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There are three tiny words that echo through the hearts and minds of
little boys, long before they ever take a step down the path to becoming
a man. They’re just three tiny words, but they pack such persuasive,
pervasive power that their message resonates in every corner of society,
leaving no man, woman or child undamaged.
Domestic violence, suicide, alienation, isolation, depression, rage,
drug and alcohol abuse, relationship breakdowns and terrible loneliness
all flow directly from the deeply damaging ideal expressed in these three
tiny words: be a man.
Don’t show weakness. Don’t express any emotion—apart from
anger. Don’t cry. Don’t be soft. Don’t be empathetic. Don’t be a pussy.
Don’t be gay. Don’t be ‘feminine’. Don’t ask for help. Dominate every
interaction. Be a firefighter, a pilot, a sportsman, a leader of industry,
a boss, a stoic provider.
This, apparently, is what it means to ‘be a man’.
It starts before we are at school, before we join football teams, before
we encounter the whispered wisdom of our brothers and cousins,
teachers, coaches and bosses, before we see older guys proudly ‘being
men’. Long before that, we have already come to understand what we
must do.
It starts the moment we make eye contact with our parents. Study
after study shows that when the sex of a baby is hidden from an adult,
they’ll project their own gender bias and treat the little ‘boys’ differ-
ently from the little ‘girls’. The ‘boys’ are perceived as angrier or more
distressed by adults who didn’t know they were girls. The ‘girls’ were
believed to be happier and more socially engaged.
One study showed that mothers could pick the steepness of a slope
their baby boys could successfully crawl down, to one degree. But
mothers of baby girls got it wrong by nine degrees. He can get down
there, but she can’t—yet, of course, there’s no difference in the motor
skills of eleven-month-old boys and girls.
Little boys are held less often, and soothed for shorter periods of
time if they’re upset. They are offered less help with finishing a task or
a puzzle.
There’s a pivotal moment in a little boy’s life. Every time he’s fallen
over and scraped a knee up until now, he’s been held, kissed and soothed
until the drama is over. Now, with a bleeding knee again, he wails to a
parent. But this time it’s different. No hugs, no kisses. Just a firm hand
on each shoulder, a look in the eye.
‘You’re okay. Nothing’s broken. Be a big brave boy—big boys
don’t cry.’
If he manages to stifle the tears and snot, and get over the surprise
betrayal from the person, who, until this point, had always held him
until the pain and tears went away, he gets a reward: praise.
‘There’s my big strong boy! No more tears. Now, go and play with
this truck . . .’
What a powerful affirmation from one of the most influential
people in his life, a parent, of how a baby man is supposed to act.
‘You’re six—enough with the sobbing, buddy.’
Apparently, this stuff is Psychology 101. My daughter, who is cur-
rently deep into a psych degree, rolled her eyes when I asked her what
she thought about how parents socialise children.
‘We studied that last year,’ she said. ‘Duh, everyone knows that.’
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a swimsuit model who looks like she’s just had sex, or is just about to.
We need expensive luggage, suits and haircuts; if you don’t have a lush,
groomed beard right now, you’re barely a man at all.
The notion of being a man has played out powerfully in my own life.
I grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand, where there was so much
manliness around the place that we had to wear special boots to stomp
through it.
I remember a time when I was about nine years old; my younger
brother, Andrew, was coming up to five. We were playing in the woolshed
as the highly exciting annual shearing of our flock took place. I’d watch
in awe as the ‘gun’ shearers, stinking of beer from the night before and
with sweat pouring down their bodies, bent double and ripped their
way through almost 300 animals in an eight-hour shift. Drinking until
you threw up, driving a V8 and banging as many chicks as possible
had to be on the list of stuff you should do to be a man, according to
the shearers. And be tough. So very tough. Pain and whining was for
pansies. It was 1974. I had no idea what banging was, or what a pansy
was, but I knew for sure that one was good and one was bad.
My brother was in the habit of carrying ‘Sucky’ everywhere, a scrap
of fabric that had once been a blanket. He’d comfort himself by sucking
his thumb through it. When our mother gently removed it from his
little fingers for a quick wash, his tears of grief and pain wouldn’t stop
until Sucky was out of the dryer.
