Male Communication

I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a thread about male-female com­mu­ni­ca­tion at one of the com­mu­ni­ty sites I fre­quent, and have con­tin­ued think­ing about it offline. It kind of bleeds into my ever-evolv­ing thoughts on mas­culin­i­ty, and since I haven’t done much thought­crime late­ly, I fig­ured I’d flesh it out a bit here. One of the com­menters is some­thing of an anthro­pol­o­gist, so her thoughts usu­al­ly get me think­ing in that mode. Much of what was said had a Men are from Mars tone to it, but the point was made that this par­a­digm is facile and in real­i­ty we’re all indi­vid­u­als [except that guy] and our com­mu­ni­ca­to­ry ambi­gu­i­ties are unique as well.

I think this is a use­ful and true state­ment in an objec­tive sense, but does­n’t do much in actu­al appli­ca­tion. That’s where the Men are from Mars par­a­digm rules. I tried to flesh out my thoughts, quot­ing myself:

What I’ve noticed … through the asso­ci­a­tions I’ve had with girl­friends and girl friends is that women have a cer­tain way of talk­ing about their feel­ings that men don’t have. I’ve seen sev­er­al instances in this thread of peo­ple say­ing men don’t have feel­ings, which is wrong. For me, I don’t talk about my feel­ings unless some­one asks. I don’t inter­pret lack of ask­ing as non-inter­est in my feel­ings; I think that women are used to talk­ing about such things with­out the need to be asked. What I’m get­ting at is that there might be an expec­ta­tion on each of your parts that the oth­er will behave in the way that they’re used to.

I agree with [the idea that each com­mu­ni­ca­to­ry act is unique] in con­cept, but I don’t think it is actu­al­ized very often, because emo­tions nec­es­sar­i­ly pre­vent an objec­tive exam­i­na­tion of the mech­a­nism in which they are com­mu­ni­cat­ed. They aren’t rea­son­able.

Of course, this is how I deal with my emo­tions, for the most part. I don’t com­mu­ni­cate them [unless asked] but objec­ti­fy them and deal with them ratio­nal­ly. So, when some­one does ask about them, I sense incip­i­ent bore­dom right off the bat because I’ve got them con­trolled and ana­lyzed to such a point that I don’t talk about them in a way that has been inter­est­ing to the female friends I’ve had.

Com­mu­ni­cat­ing emo­tions with my male friends is much dif­fer­ent. No one asks, because most of the time there is no need to. The cor­rect type of space is auto­mat­i­cal­ly defined and giv­en. The male emo­tion­al empa­thy is so strong. The most out­reach I ever give or have been giv­en usu­al­ly con­sist of “Are you alright, man?” “Okay, if you need to talk, I’m around.” This is kind of sad to me since the def­i­n­i­tion of “Amer­i­can Male” is so simul­ta­ne­ous­ly rigid and neb­u­lous; emo­tion­al­ly dan­ger­ous, that any waver­ing from the macho brava­do is “gay.”

That is all prob­a­bly over-sim­pli­fied, Men are from Mars crap, but like I said before, so many peo­ple buy into that par­a­digm that it has some util­i­ty.

So what inter­ests me here is my rather quick state­ment about the rigid­i­ty and neb­u­lous­ness of “Amer­i­can Male”, some­thing that has been sim­mer­ing on a back-burn­er since the dis­ap­point­ment that was US Guys. Basi­cal­ly, what I meant by that state­ment is that, men have a def­i­nite list of attrib­ut­es which are giv­en to us through cul­tur­al incul­ca­tion and expec­ta­tion to fol­low. Such as not being emo­tion­al in a cer­tain way. The neb­u­lous­ness rolls in two sep­a­rate ways. The fact that the list of Amer­i­can Male attrib­ut­es is so long that it might as well be infi­nite, and the fact that there are no assem­bly instruc­tions. It is like hav­ing all the ingre­di­ents for an apple pie, and a pic­ture of an apple pie, and being told to make one. That, I think is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with being male. The entire con­struct is arranged in such a way that there is lit­tle to no sup­port net­work, each must fig­ure it out for them­selves. They sys­tem is so arranged that attempts to cre­ate a deep­er, more mean­ing­ful sup­port net­work [from a fem­i­nine stand­point] are imme­di­ate­ly and extreme­ly awk­ward for all male par­ties involved.

That’s where we end up with throw­away com­ments like “that’s gay”. Any male behav­ior that devi­ates from the norm in such a way as to chal­lenge it is “gay”. So, at least for my gen­er­a­tion, there is no room for homo­sex­u­als in the soci­etal con­struc­tion called Amer­i­can Male. I’m sure this will change, and I hope that as it does, the rigid­i­ty and neb­u­lous­ness will reduce to some­thing at once a bit more cod­i­fied and broad-mind­ed than the yee­haw toe-the-line emo­tion­al trea­sure hunt that men have been rough-paint­ed as.

There might be some­thing sim­i­lar for women, but I’m not qual­i­fied to speak on that sub­ject.