Studs, Tools, and the Family Jewels

Studs, Tools, and

the Family Jewels
Metaphors Men Live By

Peter F. Murphy

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press
2537 Daniels Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53718

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England

Copyright 2001
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved

5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murphy, Peter Francis.
Studs, tools, and the family jewels: metaphors men live by / Peter F.
Murphy.
182 pp. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-299-17130-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-299-17134-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. MenUnited StatesLanguagePsychological aspects. 2. Sexism
in languageUnited States. 3. MasculinityUnited States. 4. English
languageUnited StatesSex dierences. I. Title.
HQ1090.3 .M87 2001
305.31dc21 00-010619
Dedicated to Shere Hite, Leslie Fiedler,
and Roland Barthes (19151980)those with whom
I share a profound interest in the everyday
 Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 3

I The Language of Male Bonding

1 Sex as Machine 17
2 Sex as Work and Labor 38
3 Sex as Sport 59
4 Sex as War and Conquest 76
5 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 98

II Beyond the Present

6 Insidious Humor and the Construction

of Masculinity 119
7 From Theory to Practice: New Metaphors
of Masculinity 135

Notes 147
References 159

vii
 Preface

I realize that writing this book makes me vulnerable. By revealing some-

thing of my own sexual experiences and reactions to this discourse in a
less than heroic light, and in proposing alternative metaphors that are un-
hard, I open myself up to mockery. Men need to take these kinds of risks,
however, risks that women in the feminist movement have been taking for
decades (even centuries) as a way to confront what is touted as natural
and normal. If men are to participate authentically in the struggle to
change the way we think about masculinity and femininity, to move the
discourse beyond the oppressive and the demeaning, we too must take
some risks.
Writing this book has been emotionally dicult. As I worked my way
through each of these metaphors/tropes of male heterosexuality, I became
more and more disturbed by the alienated descriptions of what was pur-
ported to be my sexuality. Although I found some relief in the realization
that somehow I had managed to resist adopting much of this identity, and
that I was not alone among my male friends in this survival, I remained
saddened that most men have nonetheless been crippled by this discourse
(and to a great extent my friends and I are not exempt). The power of
language to create our identities and to teach us how to construct interper-
sonal relationships is so overwhelming that even those of us who have
reflected critically upon who we are as men will never be able to transcend
completely the eect this discourse has upon us.
Some figures of speech were individually more poignant to me than
others, but collectively they proved to be quite disturbing. Blow job, for
example, gave me the most trouble emotionally; I realized that even
though I was quite well aware of this trope, I initially failed to incorporate
it in the list of metaphors I planned to analyze. Although I eventually
made the decision to include it, it was not an easy choice. The reification
in this phrase, its reduction of one particular form of sexual pleasure to an
experience that is both external and mechanical, aected me profoundly.
Gang bang was another extremely troublesome phrase to think
about. The immediacy of the gang rape case in Gouverneur, New York, a
village in northern New York near where I grew up, made vivid my own
near-miss with this experience when I was a young boy. A gang bang, while
ix
x Preface

not gang rape, was one experience that many boys believed proved their
manhood. How that assumption resonates with the socialization of male
heterosexuality in general was an insistent reminder of how depressing
(and ultimately crippling) mens maturation can be.
The project brought humorous moments as well, and I should mention
a couple. While writing the book, I realized that if I had been researching
Twain or Faulkner when a friend asked what I was working on, I would
have answered, Huck Finn or The Sound and the Fury. With this book
I had to respond by saying, Getting laid. Or, when I described the overall
project to a friend and I came to a phrase like jerking o, he said, Thats
one you better keep at arms length.
The title of the book elicits laughter too, probably in part because the
topic tends to embarrass people. When I presented an early version of
its thesis at a small liberal arts college, I became aware of the absolute ne-
cessity to add a separate chapter on humor. As should become clear from
the text, the discourse of masculinity can be very funny in a tragic sort
of way. Male heterosexuality can be understood as a tragicomic experi-
ence. Frequently, though, the actors apprehend neither the humor nor the
misery.
I wrote this book to help reveal the insidiousness of language in the
tragedy of contemporary manhood. By unearthing the multiplicity of mas-
culine discourse, how it works against us while appearing to empower us,
I hope men will better understand who they have been forced to become
in American society. Out of this knowledge we may be empowered to re-
envision, indeed re-imagine, and re-construct ourselves as men.
 Acknowledgments

Sarah Gutwirth deserves the strongest acknowledgment and the deepest

thanks for her contributions to this book. It is customary to acknowledge
ones wife, lover, soul mate, partner, and/or significant other at the end of
this particular section and frequently to talk about love, friendship, emo-
tional support, and patience. While Sarah provided all these invaluable
qualities, she is also an excellent editor, critical reader, and demanding
audience. She read this book almost as many times as I wrote it, and she
always brought to her engagement new insights, new phrasings, new ques-
tions. Without her suggestions the book would not be written as well as it
is, thought through as thoroughly as it has been, nor articulated as clearly.
Where it fails in these areas, the responsibility is solely mine; Sarahs rec-
ommendations only improved it.
Few people have the good fortune to marry into a family of editors,
critics, and creative geniuses. I count myself one of those lucky few. Thus
with the warmest, most sincere sentiment I thank Madelyn, Marcel, and
Nathanael Gutwirth for their inestimable contributions to, and their unre-
mitting support of, this project. For those of us who have been raised with
the myth of the meddling, inimical mother-in-law, any man whose mother-
in-law could read this book cover to cover without rejecting her son-in-
law as a pervert should be honoredand I gratefully take this opportunity
to honor Madelyn Gutwirth. Her own feminist work provided me with a
more than worthy goal to which I could only aspire. Her editorial sugges-
tions improved immensely the quality of this book. Marcel Gutwirth, a
funny man in his own right, and a highly sophisticated, even brilliant,
commentator on laughter, strengthened the chapter on humor in particular
and provided countless technical corrections to the entire text. In addition
to his numerous grammatical revisions, he made sure I included the l in
public. Nathanael Gutwirth, one of the great original minds in the world
of advertising, gave me the title. What more need be said?
Neil Schmitz and Bruce Jackson read the earliest draft of the manu-
script, and for that torturous experience I owe them both a great debt.
Neils suggestions for reorganization and emphasis gave me some much-
needed direction at a time when my own doubts about the project were
emerging. Bruces observation at the end of the section entitled Blow
xi
xii Acknowledgments

Jobthat if this is really your take on the term, I should get counsel-
ingconvinced me that I was on to something after all. For their support
at an early stage in the project I thank them both wholeheartedly.
Michael Kimmel also read a very early draft and a subsequent version
of the manuscript. His observations at each stage in the project provided
useful guidance. His belief in the importance of the book and his sugges-
tions for improvement warrant an enthusiastic thank you.
Nancy Walker read and commented on the humor chapter, and John
Massaro responded to the chapter on sports. Their remarks helped
strengthen these sections.
My agent, Anne Edelstein, provided support for the project when I
needed it most. I thank her for her suggestions and for her belief in the
book.
Two readers, James Armstrong and Leonard Duroche, deserve warm
thanks for their advice and suggestions. Professor Armstrong, in particu-
lar, provided copious notes, minute observations, and dicult questions.
His observations forced me to be more clear and precise.
The people with whom I have worked at the University of Wisconsin
Press have made the production of the book painless and enlightening.
My editor, Raphael Kadushin, was always reassuring, helpful, and astute.
Polly Kummel, copy editor extraordinaire, made both my writing and my
thinking more precise. In addition, she contributed many kind words and
humorous anecdotes.
I want to acknowledge the undergraduate students at the State Univer-
sity of New York at Potsdam who attended the very first presentation I
gave of this work. Their responses inspired the chapter on humor and
helped me to understand much better the audience to whom the book is
addressed. David Brown, professor emeritus of politics at SUNYPotsdam,
who invited me to deliver the paper that gave rise to this book and who
has followed the maturation of the manuscript through its several incarna-
tions, deserves a heartfelt thank you. I want also to thank the Womens
Studies Program at SUNYPotsdam, which invited me back to present
the chapter on humor and in that way provided coherence to a work that
sometimes seemed on a track of its own.
My dear friend Victor Chaltain, with whom I grew up in the north
country of New York State, helped me think through the meanings of a
discourse we were both raised with. As always, Victor kept me honest
about who I am in this discourse, my ambivalence, and my lack of
immunity.
Another dear friend, Susan Pearles, suered through the earliest stages
of this project. For her support and critical observations I thank her
deeply.
I must acknowledge Goddard College for awarding me the John Dewey
 Acknowledgments xiii

Fellowship, which gave me a year o from my responsibilities as dean for

academic aairs to finish the book. In this context I should also thank
Scott Cameron, my attorney from Montpelier, Vermont, whose hard work
and perseverance guaranteed a remuneration that allowed me to work on
the book full time. I hope my project is the first in a long line of scholarly
undertakings supported by this fellowship; I hope also that subsequent
awardees do not need the services of an attorney.
On a related note I want to acknowledge some members of the God-
dard College faculty, and especially of the administration, for providing
some invaluable clarification about the nature of the discourse I have ex-
amined here. Contrary to popular belief, men do not have a monopoly
on the authoritarian, competitive, self-serving mentality that informs the
discourse of male bonding. If I learned anything at Goddard during my
rather brief tenure, it is that the struggle for liberation requires a subtle,
critical, and constant vigil. This engagement is in no way the exclusive
purview of women.
In closing, then, I want to acknowledge the male friends I gained at
Goddard who, I believe, are committed to a feminist future. I want to
thank Tom Arner, Bobby Buchanan, Steve Shapiro, Richard Schramm,
David Boyce, and Ken Bergstrom for the work they are doing as teachers,
as husbands, as fathers, and as friends.
A revised version of the chapter on humor, chapter 6, ran in a special
international issue of Mattoid as Examining/Experiencing Masculinities
(vol. 54 [1999]: 6173).
I used The Oxford English Dictionary to locate many of the epigraphs
I cite throughout the book and credit to their original authors; I want to
acknowledge the work the OEDs researchers have done to identify specific
examples of usage.
Studs, Tools, and the Family Jewels
 Introduction

Language orders life through concrete utterances . . . and life enters

language through concrete utterances as well.
M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

We can assume that there is a set of discourses of femininity and mas-

culinity, because women and men behave within a certain range of
parameters when defining themselves as gendered subjects.
Sara Mills, Discourse

Institutional practices people draw upon without thinking often em-

body assumptions which directly or indirectly legitimize existing
power relations.
Norman Fairclough, Language and Power

