Straight/White/Man
Straight/White/Man
By Adam Jacob Segal
Mom,
I don’t recall the specifics of your complaint, but I know you walked into the den, where dad and I were sitting, to drive your point home: “and it’s all because of straight white men.” I was around nine years old. You nodded at your own statement, affirming its correctness, and smiled in your way of saying: I am not a threat, but I will strike you down if you disagree.
Which is both true and not. You are the safest person I’ll ever have in my life. Your creamsicle orange curls have always stood for unmatched warmth and comfort. But you also know just how to make yourself heard.
Dad looked up, his straight white male eyeballs raised in the slightest recognition. He’s never shared your enthusiastic [straight white] feminism, but neither does he get flustered if he doesn’t feel it’s about him. It was after dinner, which you had cooked, served, and were presently cleaning while your two straight white men sat on couches. But you weren’t talking about that. You were talking about politics, something abstract, so the night’s tension ended there.
I was on the couch under the vibrant parrot painting, seated closest to the kitchen, closest to you, my chubby straight white male thumbs playing Pokémon Yellow. I mouthed some rote response like “okay mom,” blissfully unaware that I would think about this comment for the rest of my fucking life.
This memory is a delicious plate of puttanesca by which I mean it’s an absolute saucy mess of thought-strands piping hot and ready to twirl around the fork; if I do this right, maybe we’ll get to eat the whole meal. Here’s a nice noodle: It took about 20 years for me to reflect, to realize that you yourself are also straight and white, have been the whole time, in fact, and in that sense, you’re two for three. What are the identities that unite us, and which keep us apart?
What occupies the space between the concept of straight white man as a political idea and the identity of straight white man as me, a fat kid on a couch who wanted his Pikachu to love him and his rougher friends at school to stop confusing cruelty for connection?
Am I stomping on sacred ground? After millenia of men’s dominance through violence, psychological terror, and the banal insistence on the status quo, revolutionary movements against colonialism, racism, and patriarchy have rightly forced us to acknowledge the experience of the oppressed and the marginalized, by which I mean, those the existing order does not center or serve. It’s about fucking time, ma.
But to explore power is not to endorse it. If I don’t ask how to live rightly in my privilege, I cede ground to those who will tell us all to live wrongly: the fascists, the warmongers, the aggrieved old comedians. I’m writing because I want you to see it too, that you are white as much as you are a woman. And in that sense, this really is for both of us.
You helped guide me toward what I wasn’t trained to see. Now I’m trying to understand what I’m looking at when I see myself.
* * *
Mom,
Did you read Sisterhood Is Powerful? Maybe it was one of the books that made you strong, sharpened your senses, gave you the profane power of liberatory insight. I say profane, and I mean it, for this sense can sketch the contours of our societal assumptions and show how we might begin to shatter them. You encouraged me to be Jewish by asking questions—by questioning—and in that way, you taught me that irreverence was far holier than faith.
In college, you told me to take a Women’s Studies course because “you’ll see that everything you’ve ever studied, from history to literature to music, has been the men’s study of that discipline.” You were right. I saw how misogyny informed our most basic reproductive functions, depicting the glorious male capability to blast out millions of brave little soldiers, while the menses was a wasteful mess for the monthly discharge of one or two passive little eggs. The profane insight so quickly became mine.
Robin Morgan, who edited that anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, wrote in the introduction that “I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.” I wonder if you agree. I wonder if I came out of the womb and singed your skin when you touched me, your son, this hairy, wet newborn, the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power?
My profane insight has grown out of control—out of your control—thanks in large part to feminism’s third wave. For example, I now consider the absurdity of the moment when the doctor pulled me out of you, saw my limp little cock, and declared I’d be a man. It’s a simple observation, dumb and obvious as a pile of rocks. But if The Gendering was a statement of truth, it was also a fateful imposition. You and the doctor put that gender onto me like a warning label, like a promise, so that everyone would know how to treat me. Everyone would know how to tell me what to be. Does having a cock and balls and a larger frame make me in some ways different from someone with a clitoris? Sure, yes, of course. But then, the distance between myself and other men has often been so great that I’ve often wondered if I even constitute a man at all.
* * *
Mom,
I can’t write accurately about my development as a man without reflecting on my rage and resentment toward other boys. I was, after all, sensitive, a word spoken in euphemistic tones to variously mean kind, or weepy, or inadequate. Eventually, the spice of male friendship turned from imaginative play to demeaning jabs. It was incomprehensible that these guys I loved would now frequently point out my jiggling gut and my “tits,” a boy’s body grown large in the wrong dimensions. I still fantasize about unzipping my soft flesh like a jacket, revealing the man I ought to be—with a fresh sheet of taut skin—waiting beneath.
Beyond being fat, I was also a bitch. Used against women, this word suggests stubbornness and a strong will. It’s a punishment for standing firm, for refusing to submit. Against me, it was emasculation, a punishment for passiveness, apology, submission. It was self-fulfilling and endless: the more I reacted emotionally to a dig, the deeper they dug. Maybe I told you this story once, years later, when I could finally laugh at it: Alex once chastised me for how often I said sorry, and I apologized for it. That one exchange gave him ammunition for years.
This cruelty wasn’t constant—these were also boys I loved to spend my time with—but it stayed with me constantly. I wanted them to hurt, these boys I loved, partly out of revenge and partly on the belief that if they felt my pain acutely, they might actually stop. We could be kids again.
I wanted them to hurt, but I didn’t want to hurt them. So I turned my rage inward, and also shamefully funneled it toward weaker peers and easier targets I could tease without much risk. Surely there are essays in which others grapple with the pain I’ve caused them, then.