I knew he’d be starting at my school soon. As far as I was concerned,
there was absolutely no way he was going to turn up with Sucky.
I clearly remember panicking that he’d somehow reduce my manliness
by association. Real men, I knew, didn’t suck a Sucky.
In the woolshed, the wool is made into bales by ‘roustabouts’.
A hydraulic ram packs the whole thing down tightly, while the roust-
abouts quickly hand-sew a top panel onto the bouncy new bale.
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In a planned move, just as the last fleece went into a bale, but
before the ram came down, I grabbed Sucky and threw it in the wool.
Andrew’s howls couldn’t be heard over the noise of the dogs, sheep,
yelling and shearing machines; I think I even held him down so he
couldn’t run around hysterically. The roustabout sewed the cap on the
bale, the ram was released and the bale was marked to be shipped who
knows where?
Eventually, Andrew’s screaming got my father’s attention, when we
stopped for smoko. I proudly and happily confessed my sin because
I had decided he was too old for Sucky. I knew I was right. Tough
love—it was time for my brother to toughen up. No one was about to
pull a finished wool bale to bits to get Sucky out, so that was that. And
everyone—apart from Andrew—agreed. It may have been a bit trau-
matic for him, but it was a good thing in the end.
This little incident from so many years ago isn’t that big a deal. Yet I
remember every moment of that day, and so does my brother. Emotion
creates memory.
Of course, my brother survived the ordeal and went on to become
a creative leading educator and a beautiful, open, loving father and
husband. The ‘Saga of Sucky’ has become part of family legend. But
behind it is a neat illustration of how the requirement to start acting
like a man is policed at every moment by everyone around you. Every
day of his life, a young man learns a little more about being a man: what
behaviour is appropriate, and what is not.
A few years later, my unformed manhood was being forged in
perhaps the ultimate crucible of masculinity, the sporting field. In my
case it was New Zealand rugby union.
A key element in being a man is to be physically dominant over
others. The tougher, bigger, more muscular you are, the more ability
you have to impose your will, physically, over another human being,
and the more of a man you are seen to be.
By sixteen, I had the delicious self-satisfaction of being a young guy
in a senior team. I was a boy playing against men in the most manly of
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sports. So powerful was the validation I felt that I let it define me for
the next few years. I had fought to prove I was a man, and I was never
going to give that up.
One weekday evening, as the weak winter sun gave up the fight
against a bitter wind and savage little blasts of freezing rain, I sat on a
bench after footy practice with Don, who played in my team. Don was
tall, strong, athletic and aggressive. As our bodies steamed and cooled,
we chatted about the session. Don didn’t seem happy. He stopped
talking, looked away for an age, and when he turned back I saw tears
streaming down his face.
‘I hate rugby,’ he said. ‘It hurts. It’s always freezing. I really don’t
like hurting other people. It’s just shit. I don’t want to do it anymore.’
I was horrified. How on earth could someone with their hands on
the holy grail of manliness—sporting prowess—possibly want to fling
it away?
And the crying? As well as admitting to the blasphemy of weakness,
Don was also guilty of unmanliness. I remember panicking, looking
around to see if anyone else was witnessing this humiliating display.
He was my friend, a nice guy, smart and sensitive, but I couldn’t get
away fast enough. I suppose I was afraid some of the ‘pussy’ might
end up sticking to me—or, worse, that there might be some suggestion
of gayness.
Don’s father, Norman, was a well-known, pugilistic local politician,
best remembered for his hysterical opposition to New Zealand’s 1986
Homosexual Law Reform Act, which legalised consensual sex between
men over the age of sixteen. ‘Turn around and look at them, gaze upon
them, you’re looking into Hades. Don’t look too long—you might
catch AIDS,’ said the man nicknamed ‘the Mouth from the South’.
It’s likely, then, that Don didn’t come from an environment where
an open, compassionate, loving chat about his sporting future would
result in him being able to make a graceful decision to hang up the
boots. No, Don’s path to manly glory lay open before him—and there
was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
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What is clear to me now is the depth of pain Don must have been
in to open up the way he did. What is also clear is what I should have
done, but didn’t.
