Masculinities I have known

by RA

I grew up in Maine and am current resident, and have known a wide variety of persons.  They represent a broad swathe of the varying masculinities that can be encountered here in my home state.  In this article I will examine each of them as I know them, and see what I can determine from critically assessing their environments and identities.  All the names and initials have been changed, and everyone written of is a born Mainer except N.

N is an out of stater, but very much wants to see himself as a mainer and does see himself as a mainer.  He’s adopted the slang and the mannerisms like those of other old time Mainers.  There’s a local Maine saying that “just ‘cause the kittens were born in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits.” which is the local attitude towards folks from away who move to Maine.  

We are strongly exclusive about who is a Mainer and who is not - state pride is part of the masculinity of Maine.  If you’re a Mainer, you’re proud of it, it’s part of who you are, how you define yourself.  I think each state must glorify the local people in their own way, and in the end, we are no better or worse than any other people in any other states.  I think, mainers have pride, but we are also a very friendly people and tend to accept those who move here.

And then there’s L.  I know L very intimately.  He is four years older than me.  He was not kind to me when I was a child, I think he was an unhappy teenager just like any of us at that stage.  I think he started out with low self esteem because of not living up to masculine norms in our society.  He was tall, pale, with some acne, and very smart but not very socially adept, he didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs (soberty can be a subordinate masculinity in highschool social environments).  He eventually gave up any interest in pursuing a love relationship - I think because of his inner pain.  I don’t think he can imagine a woman who loves him and puts up with him simultaneously.  I think he doesn’t feel like he is worth loving.  It’s really sad but that’s what he feels about himself when he thinks about his own identity and masculinity.  I think, we compare ourselves to societies idea of the masculine man, and when we can’t live up, we suffer.

I have another friend named G.  When I first met him, he was socially nervous with not great confidence, and he was a little overweight.  As the years went by he became a strong and handsome man, living up to what he saw to be masculinity.  He has had many sex partners and has told me many sex stories.  He has good self esteem and has finally become a really good person (I just say when he was young, my friendship with him caused my insurance to go up).  G also has had on and off drug problems for a long time.

When we were young he abused opiates and eventually even heroin for awhile.  There is a drug culture masculinity where, if you do drugs, you are measured positively for it by others who do drugs.  In a drug environment, this kind of masculinity is dominant and so G was encouraged and enabled to continue his habit.  Nowadays, he mostly uses suboxin to deal with the nerve damage of drug abuse - but he doesn’t acquire it legally.  I love him very much as one of my best friends, even though he has caused me a lot of trouble in our time living next door to one another, even stealing my medication sometimes.  We love each other - I don’t think anything will ever change that.  We’ve been through so much together, there’s a man-bond.  G and I were so close we had our own culture, language, private jokes.  I miss having him around.  Of all the people!

He and I sure have influenced each others masculinity.  I’ve taken opiates with him, and was a drug experimenter for a short time.  He learned a lot about philosophy from me, because I usually had my head in the spiritual cloud (pun intended).  I think more than any other person we shared a lot and became the adults we are because of the homosocial bond.  Even after everything, I know that I can depend on G when I’m in a pinch or having a spell of mental illness.  We understand each other and - it’s beautiful.

Oddly enough we make a lot of jokes about fucking each other in the ass and sucking each others dicks - not that we have any sexual interest in each other’s bodies, I think, it’s just a form of friendly domination.  For whatever reason, males, even close friends, love to compete, love to dominate.  Domination, especially sexual domination,  is a value our society holds and promotes in men.  Since our identities are socially situated, it only makes sense that culture moulded both of us.  At least, we made light of the situation by joking with each other.

Let’s move on to X.  X lived with me for awhile, and we eventually parted on bad terms, although we’ve apologized to each other, we no longer have contact.  For all the hell G put me through, we stayed friends, but with X it didn’t work out.  I would set the house rules, and if I asked him to do something, and he didn’t do it, i’d get frustrated.  Or if I asked him knock the dirt off his boots outside instead of inside, he’d start bottling up his frustration.  He had never had a father and I think I was taking the place of a lot of negative energy he had towards that archetype.  Eventually he told me one day “I’m going to beat you into the ground,” and started pushing me around.  I know kendo karate but what you learn is not to attack unless you absolutely have to. it’s not good to hit a person.  So I let him push me around a bit and he stole my $3000 welder and sold it to a friend of mine for fifty dollars.