What changed? I remember checking my phone after rehearsal for the upcoming high school performance of Wonderful Town and finding a text telling me to stop being a “theater faggot” and come hang out. I was 15, a sophomore, and by now, these comments weren’t outright hurtful. They were more frustrating little reminders of the boundaries of acceptable boyhood. You’d raised me to respect gay men. You’d raised me not to fear that word.
The kid who sent the text would probably say he respected gay men, too. He wasn’t trying to insult gay men, he was trying to insult me. And anyway, he was only joking.
What if I did stop? What if I quit the musical, spent a few more after-school hours playing video games in basements and standing around in fields with the boys? They wouldn’t have this ammunition against me. But if I bent to their pressure, wouldn’t that make me submissive and weak? As a young man, masculinity was a constant choice between falling in line and being ridiculed for behaving as myself. Queer men learn this lesson with far more violence than I ever experienced. But the rage and the humiliation are still mine, as are the ways I grew through the tension.
I say it with concision now, but this was a burbling mess to my high school brain: I clearly would not succeed in being a man. So I’d have to succeed at being something else. This thinking was flawed, but its implications were lasting: I could exist on my own terms, and I would be okay.
The other thing that changed was prioritizing the friendship of women in college, and learning I could be loved explicitly and to my face, by people other than my mom. Other than you.
* * *
Mom,
In 2017, I sat on a different couch far from home, in the apartment of a straight white woman I’d been dating, though at this moment we were breaking up. I’m the one who ended things. Heather had 11 distinct paintings of horses in her apartment—a fact she told me on our first date as a too-subtle-for-me ploy hoping I’d invite myself in—but here we were under her framed print of the phrase “MEN ARE WORMS” spelled out by the contorted bodies of smiling cartoonish crawlies as she spent over an hour enumerating her disappointments with our casual relationship. I sure wasn’t perfect.
I’m talking about the worm print because it’s fun and thematically resonant, but the truth is, I adored this woman during our time together, and Heather made me feel adored. I remember our first date at the Red Fox, where she opened with a grotesque story about an old woman crushed slowly under the weathered boards of a tornado-broken house, something so grim it afforded no response but laughter and another round of drinks. The horse paintings, yes, but also the early mornings before her teaching shifts when she’d throw open the blinds and sing gorgeously along to Bill Callahan and other mournful songs of American wreckage, while fixing us both some eggs on buttery toast. That and the way she’d stretch my name into 4 syllables, playfully disapproving, whenever I did or said anything slightly mischievous. There is so much to love in the company of others.
Later, she’d tell me the breakup was like a writing workshop: how I listened to her critiques without interruption, just quietly taking in the feedback so that I could hopefully improve my manuscript, by which I mean my performance as a romantic partner, as a man. I took it as a compliment then because I pride myself on listening, on not reacting aggressively.
I was determined to never scare anyone I loved like the way dad sometimes scared me as a kid, even though he never did anything particularly hurtful or frightening. It was the obfuscation of his inner life, the way I couldn’t quite read him, and the size of his presence during your occasional fights, where the roiling pressures of family life would push you guys to yell about discarded socks or TV remotes, worthless trinkets imbued with power by white suburban despair. I’m six feet tall now and 300 pounds, and I’d love to be forever harmless to the ones I love if I weren’t certain that would also forever dry up my sex appeal.
Anyway mom, by this point, I’d learned that to be a man in a heterosexual relationship is to love and fuck across power, to be structurally, statistically, and in real experience the dominant partner. It meant being more controlling, more capable of causing harm, more prone to coercion, more likely to prioritize my needs and desires, and blowing off all the rest. It meant being the center yearning after the margins without any intention of ceding ground. And yet, we’re also independent human beings. And yet, we’re also expected to meet as equals.
At the time, I’d made peace with these contradictions in a way that was stupid but felt suitably safe: I decided that anything a woman said about me must be true, especially if she was hurt by my behavior. And that got you really worried.
The day after the breakup, she wrote an email catharsis, intending to get all her lingering criticisms off her chest and into my inbox. I read it over my lunch break, reuben in hand, dripping hot dressing. This email was a masterful summary of everything I’d ever hated and feared about myself. I was weak and emotionally needy, I leaned too heavily on the support of others while offering precious little in return, my feminism was performative and false, and embarrassing to watch. Thankfully she stopped short of calling me a fat little bitch.
Friends told me she felt hurt and just wanted a chance to hurt me back—you told me this, too—but that felt like the height of misogyny, a stock sexist denial of women’s experience. And I believed in accountability, so I guessed it all must be true.
“I’m just concerned that all this feminism has made you hate yourself for something you can’t even control,” I remember you saying this over the phone while I walked home one wet and dismal night in Portland, down one of those streets where tree roots rip through the concrete sidewalk slabs, revealing whole societies of moss and primordial pools of mud, from which blooms will be born as soon as the first sun comes.
I thought you must be a hypocrite. Was this not exactly what you wanted of your son?
By all this feminism, you might have meant the books I’d been reading and the discussions I’ve been having with my men’s group, or maybe you meant the powerful new wave of meme-driven pop feminism that insisted we shout MEN ARE TRASH while drinking from our MALE TEARS mugs and inspiring one another to KILL YOUR LOCAL RAPIST.
Your worry was that I had confused responsibility for my privilege with irresponsible self-loathing. That I had begun to see straight/white/man as original sin in need of redemption, rather than a set of descriptors for the ease with which I walked through the world. Or maybe I’m putting these words in your mouth, and your real concern was just for your sensitive son who believed every harsh word anybody sent his way.