The metaphors of gender reflect ways of constructing the world, and

ways of coping with it.
Helen Haste, The Sexual Metaphor

Men bond around issues of sexuality, and when they speak about them-
selves, about other men, and about women, their discourse tends to con-
centrate on a few recurrent themes. Clearly, their primary focus is on the
penis. From that central preoccupation men create a discourse of mascu-
linity that in turn engenders a sexuality of war and conquest, whether the
battle takes place at work, on the playing field, in the bedroom, or on an
actual battleground. For most men all relationships are tactical encounters
that have to be won, lest they risk the loss of manhood. The language men
use to describe the way they interact with other people, women especially
but other men as well, evokes a conception of manhood imbued with a
sense of alienation, distrust, fear, and confusion. When men speak of their
lives as men, they hide behind a discourse that protects them from close,
personal, caring relationships with others; they cower, ironically, behind a
language whose meaning even they do not fully comprehend.
The main purpose of this book, then, is to reveal the insidiousness of
3
4 Introduction

language used by men to speak of manhood and heterosexuality and in

this way begin to undermine the discourse of male bonding. By making
public the meanings of these disparaging terms, I hope that fewer men will
feel they have permission to use them against women and other men.
The dominant perspective I use assumes that language shapes us, con-
structs our reality, and creates our identities. The book analyzes metaphors
in order to reveal the shared assumptions they reflect about masculinity.1
This book is less about rigorous scholarship and ironclad categories than
it is about accessibility to words and phrases, and new ways to look at the
discourse of male bonding. Rather than see the book as another contribu-
tion to linguistics or to academic cultural studies, it should be seen as a
critical, even feminist, glossary. Ideally, people should be able to open this
book to any one of the terms, read about it independently of the rest of
the book, and gain something from that brief section. If a person should
become interested from that serendipitous encounter, she or he may want
to read furtheranother section in the same chapter, one from a dierent
chapter, or even one of the introductory pieces to a theme. This book
should be read from the middle out, not just from the beginning to the end.
In fact, the first organizational structure I tried was an alphabetical
list without thematic chapters. The eminent scholar Michael Kimmel, an
activist in the U.S. mens movement, suggested the current organization,
and I agree that it strengthens the book. I still believe, though, that an
argument can be made to include the metaphors in alphabetical order, in
the way Roland Barthes does in A Lovers Discourse. The themes provide
coherence, of course, and they elucidate the violence of the masculine ex-
perience. A list, on the other hand, points to the randomness of it all. For
this reason the organization is alphabetical within the thematic chapters.
This analysis of metaphors of manhood is intended to reveal the as-
sumptions about masculinity that American men take to be normal. Ironi-
cally, this discourse reflects an objectification of self and sexuality, a phal-
locentric sexuality, a disembodied sexuality, and a great deal of ambivalence
about sexuality.
Metaphors emerge from conversation, not just from novels and poetry,
and inform the speech of the most fundamental section of our society, the
common folk, our friends, who are not intellectuals or authors or academ-
ics. Speech is fundamentally metaphorical, and folk language embodies a
speech that is poetic in nature. Indeed, this metaphorical language is a
part of the ordinary discourse many of us frequently rely on to make our
points in conversations.
Aristotle acknowledged and the Romantics emphasizedespecially
Wordsworth and Coleridge, who recognized the poetic nature of everyday
conversationthe predominance of metaphors in popular discourse.
Coleridge, for example, denounces the artificial distinction between lan-
 Introduction 5

guage and reality, asserting, according to Terence Hawkes, that metaphor

provides the means by which words are elevated into living Things
(53). The metaphors I examine are metaphors for men and by men. They
are the metaphors men have created, have imagined, have imposed upon
themselves. These tropes are not literary metaphors but rather the poetic
language of regular people. These conventional metaphors, to use Lako
and Johnsons phrase, reflect the values of a society and are not indepen-
dent of the metaphorical concepts used by that society.
I do not intend, however, a discourse of discourse determinism. 2 An-
alyzing language allows us to explore the underlying assumptions of real-
ity. In this way it interacts with other behavior to constrain the ways we
understand ourselves and how we construct our identities. Language re-
inforces social roles, and, while it may not construct them, discourse both
gives us permission to perpetuate certain behaviors and restricts the pa-
rameters in which our assumptions can change. We objectify women in
our language because our behavior objectifies them. Metaphors that reify
women are imaginable because they make sense from what we experience
in life. We could not use objectifying language if we did not engage in
objectifying. It would not make sense. Language reinforces this alienation
and makes it dicult to imagine other ways of behaving. Although lan-
guage does not determine this reification, it describes it in a way that gives
it legitimacy.
While it is true that men can imagine certain metaphors only because
they make sense in the cultural contexts with which they interact, changing
the language can provide an alternative vision for masculinity; it can sug-
gest another way to talk about and thus conceive of heterosexual male
behavior. The conclusion to this book posits some alternative metaphors
that I hope will initiate a broader conversation about how we conceive of
ourselves as men and how we describe those dierent conceptions in the
language we use.
The suggestion that metaphors have to be understood within the larger
cultural context in which they are articulated, and that they mean more
than their literal interpretations might suggest, is not self-evident for all
theorists. Donald Davidsons now famous (or infamous) assertion that
metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretations
mean, and nothing more (2930) notwithstanding, we cannot deny the
importance to a metaphor of the unusualness of the idea as well as the
originality of how that particular concept is conveyed. The uniqueness of
the language used, the connections between images of two unrelated ideas
or concepts captured by two dissimilar words, make a trope metaphorical.
The metaphors interpreted in this book have a much more dynamic mean-
ing than each word used separately or together. Blue balls, for example,
if interpreted literally, brings to mind the small rubber ball used in the
6 Introduction

game of racquetball, whereas pussy whipped might conjure up a cat-o-

nine-tails made by weaving several cats together, or a womans pubic hairs
fastened to a wooden handle to make a horse whip. Although literal inter-
pretations of these metaphors are inadequate, they do inform many of the
interpretations I suggest. Literal meanings interact with the figurative and
in that way enrich the associative meanings.
Recent work on metaphor, certainly most relevant to this book, exam-
ines metaphor as a cultural phenomenon that permeates popular dis-
course. Although Hawkess primer on metaphor allows for an appreciation
of the broad historical context in which our thinking about metaphor has
evolved, his concluding remarks focus on the contribution anthropologists
have made to the examination of metaphor. Central to his concern is the
significance of the social context for a clear understanding of how eective
metaphor can be within a culture.
Conceptions of how metaphor works as discourse and not just as lan-
guage stress the importance of a cultural environment to the understand-
ing of how metaphors function and give meaning. These observations un-
derscore ways in which language exerts power to suggest that it is not
neutral; rather, it contains within it constructions of everyday life that have
ramifications across a spectrum of behaviors and values.
In this realm discourse theory oers important insights into the power
of language to reinforce social roles, especially in the broader context of
ideology. Although, as Sara Mills observes, no single or even clear defini-
tion of discourse exists, understandings of discourse gain clarity within
the context of linguistic theories and analyses of language. Discourse the-
ory comprehends language usage in its broad social context. Thus lan-
guage can no longer be conceived of as simply expressive, as transparent,
as a vehicle of communication, as a form of representation . . . [but rather]
as a system with its own rules and constraints, and with its own deter-
mining eect on the way that individuals think and express themselves
(S. Mills, 8). That is, a discourse can be seen as a set of sanctioned state-
ments which have some institutionalised force (62). This use of language
influences the way people act as individuals and the way they think. Dis-
courses structure our notions of identity and restrict the way we can imag-
ine ourselves as gendered beings. Discourse organizes social relations and
in that way polices personal relationships.
The discourses of work, sports, war, and heterosexuality, for example,
reinforce culturally constituted social roles. The construction of heterosex-
uality depends upon the norm of marriage, the family and procreation,
which provide the particular regime of truth for the classification of
other sexual and moral practices (Mort, 44). Although homosexuals
constitute the most aggrieved victims of this particular regime of normal-
ity, this ocial standard also torments single or celibate people, whether
 Introduction 7

straight or gay. The norm of heterosexuality pervades our everyday lives

and determines in a variety of oppressive ways who we are as social beings.
In his book on the relationship between language and power Norman
Fairclough examines the connections among discourse, power, and ideol-
ogy. Fairclough distinguishes between coercion and consent as the basis
of power and focuses his analysis on the role of ideology. As the primary
means of manufacturing consent, ideology relies on acquiescence, fre-
quently based on the notion of common sense, or the assumptions of
knowledge held by a community or group. The discourse of male bonding,
grounded as it is in the institution of heterosexuality, depends on a series
of assumptions widely believed to be natural, normal, and truthful. These
premises represent what Fairclough calls an ideological common sense
. . . in the service of sustaining unequal relations of power (84). Fair-
clough goes on to suggest that commonsense assumptions establish and
consolidate solidarity relations among members of a particular social
grouping (84). The social grouping whose relations of domination the
discourse of male bonding perpetuates is, of course, that of heterosexual
men. When heterosexuality is seen as a set of discursive constructs with
which subjects interact, refusing certain elements and accepting others
(S. Mills, 96), the extent to which many of our choices are next to nonexis-
tent becomes apparent. Common sense, in the guise of seemingly innocu-
ous metaphors, perpetuates the myth of a transhistorical human nature
that represents a normal and appropriate social order.
Cultural anthropology provides another broad theoretical framework
for comprehending the social nature of language. James Fernandez, and
David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker, for example, focus on the social
context in which metaphors occur, whereas Herbert Landar suggests that
language is not an isolated creation of individuals but rather a product
of a collective elaboration.3 Fernandez, for one, speaks directly about the
contribution anthropology can make to metaphor theory: First in its in-
sistence upon the role of culture in the formation of metaphoric models
with which various peoples reason . . . and second in its concern to avoid
over concentration on metaphor as the uniquely interesting trope, but
rather to see metaphors in their natural context in dynamic relation to all
other tropes (910). For the metaphors examined here, this characteriza-
tion underlines two crucial points: the discourse of male bonding is not
only cultural but exists in direct relationship to the ways in which men
think or reason about their sexuality, and these metaphors should not be
seen as isolated examples of male oppression of women but as part of a
larger linguistic framework in which men conceptualize and describe their
relationships with women and with other men.
Anthropology focuses on the politics of everyday speech as a cultural
phenomenon and regards language as a broad-based discourse within a
8 Introduction

larger social and historical context. For Sapir, the metaphoric . . . process
is not a simple game of substitution, but rather a creative game where the
pregnant . . . interplay of two disparate terms provides insight that, al-
though it might at times be trivial . . . can also be . . . profound and reveal-
ing of important and deep cultural understandings (32). Some work in
literary theory echoes this notion of a dialectical relationship between the
two dimensions of metaphorical meaning. Hugh Holman and William
Harmon, for example, in their handbook of literature, point out that the
identification of one object with another invests that first object with
emotional or imaginative qualities associated with the second (298).
The transference of emotional qualities in the metaphors I examine
enhances the power of these tropes. Gang bang, for example, combines
the brutality of a gang with the violence of a bullet being fired. Together,
taken literally, these words exemplify the power men have over women,
while as a metaphor they allude to the male myth that women are over-
sexed, craving intercourse with several men. As a metaphor, gang bang
becomes a means to control this mythical sexual need of women by provid-
ing an implicit threat that if women do not behave, men will control them
with as many men as it takes to do so. This metaphor, like all the others
on my list, is not neutral. It is specific to a particular society and acquires
meaning only within the broad context of its culture.
Thus a more precise title for this book might be Analogies, Similes,
Synecdoches, Metaphors, Metonymies, Ironies, and Allusions Men (and
Women) Live by in the North Country of New York State. That is a long
title, to be sure, and nowhere near as poetic as Studs, Tools, and the Family
Jewels: Metaphors Men Live By. It captures, though, some of the chal-
lenges inherent in this work, as well as the regional specificity of speech.
To begin with, the phrases I examine here are not just metaphors but
qualify as a variety of tropes. Some terms I analyze might be more accu-
rately referred to as metonymies, especially if we understand a metonymy
as that which uses one entity to refer to another that is related to it
(Lako and Johnson, 35). Pussy whipped might be a good example:
pussy becomes a metonymy for female genitals and a synecdoche for
woman. Similarly, to say, He doesnt have the balls, makes balls refer
to strength or bravado or manhood in general. Indeed, throughout the
discourse of male bonding examined here, synonyms for the penis repre-
sent a metonymy for the man. To make the case for each of these tropes
as constituting either a metaphor, a metonymy, or a synecdoche would
detract significantly from a consideration of what these phrases mean as
ways in which men describe their heterosexuality. My objective here is to
comprehend the language we use in order to envision changing that dis-
course, not to compartmentalize words or phrases.
Second, these tropes aect women as well as men. These metaphors
 Introduction 9

