Masculine Role Models
I say that a real man has it harder than any Doris Day who had to work so hard to stay perky despite all the pressures she faced. All you have to do is be an honest stand-up person and the hornets will swarm you, no matter what your race, sex or creed.
One role model that comes to mind was my first magazine editing boss. He was in active duty leadership in 3 wars (W2, K, V). But he could give a rat’s ass about officers per se. What he gave you earned. I rented a room in his house. He was still active in the Marines but had been passed over for almost all types of promotion. He was a bit bitter but not too. That’s saying a lot. (Have you seen From Here to Eternity?) I took phone messages for him when he was out of town or out of the house. I got calls from generals about emergencies like plane crashes. Pendleton seemed to rely on him. He was against war and hated those who started war, but there’d be few other people you’d turn to if you were in one to get you out alive. He was of the ‘no one wins’ school. But he’d put his life on the line to help others and for the right Cause as well. He ran a little empire of a dozen outdoor mags. He’d been a private eye, a steelworker, a stuntman. You’d go into his office and there’d be a cloud of cigarello smoke. He had squinty grey eyes and a movie star look. Big, wore a cowboy getup. He and his family rode horses. You could poke fun of him, but if you met him you wouldn’t want to. He skewered everyone who looked at him just by giving you his quiet attention. Yes, he was a personal friend of John Wayne, and, he said Slim Pickens was the funniest man alive at a party. Just for fun years later I introduced a friend to him at the ABA book convention. I told my pal that this introduction would be different, and afterward he agreed. You kind of shake in your boots. He was never mean. He told me that he ran his business so that he could provide a living for 40 families. He took care of these people and knew their livelihood depended on him. In turn, everyone kicked butt for him, yet you shuddered to think what he would do if he found out that you did something low. He didn’t mind a good fight. He knew life was made up of compromises. It was simply up to you to make the right choice. If you did something a little dirty, who did you do it for was the question, yourself or your family. Try walking that line and see if it doesn’t hurt, see if it doesn’t result in you quietly sitting back after work and popping a brew while everyone else gabbles about. Being decent is as tough and unappreciated a job as it ever was. And a role model like he was is as good a way to learn about this as any.
I’ve had a wide array of masculine role models. Mountain men. A hard-drinking smalltown literary woodsman who’d been on the Supreme Court and wrote an Oscar screenplay starring Jimmy Stewart. Ranchers and hard-driving farmers. Hunting and fishing uncles who never wasted a shot or a minute. Seafaring types represented in books by Sterling Hayden and Tristan Jones. Artists and geniuses, both poofter and manly man.
My Dad is a loyal, scientist, hard-working, farmer, gungho sportsman. A good role model.
I’ve also had plenty of role models in Real Women. None of whom were bitches. All of whom kick butt. A woman who’s a bitch isn’t as sensitive to as high of a standard as tough, competent men are. Men worked out how to lead, not how to boss. That requires plenty of strategic humility. Well, as long as it works and is fair in terms of that, whatever gets the job done. But firmness seems of a higher order than a fit. A rage better than a hissy. Wherever panache feels most at home. When done right people might hate but they will respect. A bitch though will lose in the end. Caprice is one of the first things crushed at the highest levels. Strategic spontaneity is a different creature.
Simone Weil is a great female role model. 20-something modern genius who lived with the peasants and wrote great enduring thin volumes of passion and reason and died a martyr of starvation for the French Resistance.
My books are mainly manly books. Hardly a lady among them. Lots of tough ladies in our record collection, tho. Pearl, Billie, Madonna, Maybelle, Patsy, Glenda, Dolly, Linda Ronstadt (when she did those Nelson Riddle records).
I’d say that half the women in my life have been VERY strong. I wonder how many guys with manly man role models get wimpy women.
MALE SENSITIVITY
I don’t understand Camille Paglia’s remark about women expecting too much of men, about how men can’t be as sensitive as women. I think that men are as aware of their world, their lives and the lives of those around them, as women. Perhaps not in the way that women desire them to be. But that’s on women. It’s not that women sometimes expect too much, it’s that they expect chimera, they don’t know what they want. And who cares. Life isn’t about want and like. Expectations. Ha, a nice thing to put on someone. Why don’t we talk instead about fulfilling our duties: isn’t that all we can work toward, after all? As Camille says, that’s what a guy is about: finding out what he’s supposed to do, meant to do, can possibly do, ought to do, pick between different forms of greatness then press on, don’t look back, don’t whine, kick butt, as people abandon you that’s on them.
BEING ‘OUT’ ABOUT BEING HETERO
I suppose sometimes I’m a little cloddish so I haven’t always gone out with the lippiest ladies. I can be sharp, but sometimes the ladies in black are just put off by my hunter’s plaid.