I remember your affirmations of my inherent goodness and your admonitions against dating again too soon, and I remember hearing you without believing you. Sure mom, okay mom, uhhuh.
* * *
Mom,
Of course, there is some truth to Robin Morgan’s point, despite my coolest jokes. Straight white men are statistically the most conservative, at least in the US, and the bar for our behavior, let alone our politics, is abysmal. Yet I have to insist that one’s identity describes their experience rather than determining it. People are not symbols, nor are they figures in a morality play. I think you agree it’s pretty fatalistic to say men like me are the “very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.” My body is truly so big, I hope there’s room in there for other things.
Perhaps my concern can be addressed with linguistic surgery, and I would feel better with the phrasing “straight white men embody the reactionary-vested-interest-power,” something equally true but with more spaciousness and less finality. Or perhaps I want from Morgan what I want from you, an acknowledgment that as a white American woman, she is also “an embodiment of power.”
Or maybe it’s that the finality of identitarian boundaries feels related to Morgan’s violent exclusionary transphobia, as at the 1973 West Coast Lesbain Conference when she referred to folk musician and activist Beth Elliot as “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist” and attempted to have Elliot expelled. Before you say “that was just the time,” over ⅔ of the attendees voted to keep the folk singer there; Elliot only left under pressure from the incensed minority.
And no, I am not comparing my experience as a sad cisgender man to the brutal trauma of a trans woman suffering the hateful myth of the trans predator, except by the loose theoretical threads which may connect them. I am drawn to feminist theory wherever it names and exposes systems of oppression, and provides inspiration for resistance, growth, and expansion. There is another school that is interested in more binary, fixed solutions that to me always read as a deeply paranoid yearning for “separate but equal” gender dystopia. The women who write that stuff are almost always white. When we argue feminism, as occasionally happens, it’s because you sometimes ascribe to that shit.
What I’m trying to say, mom, is that it really is bullshit for white American women like Robin Morgan and you to suggest that white American men like me are categorically embodiments of power, or solely to blame for the world’s problems, as if these other expressions of power are not also yours to bear. And I want to say, further, that sometimes the constructs that empower us are built on the degradation of others. Like Morgan’s viciousness toward trans women, or Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinian people and land.
You took your first women’s studies class in 1975, and from what you’ve told me, those texts revealed things you’d always dimly known yet never once considered. Your favorite was Our Bodies, Ourselves, from which you learned your body and sexuality were fully understandable and fully your own. Consciousness-raising as a phrase has become something of a cliche, but in experience, it is often miraculous. An expansion and elevation of the mind, this profane insight pushes you beyond the what of the world and into the why, the why not, the to what end. You felt it as both a sudden blowing open of the doors of patriarchal conditioning and as a seed embedded in the gendered core, nurtured through therapy and passing years. In time, you learned the animating principles of your bickering with your sisters, your disappointment with your father, your distance from your mother. These revelations changed you, and in the chaotic flow of causality, they made me.
I didn’t singe your skin, you tell me, though you laugh when I share that line. Instead, I filled you with wonder, with possibility. In a recent phone call, you said, “Men weren’t really part of my life, I had no brothers, an absent father.” You also had an ex-boyfriend you’ve only ever referred to by his full name, Chuck the Asshole. “I didn’t know what I would do with you! I was excited, because I could mold you—” and here you corrected yourself, “influence you, push you in the direction of being a good man.” I asked, Why not mold? “Because I couldn’t tell you exactly who to be.” I think you meant this as an ethical concern as much as a practical one: 10,000 daily influences on a human life, but surely there’s always space beneath/between/within for a self that’s fundamentally mine. Surely?
I wonder, mom, if before that rainy post-breakup phone call, you’d considered that the texts which freed you often figured me as the antagonist, as the jailer. I don’t think I had. I’m well aware that my occasional discomfort and eventual exhaustion with misandrist generalizations is nothing at all compared to the crisis of violence women face every moment, not to mention the way threat of violence—direct or implied—controls the lives of women constantly down coercive, manipulative, deeply unfree paths. I know, for example, that MEN ARE WORMS is a cute little expression of diffuse revenge against the men who hurt my ex in far more acute ways. And I know, also, that when women trust men enough to share their experiences of sexual and psychological trauma, men’s first response is not to validate their companion’s feelings but to fantasize about extreme retribution against the perpetrator. Which is to say, men often mirror and even eclipse women’s rage when they see that woman as theirs.
I have sought for so long to understand my responsibilities as a man. And I want, in the ample space between self-loathing and male chauvinism, to keep asking who the hell I and others are supposed to be.
* * *
Mom,
Do you remember the worst thing you ever said to me? You were driving me back to Iowa City after spring break of my freshman year at the University, and we took the river road with the nuclear power plant rising in the distance past the floodplain forest, its tower cooling water like a hare’s ears cool hot blood. We were talking about being Jewish, a topic that had recently bored me. Being Jewish felt like it revolved around religious observance and support for the Israeli state, two things that hadn’t carried much weight for me since my late teen years. It felt embarrassing on the one hand and immoral on the other. I was overall uninterested in being responsible for carrying on others’ legacy; the weight of what the Nazis had done to us.
I’m sure I expressed none of this with any clarity, and instead, I told you that if I had kids, I probably wouldn’t raise them Jewish. Was this the worst thing I ever said to you? And if so, did it justify what you said next, which was, in my recollection, “I think if you don’t raise your kids Jewish, you’ll be finishing Hitler’s work.” I could say I’ll never forgive you. I could say I forgave you years ago. I could say I really don’t feel one way or another, and all three of these statements would be completely true. Your intention was to keep our culture alive, but in that moment, it had the reverse effect.