men live by are experienced equally by women. The stress on the word
men might suggest that the masculine experience is somehow a univer-
sal, unrelated in any way to the experience of women. But these metaphors
profoundly aect the lives of women. They specify, define, and structure
the experiences men have with women in our society. The recurrent char-
acterization of male sexuality as hard, dominant, powerful (e.g., having
the balls, gang bang), and mechanical (e.g., jerking o, lead in your
pencil, wet dreams, piece of tail) structures the kinds of relationships
men can conceive of having with women (and with other men, for that
matter). Women are not merely victims of these metaphors as men are;
ironically, women frequently perpetuate their oppressive structures when
they talk about their own interpersonal relationships (e.g., shooting
blanks and studmun).4
Although many women are privy to such metaphors and indeed also
live by them, as part of masculine discourse the metaphors provide a lan-
guage of oppression in which men may speak secretly about their relation-
ships with women. These metaphors that men live by propose to exclude
women from the conversation and in this way control the dynamics of the
heterosexual relationship.
Third, popular speech is regional. Although metaphors represent a
way in which people understand their language and their experience,
metaphors dier significantly from culture to culture and region to region.
Discourses of gender in particular vary over time and by race, class, eth-
nicity, location, sexuality, nationality, age, and other factors.5 From items
on my list cock demonstrates this dierence best. In the northern United
States cock refers to the penis, whereas in the South it refers to female
genitalia.6
The metaphors examined in this book are predominantly heteronorma-
tive, and they are the ones with which I am most familiar.7 As a male who
was raised in the northeastern United States and, even more specifically,
in the north country of New York State, the metaphors I am familiar with
may not be the same ones a young boy growing up in the Southwest or in
an urban ghetto or in Hawaii may know. These metaphors are also dier-
ent from those used by gay men, no doubt, but just how much gay male
discourse diers from the dominant male heterosexual discourse is an area
still in need of examination.8
The tropes examined in this book voice commonly held assumptions
about masculinity and femininity. They describe, at times poetically, the
beliefs men and women share about sexuality and gender. Language is not
neutral, and discourse frequently articulates unfounded presumptions and
opinions that people take to be true. These metaphors convey, at times
subtly, at times vociferously, traditionally sanctioned assumptions of dif-
ference: of male superiority and female inferiority, of male prowess and
10 Introduction

female sexual availability, of male fear and female deceit. This discourse
of male heterosexuality, in the form of metaphor and allusion, elucidates
the dynamics of malefemale relationships.
Discourse is by nature metaphorical, and this book examines the meta-
phorical character of everyday speech. My concern is with the politics of
language, with how we can change the way we talk about and describe
ourselves as men. I focus here on the metaphors of daily conversation more
than on literary metaphors,9 although literature, as Leslie Fielder has made
abundantly clear, reinforces many of our conceptions of manhood.10
How the more than forty tropes I examine operate as descriptions of
behavior and interpersonal relationships, and how they fall into a few cen-
tral themes of masculinity, focus my inquiry. Each domain is cognitively
intertwined in the conceptual structures involved, however, thus creating
the potential for overlap. Courage as a male ideal, for example, is needed
both in war and in competitive sports, and courage and sexual prowess are
supposed to go together in the ideal male (impotence is a sign of being a
sissy). This intertwining can lead to overlapping discussions in the
dierent chapters suggesting the relatedness of several metaphors.
Clearly, then, these themes of manhood are not mutually exclusive, nor
are the metaphors themselves. While a characterization of masculinity as
machinelike and mechanical constitutes a separate theme in this book, the
mechanistic metaphor also infiltrates motifs of work, conquest, and sport.
The chapter on war and conquest might also have been called Sex as
Violence, but war is the broad ideological framework in which men are
socialized to believe in violence. War endorses rape, murder, and conquest,
but, more important, war teaches men to be warriors and through that
identity to trust violence as a solution. Other themes might also be appro-
priate: for example, Sex as Objectification, though it should become
clear that this theme could serve as an overarching rubric, and Sex as
Animalism and/or Strength, under which cojones and stud might be
discussed.11 I decided on the five themes I use because they seemed the
most general and the most helpful as categories. The themes are fluid; they
provide a loose organizational structure that, I believe, suggests connec-
tions and relationships.
Several metaphors will overlap the individual categories: for example,
wimp is discussed under sport but could also go under heterosexual-
ity; having the balls and pussy whipped are examined in the section
on war but could be discussed equally under sport; faggot and stud-
mun are analyzed under heterosexuality but also relate to men as
machines.
With the few exceptions of bottom line, husband, and jock, the
rest of the metaphors under consideration relate directly to sex (though
the case can be made that jock has at least an implicit sexual connota-
 Introduction 11

tion). This almost singular focus on various aspects of sexual acts under-
scores mens fixation with size, power, performance, and control and how
they always imagine sex through sexual conquest.
Mens confusion, or even ambivalence, about masculinity emerges in
several metaphors examined here, especially those that are synonyms for
the penis. Take, for example, the term dick. While it represents a personi-
fication of the penis and signifies the phallocentric aspect of male sexual-
ity, dick is also a term used to denigrate other males, those who are
mean, domineering, and spiteful. This confusion reflects a degree of am-
bivalence about sexuality that should strike men as absurd. We love our
dicks enough to give them names, while we use the terms we apply to them
as the central insult we bestow on those we do not like. When the phrase
jerking o refers to a person, a jerk-o who resists doing any work,
this synonym for male masturbationpotentially a pleasurable experi-
encebecomes derisive and demeaning.
The language of male heterosexuality allows men to hide their vulnera-
bility and in the process cripples them as human beings. Ultimately, men
translate their fear of being seen as weak or nurturing into violence against
women and gay men; language expresses this violence, sometimes covertly
but always eectively. Lucy Komisar, in her work on violence and mascu-
linity, stresses this eect when she points out that sexual violence provides
the ultimate proof of manhood and that even the language of sex is a
lexicon that describes the power of men over women. Men are aggressive
as they take or make women, showing their potency (power) in the
conquest. Women, on the other hand, submit and surrender, allowing
themselves to be violated and possessed (13435). The not-so-subtle
dierence between the words take or make to describe mens behavior
versus submit or surrender to describe womens makes clear the power
of the phrases examined in this book. Metaphors of masculinity, tropes of
male heterosexual behavior, discourses of manhoodall contribute to the
ways in which men keep women in their place and men maintain their
position of power over them.
As an instance of backlash against feminism, a subject about which
much has been written over the past few years, the popularity of many of
these phrases during the 1960s attests to mens fear of womens demand
for equality.12 The phrases blow job and gang bang, for example,
spread from the United States to Britain in the 1960s. Helen Haste, in her
book on the dominant sexual metaphor of duality, observes the magnitude
of the violent rhetoric produced in response to early manifestations of
feminism, which she sees as motivated by a deep terror on the part of
some men threatened by the idea of women defining sex in their own
terms (181). As women gain some power in contemporary society, men
fear for the continuity of their privilege. Their response has often been
12 Introduction

one of anger and contempt, and these feelings of doubt and animosity are
manifested in the way men talk about women, the way men bond together
to keep women down. Men wield the language of masculinity as a weapon
against women in the ongoing attempt to remain in power.
The discourse of male bonding embodies what Bob Connell and others
have come to call hegemonic masculinity. Harry Christian, for example,
in his work on ways to become an antisexist man, suggests that the omnip-
otence of heteromasculinity occurs in relationship to subordinated mascu-
linities and to women; quoting Connell, Christian maintains that most
men benefit from the subordination of women, and hegemonic masculinity
is the cultural expression of this ascendancy (8). The metaphors I have
identified for analysis contribute to mens power over women and over
other men. Men learn this discourse of masculinity at an early age as it is
passed down from one generation of men to the next. For little boys, ac-
cording to Victor Seidler, language oers a means to conceal themselves.
Men learn to master language as a mode of control over the world
around them. Language becomes a way for men to assert their indepen-
dence and their power (strength), but as Seidler makes clear, as we learn
to deny and estrange our individual and collective needs and wants so that
we can live up to these ideals of ourselves we form and shape the kind of
personal and sexual relationships we can have with others (142). A criti-
cal engagement with this language, this discourse of male bonding, can
contribute to our ability to transcend and even replace a form of communi-
cation and a structure of behavior that cripples us all, women and men.
My approach to examining these metaphors has been informed by the
work of Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams, most notably, A Lovers
Discourse and Keywords, respectively. Barthess fascination with the lan-
guage of everyday life, coupled with his particular focus on the discourse
of love, which is derived from his personal experience, inspired me to em-
bark on this project. In Keywords Williams analyzes the historical develop-
ment of significant political terms, such as class, culture, democracy,
and work. He began his research with the Oxford English Dictionary,
which gave him the etymology of each word and the evolution of its use.
In many cases I choose to examine phrases, not singular words, and thus
my formal research begins with a variety of dictionaries of slang.13 After
recalling these metaphors from my years of growing up male, I used the
information contained in the slang dictionaries to reflect upon my own
experience with this discourse. That is, my interpretation relies on both
etymological research and impressions derived from growing up male in
northern New York.
These are not the only metaphors that can be examined, of course; they
are just the ones I can recall from my maturation into manhood. The list
is not exhaustive, the categories are not exact, the interpretations are sub-
 Introduction 13

jective and personal. None of this is an exact science and it is not intended
to be. The primary objective of the book is to introduce a new way to
think about how we construct ourselves as American men in the immedi-
ate context of the language we use to talk about ourselves as men and in
the process at least to rethink that identity.
To a great extent, then, my interpretation relies as much on my imagi-
nation as it does on a set of defined interpretive criteria. It should be clear
that my methodology, as loose as it may be, synthesizes insights from cul-
tural anthropology, literary theory with an emphasis on discourse theory,
and the politics of language vis-a-vis ideology and concerns about power.
The broader theoretical context relies on feminism as an interpretive
framework to examine representations of gender and sexuality and to ap-
preciate the subtleties of power in all interpersonal relationships.
In addition to the thematic chapters I used to organize the individual
tropes, I have included a chapter on humor as a means to focus attention
on the form of male discourse, not just its content. Chapter 6 examines
the means by which insidious humor enhances the power of the discourse
of male bonding in subtle and even perfidious ways and focuses on humors
ability to mitigate the actual intent of this discourse, thereby sanctioning
a control of interpersonal relationships.
The concluding chapter, chapter 7, attempts to provide some alterna-
tive metaphors as a way to re-envision masculinity. While in no way com-
prehensive, this chapter is meant to initiate the development of a dierent
discourse of masculinity. Very much a work in progress, the last chapter
should be seen as initiating a conversation, certainly not as the last word.
Literature, popular culture, and discourse in general reinforce our be-
liefs about gender, but as powerful as they may be they are not omnipotent.
Of course, one school of thought would disagree with my contention that
changing the language will change behavior. This group maintains that
only with the transformation of cultural behavior can a new language
emerge. I believe that the relationship between language and behavior is
more dialectical, however, and that if we can introduce new verbal descrip-
tors, we can aect the way we think about ourselves as cultural beings. If,
as I believe, masculinity is largely a social and cultural construction, we
can aect its meaning. How we talk about ourselves as men can alter the
way we live as men.
I The Language of Male Bonding
1 Sex as Machine

By renouncing a large part of his humanity, a man could achieve god-

hood: he dawned on this second chaos and created the machine in his
own image: the image of power, but power ripped loose from his flesh
and isolated from his humanity.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

The most powerful cultural metaphor for masculinity is the machine, a

cold, disembodied, ecacious piece of equipment. It encompasses, and is
far more omnipotent than, the metaphors of businessman, athlete, warrior,
hunter, and husband/father. True masculinity as a finely tuned, well-oiled,
unemotional, hard, and cost-eective apparatus deeply informs the way
we conceive of manhood, a manhood that, according to Elisabeth Badin-
ter, the French feminist, is not bestowed from the outset; it must be con-
structed, or let us say manufactured. A man is therefore a sort of artifact,
and as such he always runs the risk of being found defective. There may
be a defect in the manufacture, a breakdown in the machinery or virility,
in short, a failed man (2).
The Oxford English Dictionarys definition of machine can be read in a
way that develops this instrumental view of manhood: a combination of
parts moving mechanically . . . from habit or obedience to rule, without
intelligence, or . . . one whose actions have the undeviating precision and
uniformity of a machine (1687). Male sexuality as involuntary, dumb
even, and a product of rote memorization counters the contrasting cultural
assumption that real men are independent, in control of their own destin-
ies, and of superior intelligence. Lewis Mumford distinguishes between a
machine and a tool and suggests that the dierence lies in the degree of
independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the oper-
ator: the tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to automatic ac-
tion (10). Metaphors abound that characterize the penis as both a tool
and a machine, even according to Mumfords dierentiation. The penis as
an object for manipulation informs such terms as jerking o, whereas
the penis as an instrument subject to automatic action inspires such