I should have put an arm around his shoulder, listened, showed
empathy, told him I understood. Maybe I should have confessed that I,
too, felt the same. The cold, the exhaustion, the physical pain, the
injuries, the sheer brutality of the physical contest you had to win at all
costs . . . it was actually awful.
It wasn’t that I acknowledged this truth in the back of my head
but couldn’t admit it. The idea of not loving sport and all it rep
resented was simply alien to me at the time. It was a concept I didn’t
understand.
Don grimly endured the rest of the season in his own private hell.
We lost contact as university and the next exciting stages of manhood
beckoned us, but that raw moment of emotional honesty has stayed with
me since. It was the first glimpse I had of the truth that men are vulner-
able and emotional, and often suffer in a silence of their own making.
In a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald headlined ‘Isolation from
Platonic Touch Is a Tragedy of Modern Manhood’, feminist writer
Clementine Ford, mother of a young son, argues that nothing much
has changed. ‘I’ve become interested in looking at how men police each
other’s expression of masculinity. It seems especially sad to me that
men—and young men in particular—are conditioned against embracing
the pleasures of a physically expressed platonic love with each other
from fear that the authenticity of their manhood may be challenged.’
It’s the old ‘don’t be gay’ rule. Don’t touch your mate, no matter
how much you love him, because men must maintain their reputations
of strict heterosexuality.
The American writer Mark Greene, a regular commentator on men’s
issues, particularly on the website The Good Men Project, argues that the
depth of our desire to act like men leads to physical and emotional
isolation. In an essay titled ‘How a Lack of Touch Is Destroying Men’,
he writes:
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The inability to comfortably connect, Greene argues, has left men vul-
nerable to depression, alcoholism and suicide, and prone to becoming
frustrated, angry, impotent domestic abusers.
It’s not just about physical touch, in fact, but about successful communi
cation on all levels. Because of the tightly policed imperative that we
must remain stoic and self-reliant, our emotional landscapes aren’t experi
enced by anyone but ourselves. It’s like we’re living life trapped inside
a box, its impenetrable walls built by the pretend dance of manhood,
policed by other men, women, our parents, our friends, our partners
and, ultimately, ourselves.
The idea of the ‘Man Box’ isn’t new. It has been used in group work
with boys and men all around the world to show what a powerful force
masculinity is in our lives. Here, White Ribbon Australia uses the Man
Box tool in group exercises that aim to ‘redefine masculinity’. The
concept has its genesis, as far as I can tell, in a 1998 book by Paul Kivel,
Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence that Tears Our Lives Apart.
Kivel has also been driving the ‘Oakland Men’s Project’ a group in
California dedicated to preventing men’s violence against women for
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more than thirty years. It was in this work he and his colleagues devel-
oped and refined the idea of the Man Box.
American sexuality educator, workshop teacher and writer Charlie
Glickman has been using the Man Box in his work with men for the
past fifteen years. He prefers to call it the ‘Act Like a Man’ box, because
pretending to be a man all the time is a continuous, lifelong perfor-
mance. Glickman argues that if men are born in a Western country,
their responses are remarkably consistent, regardless of age, gender mix,
sexual orientation and racial makeup.
Here’s a typical Man Box, completed by one of Glickman’s groups.
It doesn’t matter where they are or who they are, the things young men
chose to put in the Man Box are remarkably consistent.
A real man is ‘tall, strong, muscular, 25–45’ (meaning I’m
apparently too old now to be a real man!), ‘able-bodied, hetero
sexual, competitive and dominant’. He is a ‘cop, firefighter, mechanic,
lawyer, businessman or CEO’. He is a ‘caretaker, competent, a leader’.
He ‘drinks, watches and plays sport, and hangs out with his mates’.
As usual, he shows no emotion apart from ‘anger and excitement’. He
is ‘stoic and violent’. Our hero ‘always wants sex, has lots of sexual
partners, and knows sex is about scoring’. He ‘has a big penis, gets
hard when he wants and stays hard’. He is also ‘always able to give
his partner an orgasm’ (or multiple orgasms) and ‘ejaculates when he
wants to’. His sex life is focused on ‘intercourse, receiving blowjobs
and possibly anal sex (giving)’.