I didn’t renounce being Jewish, but neither did I embrace it again for years. When I theorize about identity, I talk about explicit identities—which are apparent to the world and affect how others treat us as well as our inner lives—and implicit identities—which inform our behavior and our sense of self, but are not obvious from a glance. Jewishness is explicit for some people, but it’s never been so for me. When I was younger, peers would sometimes observe, as if giving a compliment, you don’t look Jewish. Meaning, don’t worry, you don’t look like a Shylock. No hook nose, no tight curls, no rubbing together of scheming hands like a fly getting ready to taste its next meal.
You’ll never watch Andy Muschietti’s 2017 rendition of It, so let me tell you this. When the shapeshifting evil, most often seen as a clown called Pennywise, starts haunting the protagonists, he comes to most of the children in the form of appropriate terrors: a leper for the hypochondriac, a vision of burning parents to the child who lost them to fire, and so on. The Jewish kid, though, is haunted at his synagogue by a frightening portrait of a woman, inspired by the elongated forms of Italian-Jewish painter Amedeo Modigliani. I listened to a podcast about the film hosted by three goyishe women I love, who joked about the woman in the painting as a relatively tame and inconsequential fear. But I knew exactly what it meant, that woman. A ponderous face from an old world artist, hanging on the temple walls while the boy prepared for his bar-mitzvah: the portrait represented the cattle cars and the gas chambers bearing down upon a child of 13, expected not just to become a man, but to preserve for posterity a culture that could not by any means be extinguished. The fact that I saw that, while the goyishe podcasters did not, is what I mean by implicit identity.
And yet I have to tell you what an immense marker of privilege it is that, in retrospect, I could even choose to briefly disown that aspect of myself. People of color cannot, for example renounce their skin, no matter what ghoulish shit their moms say to them. In the years when I rejected the Jew in me, I was still a straight white man, still the embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.
* * *
Mom,
You know my college friend, Jen? She and her sister, Lena, were wonderful women who showed me loving friendships could feel like love on the surface. Jen coaxed me out of my shyness, encouraged my frantic dance floor antics, coached me on dating, and literally screamed from across the room the first time I kissed a woman at a house party. You know her: she has a sharp bob and gorgeous, full lips, inherited from her sentimental father. We share a lasting joke that she’s angry at being the only woman friend I’ve ever had without having a crush on her first, despite me not being her type. I’ve never had a satisfying answer for her. I think it’s because the first night we met, she fucked my roommate, and more importantly wore a brutally vibrant shirt like the parrot painting above the living room couch, which is to say she always felt a bit too much like home.
By my senior year, I began to realize I could be Jewish as an intellectual, moral, and cultural practice. I could even connect to an ancient Jewish lineage on my own terms. This, strangely, was thanks in large part to the lectures of Professor Holstein, a short, muscular old man with a third young wife and sick George Carlin-like glee at offending, who would ignite controversy with his remarks and deflect blame, saying, “Don’t take it up with me. Spend seven years learning biblical Hebrew and take it up with the text.”
Regardless of inspiration, I grew curious about coming home to this aspect of myself, and was excited to share this with Jen. Her response, another cattle brand on the flesh of my memory, was “But Adam, you’re not oppressed.” It was comically deflating. I interpreted her response to mean: as a straight white man, I had no right to seek out earnest identification with a distinct cultural experience, since identity is ultimately the salve that heals, connects, and unites oppressed peoples.
“That does sound like me in college,” Jen said over the phone, both of us laughing. I’d called her recently to see if she remembered the exchange, and now I was lying reverse prone on my bed like a teen girl in a horror film, taking notes. “I was always trying to be controversial. I think my comment was crazy.”
Jen’s mom is [just] white, and her dad, a gentle man who loves his daughters and his collection of ’40s-’70s jazz, is Lebanese. Jen had asked him once how he identified racially; he responded with soft surprise, “I’ve never really thought about that.” Jen herself asserted that she “lives in the world as a white person,” but also acknowledged a felt difference between the traditions of her mother’s and father’s extended family. I wondered into the phone, did Jen shut me down in that moment as a minor projection, a sense that she also came from an ancestry that was no longer hers to claim?
Jen apologized sweetly for what she’d said so long ago, but I deflected as usual. I joked—sincerely—that in a way we’re all just saying shit to each other, our whole lives long, testing out theories and beliefs and seeing how it feels when thought becomes sound. Most of the time, our tongues tremble off inconsequential little nothings, but occasionally, that thing you say sticks. Why apologize for that?
What I suggested to Jen next is what I want to tell you now: that for many folks today, there is truth in the assumption that identity belongs only to those on the margins, as a way to define oneself against the oppressive norm. I believe that assumption is harmful to many people, including straight white men, and through us, the people we hurt.
* * *
Mom,
Is there anything to love about being a man? For a time, I came to believe there wasn’t, that as a man, the best I could do was to simply be a Good Person with gender-neutral virtues. Anyone can be kind and compassionate, intelligent and strong. When we were kids in the basement where his older brother had punched through the drywall after a crushing defeat in Smash Bros, Benjamin once told me he’d love to have a son but wouldn’t know how to raise a daughter. How could he not know? Everything you want in a son, you’d surely want in a daughter. Was Ben being regressive, or was he just clued into the reality that it actually takes a ton of work to train someone in their gendered roles? I don’t know how to raise a daughter, meaning: I’ve never seen a woman be manufactured in real time.
