Mannish: On the Accidental Art of Not Being a Guy's Guy

I am uninterested in a lot of things. So many, in fact. Too many to count.

This is arguably not the greatest opening observation for a blog post, because:

1. Talking about a vague absence of something is generally a lot less compelling than focusing on something that, you know, is actually there.

2. An upfront lack of curiosity is not the most attractive or sympathetic quality in a human. "Uninterested" can be dangerously close to "uninteresting".

3. It's a fact about myself that does nothing to distinguish me from you or any of the other 8.mumble-mumble humans on the planet.

   
   

Let's face it; we're all pretty alike in having a lot of stuff we simply don't care about. In fact, depending on how you categorize the stuff, it's probably fair to say that most of us don't care overly about a majority of the things. We may not like to think of ourselves in this way—it makes us seem small-minded—but in fairness, there are just way too many things and way too little time. And also our minds are pretty small.

The things we aren't interested in become more interesting (marginally) when, taken all together, they start to form a larger pattern.

For example, I have virtually no interest in any pursuit that falls within the generally recognized boundaries of traditional manliness. I just can't be bothered. Whether my preponderance of not caring about conventionally masculine things is the result of nature or nurture, a mixture of the two, or just coincidence, I cannot say. All I can tell you is that I've always had difficulty locating shits to give.

Here's a noncomprehensive list of dude customs and pastimes I can't get excited about. Brace yourself for an invigorating mentholated splash of heteronormativity!

GUY THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT

• sports

• golf (yes, I'm separating it from sports and so should you)

• cars and things that go vroom

• guns

• hunting

• fishing

• beer and spirits (my use of the word "spirits" may be something of a giveaway here)

• cigars

• grilling meat

• poker (the card game, not the fireplace tool, although I'm not wildly interested in those either)

Now I'm not suggesting that any of these areas are exclusively the purview of men. Or that you need to be interested in all these things to qualify as "manly", whatever that is. And just to further disclaim myself, I'm not looking down my nose at any of these of these interests. Far from it. Well, maybe a few of them I am. Yes, definitely a few. Can you guess which ones? Turn to page 72 for answers!

These are all perfectly reasonable preoccupations (apart from the ones that objectively aren't. Here's a clue: there are at least two of them!) I can't claim that any of the stuff that interests me is any more valid, enlightened, or ennobling. Unless I'm comparing it to cigars. I feel pretty confident that I can beat that.

But that's not the point of this post. And may I defensively reiterate that everybody is uninterested in, if not openly contemptuous of, most of the things that there are to care about. That's just math, which is another thing I don't care about.

The point of this is: I have never shown much aptitude or initiative when it comes to the time-honored customs of hetero manhood. "Guy talk" mostly baffles me, although I can usually communicate adequately enough with the locals. Male bonding of the overtly masculine variety (e.g. games of pick-up basketball, knife fighting shirtless with your free arm lashed to your opponent's) is not something I am suited for.

And I don't care all that much. One would hope not at my advanced age (I was born during the Hoover administration). One would hope I had evolved beyond such things as my testosterone and relevance have inexorably seeped away. I mean, I probably must care about it a little or I wouldn't choose to write about it now, but mostly I'm pretty okay with not fitting the standard idea of a "guy's guy". Like 85 to 90% okay with it. Really.

The things I listed don't really tell us what manliness is exactly. They aren't qualities. They're just optional activities that lots of men seem to enjoy. At times, though, they can feel like a set of establishment approved expressions of masculinity. Together, they form a sort of cultural man zone, perhaps a hardscaped section of the backyard or a garage with an epoxy-coated floor and lots of diamond plate metal, that feels like foreign territory to a dude like me.

This feeling of being a man outside of the tribe of men can be odd. But I don't want to make it sound like this has been a source of great hardship for me, because it hasn't. More just a sense of puzzled otherness. I am fond of saying that I feel an unearned sense of kinship with gay men. It's a little like a fifth-generation Irish-American tourist visiting Ireland for a week and going on to anybody who'll listen about how "Irish" they feel. Meaning I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. But I assume the gay experience is analogous to being Irish in Europe.

As much as I've felt like an outsider most of my life—and not just with regard to any mainstream expectations around manhood—I've been the kind of outsider who is on the periphery of the room, partly by choice or disposition, watching the party, not the sort of outsider who is denied access to the grounds. I have never known true fear for not conforming to the norms. Maleness, for cishet men anyway, is the safest of genders.