 But what I’ve learned about X is that we carry our reality with us - and each of us represents something to each other.  To him, masculinity was strength.  He was always trying to pick up too heavy things in front of girls and going red in the face.  And when I would set rules, I think, his sense of masculinity was threatened. I think naturally he wanted to be his own man but I represented a barrier to that - a parent figure.  It’s funny but sometimes when we leave off a relationship with someone, we pick up that relationship with someone else - right where we left off emotionally and intellectually.  X was heavy in drug culture and also wanted to be the tough guy - and since I represented the super tough guy (father figure, big muscles) I think I represented a barrier for him.  So naturally he moved away and I think he is doing better and staying off drugs.  I saw him one day and he apologized and the last thing I said to him was, “X, if you’ve got something good, don’t ruin it”.

C was another one of my best friends as a kid and we spent tonnes of time together.  I really admired him a lot.  He was a year older than me and really cool, he was socially adept which I was not.  He was handsome, funny, kind, and generous, everything you could ask for in a friend.  I think the worst thing we ever did was smoke some pot together.  C had had two loving, supportive parents and a lot of self esteem.  He got a degree and moved out of state to design airplane engines.  I think C represents a lot of the lost youth of Maine who move away seeking better economic prospects.

Part of the problem in Maine is that you have to be a jack of all trades to get by.  You have to cut your wood, be your own plumber, your own electrician sometimes, your own gardener and your own builder.  For a lot of Mainers having a variety of skills is extremely important.  Because our youth is now brought up in schools and learning specialized skills in college - living in Maine becomes more daunting because we didn’t grow up on the farm learning all the important skills we need to live in the woods in Maine.

To go along with that, we get our sense of masculinity from the older generations in Maine, who are usually multitalented.  I personally have always had a sense of not living up to the dynamic mainer masculinity for a lot of my life.  I’ve always been really smart, good with computers, good at writing.. When I moved into the woods at age 20 I had to learn a whole new set of homesteading skills that a lot of folks in Maine never learn nowadays.  I got big muscles, learned to chainsaw, learned to frame build, and became more confident and have stayed in Maine - but a lot of kids leave the state because of these reasons, along side the high cost of living.  Masculinity in Maine can mean being a jack of all trades - especially among the white collar population.

My friend B was always a very gentle, soft spoken boy.  He was smart, he was always kind, quiet, submissive, and somewhat feminine.  We made a good pair because relatively, I was more confident and socially adept than he was!  We played together a lot as kids.  When we got to highschool there was sort of a social group of us misfits who didn’t fit in with the jocks.  Eventually one of the other members of our group started picking on B and it eventually became a problem.  I wish I had done or said something back then but I didn’t understand what was happening.  One kid was always mean to B, and I have never had a liking for that kid since although he is still in the area.  
B wasn’t overtly masculine, and he was not aggressive or defensive, and socially he suffered for it.  Dominant masculinity in our society, and in Maine, wants manly men.  B was not a manly man.  He’s married and successful and happy now, but it was a long road of suffering from low self esteem, comparing himself to the dominant hegemonic masculine norm.

My friend T was a cool guy.  He played the guitar, and I admired him because he was muscular, and could play.  He was friendly and kind.  With girls he had no confidence.  His older brother had really abused him emotionally as a kid and it has taken a long time to heal.  I didn’t know his older brother but I can only imagine some of his anger.  As teenagers it is so easy to be angry. Part of the problem was that their parents marriage had split up.  Kids are so sensitive to that, and neither T or his older brother had a lot of self esteem.  He never saw himself as very masculine but wasn’t too concerned with it I think.  He smoked marijuana but never did any harder drugs.  Rock and roll was a huge influence on T’s masculinity, and he centered his identity around his ability to play the guitar and he played constantly and very well.  I think eventually that self esteem spilled over into the rest of his life as sometimes happen when we become adults.  It’s our society that gives the path of the rock star as legitimately masculine.  I think it was rock and roll that helped him through his childhood, oddly enough, because it’s where he gained his confidence.