There are, of course, feminists who want the total destruction of all gender: a world wiped clean of binary aesthetics, norms, expectations. I’ve flirted with this idea, the dream of children who aren’t immediately sorted into one of two flavors, where nothing is demanded and all (ethical) behavior is encouraged. It’s a question I’ve asked in my men’s groups since nearly the beginning: Who would you be, if no one had ever told you who you were supposed to be? The implication being that masculinity is a sort of personal prison with guards outside the walls and inside our hearts, one we might escape if we only thought to risk it.
But is it fair to call gender a prison, when it often feels like more of a home? It’s not just that any good utopian platform requires me to grapple with the present situation—in this case, the assumed man/woman divide—while making way for better things to come. A lot of us do enjoy aspects of our inherited genders. In many ways, my relationship to masculinity is like my relationship to Jewish tradition. It’s something I grew to resent when I felt how it constrained me, and something I’ve only just grown to love now that I’m the one who chooses what stays and what goes. Maybe the most common contemporary feminist response to gender is not outright rejection but simply the insistence that the individual, above all, gets to decide what is natural and right for them.
This is great, but it doesn’t address the problem that MEN ARE TRASH. What is there to love in being a straight man if pop feminism and pop culture broadly are right about us? What’s to love about our graceless bodies, our comically embarrassing sexuality, our lack of emotional intelligence, the fact that we’re so often uglier than the women we date? Why do we never read novels, why do we take up so much space, why are we so friendless, why do we play so many fucking video games? For men like me out shopping for a masculinity that’s certified non-toxic, it sometimes feels like the best we can do is minimize our flaws and hope a potential partner will pardon our mess long enough to fall in love.
Let me tell you about The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, a captivating book I wrestled with like the spirit of God, underlining half the text and scribbling rough reactions and accusatory questions in the margins. The author Jane Ward places “the collective recognition that ‘men are ‘trash’” within the context of complaint, “one of the defining features of straight culture.” Ward argues that complaint, rather than being a radical rejection or subversion of patriarchal norms, is more like a necessary exhaust vent for a system it has no interest in changing. Citing Lauren Berlant, Ward describes a “normative ‘woman’s culture’ organized around the premise that heteronormative love is what women most want and what they will seek at all costs, even when it fails them and causes them great pain.”
The core argument of Ward’s book is that if straight men and women actually can love each other, then maybe we should fucking act like it. She’s right to put most of the onus of this work on men, but I appreciate that she doesn’t figure wholesale dismissal as part of the solution. After all, if blanket complaints about men are a necessary feature of patriarchy, then imagining something better than patriarchy means dreaming of something better for men, too.
But still, mom, what’s to love? I’m trying to recall if you ever told me what you liked about men. I know you wanted a man with a toolbox who read books, then decided you were fine with just the tools after you met dad. I remember you famously announcing at dinner that you’re “not attracted to handsome men,” backpedaling over uncomfortable laughter to clarify that dad was attractive in his own way. I know you raised me skeptical of sandals because you don’t enjoy the look of men’s toes. I remember you encouraging me to walk proudly, “barrel chest” out in the open, rather than the concave pose I often collapsed into. You’ve called me handsome 10,000 times. But it wasn’t until meeting trans men and reading trans masculine writers that I understood what could be specifically lovable about my manhood.
It’s appropriate that trans men often lead the way on naming masculine beauty, considering their gender expression is often more deliberate, thoughtful, and is something they’ve had to fight for. Consider the words of Thomas Page McBee, who generously shares, “I loved the way men looked, and smelled, and held themselves. I loved their lank and bulk and ease, their straight-razor barbershop shaves, their chest-first centers of balance.” While transitioning, he reveled in “the extra muscle mass that squared my walk, broadened my hands, my calves, my throat.” In the mirror, “I turned, and he turned. I smiled, and he smiled. I expanded, and so did he.” This makes me sigh in relief and pride, allowing myself the rare pleasure of reveling in my body’s size, its shape and textures. McBee gives me permission to expand after a lifetime of fantasizing about being small.
Beyond the physical possibilities of gender affirming care, McBee notes that transitioning brings with it an awareness and curiosity about masculinity that all men would do well to practice: “All men have an opportunity to open their eyes in the same way trans men […] are made to in these heady, early days of transition. What are some actionable steps [men] can do to engage with gender in a more meaningful way, and challenge toxic masculinity, in this charged moment?” Part of the brilliance of McBee’s writings is that he clearly recognizes it is men’s work to combat patriarchal violence, but he does so while loving men and loving himself as a man. I understand now; I have always needed more of that.
I think what I’m trying to tell you here is that even our privileged identities are worthy of investigating, tending to, and loving. When I called you after the breakup with Heather, maybe I wasn’t ready to hear that I needed to love the man I am. Or maybe I just didn’t know what it could possibly look like to love something I felt was so foul. I’m learning.
* * *
Mom,
I’m willing to bet a spicy bowl of Real Chili splashed with cayenne vinegar that part of your primarily identifying as woman—and not as straight and white—is that you've experienced a lifetime of adversity due to your gendered experience. That adversity frames your perspective because, especially since Our Bodies, Ourselves, you’re aware of differentiated treatment, of the way men threatened you when younger and discount you now that you’re older. Being white and straight are still considered the norm, and as such are far less visible, and in a certain sense are far more shameful. As woman, you speak from a place of defiance; as white, you speak from a place of domination. Supremacy and subjugation swim inside you always, they live in each of us to varying degrees.
