ON TOXIC MASCULINITY CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS
(WITH APOLOGIES TO THOMAS DE QUINCEY)
How Two Generations of Women Taught Me to Be a Man
“To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?" –Horatius Clocus at the bridge
"Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen." –Martin Luther
I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t happy that I was male. In fact, though I never said anything out loud, I doted on the fact that I was male. Sexual assignment is the first spin of the cosmic roulette-wheel all human beings experience. The ball falls one way or the other either by the choice of God (or by the randomness of evolution, if that’s what you choose to believe).
Whichever or whoever makes the sexual assignment, chemistry influences each of us more than intellect. All the varied human cultures exploit that chemistry to produce a culturally idealized male or female child. Not surprisingly, women are in charge of the first stages of this production.
I was fortunate. The female line that had control of my earliest development were products of pioneer, cowboy, fundamentalist-Baptist culture, which meant that they had a clear idea of the manhood that I was expected to reach.
One day when I was eight years old, I walked across the front room and my mother spoke strongly to me from the couch: “Stop walking like a girl!”
I wanted to know what she meant.
“You swish.”
I didn’t know what that meant either, but I tried to walk like a boy from then on, and she never complained again.
Actually, I didn’t know anything at that time. I didn’t know that I had uncles who were versions of homosexual. I didn’t know what homosexual meant, and only vaguely understood the street definition of “queer.”
The men interjected themselves into my young childhood life when they saw the need. At the age of four, I was taking a bath at my grandparents in Fort Worth. My grandfather came into the bathroom and I complained that the bath water was cold. My grandfather was huge: 6’ 3”, a famous West Texas brawler in his youth (the brawls took place after church and men came from all over Texas to fight my grandfather), a genuine cowboy. At the age of eighteen he had made a series of large cattle drives from Mexico into New Mexico. World War I swept him into the ranks of the infantry (he never left Texas), and afterward he married my grandmother and became a blacksmith. World War II drew him to work in the development department of the Convair plant in Fort Worth producing the B-24 bomber.
He heard my complaint, and glared at me saying: “You ought to be able to take a bath in cold water only.”
I took his comment as a challenge, and practiced until I ran only cold water to fill the bathtub. I called in my grandfather and told him to put his hand in the water so he would know there was no hot water. He checked and grunted and left. Two weeks later he took me to a sawdust-smelling store on the cowboy street in downtown Fort Worth (Cowboy Street, because you could see horses tethered to parking meters on that particular street) and bought me a pair of cowboy boots. I wore those boots (or tried to wear them) until I could no longer stick my foot all the way to the bottom.
I had no sisters or female cousins, so I never had anything to do with females my own age, except the girl in the window (See my essay: The Girl in the Window). The two most important women in my life were my mother and grandmother.
I knew my mother when she was young, and the most beautiful she would be in her life. But I didn’t know that my mother had spent a significant part of her life resenting being female, which might be understood better if you knew that she took after her large masculine father, that she reached her full height of 5’ 8” in the sixth grade, was large-boned, and struggled with her weight. She was also intelligent, thoughtful, and aggressive. The crowning achievement of my mother’s young life was driving the family’s herd of cattle from one tenant farm to another 30 miles away—on horseback—at the age of fourteen. The whole time I knew her I never could imagine her on the back of a horse.
For all her discontent with being female, my mother firmly believed that no boy should ever be placed in a classroom with a girl for the first six grades. She said, “The boy doesn’t stand a chance. Not only is the girl two years ahead in development, but she also tends to favor what is still, and close up.” The male is two years closer to infancy, and lives in a world of distant horizons, which more than anything else he wants to reach. On secondary education my parents had a totally opposite view. I was told at a family conference when college was being discussed by my father: ‘We will help to the best of our ability with any college that accepts you, except for Notre Dame and Texas A&M.” I was given to understand that all-male schools were unnatural.
I considered my mother a deep thinker who kept herself informed in the ‘50s with subscriptions to magazines such as The Reporter, Time, Life, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, as well as The New Republic and The Saturday Review—magazines that made an impression on me. I was ten years old, but I can still remember the Time Magazine cover for the death of Josef Stalin. Jewish intellectuals would have called my mother middlebrow. But she came from the mesquite laden areas of West Texas, and I think she did pretty well for herself.
My grandmother—who had married a giant—was 5’ 2”, wiry and strong. She had attended Mary-Hardin Baylor College in Belton, Texas, 1912-1914, and had taught school in Sherwood, Texas, until she married. She also was a truly spiritual woman—whose faith was firmly rooted in extensive Bible knowledge and understanding.
