Slow dancing with a mate

When you’re writing up research you usually have to write an impact statement where you describe how what you’ve learnt about might be put to use one day. I’m pretty relaxed about the idea that my thesis (if it ever gets written) will mostly just occupy some dusty space in a university server somewhere, almost entirely untouched for the rest of time. But I’ve not got many regrets about taking it on because it has lead me into so many conversations about what it is to be a man or woman, and I know there is lots of good that has come from these. My interest in this area came from trying to understand the lived experience of boys at school, and it’s still in this area where I hope a lot of what I’m learning might one day be able to be used. I reckon that what my impact statement is going to focus on. 

First and foremost, I talk to Naomi about all this stuff, and some of what I read is a catalyst to chats that mean I get to appreciate her position a little better. The school I was in when I started the research had so many great colleagues who were also great mates and I talked to them loads, and although it’s not easy to get into it when you’re a little less familiar with professional colleagues, I hope to have these chats in my current school at some point (hoping as well that I’m not going to look too weird in doing so). I’ve also been lucky enough to talk to pupils about what their gender means to them more often. But probably more than anyone other than Naomi, I talk about being a bloke to three mates from school on a WhatsApp chat, and given that it’s Father’s Day tomorrow and all of us are now dads I thought I’d stick something up about the idea of sharing what it is to ‘be a man’, and share also a resource for teachers for getting a conversation going with students (which is towards the end for those who want to skip there).

When we think about what it is to be a man, there are some physical markers that people might be drawn to, like sex characteristics, and there are also reified markers of gender. These are cultural symbols of ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’, or rather masculine and feminine practices. Some of these might be linked to male and female bodies but then society gets carried away with the idea, like height or muscles: despite overlapping normal distribution of heights for each sex, because the averages for males is taller than females, we reify being tall with being masculine, or rather it becomes a symbolic marker of masculinity. Muscles too, however in the case of muscle mass that’s something that individuals can then feel a pressure to conform to, causing a social pressure, and further exacerbating things. 

Some of these markers of gender however are so far disconnected from any physical reality of being men or women, and yet they persist because of the way we learn gender, and emotional stoicism is one of them. This is the idea that it is masculine to repress emotional responses to things (aside perhaps from anger) and hide vulnerabilities, or conversely it could be interpreted as ‘to share how you’re feeling is to do a bad job of being a man.’

Carrie Paechter (2007) described how we learn what it is to be a man or be a woman from ‘communities of practice’ that we are placed in, and we can simultaneously be in overlapping communities. As a boy you’re a prospective member of the ‘dad community’, but obviously you’re lacking the children to be a full member:

“…boys can be seen (broadly) as apprentice men, learning, through observation of the men they encounter and peripheral participation in their activities, what it means to be a man in the local communites of practice in which they live.” (Paechter, 2007, p7) 

There are some sources who would derive the source of emotional stoicism from a historical necessity to be tough because of the amount of adversity that men in the olden days had to face, which I dispute. The fact is that men embody emotional stoicism because they are judged in their performance as a man against a standard that was set by fathers who learned it from fathers who learned it from fathers who… you get the point. And this is probably one of the things need to be addressed for meaningful change in how boys learn what it is to be a man.

Being a father is an interesting position because in a way it has some contradictions caught up in the role as a man, who may be judged on their emotional stoicism, and as a care-giver. My supervisor sent me a couple of interesting articles this week about caring masculinities which debate the impact of this version of masculinity in potentially changing longstanding stereotypes of what it is to be a man. Caring masculinities are described by Elliott (2020) as masculinities that reject domination and patriarchy and involve principles of care in their practice such as positive emotion, interdependence, and relationality. Fathers are commonly the subject of studies on caring masculinities. In recent decades some social theorists, and even government papers, have pointed towards the promotion of caring masculinities as an avenue towards raising boys’ achievement. But others would argue that the very nature of being caring is another reified marker of femininity, so rather than being a progressive form of masculinity, it is more likely to be subordinated against stereotypical hegemonic forms. 

There are definitely different ways to be a father, but generally I think that a man caring for a child is something that society views as pretty masculine because having people depend on you is stereotypically masculine. But needing a bit of looking after yourself as a man is definitely different: emotional stoicism prevents performances of vulnerability. This is a really big problem for fathers because the stress of parenting is all too real, and when you become a father I think you're redefined from a position of being someone's child, who can privately accept support from parents, to a position where there is a social expectation to be in control of your life all of a sudden. Loads has been said about this  both in academia and in the media with celebrities railing against the idea of ‘manning up’ being synonymous with shutting up when it comes to sharing your feelings, although not necessarily in relation to fathers. Of course, its difficult to force a change like this though because gender is so deeply entrenched in identities and identity construction. That brings me to this video, which I think is an awesome resource for talking about emotional vulnerability with boys and girls at school. It’s a music video for the song Something about you by Elderbrook and Rudimental. 

I think there is so much in this that you could draw on in a conversation: the worry wrapped up in expressing yourself to other men and the way in which you feel a pressure to do it in a manly way. In fact there’s so much that I don’t want to start going into picking too many parts out, but encourage anyone to have a watch and a think themselves. 

There is just two parts that I want to mention though: the first is at about 1min10s in, when one guys put himself out there and another steps in and ‘goes through the steps’ with them. This reminded me of the support that you get as a parent when you know that you’re not alone in your experiences and that other parents are having a tough time too. That WhatsApp group with my mates helps with that.

I think if I was using this as a resource in school then I would put some prompt questions with it, or ask people to think of the different people in the video and what they might be feeling. But it would be great to hear from other people about how they might use something like this.

The other bit that I wanted to mention is at about 3 minutes in when the guys have a slow dance together. For me this represented those rare moments when you properly put your guard down with someone. Honestly I don't think I do that with my mates from school because we spent too long trying to carve out presentations of ourselves that were emotionally stoic, although we're getting better. There have been a couple of guys at uni, work and football however. Maybe you do it because you feel you can with them, or maybe it’s just that they were there when it all got a bit too much, but they didn’t bugger off or hang up because it was all too weird to see another man being vulnerable. I’ve only had a few of those moments in my life and I’m very lucky to have had some men there to give me a hand. They’re all dads too now actually so that’s my father’s day nod to them. Thank you to those guys that I’ve slow danced with when I’ve needed to. Happy Father's Day!

 

Paechter, C. (2007) Being Boys, Being Girls: Learning Masculinities and Femininities. 

Elliott, Karla. 2020. “Bringing in margin and centre: ‘open’ and ‘closed’ as concepts for considering men and masculinities.” Gender, Place & Culture 27, no. 12, 1723–44