There are ways in which being a man is quite difficult, but we both know a vast and threatening borderland divides our gendered experiences. Yet, a violent sea separates us both from the experiences of, say, Black Americans. I’ve riled you up more than once by sending this quote from Barbara Smith, one of the founding members of the Combahee River Collective: “My perspective [in 1968] was, like many Black women…‘What do white women have to complain about? I mean, they’ve been terrorizing us in their homes and in their kitchens for several centuries here now…’ Their status also was the absolute opposite of what our status was as Black women.”
Your flustered response to this, which I really do agree with, is that 1968 predates the criminalization of marital rape and the legalization of abortion, which is to say all women had major concerns that feminists fought hard to address. Smith’s story simply reveals that Black women had even more compounding concerns, which white women famously often refuse to fight for. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò teaches, “When elites run the show, the ‘group’s’ interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.” In a lot of ways, you’re right on top, right next to me, your straight white son.
And anyway, my silly metaphors about borderlands and seas fall apart quite quickly, because the divisions between experiences do not leave us on neat, isolated little islands. They bind us in strange and fascinating ways we would all do well to explore. For instance, my nontraditional sensitive masculinity puts me in solidarity with everyone who cannot thrive within classic cisheteronormative gender roles: the tomboys, the queers, the delicate Jen’s dads of the world, the trans folks who love their binary gender and the trans and nonconforming folks and everybody else who wants so much more than two crusty old options to choose from.
I’m saying, essentially, that everyone’s identity is so much more complex than the few primary aspects of our lives which render us oppressed and separate us from privilege, safety, and that warm translucent ooze we call normalcy. The regressive white feminist rage we’ve all now heard so much about often shows up when Black women demand white women take responsibility for white supremacy, the same way those white women demand men take responsibility for the patriarchy. Kimberle Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality does not suggest that you are a woman in some contexts and white in others; rather, you are both, always, a gestalt construct. You are more than your discrete identities, more than the sum of your parts.
* * *
Mom,
What happens when people identify too strongly only with the ways in which they are oppressed? Many are the dangers, but an increasingly obvious one is the practice of demonizing the people we hurt, and allying with fascists who will cynically affirm our protected status. I think you know about Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs, who like to brand themselves as “Gender Critical.” TERFs may or may not accept trans gender identity as legitimate, but either way, they reject the call for trans rights and trans inclusivity. TERFs claim such calls are threatening to cis women, whom they refer to as “real,” “natal,” or simply yet dangerously “women.” Trans people, especially trans women, are described as a threat to their protected status.
TERFs frequently build nasty coalitions with alt-right traditionalists and god-fearing binary bullies in order to preserve their cherished insistence that womanhood is immutable, exclusive, and sacred. Judith Butler puts it best in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, “Anti-trans feminists seek to still the category of woman, lock it down, erect the gates, and patrol the borders.” This, while trans folks suffer extreme rates of violence, stigmatization, and policing of their every behavior. Clinging too strongly to cis womanhood invites the fear that trans folks directly threaten your livelihood, even as they’re crushed beneath a TERFy pink pussy hat-wearing boot.
And let’s talk about Jews. Less than 100 years after the Holocaust, we are, of course, an extremely threatened and deeply traumatized minority population. Simultaneously, as diasporic Ashkenazis living in America, we’re now also white, and disproportionately affluent within our new communities. And further, we’re useful to American foreign interests, culturally legitimizing the state of Israel even as goyishe politicians regularly make it clear this is because Israel is an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” Take it from Joe Biden, who’s been saying since the 80s that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
Supporting Israel even as it commits the crime of extermination is a dangerous game too many of us play. Pro-Israel Jews regularly climb into bed with Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Trump and Biden both, apocalyptic Jew-hating pastors and alt-righters of all stripes. They turn away from coalitions of people of color, even after promising just a few years back to commit to anti-racist politics. You told me years back in a defensive fury over the phone that “the Israel Lobby does not exist,” as if AIPAC were some unmentionable anti-semitic bogeyman. Did you really think that the Israel Lobby doesn’t exist? Or is it that you were so committed to thinking of Jews as unsafe that you couldn’t recognize some of us as wielding incredible destructive power?
We’ve got to stop with the denial, mom. Denial of the rights of Palestinians, denial of AIPAC, denial that we’re at least as powerful as we are threatened.
What I really want to say to you is that these people don’t love us, mom. The biggest mistake we make with these dark bargains is not even the crushing moral failure of the alliance, it’s that in the end, these people don’t want what’s best for us at all. We’re useful in the moment, useful because we can sow division against the opposition. When JK Rowling buddies up with men who want to police trans bodies, she’s ignoring the fact that they want to police all women’s bodies too. And they will, when the time is right. “What if the aim is to keep everyone safe,” Judith Butler asks, “and the task, to come up with an organization of space that makes that possible?”
There is no “what if?” That is the aim, mom. That is, in fact, what you’ve always told me being Jewish is all about.
I gave a speech for ceasefire earlier last year. I was too afraid to send it to you then, but I want you to read this portion now. It’s about my saba, your dad:
“My dear saba, my grandfather, who died a zionist, I speak to your memory: Though you left this world believing in an unquestioned Israeli state, I am here because of what you taught me: to be Jewish is to bring light to the world. I pray your spirit will understand, and perhaps even smile proudly, that your legacy will be one of liberation.”
I cried when I wrote it, I cried when I spoke it, I’m crying now. I’m a sensitive boy, all I do is cry.