17
18 The Language of Male Bonding

phrases as getting a nut o, hard-on, and letting his little head rule
his big head.
The language of masculinity examined in this book suggests that there
exists an uncritical conception of masculinity reducible to a half-dozen
general themes, all of which rely on a mechanical vision of manhood. This
insight is not new, of course, but it remains relatively unexamined. In 1975,
in what might be seen as the early years of the contemporary American
mens movement, Marc Feigen Fasteau published a book called, quite
simply, The Male Machine.1 Here Fasteau describes at great length this
stereotype of masculinity:

The male machine is a special kind of being, dierent from women,

children, and men who dont measure up. He is functional, designed
mainly for work. He is programmed to tackle jobs, override obstacles,
attack problems, overcome diculties, and always seize the oensive. He
will take on any task that can be presented to him in a competitive frame-
work, and his most important positive reinforcement is victory. (1)

Fasteau goes on to develop the metaphor of the machine by referring to

mens impenetrable armor, their internal circuits, their clashing gears, and
their absence of intimacy. Men as automatons, men as executives, men as
super athletes, men as invincible soldiers, and men as sexual performers
these are the mechanical roles males must assume or be labeled faggot,
queer, wimp, or wussy.
Although the association between masculinity and the machine may
be a recent one for the American mens movement, the mechanistic con-
ception of masculinity began at least as early as Plato and Aristotle.2
Helen Haste examines the development of the mechanistic metaphor
through Descartes and Bacon and finds that this conception of masculinity
reinforced the belief that nature could be brought under control; with Na-
ture cast in a stereotyped feminine role, and Man cast in a stereotyped
masculine role of activity and control (76), man as rational machine be-
comes a means to master the organic and the natural (i.e., the feminine).
Mumford carries this point forward when he suggests that in attempting
to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what
comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of himself except
that which was bent on seizing power (31).
Although the clock, considered to be the first real machine, represents
best this desire to control nature, Mumford sees the iron discipline of
rule (13), which occurred in both the monastery and on the drill field, as
introducing the kind of structure and mentality Western civilization
needed to build machines of production and conquest. Mumford demon-
strates this in an illustration of a fortified camp from 1573: Sixteenth
century drill was the prelude to eighteenth century industrialism. Precision
 Sex as Machine 19

and standardization appeared at an early date in the formations, the exer-

cises, and the tactics of the army. The mechanization of men is the first
step toward the mechanization of things (fig. 3, after p. 84). As the instru-
ment that keeps track of time, the clock helps realize the bourgeois ideal
that time is money. The earliest machines, then, reinforced the ideals of
a society fixated on ecient production, market value, armaments, and
competition, ideals that reverberate throughout the Western conception
of masculinity.
In contrast to the introduction of mechanization into the mine and
onto the battlefield, the machine came most slowly into agriculture with
its life-conserving, life-maintaining functions (Mumford, 36). Despite this
positive aspect to mechanization, the epigraph to this chapter emphasizes
the alienation of the machine from mans humanity and his obsession with
power and control. Men as machines identify with death, their own and
others.
The mechanical model of masculinity fixated on control manifests it-
self today in a variety of ways. Many men still believe, for example, that if
they can just master the right technique, they can satisfy women sexually
and bring them to orgasm. Men project upon women their limited view of
their own sexuality and assume that with a sucient number of mechani-
cal strokes anyone can come. This assumption reduces womens sexuality
to passive nature while envisaging mens sexuality as instrumental and
active.
Ironically, the discourse of masculinity examined in this book demon-
strates mens ambivalence about power and control. The phrase getting a
nut o exemplifies this confusion. A man who gets his nut o partici-
pates in a passive occurrence delivered upon him by a woman whom he
watches as if from afar or who performs a sexually satisfying act upon
him. The man is not in control of this activity, nor is he in control of her
sexual pleasure. The contrast between mens socialized need to dominate
and their desire to relinquish control haunts many metaphors examined in
this book.
Indeed, the discourse of masculinity resonates with this instrumental
conception of manhood, and the metaphors examined in this section refer
explicitly to male sexuality as mechanical. This allusion informs several
other sections as well: men at work, men at war, men on the playing field,
and men in intimate relationships all reflect a vision of manhood as opera-
tional, technical, and perfunctory. A man as a machine, with his tool, his
prick, his hard-on getting a nut o provides the dominant metaphor of
masculinity.
20 The Language of Male Bonding

COCK
As a spout or tap, such as in a barrel (Spears, 86), a cock functions as a
spigot that allows for the flow of wine or cider out of a wooden keg. The
first cocks were made completely of wood and consisted of only two parts,
the screwing device that turned on and closed o the flow of liquid, and
the tube through which the liquid flowed. This faucet . . . by which the
flow of a liquid or gas can be regulated (American Heritage College Dic-
tionary, hereafter AHCD, 268) constitutes one of the earliest machines and
certainly one of the simplest. As a machine made only of wood, cock has
an organic origin, not just a mechanistic one, but the mechanical quality of
this particular apparatus has eclipsed the natural.
In suggesting that the origin of the term cock of the walk (discussed
separately in chapter 4, Sex as War and Conquest) may derive from the
image of the male member . . . as . . . resembling a chickens neck or water-
valve (102), Tony Thorne makes explicit the characterization of the penis
as a mechanical apparatus, something that is turned on and o indier-
ently to pour water or other liquids. The penis as an unconscious machine
resonates with the notion of the male body as an instrument or a device
engineered to perform a particular task.
In northern New York State and, as it turns out, throughout the North-
east as well, cock refers to the penis. This association has been around
for a long time, at least three hundred years. A synonym for the penis,
especially the erect penis, this term, according to Thorne, is used all over
the English-speaking world, dating in Britain from the seventeenth cen-
tury (102). Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner cite Shakespeares
Henry IV, part II, written in 1599: And Pistols cock is up (112).
Any assumption of universal meaning is, however, incorrect. Richard
Spears points out, for example, that in much of the Southern United
States and Caribbean, cock refers to the female [genitals] exclusively. Pos-
sibly related to cockles. . . . Women considered solely as sexual objects
(87). Frederic Cassidy oers as his first definition of cock the female
genitalia and cites several specific references to its use in that way from
the 1940s to the 1970s (707).
I had always assumed cock to be a generic term for the penis used
everywhere in the United States with exactly the same meaning. I also
inferred that cock came from rooster and had to do with cock of
the walk as the strident, erect male member. The realization that cock
invokes both male and female genitalia depending upon what region of
the country you are from suggests, minimally, that the discourse of mascu-
linity is ambiguous about sexuality. This ambiguity is evident throughout
many terms examined in this book, especially those that have the dual
 Sex as Machine 21

meaning that conflates the penis with a bad person (e.g., hard-on, prick,
dick, etc.).
Although as an early machine made only of wood, a cock has an
organic origin, not merely a mechanistic one, the use of the word as a
synonym for penis emphasizes a screwing mechanism that characterizes
the penis as a insentient tool. A focus on the historical origins of the term
could help to underscore the natural, the malleable, and the unassuming.

GETTING A NUT (OFF)

Hed get his nuts just looking at her / When Id gotten my nuts o
about six times, we got hungry.
Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

This hydraulic metaphor advances a conception of manhood removed

from intimacy and satisfied by a mechanical release of liquid. Although
nut or nuts, as a synonym for testicles, is usually understood as a
reference to the fruit or seed from a tree or bush, a nut is also the recipi-
ent of a bolt. A nut and bolt, like a spigot, can be seen as a simple machine
or device. On and o, as states of a machines either working or not
working, reinforce this mechanistic conception of male sexual behavior.
As a slang term, getting a nut o or getting ones rocks o refers
both to an immediate and a passive sexual endeavor. A man gets his rocks
o or comes as quickly as possible and then goes on about his business.
Like a machine designed to eject newly minted parts, a man gets his nut
o and moves on to the next experience in his life, like having lunch.
The epigraph from Claude Brown illustrates starkly these assumptions
(and others, for that matter). For the two guys conversing, the woman is
the object of their gaze, the passive detached stimulus of their sexual fan-
tasies. One man fantasizes so much he wants us to believe he comes a half-
dozen times and then just wants (has enough energy left) to eat.
Getting a nut o exemplifies a masculinity alienated from the sub-
ject, the man (and equally the woman, its object). Women remain the ob-
ject of heterosexual male fulfillment, however, so maybe what this meta-
phor really describes, or rests upon, is the virgin/whore dichotomy; women
are either the maidens with whom we make love or the sluts who get us o.
Like many tropes examined in this book (e.g., blow job, blue balls,
getting laid), this one reduces the male heterosexual experience to ejacu-
lation and locates it in a dispassionate occurrence of which he is the recipi-
ent. The instantaneousness of this incident reflects an ideology of mascu-
linity that characterizes male sexual pleasure as both genitally fixated and
22 The Language of Male Bonding

something that is visited upon him. The passivity implicit in this metaphor
suggests a confusion, however, about male power and control. The com-
mon wisdom of men is that they always want to be dominant and the
active participant; men want to be on top. Getting a nut o, like many
other metaphors of masculinity, suggests that there is a certain pleasure to
be found for men in passivity and recipience.

HARD-ON

As they had the capacity and were bound to use it once in a while,
people were bound to have such involuntary feelings. It was only an-
other of those subway things. Like having a hard-on at random.
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

According to Thorne, to have a hard on has been the most common way
of expressing male sexual tumescence since the early 20th century (233).
A close look at the construction of this metaphor illuminates how it works.
Hard refers to the stiness of the penis when a man (not it, not the penis
by itself) is sexually excited. On suggests being on, being alive, maybe
even vibrant. The hint of sentience in this characterization, of the penis as
corporeal, does not, unfortunately, eclipse the more pronounced implica-
tion of the penis as a wrought-iron machine part ready to be turned on at
the flick of a switch or the steely hardness of a weapon always prepared to
inflict pain.
Ironically, though, hard does not describe accurately the quality of
the penis even when it is erect. The penis goes through a series of stages
in the course of sexual excitement, and hard is only one part of the experi-
ence. And hard is, of course, a relative term. How hard is the erect penis,
and how long does it remain that way?
Emmanuel Reynaud stresses the significance of this terms rhetorical
construction when he observes: If one understands words in the context
of prevailing ideas, their meaning becomes clear: erection is not a delicate
warmth which spreads from the penis through the rest of the body, nor a
pleasant swelling of the penis when the senses are receptive to voluptuous-
ness. Man decides otherwise; erection is the symbol of his power, the asser-
tion of his potency, and its absence is simply his impotence (64).
The term hard-on, when it refers to an erect penis, emphasizes the
correlation between a penis that is as hard as iron and sexual pleasure for
both the man and the woman. The myth engendered in this term asserts
that only when the penis is erect can sexual satisfaction take place. As
many of us know, I hope, sexual satisfaction can take place without the
use of the penis at alland certainly without the penis being erect.3
 Sex as Machine 23

Myths abound about masculinity, and the epigraph I borrowed from

Seize the Day highlights one of them: the belief that erections arise invol-
untarily and that men have no control over them. When the narrator of
Bellows novel says, It was another of those subway things. Like having a
hard-on at random, the emphasis is clearly on the spontaneity of the penis
to just react without any influence from the mind.
The ubiquity of this myth pervades the female imagination as well as
the male. In her collection of short stories called Dick for a Day, Fiona
Giles asked women to respond to the question, What would you do if, by
some mysterious means, you had a penis for one day? While several sto-
ries provide a satirical rendition of the absurdity of the penis to bequeath
power and privilege, and some provide an alternative vision of the role of
the penis in love making, far too many stories rely on the trite and oppres-
sive notion of the uncontrollable hard-on in hot pursuit of a vagina to
penetrate.4 References to the penis as a tool for womens pleasure (used
sometimes to jerk o in the shower [167]), the penis with a mind of its
own (189), the penis as a weapon (220), and the penis as a machine with
hydraulics (233) recur in several stories.
The assumption that men are not in control of their passions, that they
are ruled by their penises, informs much popular culture and certainly
much religious dogma. In the realm of popular culture a joke I heard on
television exemplifies this belief: A woman has to be in the mood, a man
has to be in the room. This joke reinforces the view that men have peren-
nial hard-ons, that they walk around with their penises in a constant state
of erection. When the assumption that male tumescence is both natural
and uncontrollable reaches its most logical conclusion, it becomes an ex-
cuse for rape, as it did for one father in the Glen Ridge, New Jersey, gang
rape (Lefkowitz, 327).
As with so many metaphors examined in this book, hard-on assumes
a derogatory meaning when made to refer to a person. At the same time
that men perceive of having a hard-on as a positive aspect of male sexu-
ality, to be a hard-on is an insult. Robert Chapman points out that to
have a hard-on for someone or something . . . means either to be enam-
ored with or to dislike and make problems for (197).
Thorne sees this term as a piece of macho business jargon from the
late 1970s. The phrase suggests an aggressive and uncompromising wish
to acquire or cement relations with a business partner (233). In light of
other terms examined here (e.g., bottom line), a male tendency to view
all relationships fundamentally as business deals becomes clear.
Hard-on relates also to the male view of the penis as a weapon to
wield power against a foe. The foe in this equation becomes the woman in
the relationship. Reynaud describes the consequences of this kind of logic:
The erect penis is the weapon man arms himself with to try and tame a
24 The Language of Male Bonding

woman via her vagina; and so he tries to make it threatening, and he likes
it to arouse fear (37). Ironically, this weapon, this symbol of power is, in
fact, one of the most fragile and vulnerable organs of his body (Rey-
naud, 36).
This irony makes sense, though, as a compensation for vulnerability.
Men exaggerate the importance of the penis for love making because they
fear what will happen if its insignificance were to become known.

