Do you wish you could explain some of the basic things covered in What You Really Really Want to a man you know? A lover, a relative, or a friend? Do you feel like if he “got it” just a little more he could really be a more positive force in your life? This essay is by a smart, feminist guy friend of mine. It’s a primer by a man, for men, on how to be better to the women in their lives. Read it (you may find some of it useful yourself!), and then try asking the guy in your life to read it, too, and to do the exercises. If he’s willing, it could be very helpful in opening up a potentially healing conversation between the two of you.
How to Be Good to the Women in Your Life
by Thomas MacAulay Millar
In all likelihood, you’re reading this because a woman in your life has asked you to. And you’ve agreed to read it because you want to—or are at least willing to—learn how to be a better ally to the women in your life, whether those women are your wife, girlfriend, or booty call, or your mother, sister, or daughter. That’s great. But to be allies to them, we first need to know how to be a man. I can tell you everything I know about this fairly quickly, because it’s very simple. Not easy, just simple.
A. How to Be a Man
I don’t let anyone tell me how I should be a man.
That’s it. That’s all I really know. Simple, right? And not so easy. We’re bombarded with people telling us how to be a man. Vodka commercials and beer commercials and commercials for pants tell us what men do, and what men don’t do. We could ignore all those messages, but then we’d be interrogated by the man police. I have seen the man police, and they are us.
We have a bad habit of telling each other how to be men. It starts in kindergarten, and we do it right up through the retirement community: “Bros before hos,” the “guy code,” “man up,” and “who wears the pants in your family?” Men don’t order white wine or fruity drinks; men order hard liquor and beer. Men don’t want relationships; men just want to hit it and quit it. Men are walking cardboard cutouts of John Wayne.
But I’m not, and you’re not. I’m a real person, with a full range of human emotion. I like a lot of things that are traditionally considered male, like fighting sports and woodworking. But I don’t like those things because I’m required to. Maybe I watch boxing and make furniture because, the way I was raised, those were things men did. But I’m a grownup now, and I need to take responsibility for myself. I like what I like, I am how I am, and I’m not going to be how someone else tells me to be because they have a narrow idea of what a man should like or should do.
The Job of Being in Charge
Some of the stereotypes of men are obvious: the strong, silent type, with a very limited emotional range. Independent, self-sufficient, the one who is relied upon, and relies on nobody but himself. The leader, the conqueror, the guy in charge.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Many of us are that guy. Robert De Niro is a terrible interview subject because he just doesn’t show much emotion when he isn’t acting. On the other hand, General Patton was an emotional guy and got choked up easily. Who was the “real man”? Both of them. Narrow notions of manhood leave a lot of people out. Oliver, twenty-nine, told me, “Some of us are incapable of being a real man . . . I have a disability, so that bars me from a lot of masculine stuff. You know, I can never be the athletic hunk.”
Admiral Nelson was short and skinny with one arm and one eye, and he saved Britain.
One of the major themes we learn is that being men is about taking responsibility. The messages we get about men’s roles in families and in sex are not too different. Traditionally, men propose marriage, make the first move to ask for a date, kiss, or fuck. And whose responsibility is it to plan it and make it all work out well? Traditionally, the man. Whether we accept that or run from it, we’re still reacting to it. Lots of men dodge responsibility, but very few men make a conscious, acknowledged choice to cede responsibility. It goes against the grain of so much that we’ve been taught. The sense of responsibility can wear us down. In the movie Parenthood, an exhausted dad (Steve Martin) exclaims, “My whole life is have to!” I know the feeling.
The stereotypes about what men want from sex are almost invisible, because they’re not discussed—they’re just understood as if they’re true. If you’re reading this chapter, then you’re probably at least a little sensitive to the labels that people toss at women—prude, slut, easy, etc. The labels imposed on men are not as directly insulting, and for that reason, few people talk about how limiting they are. There is no male equivalent of “slut.” The names for men who have a lot of sex partners—from “stud” to “player” to “dog”—aren’t necessarily compliments, nor are they very serious insults; nothing to make a crowd go “Oooooh!” They’re expectations.
The social expectation is that men’s sexual urges are for lots of sex, variety, and visual stimulation—that men are sluttier, kinkier, less monogamous, and more visual than women by nature.* Refuting the crap that pretends to be science around this stuff is beyond the scope of this chapter. Whatever the truth is about “men,” you’re not “men.” You’re you. If there are ways you don’t fit the stereotype, you probably hear people make all kinds of claims about “men” that are not true of you. You’re right. They’re wrong, at least about you, and you can’t make yourself happy doing things that are wrong for you.