A part of Jewish history I never learned at synagogue was the Jewish Labor Bund, active in turn-of-the-century Europe, which was actively anti-zionist and knew we could not make ourselves safe by colonizing the homes of others. They preached and practiced Doykeyt, “hereness,” and proudly declared, “Wherever you are, that’s your home.” Here I am, a man, a Jew, a colonizer on stolen land, a child of persecution, a plump little white boy raised on a perfect little suburban lawn of trimmed Kentucky Bluegrass. There is no place I can go to be more ethical than here. I can only act rightly where I am. Where my people are not safe, I will defend them. And where my people oppress others, I will confront them. This is what it means to love.
I am bursting at the very seams with love, love you gave me. You didn’t just birth me, mom, you ignited this engine in my core, which yearns to fight for others. Listen, it won’t stop churning. I am training it not to burn me.
* * *
Mom,
Did you read Sisterhood Is Powerful? I didn’t. Anthologies rarely do it for me. I know the Robin Morgan line because it’s quoted near the conclusion of the legendary 1977 Combahee River Collective statement, the Black feminist anchor text and origin of the phrase Identity Politics. As the Collective makes clear, “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” They contrast the not-knowing of Morgan’s line with a certainty of their own: “As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.”
This is a direct response to the experience of racism in the Women’s Movement as well as racism and sexism in male-dominated Left spaces. A person cannot be expected to fight for a common cause if they’re also expected to deny or slice off parts of themselves in the process. Black feminism has long fascinated and attracted me, perhaps because it represents—symbolically and in practice—the inverse of my own experience. The Collective writes, “We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess any one of these types of privilege have.” I, on the other hand, have all these things. Learning that I have privilege in every way brought me through that mirror to a similar conclusion as those who have no privilege in any way: an opposition to all oppression, unstuck by the dangerous snag of power and powerlessness I’ve been describing in these letters.
Of course, it’s more complicated than all that. I’m also fat, and Jewish, and deeply unhappy with the grinning brutality of my masculine adolescence. And the CRC members had privileges of their own: like me, they are college-educated, English-speaking citizens of the American empire. But the point is that Black feminists view themselves not simply as Super Duper Oppressed but as vulnerable along countless faultlines, and further view themselves as responsible to each of these intersecting tensions. The problem with “white feminists” is not their whiteness, it’s their tendency to look at the one faultline of gender beneath them and demand that all women only focus their attention right there.
Here’s the fucking rub though, mom: I really am proud of understanding that I benefit from just about every form of privilege there is. And I really am proud of feeling responsible for making things right wherever I am implicated, which is everywhere. But it’s also damn hard to love myself when I look at everything through the lens of my unearned advantages. Privilege pads my every experience like excess stores of fat; I need only look down at my gut to remember I am simply too much.
I want to be good. I also know, because you’ve told me so many times, I have to find a way to live.
* * *
Mom,
Do you remember that day in the driveway when I asked how you’d feel if I turned out to be gay? We were sitting in the car, me an early teen, probably after an afternoon of errands, in that fleeting space between the outer world and the return to normalcy that awaited once we set the groceries down on the kitchen counter. In the private capsule that is the American automobile, I felt safe enough to ask. Did I suspect that gay men were men who, like me, didn’t much care to be the man I saw in films and TV ads? Did I think being gay would be pleasantly subversive, a way to shock you and dad just enough to create distance while still being loved? I’m not sure anymore.
Your garden must have been blooming with your favorite orange poppies. The suburbs would be ringing with the sounds of cicadas, their resounding alarm snuffing out even the distant echoes of gas-powered lawn care engines. We would have heard little of this, in your station wagon with the windows up and AC blowing dry air in our faces.
Here’s what I remember from your answer: First, you said you’d be sad if I didn’t bring any kids into the world. Which is too bad, because I’m decidedly straight and probably will not be fathering any children anyway.
Second, you said that life is difficult for gay men, and that you’d be sad just to see me struggle in a bigoted culture. I’ve since learned this is a fairly common reaction for liberal, “tolerant” parents to the idea of children coming out as queer: of course I support you, but I just worry how unhappy you’ll be in this big hateful world. This actually forms the hook of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, which I referenced earlier. Ward argues that the focus on “queer misery” means “we fail to name the contradictions and miseries of straight culture—the entrapment, the disappointment, the antagonism, the boredom, the unwanted sex, the toxic masculinity, and the countless daily injustices endured by straight women.”
Ward’s solution is what she terms “deep heterosexuality,” a new cultural expression of straight romance that is deliberate rather than assumed as the norm. Ward envisions a straight sexuality in which partners are “so hungry for the wholeness of the other that it forged strong bonds of identification and deep mutual regard, rather than oppositeness and hierarchy.” It sure sounds nice to me. Though I wonder if all straight women desire a connection like this, even if they want it as an ideal. I think it’s worth noting that straight women often seem to desire aspects of dominance, control, and other traditional masculine traits in their partners, and that this sometimes makes it difficult to figure out the proper balance of new and old masculinity.
Regardless, it’s the conclusion of the chapter on Pickup Artists that sticks with me now. Ward explores Pickup culture, which has not died off after #MeToo, but has merely modified its approaches. The new Pickup Artist M.O. is to meet the basic demands of emotional intelligence so that one can successfully have sex with women whose standards have heightened. The point is that these men aren’t sincerely pursuing introspection and self-awareness, nor are they challenging patriarchal norms; they’re just learning whatever they need in order to fuck, as always.