IMPOTENCE
Although all the other metaphors examined in this book constitute part of
the lexicon of male bonding, impotence does not fit into that vocabulary.
The impotent man, one who cannot get a hard-on, is weak, a man without
power or control. Such an inadequate man represents one of the great
anxieties of masculinity, and as a metaphor impotence is so formidable
that it can only be approached through the use of metaphor. Men cannot
talk about a lack of power except by avoiding all direct reference to it. A
metaphor such as wimp (which suggests limp) implies an incapacity
to become erect, but the explicit reference of wimp has more to do with
being womanly and a coward than with the state of a mans penis.
Bob Doles Viagra commercials notwithstanding, men rarely refer to
or talk about impotence, certainly not with other men, and they do not
use impotence as an insult against another man. While virility remains one
of the more vulnerable points of attack against a man, impotence, as an
insult, is usually only an allusion and rarelyif everidentified directly.
The emerging subgenre of Viagra jokes (and Doles commercials) may ini-
tiate a more open discussion of impotence, allowing men to confront their
deep-seated belief that without erections they are useless. Humor fre-
quently hides shame, however, while making explicit underlying fears.
Rarely, though, do we laugh about impotence or even acknowledge it, for
that matter. Impotence is one of the great male fears, and mens silence
about it says far more than does their loquaciousness about other concerns.
Literally, according to Websters, impotence has three basic meanings:
a) a lack of physical strength; weakness; b) lack of eectiveness; help-
lessness; c) lack of ability to engage in sexual intercourse: said of males
(731). Without an erection a man is weak and thus helpless as a lover.
Indeed, an impotent male cannot make love at all, which, in the ideology
of masculinity, has become identified exclusively with sexual intercourse.
As Susan Bordo points out, unlike other disorders, impotence implicates
the whole man, not merely the body part. He is impotent. Would we ever
say about a man with a headache He is a headache? (87). When we
merge impotence with the mans entire personality, we can expect the
personality to perform like a machine (Bordo, 87).
 Sex as Machine 25

Historically, women have been blamed for male impotence because of

their lack of responsiveness to male sexual ardor. In the first decade of the
twentieth century, in the midst of our countrys obsession with the evils of
masturbation, an enormously popular book on sexual impotence by Dr.
William Robinson identified the problem of impotence as frigidity in
women which will not call out his virility. Once again, male sexuality was
womans problem (Kimmel, Manhood, 131).
Robinsons desire to blame women ignores some important distinc-
tions between female frigidity and male impotence; the language itself il-
luminates a dominant confusion. Frigid, the term used to describe a
woman who habitually [fails] to become sexually aroused, means, liter-
ally: 1) extremely cold; without heat or warmth. 2) without warmth of
feeling or manner; sti and forbidding; formal (Websters, 581). A wom-
ans inability to become sexually aroused is an emotional problem relating
to her feelings and even her social upbringing. She lacks a cordial, friendly
manner, and her mien is rigid and proper.
With the application of heat something that is cold can be warmed up.
With the introduction of love, that is, or kindness and understanding, the
frigid woman may be aroused, may be made comfortable, and may be able
to relax and experience sexual pleasure. In contrast, male impotence, as a
weakness, suggests the need for vigorous exercise and implies that only
athletic men, jocks or soldiers, are potent men. A man who is not concupis-
cent has a mechanical defect, whereas a woman who is not lascivious has
an emotional problem. A defect needs a part replaced or augmented or
repaired; a problem needs some kind of attention, consideration, or
response.
One reaction to male impotence has been to ignore it with the hope
that it will go away. This response disregards the emotional aspect of the
mans predicament and confirms the belief that male impotence is a mechan-
ical problem for which the failing part needs rest in order to recuperate.
Another solution for male impotence, and one that certainly reinforces the
mechanical conception of male sexuality, is the penile implant. Looking
very much like a technical device with its reservoir, pump, and cylinders,
the penile prosthesis has been compared favorably to the earliest remedy
for the flat tire when a desperate driver filled his tire with sawdust instead
of air. Now we have the implant, and it works quite well (Gilbaugh, 55).
In addition to the implant, drugs have been developed to facilitate
male tumescence. Before the recent plethora of interest in Viagra, men
relied on a drug called the erector injector designed to cause a penis
to become erect from one and a half to three hours, long enough to sustain
intercourse (Gilbaugh, 54). Considering that the patient himself must in-
ject this drug directly into his penis, this seems a bit torturous just to get
an erection.
26 The Language of Male Bonding

With the invention of Viagra, a pill taken orally, men can now just
ingest this drug and be ready for sex almost immediately. The jury is still
out on the success or failure of Viagra, but men who take it get erections,
and in most cases they last for several hours. Evidence also seems to sug-
gest that for men with heart conditions, Viagra can have serious side-
eects and even lead to death. As a metaphor itself, this drug as a potential
source of male fatalities alludes to the tragedy of the male fixation with
an erection.
Viagra has also been responsible for the demise of many long-standing
relationships and marriages. Men who were not able to get an erection for
several years and who now can are leaving their wives for younger women
or polarizing their wives by inflicting pain on them from interminable in-
tercourse. The belief that all women want intercourse to go on forever is a
male fantasy consistent with the idea that sex is a race, a competition, a
struggle for domination.
While a great deal more still needs to be said about Viagra, at least
some therapists point to its potential to wreak havoc with peoples emo-
tional and sexual lives. According to a recent New York Times article on
the subject, James H. Pitisci, a Miami psychologist and family therapist,
[stresses that] with or without an erection, the level of intimacy between
partners often determines the level of satisfaction. Unfortunately, Pitisci
seems to be still in the minority of male therapists. This same article, for
example, quotes experts who caution that men who have known years of
anxiety and perhaps self-loathing because of inability to perform may en-
ter the Viagra age with unrealistic expectations that an erection alone can
transform them as lovers (Nordheimer, 2). The emphasis here, unfortu-
nately, remains on sexual performance and the crucial role of the erection
in that achievement. As Bordo points out, the term sexual dysfunction,
a euphemism for impotence, is no longer defined as inability to get an
erection but inability to get an erection that is adequate for satisfactory
sexual performance. Performance. Not pleasure. Not feeling. Perfor-
mance (90). Tellingly, with its message of men now being able to perform
all night, do their job no matter how they feel! the hype surrounding
Viagra encourages rather than deconstructs the expectation that men per-
form like power tools with only one switchon or o (Bordo, 90).
Indeed, all the current remedies for impotence emphasize the absolute
necessity for a man to have an erection in order to experience sexual plea-
sure. Although an erect penis can be an important component in love mak-
ing, it is neither invaluable nor crucial. Indeed, when men begin to disas-
sociate sexuality from a sense of manliness in order to break up the
identification between sexual performance and masculinity, we will real-
ize that manhood can be confirmed by something other than an erect
 Sex as Machine 27

penis (Badinter, 125). Men without erections can learn about their other
erogenous zones and begin to appreciate their potential as polymorphous
lovers. Were the lack of an erection to become just a flaccid penis and a
cause of celebration as a source of a dierent kind of wonderful sexual
pleasure, a man would begin to conceptualize his sexuality as, partially at
least, soft, gentle, and gracious.

LEAD IN HIS PENCIL

The penis as pencil or, more accurately, as pen, dominated much feminist
literary theory throughout the 1980s. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
for example, explore at some length the use of this metaphor of literary
paternity in The Mad Woman in the Attic and suggest that the pen has
been defined not just accidentally but essentially [as] a male tool (Mad
Woman, 6, 8).5 Although during the 1990s many other issues emerged in
feminist theory, the penis as a tool and as a weapon of sexual dominance
invites additional analysis.
The phallic image of the pencil as a long, slender, erect tube with inner
workings that extrude from a small opening at the tip resonates with sym-
bolic meaning. Through the pencil men ejaculate lead as the written word
and a source of power, and through their penises men ejaculate sperm, an
even more profound symbol of their power.
A colloquial expression originating in the 1900s, lead in your pencil
emerged just at a time when women were beginning to gain access to ed-
ucation. Considering that one who has lead in his pencil is, according
to Spears, a potent, virile, and vigorous man (215), the relationship be-
tween penis and pencil suggests more than just an innocent allusion.
As a metaphor, lead in his pencil refers to having an erection and
being ready for sexual intercourse. The pencil itself denotes, consciously
or not, the power (or at least authority) men have as those who are in
control of the written word (as authors and publishers). The ability to
write, the opportunity to be educated well enough (or at all, for that mat-
ter), to become literate, and to have ones ideas read and considered was
for centuries the nearly exclusive and now threatened prerogative of men.
Ironically, the assertion Here, this will put lead in your pencil fre-
quently refers to alcohol and implies that by consuming this beverage a
man will be able to get a hard-on and to perform well sexually. John Ayto
and John Simpson take this interpretation one step further when they sug-
gest that this phrase means to be lively or up to date, to enjoy oneself; to
be promiscuous, specifically to engage in group sex [or] partner-swapping
(253). Alcohol, though, tends to reduce a mans sexual ability and may
indeed prohibit him from either getting an erection or maintaining it. A
28 The Language of Male Bonding

man who drinks too much, who tries hard to put lead in his pencil, may
entertain fantasies about being sexually active but will probably be the
first one to fall asleep.6
Hidden behind this rhetoric of male tumescence lies a fear of sexual
achievement and its concomitant, personal intimacy. Haste points out that
most men never see sex as a relationship. Rather, they equate sexuality
with manhood: Making potency central to masculine identity leads to a
rhetoric of prowess and performance, [and] language is permeated with
metaphors of prowess (169). Lead in your pencil is just one example.
Prowess as a synonym for conquest has significance. Although
other metaphors examined in this book relate much more directly to the
penis as a weapon, the power of the pen(cil) is significant. The allusion to
pencil may be derived from the similarity in shape between a pencil and
a penis, but putting lead in ones pencil possesses at least an implicit refer-
ence to adding ammunition to ones arsenal. If, indeed, the power of the
pen is greater than the power of the sword, the penis as a prepared pencil
may not be as pacific as the mere similarity of shape seems to suggest.
Indeed, to return to Gilbert and Gubar: The pen . . . is not only mightier
than the sword, it is also like the sword in its powerits need evento
kill. And this latter attribute of the pen once again seems to be associa-
tively linked with its metaphorical maleness (14).
Like other metaphors examined in this chapter, lead in his pencil
relegates the penis to the status of a mechanism separate from a mans
body. The penis as pencil, especially a mechanical pencil for which one
procures lead, suggests the way in which men take care of tools or instru-
ments that they possess and maintain as something outside themselves.
Embedded in this term lies the performance motif that pervades the gen-
eral discourse of male heterosexuality. The erect penis as machine (or
tool) that alone can give sexual satisfaction, and can be maintained like
a cars engine, permeates our conception of male sexuality with its mecha-
nistic imagery.

