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Commentary
for favorite radio station, WAMC, by Dave
Belden. Aired November 2000.
The Great Male Secret
What is this business of being a man all about? I'm 51 and I am wondering if I have ever grown up. My boy is 12. What kind of a role model am I to him?
I don't think my father thought too much about this kind of thing. His father was a famous socialist minister in the church, a friend of the first Labour Prime Minister, and my mother's father was a successful self-made man in the building trades in London, with an office in Queen Anne's Gate, half way between his two most prestigious clients: Buckingham Palace and the Admiralty. My grandfathers, my father and my uncles looked like professional men - men in grey suits with an air of authority, rulers of the British Empire, or the consciences of the rulers.
By contrast I have always felt more like an amateur man myself. It's been hard even to believe I am a man. In my twenties a child in a store asked his mother something about 'that man.' Even though the child was pointing at me, I still looked round to see who 'that man' might be. Going bald has helped. You look in the mirror and see this bald man. When my son, Rowan, and I go to the movies or the mall and have to pee we head for this room with the word MEN over it: I imagine I'm an actor like David Niven in a First World War movie and I say, "All right men, we're going in."
Why this sense of irony about being a man?
It must be something to do with the times when I came of age. When I was 23 in 1972 I married a girl of 19. Feminism swept through our marriage and she discovered that she was not a girl but a woman, and men were the oppressors. I could hardly disagree.
In my family, this was déjà vu. My grandmère, my grandmother, was a 20 year-old concert pianist, brought up in Paris, when she married my grandfather, a Victorian autocrat twice her age. This was around the year 1900. He bought her a posh house and a grand piano in London and told her that her career was over. He furnished the house down to the very last item but one: he allowed her to choose her own tea set - the china she would use for entertaining her women friends. The dinner china was in purple and gold with his initials in the middle of every piece. If she wasn't a feminist at 20, she soon became one. She used to tell her first four young sons, "Men are beasts! I never should have had you!" Two of the boys died young, actual or suspected suicides. When my mother, the only girl and the only one to marry before the age of 60, asked her oldest brother why he never married, he replied, "I never thought I could inflict myself upon a woman." This was unfortunate. As his remark suggests, he was the gentlest of gentlemen. Although he was a very dignified and respectable man, a senior civil service lawyer, this uncle had a terrible secret: he lived in pack-rat squalor in a bachelor flat. When he moved, he swallowed his pride enough to ask my parents' help: they took over 8 tons of garbage out of the flat to the dump.
My response to all this bad press about maleness has been fairly confused. I have spent much of my adult life trying to write the sort of novels I loved as a teenager, and have avoided ever getting a permanent job. But I financed my writing habit by becoming a carpenter and builder: perhaps to feel as much a man as any macho guy. Now I'm a consultant for a corporation. I did my best to learn the modern sensitive man routine. If you can pull it off, it works pretty well. I'm still no good at
crying - I only manage it about once every few years. But other kinds of vulnerable I score better on and silly I can do. Wearing mismatched earrings and not wearing the suit of authority and respectability is fun. Women seem to like it. I've been married for 18 years now to a wonderful woman I have lots of laughs with. Mismatched earrings may not get you very far in the corporation, but you can always take them out and wear the male mask for a few hours when need be. Maybe this is the great male secret. That you don't have to be quote unquote 'a man'. When my wife discards her comfortable jeans and dresses up in her power suit or a smart dress for some event, she jokes that she's going in drag. I feel the same way when I put on my corporate suit.
I guess a lot of my generation just don't feel anything like the men we grew up admiring: so confident of their authority. I'm pretty confident now as a person. That's the fun of being 50. But I still don't feel much like 'a man.' I'm hoping the message my son gets is that he doesn't have to be one either. Being a person is enough.
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