In some ways, I was pretty lucky growing up as an anxious, hypersensitive only child who didn't click with a lot of traditional boy stuff. Beyond some of the ritual playground variety of homophobia, I didn't catch much flack. Oh sure, adolescence was like being shit with agonizing slowness out of Satan's butthole, but adolescence being painful is not an uncommon experience and my trials didn't have a whole lot to do with feeling like I was falling short of the requirements of maleness. I guess in the sense that I pined hopelessly over girls, but I don't recall thinking the problem was a lack of maleness. But then, my memory isn't great, so who knows?

Masculinity often feels like the elephant in the room of culture. Except nobody is ignoring it because it's a 7-ton bull elephant with anger issues and it called the meeting in the first place. It's somehow also the elephant from the parable with everybody blindly grabbing a different part (steady now) and characterizing the whole animal as something different with the only generally agreed upon point being that it's all reminiscent of a wrinkly penis. (See, it's okay. I brought that sentence back around to a penis joke.)

Let me ask some questions beaten to death by a gazillion think pieces. Because like Jason Vorhees, the questions never really die. What even is masculinity? How can it be a measure that so many men feel or are told or feel they are told they don't meet? We usually think of "manliness" as an admirable and attractive way to be, but how strange is it that there is a perceived scale of "less to more man"? Ask most people what attributes they associate with manliness and they'll tell you: strength, confidence, courage, resourcefulness, discipline, honor. But none of these are expressly male qualities.

The flipside of manliness, of course, is toxic masculinity: entitlement, emotional constipation, dominance, aggression, rage, violence, predation, sexual assault. And while these issues may not be exclusively male, let's not kid ourselves; violence and sexual assault are overwhelmingly committed by men. It's a distinctly, verging on uniquely, male problem.

So, that's fun.

I know, that took a dark turn. And I don't really have an adequate adult follow-up to justify swerving the wheel like that.

I suppose one rather obvious observation is traditional masculinity is just one dimension of maleness, but that doesn't really get us any closer to what maleness is and how it's different from any other gender identity.

I can tell you that my maleness is something I feel (settle down), but when I try to define it, it gets slippery (honestly, grow up). It can't be my sexual/romantic attraction to women, because what about men who aren't straight? What about lesbians? That sounds like an opener to a potentially very problematic comedy set. Anyway, it's all enough to make you think that sexual orientation is a distinct concept from gender. Wait, am I the first person to say that? You should probably make a note of that.

There are aspects to my sense of humor and my geeky obsessions that certainly feel male to me, but again, these aren't remotely male-exclusive traits or interests, no matter what the men who have manned their barricades to defend their stupid he-man woman-haters clubhouses say online.

Over the years, I've noticed I have a certain unwillingness to process certain experiences and emotions out loud, which seems to contrast with the tendencies of the women in my life. I have areas of emotional guardedness and reserve. I'm not great at asking for things I need. I've had to train myself out of the automatic impulse to try to "fix" the problems my wife and daughters' share when what they really need first is to be heard. I want to jump past the discussion portion (exhausting!) to solutions. But the "solutions" are often just ways to disengage from the stuff that's happening in the present.

These are all inclinations that seem statistically more male, but "statistically" covers a lot of uncertainty and assumptions. Not only are the boundaries of maleness indistinct and permeable, very little about the features and details of the interior, taken by themselves, are necessarily male.

But the mere suggestion of something like that pisses a lot of people off.

In case you haven't noticed, the introduction of nuance, ambiguity, and diversity to the mainstream gender conversation has not gone over swimmingly with the people who prefer strong borders and black-and-white distinctions. There are those who fervently believe gender is two food groups, meat and potatoes, (mainly meat) that should be served on a divided plate. They feel their grasp on things slipping, and it makes a lot of them mad and mean.

That's another thing I'm not interested in: policing the genders of other people. It's something we could use some more of. Or less, depending on how you're looking at it.

In parting, here's a list of a few more things about me, apart from my tragically fragile ego, that are maybe male or gender neutral. Whatever. I'm fine with sharing.

MY INTERESTS IN THE VICINITY OF MANLINESS

• Aspiring to be like Timothy Olyphant in Justified

• Related to the above, the desire to wear a Stetson, lean against a corral fence, and tip my hat to the ladies as they go by

• A fascination with multitools and survival axes that are also seatbelt cutters, bottle openers, and gas valve wrenches

• Reading about Vikings

• A sense that maybe I should know what scenario I'd need a gas valve wrench for

• Fight Club is one of my favorite movies

• Regular rumination on what my superhero powers would be

• Powerlifting. Like, so much of it.