PECKER

Otherwise youll start to take a leak some morning and your pecker
will come right o in your hand.
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

This Americanism, according to Thorne, may originate as a rural short-

ening of woodpecker, or as a euphemism for cock, or simply as a metaphor
for an importunate member (385). Much like a jackhammer run by a
 Sex as Machine 29

construction worker, a woodpecker attacks a tree with short rapid jabs

intent on a singular objective. Personified by John Henry, the steel-driving
man, this conception of masculinity as highly competitive, driven, and
unbeatable imbues the American conception of manhood. The insatiable
penis, like the insistent pneumatic hammer, propels forward toward pro-
ductivity and victory.
The irony of pecker as an image for the penis illustrates the signifi-
cance placed on male sexual performance and the importance for the man
to get laid. On the one hand, a man is supposed to have sex with as
many women as possible. Like a woodpecker with his quick strokes, he is
taught to visit as many trees (women) as he can. On the other hand, as a
virile lover he is expected to last for a long time. If premature ejaculation
is the bane of male existence, why, one may ask, have men adopted as a
reference to the penis an allusion to precisely the kind of activity that
brings it on?
Since the penis is an importunate member, an organ that is demanding
or insistent, the allusion to the woodpecker makes some sense. The myth
of male sexual desire as urgent and persistent, uncontrollable and unwill-
ing to be denied, reemerges. The penis as a pecker, as an instrument that
rages forward with a singular purpose, is metaphorical, indeed.

PIECE OF ASS (PIECE OF TAIL, POONTANG)

Him and four buddies want a little dough to get a high class piece
of tail.
George Vincent Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

In recent years feminists have pointed out the pervasiveness of the idea of
woman as sexual object in much of our language. The inclination to reduce
women to body parts and reified entities has been around for a long time.
According to Thorne, piece has been employed in a similar sexual context,
invariably referring unromantically to a woman, since the 15th century
(389). A piece as an isolated part of ones body stresses the possibility
for replacement when it becomes dysfunctional or no longer attractive.
Today, in the era of plastic surgery as a panacea for failing body parts,
women (and more and more men) take themselves to a form of the body
shop, just as men take their cars to for repair of dented fenders and bro-
ken windshields.
Hatred of the human body, and especially womans body, predates the
1600s, of course, resonating throughout much of the Judeo-Christian tra-
dition.7 This view has structured our conception of love, marriage, and
30 The Language of Male Bonding

intimacy. Mans need to control women finds a strong rationale in both the
Old and the New Testament, and his fear of female sexuality has its origins
in the earliest works of Western literature and culture.
The longevity of this particular phrase, though, highlights the extent
to which men have reduced their heterosexual desire to the need for only
part of the woman, not her whole person. By degrading a woman to a
sexualized body part, her ass, a man disentangles himself from any emo-
tional involvement with a womans mind or feelings. When women be-
come, in the male imagination, a piece of something, men gain control,
because women are no longer human and thus not equals.
Poontang, for example, seems to refer specifically to a black woman
considered as a source of sexual gratification (Spears, 338). According
to Thorne, although poontang originated from Louisiana French in
which it is a corruption of putain (the standard French term for whore)
[and was] first applied to black women, it refers more generally to the
female pudenda [or] woman in general, seen as sexual objects (389).
As a general reference to women, the equation of all women with pros-
titutes is just one more misogynist characterization of the female. As a
piece of tail, the female body becomes animalistic, even bestial, and thus
an object of disgust. Animals can be domesticated, of course, and in this
way controlled and exploited.
The metaphors examined in this book frequently manifest a hatred of
women or of men. None is neutral about fear of and contempt for the
human body. Women as prostitutes or sluts, and men as pricks and hard-
ons, form the substratum with which heterosexual relationships have to
contend.
The female body as a compilation of parts (or pieces) remains a power-
ful metaphor today. Men still refer to a woman as that (e.g., Boy would
I like to try that out for awhile), and advertisements show women from
the perspective of their breasts or their behinds or their legs or their lips.
Rarely do we see the whole woman, and when we do the focus is still on
her function in society as an object of mens pleasure. Woman as a sentient
being threatens male sexuality because a thinking being rebels against
control.8
 Sex as Machine 31

TOOL

He had a thing about his penis. When he was away from me, he was
always referring to it as my noble tool.
Anna Kashfi, referring to ex-husband Marlon Brando,
(London) Sunday Mirror

Then, to his extreme astonishment, Louisa squatted right atop his

middle and reached into his long johns and took hold of his tool.
Nothing like that had happened to him, and he was stunned, even
though his tool wasnt.
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

The penis as a tool makes explicit the association between male hetero-
sexuality and the machine. This notion of the male member as an imple-
ment is very ancient. The word tool itself appeared in Middle English and
by the 16th century had been recorded as a sexual metaphor (Thorne,
522). Literally, a tool is a device . . . [or an instrument] used to perform or
facilitate manual or mechanical work (AHCD, 1426), or any implement,
instrument, or utensil held in the hand and used for cutting, hitting, dig-
ging, rubbing, etc. (Websters, 1535).
The penis as a device for performing a chore or doing a job is one
metaphor that dominates the lexicon of male bonding. The idea of the
penis as an instrument to accomplish something (usually penetration of a
woman to allow a man to have a quick and easy orgasm), or as an imple-
ment to get a particular job done, pervades the way men think about their
sexuality. The suggestion of an instrument used for cutting, digging, and
rubbing resonates with the heterosexual males conception of sexual plea-
sure. As Reynaud points out:
Man has directly reproduced his imagery of man as culture and
woman as nature on the sexual organs: he has located the penis on a
human scale, and the woman as a force of nature against which he
fights through her vagina. Following the traditional metaphor of the
phallus as a ploughshare furrowing the woman, he has diversified the
imagery: with the knife blade, the barrel of a gun, or the electric drill,
the vagina has become either the wound he opens or the hole he bores.
His morbid imagination has produced a batch of endless metaphors,
which, however, come up against the anatomical and physiological
reality of the two sex organs: the vagina is no more a wound than the
penis is a tool or a weapon. (31)
The association between tool as a mechanical device and its use as
a synonym for a weapon is explicit in at least two dictionaries of slang:
32 The Language of Male Bonding

Thorne refers to the standard underworld and police jargon expression

tooled-up [meaning] armed with fire arms (523), and as its second defi-
nition of tool the Oxford English Dictionary cites a weapon of war,
especially a sword (3349). Chapter 4, Sex as War and Conquest, exam-
ines at greater length the penis as a weapon, but for now it should be clear
that both as a weapon and as a tool, the penis is reduced to an impersonal
machine that functions as a device to get the job done. The goal can be
either victory or eciency, but in either case the penis becomes an eective
mechanism for accomplishing a task.
The penis as a tool has its own significance, and Paul Hoch elucidates
this well when he observes,

To the extent that men see woman as nothing more than a sex object,
they objectify their own sexuality as well. Man degenerates down to
the cocksman, phallus, or just another tool. Manhood becomes
stickmanship, love becomes screwing, and men begin to take on
roles of machinery. Sex is reduced from a total mind-body intercom-
munication down to a mere organ grinding. (18)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the extent to which

men view their bodies as machines in need of mechanical repair and main-
tenance becomes apparent when we consider that of the very few books
available on mens health, two are subtitled An Owners Manual (Diagram
Group; Gilbaugh). Diametrically opposite to a book like The New Our
Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Womens Health Book Collective), for example,
a health book that attracts women readers with its organic fusion of body
to self, the mens health books suggest a use comparable to the manual
one receives with any new machinery. The dierence in titles is important:
womens selves are identified with their bodies, but men believe they own
their bodies in the same way they own their automobiles; men persist in
maintaining a complete separation between their bodies and their selves.9
The irony, of course, is that men do not own their bodies, they do not even
understand their bodies. In fact, most men deny that their bodies ever fail
or hurt or need attention.10 Consistent with the language they uncritically
embrace, men accept the belief that real men never complain about their
bodies, never ask questions about their discomforts, never admit when they
are ill or in pain.
As with other metaphors examined in this book, tool takes on a
derogatory meaning when it is used to refer to someone: Like many other
words designating the male member, tool has a secondary meaning of a
stupid (male) person (Thorne, 522), a dude [or] someone easily tricked
(Spears 449). The OED suggests its use as a person used by another for
his own ends; one who is, or allows himself to be made a mere instrument
for some purpose . . . an unskillful workman; a shiftless person (3349). A
 Sex as Machine 33

man who sees his penis as just a tool may indeed be an unskilled lover and
is certainly a fool.
Ironically, and maybe even tragically, this man (or these men) who
conceives himself as handler of an instrument, never sees himself as either
a purveyor or a recipient of pleasure. Once the job is done, the tool has
functioned well, has repaired the damage or fixed the leak, the man can
put it back in his tool box and go on about his business. The male body
as a machine with the penis as a tool robs a man of the wonder he can
experience when his body becomes a polymorphous organism with a vari-
ety of erogenous zones and areas of sexual experience. The machine drones
on, in contrast to the body, which sings harmoniously.

WET DREAM
Popular definitions abound for this term and are not all that dierent from
the formal ones. The American Heritage College Dictionary, for example,
defines wet dream as an erotic dream accompanied by ejaculation
(1534). Slang dictionaries characterize a wet dream as a mans erotic
dream during which he has an orgasm (Chapman, 462), or a nocturnal
seminal emission (Spears, 473).
These definitions come as no great surprise. Indeed, a synonym for
wet dream is nocturnal emission. Both terms ignore the why or the
how of this experience, however, and relegate it to a hydraulic metaphor
that reduces a male sexual experience to the equivalent of a geyser or an
automobile engine that has overheated and is spewing antifreeze all over
the place. Much of the literature on this subject, as little as there is, reiter-
ates this perspective by characterizing a wet dream as a natural release of
built-up sperm not ejaculated in normal sexual relations. Alfred Kinsey
and his colleagues, for example, echo this mechanical view of male sexual-
ity when they suggest that wet dreams have been looked upon as involun-
tary and spontaneous releases of pressure (527).11
The exclusive focus on the what disregards the context and the dynam-
ics of the occurrence. What happens, quite simply, is that during an erotic
dream a man ejaculates semen. But what occurs before the ejaculation,
how this particular kind of response takes place, and why a man orgasms
in the middle of a fairly unconscious experience are questions left unre-
solved by the simple phrase wet dream or nocturnal emission.
Both terms locate a sexual activity outside the emotional, physical, and
pleasurable experience of having an orgasm during sleep, and they ignore
the significance of the act as a lived experience. They describe only the
fact that when a man comes he produces a liquid, but they ignore the sub-
jective experience. As a pseudomedical term, nocturnal emission con-
tributes to the understanding of male orgasm during sleep as just one of
34 The Language of Male Bonding

those things better relegated to science. We learn as much about mens at-
titudes toward their sexuality from what is not said in this term as we do
from what it expresses, because all wet dream tells us is that sometimes
when men dream they have orgasms.
Mens ambivalence about their sexuality becomes apparent when wet
dream refers to an individual rather than to the act of coming to orgasm
during sleep. As with several other metaphors examined in this book, when
wet dream invokes a particular man, he becomes a dull, stupid person
(Beale, 497). Ironically, this reference captures the way in which our lan-
guage fails to describe the actual experience of a wet dream. The language
denies the mans active participation in the experience and the erotic sen-
sations he feels. By focusing on the outcome and its messy aftermath rather
than on the context in which it occurs, the language ignores one aspect of
a mans sensuality. Most men are ashamed of having wet dreams, and some
women feel threatened when their lovers have one. The lack of much overt
critical engagement with the experience leaves this aspect of male sexuality
hidden and unspoken. What is forbidden to be expressed prevents us from
going beyond the superficial. In this way, as is true of so many other male
metaphors discussed here, men retain some amount of control over their
desires and passions only at the sacrifice of ignoring the depth and com-
plexity of their sexuality.
Considering how long this term has been in existence (at least since
the early 1800s), coupled with the extensive outpouring of psychoanalytic
and popular works on sexuality in general, the dearth of writings on wet
dreams is striking. The little that has been written on wet dreams suggests
that this experience is limited to male adolescents and that eventually men
outgrow it. The literature also sees the wet dream as a release of pent-up
sperm; a wet dream becomes a natural reflex that allows a man to dis-
charge bottled-up semen. Wet dreams, then, according to these authori-
ties, disappear once men get into normal sexual relationships.
I must admit that this has not been my experience with wet dreams. I
am now in my midforties, and I have had wet dreams throughout my ado-
lescent and adult life. Their occurrence seems to have very little to do with
my sexual activity. In fact, I have had a wet dream soon after making love.
I may, of course, be the exception. Unfortunately, the lack of many first-
person discussions by men of their experiences with wet dreams makes it
dicult, if not impossible, to draw conclusions or ascertain patterns.
One of the earliest analyses of wet dreams occurs in Freuds The In-
terpretation of Dreams (1899) where he discusses them under the general
topics emission and sexual content in dreams. A half-century after
Freud, in their 1948 study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey,
Pomeroy, and Martin devoted a whole chapter to the subject, Noctur-
nal Emissions. Since the publication of their work, it appears that only one
 Sex as Machine 35

