The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 2 of 8
Respectable maturity or you're gay: it is hard to see whom the equation hurt more - the actual homosexual or the “failed” heterosexual
All previous cultures contained a large element of misogyny. The Bible contains thousands of stories most of which seem to have implications that are harmful to women, and the relative lack of women in the Bible suggests that God didn't care much about them. Miriam seems like a live wire -- she leads the women in dance after the crossing of the Red Sea. One assumes that over the course of a few thousand years there must have been quite a few Miriam's, but somehow they don't get a mention. Of the 6,000 named individuals in the Bible, only 200 are women.
Because we have ancient texts that articulate misogyny we tend to think that the misogyny in our modern world is something inherited from long lost worlds. No doubt some of that is true, but it's also misleading. We'd be mistaken if we thought the modern era was entirely a story of liberation, relative to some oppressive half-forgotten culture.
Go on Twitter today and you'll easily find people talking about toxic masculinity. Some denounce it:
Most right-wingers love it:
The last part should be a reminder that's it's not just an ancient inheritance. It's something people work to build, every day.
In her book, Barbara Ehrenreich spends a lot of time documenting the tremendous effort that was made to update the concept of masculinity for the modern age, and how limiting and stifling a concept it is. By the mid-20th Century, men had only two choices, they could be mature, or they could be homosexuals. Mature men were able to get high paying salary jobs at big corporations, they could handle the responsibility of being married and raising children, a mature man was someone who knew how to mix a martini, knew exactly how much to tip in all circumstances, had an easy way of handling social situations. Respect, even glamor, adhered to the mature man. All other men were homosexuals.
This might sound exaggerated, but some of the most respected psychologists of the era were making these arguments in complete sincerity:
The Hearts of Men
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Chapter 2
Breadwinners and Losers, Sanctions Against Male Deviance
Page 17-18
It is difficult, in the wake of the sixties’ youth rebellion, to appreciate the weight and authority that once attached to the word “maturity.” Looking back on his first marriage in the 1950s, A. Alvarez wrote in 1981, “I had this terrible lust for premature maturity, this irresponsible desire for responsibility, before I had any idea what maturity involved or had ever tasted the pleasures of youthful irresponsibility.” Maturity was not dull, but “heroic,” a measured acceptance of the limits of one’s private endeavors at a time when action on a broader political scale could only seem foolish - or suspect. Novels like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Marjorie Morningstar endorsed maturity, and the 1950 best seller The Mature Mind held it up as an evolutionary achievement.
...Maturity itself required the predictable, sober ingredients of wisdom, responsibility, empathy, (mature) heterosexuality and “a sense of function,” or, as a sociologist would have put it, acceptance of adult sex roles. Thus, a woman would be immature “if she wants all the advantages of marriage” but resents doing housework, and a man would be less-than-grown-up if he shirked the breadwinner role:
...a man is immature if he regards the support of a family as a kind of trap in which he, an unsuspecting male, has somehow been caught. Again, the person who cannot settle down, who remains a vocational drifter, or the person who wants the prestige of a certain type of work but resents the routines that go with it, are immature in their sense of function.
How did a man attain maturity? In 1953 the psychologist R. J. Havighurst discovered eight “developmental tasks of early adulthood,” the performance of which was a prerequisite for mature adulthood. The list, which was to be repeated in developmental psychology textbooks for nearly three decades, included: (1) selecting a mate, (2) learning to live with a marriage partner, (3) starting a family, (4) rearing children, (5) managing a home, (6) getting started in an occupation, (7) taking on civic responsibilities and (8) finding a congenial social group. In developmental psychology literature of the 1950s, it would not take too much supplementary reading to figure out that tasks 4 and 5 are the special responsibility of the female marriage partner, and that 6 was the special province of the male.
The fact that the developmental tasks “discovered” by psychologists so closely paralleled the expectations one might find in the Reader’s Digest seemed only to enhance their scientific status. One textbook in developmental psychology rassures the student that the tasks about to be listed will be no surprise, since “social expectations for the young adult in our culture are clearly defined and familiar to him even before he reaches legal maturity.” Another introduces the checklist with the irrefutable observation that “maturity is contingent upon the number of adult developmental tasks successfully completed.” Others - and these are texts still widely read by social work students and others in the helping professions - offered more detailed psychological insights into challenges of adult life, such as: “The prompt payment of bills demands a degree of perspective and maturity.”
And on the flip side, every man who failed to live up to the ideal was a homosexual:
Page 25-26
Rather, [such a man] suffered from some “adaptive failure” to meet the standards of masculine conformity, and had begun a subconscious slide toward a homosexual identity:
...any adaptive failure - sexual, social, or vocational - may be perceived as a failure in the masculine role and, which is worse, may be symbolically extended through an equation that is calculated only to intensify the anxiety incident to the failure. This equation is the following: I am a failure = I am castrated = I am not a man = I am a woman = I am a homosexual.
From here it was a short step to becoming an “overt homosexual,” a man battered by so many adaptive failures that he “gives up all pretense of meeting the requirements of the masculine role.”
If pseudohomosexuals could be treated by helping them overcome their adaptive failures, so could the overt homosexuals, since the two types were just at different points on the axis of masculine adaptation. Ovesey cite the case of an “overt” type whole homosexuality was just one part of a larger pattern of social deviance. The physical indications were promising; the patient was “23 years old, over six feet tall, good-looking, and completely masculine in his appearance.” However,
He lived alone and his social existence was a chaotic one, characterized by impulsive midnight swims and hitchhiking. He considered this made him quite unique and he was proud to be known as a bohemian.
Furthermore, he showed no interest in a career, and supported himself as a stock clerk. The treatment (it is not told how he financed it) was both lengthy and stern. “The patient was treated twice a week, at first sitting up for 49 sessions, then on the couch for a total of 268 sessions over a 3 ½-year period...When, early in the therapy, he hopefully suggested that his homosexuality might be inherited and hence not amenable to treatment, he was told in a forthright manner that his was not so.” In Ovesey’s hands, the patient made speedy progress. By the end of the first year he had given up hitchhiking and midnight swims, enrolled in evening college courses and gotten a more acceptable middle-class job. Eventually he married and fathered a son. With the developmental tasks accomplished, the case could be closed, and Ovesey must have been pleased that his equation checked out in reverse: I am not a failure = I am a man = I am heterosexual.
It is hard to see whom the equation hurt more - the actual homosexual or the “failed” heterosexual. In association with “failure,” the homosexual’s sexual practices became admissions of defeat; while in association with homosexual sex, failure was meant to be doubly humiliating. (Adaptive failure, Ovesey believed, led to dreams of anal rape by more powerful males.) Fear of homosexuality kept heterosexual men in line as husbands and breadwinners; and, at the same time, the association with failure and immaturity made it almost impossible for homosexual men to assert a positive image of themselves. Underlying both sets of sanctions was, of course, contempt for women; for in psycho-math, “I am not a man” = “I am a woman,” which in turn, equaled failure, immaturity, mental illness and all the rest. To be hunted by bill collectors (one consequence of adaptive failure as a breadwinner) was like being penetrated by other men’s penises: both were conditions in which a man became like a woman. Since a man couldn’t actually become a woman (Christine Jorgenson was the only publicized exception throughout the fifties), heterosexual failures and overt homosexuals could only be understood as living in a state of constant deception. And this was perhaps the most despicable thing about them: They looked like men, but they weren’t really men.