Ward is frustrated that “apparently, one of the most effective strategies for getting straight men on board with profeminist, antirape messages is giving them space to celebrate their masculinity in the same breath. From a queer perspective, this is one of the more discouraging elements of the heterosexual tragedy: when straight men move toward feminism, they almost always do so in ways that prop up the gender binary that causes their problems in the first place!” I understand the concern about reinforced binaries and the arbitrary fragility of arguments that say “actually, real men seek to identify with women.” But I also have to ask: if it works, if it truly is effective to appeal to positive constructions of masculinity, then isn’t it worth considering?
Is it effective to argue that straight men “should at least embrace feminism because doing so will result in better heterosexuality—more authentic relationships with women and better sex based on women’s enthusiastic interest?” Ward isn’t happy about that strategy even if it is: “I don’t feel good about this approach; I want men to be feminists because they value women’s humanity, because they identify with women, and because they see that the gender binary… has caused no end of suffering for women and also for themselves.” Her primary concern is that we must not turn earnest feminist goals of safety, comfort, and pleasure for women into performative skills men cynically learn at a weekend workshop for a heightened chance to get laid.
But what’s so bad about self-interest? Isn’t that the fundamental motivator that brought you to feminism in the first place, because you realized you were mistreated under patriarchy and grew to demand better for yourself? I understand wanting men, straight people, white people, to show up purely out of altruistic desire. But I don’t think this is healthy, nor is it a motivation that’s built to last. I know this, personally, as someone who tried for years to think as little as possible of my own needs. I felt overstuffed, yes, but also scraped clean from the inside out, like a jack-o-lantern before the knife goes in.
Lilla Watson is famously credited with an Aboriginal Australian quote on political organizing: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I wonder about seeing straight relationships in these terms, not simply as sites of constant oppression where it is the man’s job to save the woman from himself, but rather as sites of differential power where love and desire motivate both parties to move toward mutual benefit.
* * *
Mom,
If it would have been Hitler’s work for me to have kids and not raise them Jewish, is it Hitler’s work to not have any kids at all? You don’t seem to think so, since you’ve seemed to make peace with my unlikeliness of producing heirs. None of my relationships last, at least not long enough for me to envision children with my partners. And the worsening state of our rights, our social systems, and the very environment we inhabit makes it hard to envision extending our family line. I think I told you this once, but in case I didn’t: I would proudly raise my kids Jewish now, if I ever found myself raising one.
You have to find a way to live. Like I said, I always heard it as an appeal to shut out the horrors I learned in university classes, in books, on the endless crawl of a glowing screen. But solidarity is also finding a way to live. Demanding accountability from elected officials, challenging corporate interests, learning to garden, cook, and care for my community; these too are ways to live, ways of maintaining integrity even as the world falls apart.
I’ll share another memory. I’m on that couch again, just a kid under the parrots reading a book and happy to be close to my mom, who’s in the kitchen keeping our household fed, keeping us alive. I keep saying to you, from the couch, “I love you mom,” and you keep saying it back, until you get frustrated after about a half-dozen repetitions. Why do I need to keep hearing it? Why can’t I just trust that your love is unconditional, as you’ve always proven it to be? Why do positive affirmations just wash over me, forgotten as soon as the sounds die out, while something as simple as the dim light of a rainy day wrecks my entire psyche?
Who is this weepy presence, this flickering wisp who seems to predate my conscious awareness? Perhaps an atrophic muscle in need of strengthening, a tender spot in need of callus. This sensitivity, my delicate beast, a skill I’ve found a way to train.
Heather was right. I am emotionally needy, dependent on the support of others. But I have come to acknowledge that this is not weakness, nor is it always too much. My life is full of the companionship of others, who adore me as much as I adore them.
* * *
Mom,
How strange to read that back just a few weeks later, having unexpectedly started a new romance. I look at that dour and fateful present tense—“none of my relationships last”—and hope I might one day leave it behind.
The first night Arielle and I held hands, her touch so profound I asked for a moment in which I could shut up and just breathe, she told me it had been years since she’d dated a straight cis man. She wondered aloud if this, me, was where her desire might lie in the long run. The fresh uncertainty chilled me. But I’m not the man I’ve always been. I recovered, held my fear of loss in one hand and her earnest sharing in the other, and admired them both.
She likes that I can do that. She likes a lot of things about me, it turns out.
You surprised me, too. I called you the next day while I pruned my tomatoes. I told you she has a great sense of humor, no dietary restrictions, and sings communal Jewish songs about repairing this cracked and broken world. You were thrilled. But I was worried you’d tell me to stay away from someone who wasn’t at least sure they liked my gender. Instead, you said, “You know what, Adam? It’s always something. There’s only so much you can control.” I said some uninteresting shit like “nothing is promised,” and you said it right back, affirming. It felt profound, like most cliches do when you finally say them at the right moment. I could tell from your voice that you were smiling.
It’s possible this relationship won’t last either. But hopefully the lesson remains, which is something like: the man I am is loved for what he is. And the man I am is capable of change.
You recently teased me about the basis of this project, noting it was always in my nature to turn the critical eye inward. “So don’t blame feminism for making you hate yourself,” you said, smiling wryly with your classic nod. I know, mom, I don’t.
It’s dreadful to learn that one is complicit in ages-old systems of violence. James Baldwin wrote to his nephew in the letter titled My Dungeon Shook, describing white folks’ terror of having one’s racist assumptions exposed: “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.”
I’m a straight white man. You’re two for three. The sun is shining and the stars are aflame—it sure is hot. Still, I’ve learned to carry my heft with lessening shame. I have nothing to apologize for, but we both have so much to give.
I love you, mom. And this time I don’t even need to hear it back.
