Restoring Testosterone
Thursday, 18 April 2002, 9:50 am
Column: Barbara Sumner Burstyn
Restoring Testosterone: Point Of View - with Barbara
Sumner Burstyn
Point
of View with Barbara Sumner Burstyn was first published on
Spectator.co.nz…
What’s it like to be a man? No
really, what is it like? Short of putting one into therapy
for 10 years and extracting marrow from bone we may never
know. Not because we don’t want to or because men are
aliens but because men don’t seem to know themselves.
You see it’s a woman’s world.
I know we
still get told that it’s not, that men have all the power,
and clearly in big city corporations they still do. But
down here in the heart of middle class urbania, in the 30
something female corporate zones, in the cafes and boutiques
of the leisure classes’ men seem to have lost their voice.
And I’ve come to realize that we’ve made them mute. Us.
The downtown latte women. Of course I personally didn’t
mean to, but if I look back now I can see it clearly.
In my first marriage, over 20 years ago, I berated my
partner into a version of myself. All the books told me too
and showed how and why. And I bought it. The whole lot. I
took Simone de Beauvoir’s dying words, that, ‘men were still
today as they have always been; the oppressors’, as my
gospel. And like a faith I found the facts and figures to
shore it up. By the time I left the marriage I’d turned my
man into something else. Something less, almost a new
gender group.
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Of course it didn’t stop there. Once
you’re inside a belief system you have to keep feeding it.
And that was easy. My lovers strung out, flapping like
nappies on a line and they were always wrong.
A while
ago a girlfriends husband left. We (the woman’s collective
we) were relieved. He was too much of a bloke anyway, a
typical male. He filled their home with noise – music,
rugby, arguing, politics and his too muchness.
Somehow he’d survived the feminist onslaught; the
sensitivity retraining, the language revisions, the call to
take up domestic arms. He was like the last stray eyebrow
hair that just has to go. We were all set for years of
feeding off him, turning him into a caricature of the man he
was, when she, our friend, refused to talk about him. This
was not the solidarity we had built our world on. Then she
took a younger lover and refused to talk about him as well.
We were scandalized. It was as if her world suddenly got
real. And very quiet. When her husband came home a few
weeks later we stopped visiting. Traitor. She who so
openly wanted him that she played by the rules of a game we
had forgotten even existed. I secretly found her admirable.
Of course we discussed it endlessly and in the
process I came to realize we’ve been in a covert war with
men - so secret we often don’t even recognize it ourselves -
for at least the last 25 years. We don’t like men. And
they know it.
We don’t like them for being men. And
we like them even less for becoming what we insisted they
became. It seems men have traded their masculinity or at
least a big portion of it in return for what? Woman’s
approval. You’d think we would be grateful for this but
we’re not. Now we just disrespect them for not being real
men.
Obviously there was excess’s in male culture
that was in need of trimming. And it’s not that I don’t
understand the freedoms, flexibility and options I enjoy
have been handed down by the pioneer feminists of the
previous generation. But like over-indulgent welfare systems
that have become the problem they set up to solve, in the
struggle for independence we have made men our enemy. It’s
as if we’ve lost some essential insight in what it means to
be a man or how to be women in light of maleness and instead
replaced it by a set of precepts, a manifesto and a
movement. And in doing so we have robbed ourselves of real
men. So I’ve decided to call a truce and get over it. I’m
learning the rules of cricket and rugby (well maybe not
rugby); I’ve stopped thinking that men who cut themselves
shaving have menstrual envy (ME). I’ve decided men are not
the winners – therefore making us the losers. I’ve decided
that most of them are not walking sex agendas, or
oppressors, and a good lot of them temper their rampant
pragmatism with dollops of emotion.
And I’m not alone
in this new spirit of pro-male positivity, even day-time
soap operas have recognized they have a problem with their
male characters. Hogan Sheffer, the head writer for the
planets’ longest running soap (it began in 1956) ‘As the
World Turns’ speaking in a recent New Yorker article* said
that when he first started on the show (2000) the men were
turned into whining idiots while their women ran amok. “I
used to point to the list of male characters and say ‘no
dick, no dick, no dick.” He goes on to say that you can no
longer write scenes where the men say ‘Why don’t you love
me? and ‘What can I do to help you?’
So in support of
the restoration of testosterone I’ve compiled a random list
of everyday things that are great about men:
Men almost
always carry a clean hanky and they’re good at lifting heavy
objects.
They still look good when they lose their
hair and even if they’re scared of spiders they’ll pretend
they’re not and dispose of them. Men are great at answering
music minutiae questions and they always have spare razors.
As we’re often cold, they keep us warm at night. Men always
notice lipstick on teeth – and are quick to tell us so we
don’t embarrass ourselves in public. They accept the low
jobs like putting out the garbage as part being a man,
they’re always keen for sex and they look great in polo-neck
sweaters. Men don’t cry as much at weddings (and they
always have a clean hanky) and they always think they can
fix things (even when they can’t). You can flip through a
magazine with a man and say ‘she’s got good breasts’ and the
man will always agree. Some men accept illness in others
more readily than women do and they appreciate it when we’ve
made an effort to look good. In fact men are the reason we
make the effort. They know about obscure things like
‘clipping’ in sound and how they make Rosé and they invented
things like the steam engine and the ironing board. Men are
really easy to catch out when they lie and they’re great at
telling you to ‘relax’ when you get paranoid about germs.
Men are good at opening wine bottles and the best ones don’t
get sarcastic when we get drunk and make fools of ourselves.
Men are as afraid of lesbians as we are and mostly they
understand that sexy underwear is just for special
occasions, while the finest of the breed are rediscovering
that manners; simple things like opening doors for women,
really do maketh the man. And best of all men make great
fathers.
So all you men who went into shock in the
70’s and early 80’s and stayed there, good news, the wars
almost over, you can come on out now. We’re gonna be nice
to you!
ENDS
*The New Yorker (April 15) Oakdale Days by
Larissa MacFarquhar
©
Copyright, April 2002
Email Barbara Sumner
Burstyn
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