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إعداد الصبية ليصبحوا رجالاً
الكل يحتاج إلى قدوة ومثل أعلى. اشترك مع مجموعة من المدربين الرياضيين من جميع أنحاء الولايات المتحدة وهم يدربون جيلاً جديداً من الرجال على مواجهة المواقف والسلوك التي تؤدي إلى العنف تجاه المرأة.
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| | • | في عام 2002، أظهرت دراسة أجراها المركز الرياضي الطبي لجامعة ولاية أوهايو أن17.5% من الرياضيين الذكور الذين يمارسون الرياضات الخفبفة أظهروا أعراض اضطرابات في الطعام، مقارنة مع 9.2% من الرياضيين الذين يمارسون رياضات غير خفبفة مثل كرة السلة، وكرة القدم، والهوكي. | | | • | أجرت إدارة الصحة والصحة العقلية في مدينة نيويورك استفتاء بين 193ر4 رجلاً يعيشون فيها، وأظهر الاستفتاء أن 10% من المشاركين الذكور، الذين يدعون أنهم أشخاص مستقيمون، قالوا أنهم مارسوا الجنس مع رجل واحد على الأقل خلال السنة السابقة. | |
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| | | | | | | | | | الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية | المعرض | حوار | |
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ملاحظۃ المحررة
"Lacking Harriet" by Jesse Green, from WHAT MAKES A MAN by Rebecca Walker, copyright (c) 2004 by Rebecca Walker. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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At first I didn’t notice, when I met the man who would become my life partner, that he resembled Mr. Orr rather closely. Andy, too, had been a high school English teacher (but had now escaped the classroom); he’d once had shaggy light brown hair; he wore little wire-rimmed glasses and liked science fiction.
Eight and a half years older than I, he could even have been the same age as Mr. Orr, though what seemed an unbridgeable chasm of time to a teen was now, at 37, no more than a brook, delightful to cross in bare feet.
Whether because of that slight generational difference, or because of the larger difference in personality between us, Andy brought to our shared cosmos a much longer comet trail of past involvements, with both men and women, than I did. Joining our orbits in 1995 was therefore more a matter of my merging into his than vice-versa, just as my mother had come into marriage in 1951 with little besides a sharp eye for observing the onslaught of my father’s friends and kin. But Andy brought something even more consequential and coercive than auld acquaintance to our marriage: He brought a child. Andy had adopted his first son about a year before we met; his second would arrive nine months into our relationship. By then, that baby was not his but our second, though “ownership” of the boys would turn out to be a human real-estate transaction that raised in each of us the dread specter of an inner Donal Trump.
Eight years later, that transaction long since ironed out (neither of us owns the boys; they own us), we are “four men living together” – though two of us enact a masculinity still defined by knights, superheroes, and furtive, contraband weapons. I can’t speak to the way my relationship to Andy might have proceeded had there been no children involved, or had they come along after a decorous honeymoon of several years. What I can speak t is the way two adults, under the stress of living together and raising young boys, enact their masculinity. It is not always a pretty sight. Not so much in practical matters, like divvying up chores, which actually goes more smoothly than in many male-female relationships. We choose who will make the beds – or, for that matter, pump the gas – as a matter of taste and ability, not because one is a woman’s job and one a man’s. Perforce freed from the prison of established gender roles, we inhabit a domestic world in which masculinity is, in that sense, meaningless. A job not done by men simply does not get done.
But there is more to a marriage than the chores. There is, for example, how you do the chores. I was astonished and frustrated to learn, in our first year together, that not everyone naturally bows to the obvious superiority of my method of loading the dishwasher – or folding the laundry or balancing the checkbook. And even more astonished to find that I, the soul of easygoing indulgence, could be the source of an equivalent frustration in Andy. It had seemed sufficient that our division of labor was egalitarian, but it turned out that our habit of dominance was not. This is partly the result of having met as full-fledged adults, already set in our ways; it’s easy to be easygoing when one has not yet formed tastes, or when one lives alone. But I came to feel that the habit of dominance was more directly the result of resurgent male-ness, which does not begrudge shared work nearly as much as shared control. And so, when Andy and I say (as we often do) we want a wife, it isn’t seriously because we want someone to take the “wifely” chores off our hands, though that would be nice. It’s because we want someone around who will graciously, or at any rate silently, defer to all our certainties.
For the thing about a gay male relationship is that – surprise! – it involves two men. Despite stereotypes, neither is a wife or wants to be. Just watch a Bette Davis movie (and make the appropriate substitution) to see how brutal an old-fashioned fairy tale can be. At home, even florists and hairdressers fight like cats and dogs.
The assimilated gay man is haunted by those stereotypes, and yet I liked those men, whose steely masculinity was at odds with their feminized presentation. The year before my crush on Mr. Orr, I had a geometry teacher who wore pink-tinted glasses and plaid bow ties. He required his students to prove Pythagorean theorem in crewelwork, and got a great deal of pleasure at the sight of thick-fingered jocks, otherwise so dominant, despairing to wield the dainty needles. “I hope you hit better than you know,” he lisped to one hapless lug whose hypotenuse was flaccid.
The bitchiness of pre-liberation homosexuals, depicted to enjoyably in incorrect works like The Boys in the Band, has often been posited as a kind of emotional camp: the record of a failed experiment in personhood. I’m not sure that’s right. I think the Dr. Jekyll and Miss Thing bipolarity of gay men actually had less to do with the disaster of being gay in a straight world than with the simple fact of being male in a gay world. Segregated by gender, like prisoners, all men enact arcane struggles for dominance, and the homemade knives come out. If simple repression were the cause, the style would have disappeared by now, a full generation after Stonewall. And yet the style persists; many of the men in newfangled gay partnerships are every bit as fey-ferocious as Paul Lynde, sneering and sibilating in his center Hollywood Square. However they express their nonheterosexuality – whether by armoring themselves with muscle at the gym or by plucking every last hair from their bodies (or both) – gay spouses each expect to lead and be deferred to, exactly as if they were married to Harriet Nelson. Lacking Harriet, something’s got to give. Mr. Orr could have taught me that lesson: With both men pulling on the same side, a two-man scull will only move in circles. | |  | ضعي علم على هذه القصة للمراجعة | | | |
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ahhhh, gender differences.... annoying!
I recently saw the IMOW (online International Museum of Women) February conversation/collection… "Young Men".
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