I have seen a picture from her college yearbook when she had striking beauty, but by the time I met her in 1946 she was 52 years old, and the sun and wind and minimal use of make-up had weathered her looks to resemble the Indian head on the buffalo nickel. Li’l Abner was a popular Sunday comic strip of the time, and I couldn’t help identifying my grandmother with Mammy Yokum, minus the pipe and outlandish clothes.
I was alone with her, playing on the floor in her front room when I was four. She was at the other end of the room sweeping. A poisoned mouse crawled out from under the couch, and I saw a look of death on my grandmother’s face as she approached the mouse, broom in one hand, dust pan in the other. Whack! The mouse was in the dustpan on its way to the kitchen garbage.
The next year, same place, same scene, only this time my mother’s two sisters were in the room. A mouse crawled out from under the couch. I was now five years old. The previous year I had been a child. This year I was expected to be a man. So help me, the three women stood on chairs and held their skirts as they directed me to take care of the mouse.
My first great deed as a Toxic Male was Jack slays the mouse, but I was onto them, the phonies, and meditated in my immature mind on the slippery character of women—no matter how much I loved them, or how much good I received from them.
My grandmother was born in 1894, and named “Queenie.” I had to live much of my life before I realized that she was essentially a 19th century woman, and true to her namesake Queen Victoria—don’t ask me why respect for England’s queen had penetrated to the outback of West Texas in Irion County.
I often stayed in the kitchen with her at night when she did the family ironing using old fashioned flat irons that she heated on the kitchen stove. She would tell me tales from family and Texas history while she bounced a heavy flat iron off clothing from the day’s laundry. From her I heard about the Alamo, and the loss of all its Texas defenders. Then she told me with flashing eyes and the familiar look of death on her face of the Goliad campaign soon after the Alamo where more than 400 Texans had agreed to surrender terms to a surrounding Mexican army on March 20, 1836, and had then been shot by order of Santa Ana on March 27.
This is how the wrongs done to one generation are transmitted down the generations—in this case 112 years after the event—to be nurtured in the breast of the latest born. It worked with me. When I talk to a Mexican, Goliad lurks in the edges of my mind reminding me that we might have unresolved issues. That could be described as Toxic Masculinity, or one of its many fatal effects.
Grandmother also told me stories from family history. She told me about her father-in-law’s adventurous life in West Texas after the Civil War—how he had been a pony express rider as a 17-year-old Civil War veteran.
The Comanches were the greatest horse breeders and horsemen of all the Western Indian tribes, and most often their intrusions upon the Texas settlers were to steal cattle, but primarily to steal horses. And my grandfather owned and rode what the Comanches rightly thought a magnificent horse on his pony express route.
Comanches ambushed him three time in attempts to steal the horse. He outran them three times. Now death was equally possible for both sides of those horse races. The Comanches were certainly armed and my great-grandfather carried his Civil War sawed-off double-barrel ten-gauge shotgun on those runs (I saw it standing against the wall behind the ranch house kitchen door in 1951).
Here’s what women both envy and don’t understand:
Though the Comanches didn’t get either the horse or my grandfather’s scalp—both sides remembered those horse races as the kind of experiences that made life worth living.
In 1867 my great-grandfather went on the first cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail (as pictured in the John Wayne movie Red River released in 1948—which my grandfather watched the movie to check its accuracy. He said there was one flaw—on the real cattle drive the Indians were allowed to take some beef away from the herd).
After that my great-grandfather settled down to ranching and fathering eleven children.
You could say he lived a full life while displaying Toxic Masculinity in every year of it.
In the summers of 1948 and 1949, I spent some time with my grandmother and grandfather alone. My raising in these intervals was strictly West Texas from the turn of the century. This meant that I had considerable freedom to roam. I thumbed through books, most of them generously supplied with engravings, but there was no television. On Sundays we walked two blocks down Morningside Drive to Evans Avenue near the Morningside Elementary School and took the bus to the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, so I knew the bus route to downtown.
Moderns will tell you that there never was a better day in the past, never a golden age or any fantasy like that. More liberal rot. All you have to do is track the activities of children in the 19th century and early 20th. For instance, during New York City heat waves in that era troops of young boys would spend the night in Central Park.