article has been written on wet dreams and that by a historian, B. R. Burg.
Burg summarizes a personal journal kept between 1852 and 1858 by a U.S.
Marine who recorded scrupulously the occurrences of masturbation and
nocturnal emissions in his life. Citing work by Havelock Ellis, G. S. Hall,
and Magnus Hirschfeld that includes material on masturbation and noc-
turnal emission, Burg points out that the number of cases they discuss is
small and that most of the information is based on anecdote. Given the
nature of my book, anecdotal material would be welcome, but men seem
not to talk about or refer to their experiences with wet dreams.
Hall, as it turns out, relegates wet dreams pretty much to adolescence,
and Hirschfeld categorizes them as both a sexual anomaly and a sexual
disorder. Considering these characterizations, adult male reticence may
not be so incomprehensible.
Ellis provides one of the most provocative and radical ideas about why
men have wet dreams when he suggests that, among other things, they
might be due to the existence of monthly and yearly rhythms (117). It is
striking how little has been made of this suggestion, which was posited in
the early part of the twentieth century. The idea that men might have peri-
ods, or at least be aected by the moon or the seasons, is clearly far too
radical to be discussed, much less acknowledged. The thought that men
are not entirely in control of their sexuality, while a recurrent source of
ambivalence even in their discourse about themselves, is something men
can grant only on the most tacit level.
Shere Hites comprehensive report on male sexuality, published in
1981, rearms mens silence about wet dreams in general. Her study lacks
any discussion of wet dreams. The absence of a single reference suggests
that this rather significant part of the male sexual experience either does
not warrant discussion or is too shameful to acknowledge. Given the range
of sexual fantasies examined by Hite with her male subjects, anything ap-
parently too shameful to talk about rates serious consideration.
As with many sexual subjects, Freud provides some of the most valu-
able information about, and insights into, the topic of wet dreams. Al-
though his work on dreams with sexual content leaves the discussion at
a somewhat oblique level focusing on three general themesstairs and
staircases, flying or floating, and dental visitsFreud interprets these
dreams in some provocative ways. In, for example, A Staircase Dream
Freud (with the assistance of Otto Rank) understands this transparent
emission dream (403) as being about copulation. Dreams about flying
and floating, with their intense feeling of vibration in the body that ac-
companies such dreams (430), relate to erection and emission.
Dreams in which people go to the dentist provide the most relevant
material for an analysis of wet dreams because these dreams refer to sexual
desire. Specifically, according to Freud, ejaculation in a dream accompa-
36 The Language of Male Bonding

nies the act of pulling out a tooth. Tellingly, though, the satisfaction
accompanying the emission was not, as it usually is, directed to an object,
even if only to an imaginary one, but had no object, if one may say so; it
was completely auto-erotic, or at the most showed a slight trace of homo-
sexuality (in reference to the dentist) (Freud, 427). Clearly, the feeling of
relief and release that comes from having a tooth pulled mirrors the hy-
draulic model of ejaculation that sees male orgasm as the discharge of
pent-up semen. As is frequently true with Freud, though, we learn as much
from what psychoanalysis does not say as we do from what it does.
Freuds interpretation of the dental dream as referring to sexual inter-
course ignores the obvious reference to the mouth and thus to oral sex. The
suggestion that these dreams have no object of desire and are completely
autoerotic, accompanied by the observation of the latent homosexual role
of the dentist, speaks volumes about the broad social and cultural context
in which Freud and his contemporaries interpreted sexual experiences in
general and dreams in particular. Although the sexual attractiveness of the
dentist as an object of homosexual desire is implicit, the analysis of this
dream fails to mention fellatio as a source of the sexual expression brought
on by the dream.
In the same section on dental dreams Freud describes nocturnal emis-
sion as a masturbatory satisfaction brought about without the assistance
of any mechanical stimulation (427)accomplished, that is, without mas-
turbation. The implicit juxtaposition of a male sexuality that is autoerotic
and spontaneous (the wet dream) and one that is mechanical (masturba-
tion) suggests a dichotomy that anticipates some of the insights provided
by the Kinsey report.
In Nocturnal Emissions Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin begin with a
challenging perception about adult male sexual behavior in general: The
evidence accumulates that the physical is usually a minor element in evok-
ing sexual responses among older males, and there are few of the responses
of an experienced adult which would be possible without a sucient psy-
chological accompaniment (517). Contrary to popular belief, male sexual
response is not just a mechanical, instinctual reflex but a learned behavior
evolving in the context of personal and social experience. Indeed, Kinsey
and colleagues find a direct correspondence between the frequency of noc-
turnal emissions and the amount of education a man has acquired. This
correlation rests on the imaginative capacities of an individual (521).12
Males learn to be men, they are not born that way; according to Kinsey,
males imaginations about their sexuality have a direct relationship to their
cultural backgrounds. A study of mens experiences with wet dreams that
examined their socioeconomic backgrounds and even ideological leanings,
as well as their religious identifications, might yield some valuable insights
into the social construction of masculinity.
 Sex as Machine 37

The value of Kinseys work, although it is about fifty years old (and
certainly some attitudes toward sex have changed since 1948), lies in the
copious data his study produced.13 Despite this extensive data, however,
Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin stress the lack of information available to
explain, for example, the physiological origin of these emissions.14 They
struggle to debunk the pseudoscientific explanation of nocturnal emissions
that rests on the idea that the testes are the sole source of semen, a theory
that allows for the hydraulic interpretation of the geyser just waiting to
explode. Although Kinsey and his coauthors flirt with the relationship be-
tween built-up nervous tensions that precipitate orgasm, they quickly reit-
erate their position that the physiology is not understood (528). Refer-
ring to the dearth of objective data on the mechanical factors that may
eect nocturnal emissions (528), they conclude their remarks with the
insight that no clear patterns of nocturnal emissions have been identified
and that the situation cannot be simply summarized (529). Some men
who have high rates of sexual experience have wet dreams infrequently,
whereas other men who have sex infrequently rarely have wet dreams. The
exact opposite is also true: men who have sex often frequently have wet
dreams, and men who rarely have sex have many wet dreams.
Both Freud and Kinsey raise important considerations of the psycho-
logical context versus the physical basis of the wet dream. Yet the lack of
interest in pursuing this tack is striking.
The Kinsey reports findings, however, anticipate one premise of this
chapter: that male sexuality seen as a machine in need of repair pervades
our consciousness of what it means to be a man in U.S. society. Concomi-
tantly, the overriding assumption that mens sexuality is already known,
and thus not in need of examination or research, undermines our ability
to comprehend the complexities of male sexual behavior. As a metaphor,
wet dream provides us with only superficial impressions, but erotic
dreams that result in orgasm are an experience that almost all men have
and one that needs to be analyzed much more closely than it has been.
When male sexuality becomes as much of a mystery as the common char-
acterization of female sexuality, men will begin to understand themselves
better as complicated human beings, not simplistic devices with a blue-
print or schematic that explains how they work.
2 Sex as Work and Labor

Our relationship to work activity is a fundamental determinant of the

way we live . . . our use of time and leisure, the nature of our family
and sexual relations, the state of our mental health.
Fred Best, The Future of Work

Workers tend to be so brutalized and depleted by the experience of

work, moreover, that they are largely incapable of authentic relations
with others.
Kai Erikson, The Nature of Work: Sociological Perspectives

Work, in both the general and the specific sense, is assumed to be a

major basis of identity, and of what it means to be a man.
David Morgan, Discovering Men

The machine has influenced work since its invention introduced the poten-
tial to transform work into labor. Before the onslaught of machines a mans
work was his craft, not his job. The work of the artisan or the farmer,
unlike that of the modern proletarian or the corporate executive, involved
an intimate relationship between what was created and how it was cre-
ated. As purposeful human activity directed toward the satisfaction of hu-
man needs and desires (Best, 2), work gave life meaning, it enhanced our
existence.
With the rise of the machine, work becomes labor, and labor generates
surplus value that one exchanges for money. The intimacy of the creative
process is then mediated by money, a by-product that represents workers
alienation from their creative abilities. A key source of human instrumen-
tality resides in labor: When a person comes to see work as a means to
an end, as an instrumentality, it does not nourish the workers spirit but
depletes it, and he becomes like a machine (Erikson, 22). Male hetero-
sexuality conceived of as instrumental, as an encounter alienated from a
mans humanity, pervades the masculine experience, and labor as both
alienated work and a highly disciplined regimen imbues masculinity with
certain beliefs about what it means to be a man.
38
 Sex as Work and Labor 39

Work has been variously defined. In the introduction to his collec-

tion of essays, The Social Dimensions of Work, Clifton Bryant demarcates
the main historical conceptions:

In the Western world . . . work historically has been associated with

dierent value assessments: as brutalizing activity and painful drudg-
ery by the Greeks; as religious calling and path to salvation by the
early Protestants; as opportunity for creativity and self-realization by
the Renaissance artisans. In contemporary society, in contrast, work
is conceptually defined as a sphere of social activity related to but
separated from other modes of behavior.(2)1

In contrast to the past, when work was directly related to ones personal
and social life, work today, although it remains at the center of a persons
life, frequently mediates an alienated relationship to our family lives, our
friendships, and our sense of ourselves as human beings. Indeed, the prob-
lematic of work and career in American society is that it is identity defin-
ing (you are what you do), but the work identity is intransitive. Because of
the fragmentation of modern life our work identities (which may be central
to our conceptions of self) do not transfer to other contexts, leaving us
alienated from what we do.2 The alienated mans condition is not inherent,
however, but rather one structured by experience on the job, in ones career
or vocation. Each form of work brings with it a particular social relation-
ship that influences our choices, from whom we love to how we spend our
leisure time.
The structure of labor, whether industrial discipline or corporate regi-
mentation, governs our relationship to work in much the same way a ma-
chine does. In her important book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
examines the relationships among work, labor, and homo faber. She ob-
serves that the machine transforms work into labor by equating the body
with the tool, both of which swing in the same repetitive movement
(146) and both of which contribute to a rhythmically ordered perfor-
mance (145). The discipline of the modern workplace echoes the repeti-
tion of the machine and prefigures mens relationships outside the job site.
A rhythmically ordered performance characterizes with some accuracy
many mens conception of love making, with their frequent emphasis on
execution and achievement. As Michael Kimmel points out in his exten-
sive analysis of the American self-made man in Manhood in America,
Men turned sex into work, experiencing performance anxiety while they
worked to get the job done (283).
The hard-driving repetition of the machine structures mens connection
to work, turning work into a job and influencing profoundly the way men
participate in their daily lives. In his early Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx analyzes how the quantification of work
40 The Language of Male Bonding