For a book on evolutionary psychology that disagrees with almost all the traditional conclusions of the field, read Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn, though my takeaway from it was that evolutionary psychology itself is less a science than a series of arguments looking for support.
I also recommend Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Dr. Lise Eliot, which reviews a whole universe of research on brain differences in men and women, from before birth through adulthood, and concludes that demonstrable brain differences are much easier to prove in adulthood, after culture has affected development.
Whether we were socialized as men from birth or became men sometime after, we learned on the playground that men are the aggressors, the ones who always want sex, and girls are the ones who say “no.” Most of us get the message that we’re supposed to want it, however we can get it, all the time. We can’t unlearn that message, but we can learn that being who we really are is more important than fitting that role.
Cardboard Isn’t Much Good to Anybody
If you’re a man who wants to be better to the women in your life, you can start by being more of yourself, identifying the social messages you’ve picked up about how to be a man, and making conscious decisions about how you deal with them. When we start to consider ourselves as unique people and not trapped in a role, then we can also help the women around us get what they really want, instead of following scripts that may not work for them. As folks said in the civil rights movement, free your mind. Your ass will follow.
What if you woke up tomorrow to a new, important job, with no training program; you’d be expected to start right away, and everyone would assume you knew what you were doing. Nobody would seem likely to help you out if you had basic questions, and you might get in hot water for needing to ask, but it would also be important not to mess up. That would be a nightmare! And a recipe for disaster.
For men, that’s how it goes with sex and with relationships. Most men get approximately zero serious discussion about how to do any of this stuff, and instead learn entirely by trial and error. Ben, twenty-three, told me, “One of the things I’ve noticed with my friends, which I think is alive and well today, is that when it comes to sexual interaction, men should just know what a woman wants.”
Even men who are lucky don’t get any guidance on relationships or sexuality; they just have good relationship role models in their lives, and maybe get a decent talk on safer sex. More than that is exceedingly rare.
Without that, many men suffer from what I call In Charge Syndrome. Some guys feel like they can’t ask questions or communicate because they’ll look like they don’t know what they’re doing. If a man is supposed to just sweep partners off their feet into a swoon, he can’t break the spell by admitting he doesn’t know everything, right? If a man is supposed to “run the fuck,” he should already know all the tricks and techniques, right?
That’s bull. It’s not taking responsibility if a man pretends he knows everything he needs to if he doesn’t. People who have the most skill and expertise ask a lot of questions. Asking questions is taking responsibility. How does Captain Kirk know what shape the engine room is in? Does he just hope it’s okay? No! He gets Scotty on the comm and asks for a situation report!
Another toxic manifestation of these messages is the Contempt Trap. This might or might not be something you do, but even if it’s not, you should know it when you see it. One way some guys resolve the tension between being responsible to a sex partner or a relationship partner and not feeling free to communicate is that they reject responsibility by showing contempt for their partner, by insulting them when they’re not around (or even when they are) and talking about them like they’re worthless for being sexually available. You’ve seen Grease, right? Everybody has seen Grease. Well, all those guys that Rizzo had sex with treated her like a leper in front of other guys. Even Danny really liked Sandy, but around the guys, he fronted like he didn’t, because he was more afraid of the guys making fun of him than of ruining a great thing. If we’re having sex with someone, they’re also having sex with us. It’s a glaring double standard. Looking down on a partner for being sexual with us is like declaring that we don’t want to be part of a club that would have us as members. It’s a mask for insecurity. Affecting a phony-tough, callous attitude diffuses the sense that a sex partner is somebody a man has obligations to. Insecurity is not always or even usually what’s behind that kind of talk, because there are too many guys in the world who have serious anger issues with women. But otherwise-decent men put on that mask to hide insecurity. It’s not a healthy way to deal with it, and it gives cover and comfort to men who really, really hate (and often abuse) women.
DO THIS: Make two lists: the list of things that you do, or like, that are traditionally considered masculine, and the things you do or like that are not. Keep going until you can’t think of more things. Now, pick a woman whom you know fairly well—maybe the woman who handed you this book, or maybe someone else. List all the things she does or likes that are traditionally considered feminine, and all the things she does or likes that are not. If you can, ask a woman who knows you well, maybe the one who gave you this chapter to read, to make the same lists for you and for her. She may think of things you overlook.
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* The myths about male sexuality also provide cover for people who abuse males. People often treat the sexual abuse of boys by adult women as a joke, or less serious than abuse by men. This wrong, and it hurts men who are survivors. An organization called Men Can Stop Rape maintain a list of abuse survivor resources for men. [back to text]