Note the brackets the group popped around the word ‘giving’, just
to emphasise the point. You can imagine the moment in the room.
Real men can give, but they most definitely cannot receive. To enthusi
astically receive anal sex is gay, and that’s somewhere in a fragrant
meadow a very long way from the Man Box.
After they’ve completed their list of ‘real man’ qualities, groups are
asked to come up with words used to describe men who are not all of
the things in the Man Box. If you’re on the outside, this is what you are:
‘gay, faggot, girl, weak, sissy, pussy, wimp, bitch, loser’.
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The nature of the Man Box is that you’re either in or out. You can’t
have a foot in the door. The Man Box requires a complete performance
of masculinity—and constant vigilance, lest someone be able to point
the finger at you and call you a pussy.
It gets worse. There’s not enough room for everyone in the box.
There’s a hierarchy. If you’re at the bottom, you’ll also get chucked out.
Men must compete with each other in acts of manliness. As each man
performs in more and more manly ways, the men around him must
also become more strident in their displays to keep up.
The fight to stay in the Man Box is deeply damaging to those who
have successfully stormed the walls. Communication, empathy, friend-
ship, openness, and the ability to love and be loved are all left outside.
All we’re allowed to express inside the Man Box is anger, and maybe a
little bit of sexual aggression.
Outside are those men who can’t possibly live up to the ideals of big,
strong, cool, good-looking, smart, rich, sexy, well-hung, charismatic,
‘real’ men.
The Man Box is a brilliant exercise to show men a clear and con-
sistent list of behaviours and characteristics that currently define
‘manhood’ around the world.
I’ve also used it as a wonderfully simple way to describe the eternal,
impossible, performance of manhood, and how it locks us up in a
prison of our own making.
The strange thing about the Man Box is we’re all either desperate
to get into it or struggling to stay in it, despite the pain, loneliness and
despair inside. The simple reason is because if you’re not putting on a
great performance of manhood, you’re outside the Man Box because
you’re not a manly man, and that’s a much worse place to be.
We’ll look into its sad black centre again and again in these
pages.
And when you start looking, there’re Man Boxes everywhere.
In 2018 the influential, highly editorial-driven New York–based
website The Cut—for women with stylish minds—ran a series called
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guy you want to prove yourself, not get help.’ Now he wants young
men to know that it’s brave to reach out and say you’re not coping. No
one will judge you. He tells those he works with how to spot the signs
of mental illness in themselves and others, and talks coping strategies.
Writer and musician Brandon Jack—formerly a player for the
Sydney Swans AFL club, and also the son of rugby league legend
Garry Jack, for we older fans—penned a powerful piece for the Sydney
Morning Herald in 2018.
Every day I hear comments from young men and boys about women.
They vary from things as seemingly harmless as ‘she’s a five out of 10’
to more explicitly outrageous statements of ‘She’s not hot enough to
be raped, who’s she kidding’.
There’s a sense of entitlement in groups of young men when it
comes to how women can be talked about that we should no longer
accept.
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Men who want to make a change can help by joining these conver
sations when we can, and by providing examples of how men should act
to the younger men around us. Shut down your sexist mates. Respect
the fact that women have as much right to live, unmolested, on this
planet as you do.
The Man Box is brittle. If we chip away at it, it’ll come tumbling
down. It’s a truth that all men, if they are honest with themselves, have
at least once in their lives treated another in a way they knew to be
hurtful, abusive or worse, simply because they were trying to ‘act like a
man’. For most of us, it’s been more than once.
How powerful is the word ‘act’ in that nasty little phrase? Because
trying to follow all the rules of manhood is most surely a performance.
Acting isn’t real. And we can never get it right. There’ll always be
someone telling us we need to man up. There’ll always be men who are
more manly than us, and men who wished they were as manly as us. So,
deep down, none of us is happy.
That’s a dangerous thing. It makes us angry. Too angry. Someone’s
going to get hurt.
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