Then there’s the rather unfortunate story of my friend S.  We met in elementary school, we weren’t really friends, but his story is worth saying.  He was very religious, that’s about as much as I knew about him.  But eventually I lived next door to his mother and I spent a lot of time socializing with her..  His mother was a disabled alcoholic.  But what eventually happened is that S killed his ex-girlfriend with a frying pan, cut up her body and stashed it in a trash bag in the back of his car.  He’s in jail now.  But what happened that night is telling.  His mom told me that his ex-girlfriend had been talking shit about his new girlfriend and - I imagine - he became angry and beat her to death with the frying pan.

Now - it’s easy to blame the murderer.  And it’s not that I blame society.  But society shares the blame.  S is not an island, he was brought up in our culture that teaches violence.  I wouldn’t say that S is evil because I know human beings are highly situational creatures.  And it also brings up the issue that jail doesn’t really help anyone.  It’s non-therapeutic.  It’s mentally and emotionally stressful in itself.  What kind of society are we when eye for an eye is the norm?  Does it do any good to abuse or punish another human being by imprisoning them?  Or any living thing for that matter?  What values are we teaching a person - by locking them in jail, by punishing them, hurting them?  It’s a system that perpetuates itself, because hurting a person who is already in pain never does any good except to create more criminals who hate the law and society.

Then there’s J.  J got me marijuana for a long time.  At one point we were good friends, I remember his young smiling face.  But as the years went by things slowly went downhill for him and he became addicted to opiates and is now going to the methadone clinic.  J represents the subordinate masculinity of the drug user in Maine.  Indeed - the addict is half a person through our cultural lense, because of the war on drugs.  But - addicts are people too, and addict masculinity is real in Maine.  As addict, we know we are underdogs, that sober people are better than us.  It’s not a good way to live, but an addict doesn’t have a choice of what our dominant cultural values are.

Then there’s J’s brother, JD.  JD is and was a kind person, who took it upon himself to mow the lawn and pick up trash even though J and the rest of the family just threw their trash on the ground.  JD was always kind to the three toddlers that lived there too, in poverty.  But when the sun was shining on JD, and he was playing with the kiddos, there was this sense of being beyond our troubles.  JD had a totally different idea of masculinity than J.  Where J saw womanizing and sluttiness as his goal, JD was a family oriented man, and a man who valued kindness, and appreciated other people more than J did.

For J, people were there to be used.  It’s amazing that, growing up under the same circumstances, two people can be totally different.  But it just goes to show that it’s not entirely cultural conditioning or genetics that affects people’s behavior - people are unique unto themselves, separate from all of that, and become who they are by their own free-thinking.

My friend W embodied the stereotypical mainer.  He takes opiates regularly - but has been a consistent and valued help to me over the years.  He’s a chainsaw guy, had always been super honest, worked really hard, and has been very kind and brings us blueberries every year.  He’s white collar, works his ass off, and goes home with a six pack every night, and takes good care of his wife.  He’s a war veteran, and a drug addict - but he’s not a low life.  A part of his masculinity is the value of integrity.  He sees himself as a part of a community.  He has no problem living up the image of masculinity in our society - he is strongly muscled, works hard, smokes and drinks and does drugs, and regails me with his stories of war and women.  But fitting in isn’t so easy for everybody.

My friend H is gay.  I’ve known him since we were both teenagers, and I know it hasn't always been a smooth road for him.  He said, his first sexual experience was with a girl, but eventually he knew he was gay.  H has been more quiet and less socially outgoing than the rest of us, I think, he feels like he is really different (since he does not fit the dominant hegemonic masculinity which promotes heterosexuality).  Homosexuality is a subordinate masculinity and is not always shown in a positive light in our state.  However, H got older, hit the road, grew confident, got some tattoos, and has no qualms about who or what he is or his masculinity.  He’s a masculine gay guy, which isn’t the normal image of a gay man.  I would posit that the misfit generation that was growing up in the eighties and nineties are kids who are more lenient in their social groups about homosexuals than the earlier generations..

The stereotypes are changing.  Our society, like our children, are growing up, albeit slowly.  Maine may seem on the outside like a christian lily white state, but there are as many facets to local masculinity as there are individuals.  What’s your masculinity?