I well understand our modern fears. In this century I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in Saugus, California. I wouldn’t let my grandchildren play in the front yard unsupervised. What was safe in New York City’s Central Park in 1890 or 1920, was now considered unsafe (by me) in a middle-class Saugus neighborhood in 2010. I knew the creeps didn’t just cruise the main streets, but the neighborhood streets, too—you are welcome to identify creeps any way you please.
But 1948 was spiritually much closer to the turn of the previous century than it was to the soon to come modern world. Of course, the adults taught me to never take candy from a stranger, but that was as far as that discussion ever went. Creeps were not mentioned.
On a boring morning in the high summer of 1948, I asked my grandmother if I could take a bus downtown. She said, yes, and gave me two nickels—enough to board a bus twice.
All the expectations of such an event should stagger the modern mind.
1. I was expected to know what I was doing, for openers. I couldn’t read, but I knew enough of letters to recognize the Evans Avenue bus.
2. I was expected to know how to act. If a modern movie were to be made picturing my adventure, the directors would play me running screaming down the street to catch the bus and constantly approaching strangers downtown to tell me what was in that window, or where was the court house—or any idiotic action that might remind them of their own children. Not so—I was quiet; I spoke to no one. I studied my surroundings. The only way I called attention to myself was by drinking from the fountains reserved for the Africans—but I had been raised in a family that considered Jim Crow customs and laws an abomination (and in one of the great ironies of life I have lived long enough to watch the Democrats trying to slip segregation back into the culture—the universities being the worst offenders).
3. I was expected to be generally safe from harm under the eye of the town’s adults. The director would have to play me both fearful and incompetent. What was there to be afraid of? At least every third adult male my father’s age was a veteran of World War II, and they had been so pumped full of Toxic Masculinity that they imagined themselves the protectors of the weak and the helpless. And incompetent? My grandmother didn’t raise no incompetent children.
We moved to Gary, Indiana, in 1952 and lived in a poor neighborhood of small postwar homes—utility porch, kitchen, front room, three bedrooms, and a bath—the same box that I guess was built more than ten million times across the nation. The back door was sprung and wouldn’t always lock; the wiring was suspect and we blew fuses all the time; and there was something wrong with the septic tank. Otherwise, the yards were three or four times the size of normal urban yards, and the subdivision had been built in an oak wood with most of the trees still standing. There was no wealth in the neighborhood, but all were sustained by the steel mills.
It was night time. I was in my underwear (the theme carried on into Vietnam—Every time the VC or NVA unit hit us, I was in my underwear), father was out at an orchestra rehearsal, and my mother—a grade school teacher for 36 years—told me she had been asked to visit a neighbor down the way and across the street. I begged her not to leave. She told me to go to bed, and she wouldn’t be gone that long. She left.
I heard a noise on the back porch. The back door had a problem. It would shut but often would not lock.
One of the problems faced by untaught children is that they freeze and stay in bed, but Scotch women and children in the highlands were taught to flee with the cattle and hide until the local danger was past. West Texas children were trained to scatter like quail to pre-arranged hidey holes if the Comanches showed themselves.
I left my bed and crept to the kitchen, crouching down on the floor where I could see the back door in the utility room. Somebody was on the back porch, and the door wasn’t locked. Now my grandmother at eight years old could have crouched beside me, but being from an earlier era, I am sure she would have clutched a knife.
I leapt up, flung the backdoor open and slammed it shut (which was the way the door could be made to lock). There were three young men on the porch, but the door was now locked. When my mother returned, I told her what had happened and she reacted, but I couldn’t judge how much. Decades later, she told me it was practically the worst night of her life.
My mother in the second half of her life told me that the greatest thing God ever did for her was to make her satisfied with being a woman. I would say for a good many personal reasons that she was a wonderful woman.
By the time I reached young manhood, the women in my family had done their job. I had all the foundation, and structure of a completed Toxic Male. All the men of the family had left to do was fill me with teaching and experience. When I was a teenager I would come home from fights—mostly undetectable. One night I came home looking like a walking train wreck. My mother’s sister looked straight at me, laughed, and said: “What does the other guy look like?” No hysterical women in that family at all.
I thank these women for their good work in preparing me to be a man, and I have tried to live up to their high standards of love, leadership, courage, care for the helpless, and competence in the real world.
Famous statements by Toxic Males:
Abraham Lincoln: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Gen. U. S. Grant: "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Theodore Roosevelt: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
Malcolm X: "Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down."
G. K. Chesterton: "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
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NOTE:
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This Substack is edited by Titus Gee