In the end, I married into hospitality women in an artist craftsman’s family who put Martha Stewart to shame. They get bigger jobs done, with equal style, and I daresay more panache, without ever losing their cool and they’re both God’s own democrats.
I hung out around some cool people who were basically too cool for relationships. Sure, they go thru the mating motions, but there was and still is this hip value of not losing one’s cool, of not letting go, where some seem to end up as perma-single. Now, I simply never found that getting interested in someone else detracted from me. I suppose I annoy these folks by being too out.
There seems to be a trend of women flirting ferociously with gay men. This is because they don’t feel safe doing it with straight men, but they still want to Put Out. I suggest that it can be safe…enough. Brinksmanship doesn’t need to be a dead art. I enjoyed the lady who wore the mistletoe at a mostly gay party I attended. I don’t think she expected a truly warm response, but she didn’t mind it either. She must know that some UPS delivery men are straight.
I’ve had people seem to get vicarious thrills from my approach. Now all this is very likely to go to one’s head. But I’m up for that, too. I know that the challenge never ends. I have a big head AND I have to still be decent. I think I’m great AND I know I’m a moron. How to be humble and still demand to achieve exactly what you set out to do. I never succeed all the time at anything, of course. But I do just keep trying. Somehow all my live large role models must’ve inspired me to be like this. When rich kids were picking on me in Junior High, I just kept reading Jack London (all his works) and John Muir…and CS Lewis and Tolkien…and hunting and fishing and judo books and everything else in the stacks…and I knew there was a proud place for quiet nobility expressed clearly and that quitting or going with the dull flow just wasn’t an option.
I notice a trend in Men’s magazines and TV shows. A revival of 50’s manliness, cigars and coarse talk. Revelry and indulgence. Time out. I’ve had fem lady friends look down on this. Bah. They’re not being mean or demeaning anyone seriously. It’s OK to be rough, energetic and like what you like. Be on your good behavior as you see fit. I think Camille Paglia has it right: the sexes are different. We can be legal equals, but the rest is a playing field. And it’s how you play that counts.
Camille writes about how her role models are Amelia Earhart and Katherine Hepburn—both intentionally single. She writes about how women are nuts to think they can have it all. How it’s obvious that women who forgo families can achieve more, and not be bad parents who pretend to have it all, neglecting their kids all the while, etc. I don’t recall that she has ever added the obvious punchlines to this concept. That married family men have that much of a HARDER time achieving greatness in society while doing right by their family. That a real family man will stand by his family instead of the company if push comes to shove. And where will that get him? We see that perhaps gay men also have an advantage in careers. Dual incomes in gay couples. Plenty of disposable income and great entertainment potential. Lots of time. But that’s not the whole story. Those who really trump are the Asexual. No other interests. If persuaded of its worth, how likely is it that anyone can express more loyalty to the Firm?
Men have it harder, women too…
But the Single People have competition, even if it’s stressed out, wigged out. Fear and debt are great incentives to make you willing to do anything for your job. Regular modern nuclear families find themselves perfectly positioned for such career motivation—at the expense of the family, however. As a result they often end up split, stretched, divorced, double income working overtime, house full of junk even if it’s expensive.
But how to leave all this behind and take it easy? How to give yourself the elbow room to have energy left over to fight the good fights? This brings us not to Amelia, but to Camille’s celebration of the 60’s.
What kind of coercion does a paradigm hold over someone who has an integrated, fulfilling life outside the culture, at home, and who has no debt? It’s funny how our society has that as its easy option. If we were willing to live as many did in what they believed was the splendor of the Fifties, we’d have to only have one spouse working part-time. As a result, given today’s economy of scale and professional pay rates, many of us would be able to say No to any job request that we thought was beneath us or beneath contempt. As it is, we’re all too often greedy and thus have to justify all kinds of job chicanery to ourselves, as being worth doing, as not being essentially criminal.
In most cultures I suppose the most worthy walk a fine line. How to do one’s duty without degrading oneself. Many heroes thus end up as what we call Losers. But it’s a kind of losing that you have to work real hard to achieve. Earning a living respectably. Turning down bad requests. Avoiding dishonor. Taking the heat that comes. So the best heroes are likely those you don’t hear about. The greatest artists never hung, the greatest writers never published.
This is hard on any man or women who does this. Including the men who are fathers and the women who are mothers. Each has their own special challenge. Outside the dominant culture.
If you can find out about them you’re among the luckiest. I’ve dug hard at literature all my life, really. I’ve come at it from all angles, too. All except the hothouse flowers. I think I’ve given myself the best odds of finding the choicest prize of greatest merit. I’ve found quite a few and rediscovered plenty for myself. But my biggest mother lode has come from discovering the underground volcano known as Jack Saunders. He’s written quite a bit about Camille, by the way. He’s an exquisite loser, a family man…and a role model. Find him if you can. He reminds me a lot of Camille, only lots better, far wider in range and depth.
