When does a boy become a man? In some societies- tribal cultures in particular- there are very explicit initiation rituals and ceremony. You’re a boy, you go through the initiation, now you’re a man. And perhaps there’s a later initiation where a man becomes an elder.
Before there were widespread public schools, boys were apprentices- and you probably became a man when you finished your initation.
I get the sense that in some ways, masculinity and manhood, in the classical sense, is fundamentally economic. In tribes or nomadic bands, you become a man when you begin to hunt, begin to provide food, become able to provide for a family. A child is fragile (literally). It’s a dependent on its hosts, like a parasite (only I guess parasites are unwelcome, while we’re wired to love and want children to pass our genes on to or something.)
Modern civilization is interesting. It seems to have been so successful at providing for itself that it doesn’t need as many Men (in the economic sense) as before. And this can be a good thing- it allows for the care of the disabled, it allows for the development of art, poetry and so on. (Though that’s definitely reductive. Art predates agriculture and industrialization. And I believe in the earlier days artists were supported by wealthy patrons. It was also a way to make a living.)
Aside- it’s interesting to think about the role of art in difficult times. Lee Kuan Yew was a man who appreciated literature, but when he became Prime Minister of Singapore he insisted that poetry was a luxury that we couldn’t afford. I suppose what he meant was that we couldn’t afford to spend tax money on it when there were more life-and-death concerns like housing and healthcare. At the same time I think it’s quite well understood that art helps people cope with life. I’m thinking of how LKY read poetry to his wife when she was bedridden, and of that heart-rending rendition of Home by the visiting choir at LKY’s wake. And reports of how the first acts of healing following 9/11 were people singing in the streets. Karl Paulnack’s speech.
Pause.
I spent some time asking people about their thoughts, mostly along the lines of, when does a boy become a man? There were some joke answers, and some questioning-the-question (I’m well aware that masculinity and manhood are social constructs- I’m not looking for some absolute answer, I’m looking to understand what people think about manhood themselves, whether it be ideas they inherited, reacted against or outright rejected. I don’t want to delve too deep into the meta-analysis- the objective of this whole pursuit is to better understand and appreciate the relationship I have with myself and my own self-identified.
Pause.
What is the point of all of this? If I were honest with myself I’m still looking for some sort of validation. I’m still looking for some sort of proof or evidence that I’ve grown up. I was telling a couple of other friends– I still feel hurt and frustration from all the things I’ve been told about me since I was a kid– uncooporative, stubborn, disruptive, lazy, not hardworking enough, etc. I’m doing these vomits partially to show that, fuck it, if I want something, I’m going to work towards it, and I’m going to keep going, and keep going, and keep going, and nobody’s going to stop me. I think that’s part of how I grow up. ALthough I think a part of growing up will also mean being a little less petty, a little less obsessed with other people think about me. I have to grow out of that, I have to seek my own self-respect. Which is a bit of a paradox type thing– if you’re still a child, self-respect doesn’t really mean anything. Self-respect requires some sort of internal “higher self” to respect the whole.
It’s funny. After all of this thinking and shaking and spinning, I find that there isn’t really anything big, anything groundshattering, anything different. What I thought was interesting is that there’s a fundamentally economic thing about being a man and growing up– I don’t mean money, I mean in terms of resource and energy allocation in the most abstract, general sense. About being responsible, about taking responsibility, about consulting and engaging with reality, about navigating and negotiating reality. And when I spend time here, inside my head, away from my friends and peers, I find myself thinking… I really want to get better at all of that. What changes when I’m around people? I guess I become performative. I start thinking about how to look good, rather than how to actually be good. I think I’ve gotten a little better at knowing the difference over the years, and I’m becoming better and better at controlling myself, avoiding saying stupid things.
Should a person be in a rush to grow up? That’s always going to sound silly. But I’ve always felt like I’ve been trailing behind somehow. And I’m betting that that feeling is going to persist for a long time, I’m not sure if I’ll be satisfied somewhere in the middle. I mean, I can and should learn to appreciate wherever I am at any given moment, that’s part of appreciation and fulfillment and all that.
It’s weird, before I started writing this I felt like there was a lot that I needed to unpackage here. But now that I’m here, I guess maybe because I’ve talked about it so much with several different people, it feels like there isn’t really anything that needs to be said. I was once a child. I was once a silly, stupid boy who made mistakes, was brash, naive, rough around the edges, messy. I’m not quite the man I want to be yet, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be. But I have made progress, and I will continue to make progress. And eventually I will be at a point where I’m moving faster than my circumstances, at least, faster than the circumstances that I’m used to, the tempo that has been seered into my brain as the pace that my life was supposedly supposed to be.
All of this is an incredibly roundabout, convoluted way of saying that I’m doing a fuck ton of due dillegence before I say my piece, do what I wilt, become the person that I personally think I ought to be. These vomits are roundabout and convoluted by nature, and/but I’ll finish them because I said I would. That’s one of the things a man does.