Pissing in the wind
On Gen X men and failure
The men are not alright, and the men have not been alright for a very long time. But right now? The Gen X men are very much not alright.
(this newsletter has mentions of suicide, addiction, and mental health… just FYI)
In a very funny and well-written review of Senator Josh Hawley’s new book, Manhood (more on that title and the author in a minute), Rebecca Rothfeld of the Washington Post provides us with an absolute banger of a lede:
For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis. Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence. As far back as the 1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little boys. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in Esquire that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” A dispatch from the journalist Susan Faludi confirmed that manliness remained “under siege” in 1999.
You should really read the whole thing, but here’s the essential thing she says about Hawley’s new book, which, let’s face it, neither you nor I are ever going to read. Hawley, writing in the same pseudo-advice-for-men-but-actually-conservative-propaganda genre as books like Robert Bly’s Iron John and Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life, argues that “masculinity is, at once, a biological endowment and a personal achievement.” That notion, that manhood is something one earns, is part of why there is currently an escalating (and frightening) backlash against trans and gender nonconforming people. Because if manhood is something you have to earn, that also means it can be threatened, and that right now, Hawley’s version of manhood is terrified that it might be going extinct.
Let’s hope so, because Hawley’s theocratic and reactionary worldview is actually dangerous. Hawley was born in 1979, putting him right at the tail end of Gen X. Some polling reveals Gen Xers are becoming more conservative as they age and are surprisingly Trumpy for a bunch of people who had to deal with an absolutely disappointing run of presidents from Reagan to Bush Sr. to George W to Bill Clinton (if you still have any kind of optimistic view of Clinton, I recommend this season of the podcast Slow Burn, or just reading anything written about him by women).
Here is the thing about Gen X men, and Gen X white men in particular. They were handed everything in terms of political and sociological power, and they were not happy about it. And then feminists said nasty things about them and they were not happy about it. They invented the internet, and they were not happy about it. They even made porn available to everyone, all around the world, 24 hours a day, just a neverending firehose of porn, and they weren’t happy about that either. They made some good music, and they weren’t happy about it, and they took that misery and did one of two things with it. They either internalized it, and became sour and spiteful, or they lashed out like dying animals caught in a trap, except the trap was called “ummmm yes so people of color, women, and queer people would like to have the same advantages you do.” But they just chewed a leg off and ran.
*****
This is to say that my ex boyfriend died recently. He was one of those had-it-all white Gen X guys. Handsome, funny, talented, born into privilege, and just scornful of the whole world which was apparently out to get him. He could be extremely charming (a skill learned, no doubt, growing up in one of the wealthiest and whitest counties in California), but he could also turn on a dime and be physically and emotionally violent, and I and God knows how many other women bore the brunt of that. It wasn’t a long relationship, but it was a very painful one, and the mutual friend who let me know confessed that he felt some relief that the guy was gone. And I had to admit that I shared that.
I don’t know what makes men my age so unhappy and so unfulfilled, but I have recently talked with a lot of men my age and they all seem to be yearning for something that seems frustratingly out of reach, whether that’s a relationship, the right job, or just things they can’t afford, which in the Bay Area is mostly owning a house but also things like eggs and milk. And my ex was like this too, always just missing out on something. He was a musician and was always *this close* to being successful, but it was the *this close* that made him bitter and angry, and that made him drink (a lot) and do drugs (a lot) and sometimes hit people (me, he just pushed around, because I’m a rather sizable person).
He once wrote a verse to a song about me saying I was “not even a popular bitch.” Cruelty was easy for him, because he’d been born into everything. The relationship flamed out in all the usual ways and one night, he followed me to my friend’s apartment and stood in the street yelling that “the fat bitch” needed to come downstairs, and her punk rock roommates threw dozens of empty beer bottles at him until he left.
This is the thing about men like this, and like Josh Hawley, and like a lot of men in the Gen X cohort: they are really unhappy, much of the time, because women and people of color and queer people are taking up more space, more air time, more of people’s minds. And that means that someone has to give up some of their space, air time, and their power. Someone has to move over or out of the way. And this feels unfair, because it’s competition, and they have never had that. They want to be “down” and “men of the people” but Hawley and Ron De Santis and Ted Cruz went to Stanford and Yale and Princeton and Harvard but they never mention it, just like my ex never told people he was from the rich white country but instead said he spent all his time in the Black city a couple of towns over. Cultural appropriation isn’t unique to Gen X but since hip hop achieved its Golden Age during Gen X’s 90s blip of cultural significance, there was a discomforting amount of it in men of my generation. That includes another white guy I knew who used to rap “Straight Out Of Compton” with the hard-r noise at the end of that word white people should never, ever say. It didn’t occur to him that you shouldn't do this while driving a car through West Oakland. He was unhappy, too, and NWA gave him a pose that he’d never have come by naturally.
Gen X men are also parents of the most defiant generation when it comes to gender. 50% of Gen Z believes gender norms are outdated, at least by some polls, but I’ve been teaching a class on gender and writing at Berkeley for the past year, and when it comes to binary ideas about gender and the kind thinking of of masculinity and manhood , that ship has sailed and it’s not turning back. Hawley’s idea of manhood as “a biological endowment and a personal achievement,” as Rothfield describes it in the WaPo, is so alien to my Gen Z students, even the football players, that it might as well be an idea traveling to earth from the vast reaches of some outer galaxy. Or at the very least, it’s an idea from a different generation.
My ex had a son by a woman he was apparently with only briefly, and I only found this out by reading his obituary online because we hadn’t spoken in decades. I left Facebook, so I never know when someone has died, but I made a burner Facebook and looked at my ex’s page (chaos), and his son’s page, and his son’s page was what finally made me sad. His son mentioned his father hadn’t really been around for him when he wanted a father, and that his father’s “demons” are what killed him, which could really be anything, but was probably drinking or drugs. Then I deleted the burner account and listened to a lot of Prince ballads for a few days, because my ex loved Prince.
I sometimes think about how Gen X men who were musicians may have suffered the most, because their cultural relevance was so fast and fleeting and on top of and in addition to that, they had to struggle to act like “men” by standards that didn’t always fit them . Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, DMX, Shock G, there are lots more, but they died from unhappiness and frustration. Something was always just out of reach, whether it was privacy, God, fame, women, men, the right high, the right feeling that they never had the right words for. All the guys in my MFA program were miserable too, sad men writing sad things, and never talking about their sadness. It all went into the work, and the work became an albatross, and almost no one I went to grad school with even writes at all any more.
And the thing is one of the ways men could be less sad is if they were allowed to be more themselves. More authentic, more revealing, more honest. And the more the Josh Hawleys and Jordan Petersons of the world tell men they are failing to be “men” in this very narrow and specific way, the more men will fell like failures, and the more they’ll drink and snort and shoot and hit. And the more of their kids will someday post on whatever form of social media will be around that their fathers fucked up because their fathers had everything handed to them, and they just destroyed it, and then they destroyed themselves.
I don’t miss my ex, but I want better for men. Or at the very least I want them to understand that they are not at risk of being eliminated. They are not endangered. They are hurting themselves, however, and that really needs to stop. It’s too late for a lot of Gen X men, but maybe not for someone reading this, or someone who knows someone who reads this. Or maybe, like Neil Young said:
You’re all just pissing in the wind
You don't know it but you are