I've been reading "Stiffed" by Susan Faludi as part of my research for the Talking Cock book. I'd had a crack at reading it a couple of years ago, but never really got anywhere. I'm only on the first chapter, but it's interesting how much common ground we have.
She asks why men haven't got together and formed a men's movement. It's clearly a question she intends to address later in the book, but it is one that I have also addressed in the stage show of TC.
My thoughts on this have been that men are too competitive in nature to unite. We want to be top dog and are aware that if we trust another man, then he is likely to shaft us when he gets the opportunity. Also to form a movement highlighting men's woes would be to admit weakness. Something that men are anxious not to do at all costs. Which is pathetic of us, because all men have weaknesses and we all collude in this pantomime and claim that we don't. So although we would be better off if we aired our grievances, admitted our flaws and worked together, we are duty bound as "men" not to do anything of the kind.
But Stiffed has made me think about this a bit more. Men can be co-operative in certain circumstances, primarily in war. Faludi quotes an American artilleryman Win Stracke who said "You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society... They could help each other without fear of losing a commercial advantage.... I had realized it was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the army."
So we can unite and stop competing when we are destroying something. Aren't we great?! I guess that war is a manly enough pursuit in itself, for us to allow our fears of appearing weak to dissipate.
Men are in a trap of their own making. Women and men seem happy to perpetuate the system. In essence I think that men do nearly everything they do in the hope of attracting a woman. So women are just as responsible for men being as they are as the men. If women were only interested in sleeping with pacifist and caring men, then men would pretend to be that in order to have sex. At the moment we are pretending to be human beings without frailty because we feel that is what is wanted of us.
Men and women aren't that different. We have the same feelings and desires. I feel that we exaggerate the perceived differences, but at the end of the day, when we are alone, we have the same hopes and fears.
I keep thinking of that Stephen Jay Gould essay on why men have nipples. Essentially we are all built to the same template. For the first few weeks of pregnancy a male and female foetus and indistinguishable. It is only when the sex hormones kick in that we develop sex. Which is why men have nipples, because they are needed in the template because women need breasts and why women have a clitoris because men need a penis.
Men are from earth and so are women. Let's use that as a starting point and see where it gets us.
