01 Aug 2008
Being a Real Man
I was on RTE Radio 1’s Tubirdy Today show (with Dave Fanning) this morning talking about what men want, and how we view masculinity in modern ireland.
Of course I made some incredibly pertinent
points, peppered with amusing tid-bits in a super-sexy radio-friendly voice, but as with all these experiences I left the studio feeling there was so much more I
could have said.
A panel of five of us were talking about
how men construct their own masculinity, or their sense of themselves as men,
and it occurred to me that gay men actually have to deconstruct and then
reconstruct their masculinity. I didn't get time to talk about it on air, so I'm going to blather here (you'll just have to imagine the super-sexy radio-friendly voice).
In the boy’s school playground the ultimate
insult is “you’re gay”. This means you’re a sissy, that you’re feminised, that
your passive and that you’re not as good as a 'real boy'. If you actually happen to be gay it means you have to come to terms with that fallacy as you grow into your own identity. You have to work through negative messages equating homosexuality with emasculation
that you’ve been given throughout your life.
For me, as a teenager, it meant trying to
walk in a certain way, trying to make my voice deeper and outward things like
that. But as I grew older it meant accepting the camp part of myself and learning,
with a few years of therapy, to love it. It's still a job of work though. If someone refers to me as 'camp', I'm often still insulted and bruised inside.
Whether they are camp or not, lots of gay mean feel emasculated because of the way they experienced the world growing up. Often we deal with this by becoming hyper-masculine in an
outward way. In the ’70s this meant wearing a huge moustache and a checked
shirt, like the Marlboro man. In more modern times it has meant working your
ass off at a gym to achieve an idealised version of the masculine body. But for all the iron-pumping, underneath their pecs and six-packs, lots of gay men still feel emasculated.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this,
except to say that I suppose the reconstruction of our gay masculinity, after
society has forced us to psychologically deconstruct it, is important on a deeper level. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable, or accepting yourself for exactly
who you are is just as important to masculinity, in fact more important, than
just looking the part.
It’s something we hardly ever talk about, because we’re
defensive about being ‘real men’, having been told that we're not. To be a ‘real man’ on a deep level, you have
to feel like a real man. A well-used gym membership may be a start on that road
for many of us, but it’s only a baby step.