leader probably has some feelings for Ping / Mulan also.

Which is strange. Because he believes himself to be attracted to women, what is this feeling for Ping? He does the ‘straight man’ thing and tries to ignore it.

Toward the end of the film, Mulan is discovered. One of the military higher ups with the platoon demands the traditional penalty– death. Fortunately, the platoon leader selects ‘banishment’ instead. Then the movie can continue- so Mulan can save all of China. It is Disney, after all.

Our intern minister, David Breeden, reminded me a couple months ago, that in some states cross-dressing is illegal. Indeed, cross dressing is specifically cited as an "abomination" in the book of Deuteronomy (22:5) in the Hebrew bible.

There are many examples of cross dressing in mythology, in religion, and in military history. Consider Joan of Arc, “the act of dressing in male clothing being cited as one of the principal reasons for her execution.”

There are different reasons for cross dressing. In the movie, Some Like it Hot, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon, join an all girl band in disguise in order to escape mafia hit men.

Some cross-dressers are trans-gender folk who seek gender reassignment surgery. Others are transvestites who have a fetish. The fact is, there are a lot of reasons for cross-dressing, and you can’t tell just by looking.

In a classic piece of immersion reporting, Norah Vincent left her job as a syndicated columnist to discover what it would be like in traditional men’s places.

Norah successfully traverses an range of traditionally male haunts. She adopts a persona: Ned. She comes up with some 5 o’clock shadow– a little bit of beard stubble. She is a lesbian and thought that might make it easier.

So, she wraps bands around her chest, she wears loose clothing, she changes her hairstyle, she works with a voice coach to keep her voice lower. She got the idea when she and a friend dressed up as men during a night on the town in the East Village of New York City.

They noticed men weren’t looking at them in the same way. Usually, she said, as a woman, men looked at you as you walked down one end of the street to the other.

But in drag, men looked briefly, and then immediately looked away.

Later on she writes: “to look another male in the eye and hold his gaze is to invite conflict. To look away is to accept the status quo, to leave each man to his tiny sphere of influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.”

She decides to check out what the hidden world of men is like in various parts of the country. She begins with a checking out what male friendship is like by joining a bowling league in the Midwest.

It was her first encounter as a man. She wasn’t sure if she would be recognized right away. And if so, or if not, and she was recognized much later– would she be in danger?

She remembered the Academy Award-winning 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, based on a true story where a transsexual young woman dressing as a male was raped and murdered.

But she wanted to explore male friendship. She knew it was different from female friendships. So she joins a bowling league. She experiences directly how men communicate using fewer words than women. About how men set up boundaries, but also how the guys in her bowling league accept others very simply and pragmatically.

These men say what they mean, they mean what they say. They are not as talkative as women she knows, but they communicate just as much.

Then she went– as Ned– with a couple guys to bars with– how can I put this? A bar with dancing girls. And she saw how men can be slaves to their desire– proud and ashamed all at the same time– and how all-consuming their desire can be. She writes:

No matter how high they ascend in the civilized world, no matter how tall, how dapper, how educated or savvy they stand in the stratosphere of age and accomplishment, a lot of average guys still have [an X rated] film loop flickering in the back of their minds. 67.

She even went on a few casual dates with women. She couldn’t believe the amount of rejection she got when she asked girls out. Rejection, rejection, rejection. And she learned that women are wary of men and men have to persist– which makes women wary. It’s a wonder heterosexuals get together at all, she thought.

She also became aware of how “degraded and awful a relentless, humiliating sex drive could make you and how inhuman it could make your incessant thoughts about women become.”

Next, she wanted to see what living in a men’s only situation was like. She decided to go on retreat to a Catholic monastery. And learned about the subtle insistence on emotional distance the men had there.

For they were homophobic. Always worried about emotional intimacy with the other monks. That emotional intimacy might lead to something else. She found it claustrophobic, even though the monks were spiritually intense, and very dedicated.

In her travels through these mens’ worlds, she learned quite a bit. She learned that male privilege wasn’t quite what it had seemed, that there was a lot hidden under the surface, and that there were strong reasons for that.

She learned that when people see weakness in a woman, they want to help out. And when they see weakness in a man, they want to crush it. 213.

She saw how many men had their masculinity tied to their jobs– if they were out of work, they were some how less manly. To be a man is to be a provider, a protector. So, for many men, the loss of a job, means feeling a certain loss of manhood. That’s not the way it should be. But there can be a lot of social pressure.

For feminism to be truly successful, it is not enough to liberate women. Men must be liberated also.

Toward the end of her year and a half masquerade, she joined a new age mens group, and she saw what is a dark and deep wound for many men– the wounds between father and son. She saw a curse of too much emotional distance between father to son handed down through the generations. 241.

And she saw how much men need brotherly love, care, and affection, and how rarely most of them get it.

For some of the men, it was an accomplishment to realize they even had feelings, since they’d been buried for so long. She realized that her idea that everyone could express their emotions was a “highly privileged, largely feminine point of view.” 234.

Men wanted emotional tenderness, but to show vulnerability was to show weakness. To be emotionally intimate with other men, was to risk being perceived as gay. And there is always the fact that other men may be dangerous to you. Norah writes: “as a guy you had to be at your full height and in possession of your faculties when in close proximity to other men.” 247.

In the end, Norah Vincent came to realize her masquerading as Ned was not so unusual as it might for men to understand. She was wearing a mask, a disguise. And so she was very aware of who she was and who was around her. Ned was hyper-aware of these things, and couldn’t really talk about it.

She learned that this is also true for many men in general. She writes:

“I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Only in my men’s group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room. 273.

When Norah Vincent began her journey as Ned, she thought of freedom, of being unafraid, of being loud and standing with her legs apart.

But reality was much more clamped down than that. “Someone is always evaluating your manhood,” she writes.

Whether it’s other men, women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching Consequently, somebody has always got to be there kicking you under the table, redirecting, making or keeping you a real man.276.

She says the straitjacket of the male role is that you’re discouraged from being a complete person, instead, “you get to be what’s expected of you.”

It’s easy to think that traditional patriarchy exalts men over women. But it also contributes to the fact that over 90% of people killed in the work place, killed in wars, killed by assassinations, killed by executions, taken as hostages, and taken as prisoners are men.

Over 90% of the homeless are men. Men die sooner than women from all of the 10 most lethal diseases, they die earlier generally and they commit suicide at a rate of 5 times more often than women.

Now don't get me wrong. Plenty of women are victims, too. But "re-imagining masculinity" is important.

It is easy to forget that we are animals, and not only that. But we have been and are animals far longer than we have been ‘civilized.’

Spiritual depth means we are called to examine the social constructs of gender. To figure out what cultural messages we get about being women or about being men. And then to make choices about how to be mature men and women, and not let others dictate these things to us.

We are born, we grow up, we live, we become men and women. But we can accumulate a lot of baggage along the way. At some quiet way stations along the journey, it is important to stop and examine who we are, how we want to be– to return again to that source of our desire to do well and find peace.

Let’s sing it, shall we? Return Again, #1011