The grayness of manhood

It is mid-morning and I am sitting on the floor of my apartment typing out this article. Sunlight shines through the windows and warms my outstretched legs. This column is due to The Chronicle at 5pm and my editor–who is also my housemate–is reprimanding me for being unprepared. 

Why didn’t I work on it yesterday? Why didn’t I work on it over the week? Why leave it to the last minute? To his credit, he is gentle about it, prodding but not inquisitorial, but it still annoys me terribly. Across the room, my partner is by the dining table listening in. They are clearing up the remains of the night (cups of half-finished water and little wooden sticks from the inside of frozen corn dogs). I want to shout at my housemate/editor. I want to tell him that if my column gets submitted without his comments it is my fault, not his; I want to tell him that he doesn’t get to micromanage me. I want to shout at him so badly.

But of course, I do not shout at him. I do not shout at him, because I want to be a Good Man. I do not shout at him, because shouting is violent and shouting is hyper-masculine and shouting is Not What Good Men Do.

So instead, I bite my tongue. Instead, I tell my partner that they are cleaning the table wrongly. I push them out of the way and do exactly what they were about to do. I then go back to sitting on the floor with a grim look on my face and type angrily, whipping at the keys because I did not shout, because I Am A Good Man. My partner comes over and asks me what is wrong. 

“Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know.”

I think sometimes we talk about Good Men as if they are iconic, mythological heroes–Superman, Batman, Iron Man, all come to mind–but I don’t think the Good Man actually exists. For me, manhood is too fluid and diverse for any notion of an ideal man to be useful or attainable. Thinking about manhood as a dichotomy of Good and Bad fails to account for the ways we have a difficult time identifying violence, and the ways we apply moral equivalences to sanitize violence. It frames Goodness as an identity, which, at best, simplifies the complex calculus involved in navigating a world marked by power and oppression. And at worst, it camouflages perpetrators of gender violence behind claims such as “I can’t imagine him doing such a thing.” Essentially, it fails to recognize the grayness of manhood. 

The Good/Bad dichotomy is problematic on a number of fronts. Firstly, it does not recognize (and often facilitates) the many times we let perpetrators of gender violence off the hook because they are “good men.” Conversely, it does not leave much room for reform or restorative justice, and leaves the door open for the justice system to project ideas of criminality onto men based upon race and class. Of course, we have to be able to adequately report and prosecute rapists before we can start thinking about restorative justice, but that is an altogether different conversation. We rarely use Good/Bad to describe other social identities, so why not problematize Good Men? Who gets to choose who is Good and who is Bad, anyway? Perhaps masculinities are too nuanced and complicated to be understood with such an inadequate moral standard.

Twenty minutes later, after half a cup of coffee and more key smacking, I sheepishly go over to my partner. I kiss them on the forehead and apologize: “I’m sorry. I was being ridiculous and immature, and should not have projected my irritation onto you.” I tell my housemate-editor all the things I originally should have said: “I felt hurt when you piled onto me like that. It was frustrating to be micromanaged. It felt like you were stepping on my autonomy.”