transforms labor into a commodity that alienates the worker from his
product and ultimately estranges him from his humanity. Mens relation-
ships to themselves, to women, and to other men assume a sense of ur-
gency and estrangement. For many men love becomes a mechanical expe-
rience with a product that is created outside themselves; love remains a
means to an end, not a process or a journey.
The conceptualization of men as machines gained support as early as
the Middle Ages when, according to C. Wright Mills, the Protestant sects
encouraged and justified the social development of a type of man capable
of ceaseless, methodical labor (7). This attitude was reinforced by the
invention of the clock (around the fourteenth century). As the first ma-
chine and the measurer of time, the clock allowed work to be more easily
quantified than previously and thus more easily bought and sold. Work
becomes labor and labor becomes a commodity. As a commodity, a mans
work is no longer an integral part of his life. Labor, under developing ur-
ban conditions, becomes what we do for someone else.
Industrialization has reduced labor and time to wares that men sell.
Kimmel sums it up: Rapid industrialization, technological transforma-
tion, capital concentration, urbanization, and immigrationall of these
created a new sense of an oppressively crowded, depersonalized, and often
emasculated life. . . . More and more men were economically dependent,
subject to the regime of the time clock (Manhood, 83). In this context
men no longer possessed whatever small sense of autonomy and self-
control they might have experienced with their work before industrializa-
tion. They no longer owned their own shops, their farms, even their own
labor. They found themselves much less in control of their creative work,
being overseen by bosses.
In her discussion of the crisis of masculinity at the turn of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, Elisabeth Badinter observes, As more and
more men worked in factories at mechanical and repetitive tasks, or in
administrative positions with monotonous daily routines, they no longer
found that their work made the most of their traditional qualities.
Strength, initiative, and imagination were no longer necessary for earning
their living (1415). In addition, mass production, which emphasizes the
need to produce more faster, tended to treat men as automatons. Time is
money, went a slogan used often among modern working men, and it
describes a nation obsessed with having to get things done as quickly as
possible and certainly faster than the other guy.
In his 1844 manuscripts Marx reveals the power of money to make all
men equal. Money, Marx observes, allows the stupid to buy intelligence
and the ugly to buy beauty. Money reduces human experience to an alien-
ated existence in which our needs and our desires have a price tag. For
 Sex as Work and Labor 41

Marx money is the pimp between mens need and the object, between his
life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also
mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other per-
son (16566). Money diminishes human relationships to economic ex-
change with a market value. That men talk about their sexuality in terms
of business deals and precious gems should come as no surprise.
As the means by which men acquire possessions, spend their leisure
time, and demonstrate their manhood in a variety of ways, the value of
money becomes starkly apparent when a man loses his job. According to
David Morgan, a British sociologist whose work on men and masculinity
explores issues of gender and the family, The identification of work with
a male sense of self is ideologically related to the wider patterns of the
sexual division of labour both at home and at work. Notions of responsi-
bility and sacrifice are often presented in terms of women or in contrast
to women (77). Unemployment makes men powerless, even impotent
(both figuratively and literally). Without a job and the money it provides,
a man loses his self-esteem; he is no longer prepared to compete in the
marketplace of career and, eventually, success. The inability to be the
breadwinner, to be a successful husband and father, can drive a man to
depression and suicide; at the very least it is seen to emasculate him.
Clearly, our relationship with labor is not neutral or insignificant. As a
profound source of socialization, work helps to determine the way we live
our lives. Fred Best makes this point in the phrase I chose as an epigram
to this chapter: Our use of time and leisure, the nature of our family and
sexual relations, the state of our mental health (1), all are influenced by
our work activity. This experience aects the way we behave toward others
and the way we talk about those relationships.
The discourse of male bonding thrives in the workplace, where mens
initiation into manhood is intensified. Consistent with this discourse, men
view their relationships with women through the lens of control, discipline,
regulation, and commodity. Mens reduction of their sexuality to work,
business, and an economic exchange embraces their relations to women as
part of the male economy. Men spend their money and they spend their
seed. This economic conception of masculinity is not a new one. Kimmels
research shows that a recurring economic metaphor marks many postbel-
lum advice books as men were encouraged to save, conserve, and invest
their seed, the fruits of their productive bodies, and to avoid unnecessary
expenditure or profligate waste. Masturbation would send a young man
on an inevitable downward economic and social spiral (Manhood, 128).
The economy of male heterosexuality pervades the discourse of masculin-
ity. When a man has a sexual relationship, he acquires something outside
himself (he gets laid), and when he gives himself sexual pleasure, he doesnt
42 The Language of Male Bonding

work hard enough (he jerks o). For many men relationships have a bot-
tom line, and sex is either a dry quickie or a chore. Mens ambivalence
about their relationship to work influences their personal relationships.
The literature on men and work is extensive. Up until quite recently,
all studies of work and labor focused on men at work to the exclusion of
women. Many recent studies of masculinity include a chapter on mens
relationships to their jobs and how those associations structure their roles
as husbands, fathers, and even bachelors. Frequently, these relationships
take on the kind of alienated social relations anticipated by Marx in his
critique of capitalist labor. Mens obsession with size carries over to their
concern about how much money they earn, the size of their paychecks,
because they tend to see money as a way to attract women, especially
through the objects they can buy (the make of their cars, the restaurants
at which they dine, the good time they can show their dates).3
Joseph Pleck and Jack Sawyer observe, for example, that work is the
institution that most defines the majority of adult males. Many of us look
to work for our basic sense of worth. . . . As men, the desire to do good
work, hold a respected position, or earn good money follows from learning
as boys that it is important to get ahead (94). Men look to the bottom
line as they evaluate their success as husbands and as breadwinners.
Marc Fasteau asserts even more categorically than do Pleck and Saw-
yer that there is no set of beliefs that allows men to value themselves
without regard to the marketplace (2). In his job and in his career a man
defines himself as a success or a failure. The marketplace is larger than a
mans job, however. It includes his ability to buy bigger toys, go on more
exotic vacations, acquire the most beautiful woman, and demonstrate his
masculinity vis-a-vis a salary, a price tag, an investment portfolio.
Fasteau elaborates by identifying several aspects of a mans relation-
ship to work: his preoccupation with victory, the cult of toughness,
an excessive belief in and reliance on hierarchy, and his need to have
everything rationalized, to ignore personalities (126, 132). Tough men
compete in all walks of life to conquer women and maintain a hierarchy
of masculine and feminine. That is, tough men dont dancenor do they
cry or flinch or show concern. Tough men are in control. They get the job
done, no matter who it hurts or what it costs.
Not all men, however, are in control. Not all men are senior vice presi-
dents or upper-level managers. In fact, most men have subordinate roles
at work; they take orders and do someone elses bidding. These men in
particular (although not to the exclusion of managers) need to find other
ways to assert their masculinity, other means to maintain the hierarchy of
masculine and feminine, other ways to protect their sense of superiority.
As Morgan points out, A man may feel his masculinity denied in the
 Sex as Work and Labor 43

routine subordinated work in employment and compensate for this through

exerting or attempting to exert a strong patriarchal authority at home (98).
This necessity to maintain the privilege of masculinity is obvious both
inside and outside the home. Men protect their rights in the exclusive ter-
rain of the bar, the sports stadium, and the workplace. In these arenas of
male dominance, men remain in control of their lives and the lives of oth-
ers partiallybut powerfullyin the way they talk about themselves and
others.4 The others, in this case, are women and gay men. Heterosexual
men, real men by their own definition, though frequently possessing a
sense of disempowerment and alienation, maintain a sense of control by
abusing those they perceive as less powerful and deserving of ridicule. One
of mens greatest armaments in this struggle for power and privilege is
language, and the discourse of male bonding represents a potent weapon
in their arsenal. The reduction of male heterosexuality to labor, a business
deal, or an economic transaction resonates with a conception of masculin-
ity in need of measurable success and a sense of the invaluable.

BLOW JOB

That white chickJaneof yoursshe ever give you a blow job?

James Baldwin, Another Country

A euphemism for fellatio, the phrase blow job illustrates clearly the rela-
tionship of the dominant discourse to mens sexuality. It combines the
focus on sex as machine with sex as work (and even sex as sport). By
referring to this sexual experience as a job, this metaphor stresses the im-
mediacy and the disembodiment of male sexual pleasure; sexual pleasure
becomes a task or a chore, much like changing a tire or mowing the lawn.
For the high school athletes interviewed by Bernard Lefkowitz hand jobs
and blow jobs [are] jobs that girls performed at their bidding. The guys
were the foremen supervising their work crew (128). Oral sex for these
guys, as is true for many men, is about control and power. It is about
getting the job done: Sex was something that was done to them, not some-
thing they actively participated in (Lefkowitz, 128).
The notion of the job, as a transaction or a position of employment,
reduces oral sex to a business deal and characterizes male sexuality as
work related and thus quantifiable. As a project or an achievement, this
job reinforces the notion of male sexuality as performance. Like the well-
executed play, the touchdown pass, or the grand-slam home run, male
sexuality becomes goal oriented and product fixated.
As a mechanical metaphor, blow job synthesizes the hydraulic em-
44 The Language of Male Bonding

phasis on water and other liquids, with the pneumatic concern with com-
pressed air. Although the modifier blow may seem out of place or inap-
propriate, Tony Thorne suggests that this phrase may . . . be influenced
by the there (s)he blows of whaling cliche (47). Like many phrases ana-
lyzed in this book, blow job resonates with meaning in more than one
category or theme. As a job, though, and even with its allusion to the
mechanistic, this metaphor emphasizes mens understanding of their sexu-
ality as a task related to the economy and external to their bodies (and
souls, for that matter).
When a man blows his wad, at least two dierent things could have
occurred: he either spent or lost all his money in a wager (his wad), or he
spent or ejaculated his sperm (his wad).5 Thorne goes on to suggest that
since at least the 1950s blow, in this context, is a euphemism for ejacu-
late. Acknowledging, though, that this term seems to be a puzzling mis-
nomer, Thorne provides one other plausible source of its origin in the
black jazz musicians hip talk expression blow meaning play (an instru-
ment) (47).
Clearly, though, the sensual act of blowing has very little to do with
this sexual experience. The pleasure felt derives from suction on the penis,
not air blown on it. Blowing warm breath across the head of the penis
might stimulate that highly sensitive area, but the pleasure of fellatio arises
when the penis is taken into the mouth and sucked.
As with so much of male heterosexuality, though, the erogenous be-
comes focused on the penis, denying or ignoring the extent to which kiss-
ing, licking, sucking, caressing, and holding the entire body gives pleasure.
Indeed, a man stifles the full development of his sexuality by confining it
to his penis.6 However, in contrast to the usual focus on male control, in
this metaphor someone else performs on the man, yet the sexual experi-
ence remains focused and immediate.
In my own experience with oral sex, both for me and from me, fellatio
and cunnilingus remained for a long time a means to an end, a technique
to be mastered toward a particular goal, that of orgasm. Oral sex has
always been a pleasurable experience, but for many years my focus was on
where I was going with it, the finish line, not the journey or the process or
the experience. I do not think I am alone in this perception. Many men in
the United States never pause long enough to see how much larger the
male sexual experience can be than just ejaculation.
Although I believe that for me oral sex had much more to do with
pleasure (albeit my own) than it did with power, I do not want to be naive.
The very posture of the act, the physical arrangement of the two bodies,
the fact that one person has another persons penis in her (or his) mouth
provides for a form of caress that can be overwhelmed by its reversal of
traditional power relations. In this intimate embrace pleasure and power
 Sex as Work and Labor 45

fuse. A man finds himself in a vulnerable situation with his penis in the
mouth of someone who has teeth and thus the capacity to inflict significant
harm. This pleasure-power dialectic confuses most men, and their ambiva-
lence lends itself to a discourse of objectification and derision. This dis-
course acts as a form of compensation by men because the person with
the teeth has the power. In this way men objectify their bodies as machines
and insult those who give them pleasure.
The equation of ejaculation with sexual pleasure, an assumption sup-
ported by modern sexology, understands ejaculation as a synonym for the
male orgasm. Ironically, though, men can ejaculate without really experi-
encing the intense pleasure of orgasm, and men can orgasm without ejacu-
lation.7 Unfortunately for most men, fixation on the end result, rather than
an appreciation of the enjoyment one can have from protracted love mak-
ing, stifles their ability to enjoy a more polymorphous sensuality. Oral sex,
like intercourse and even foreplay, becomes one more means to an end,
and that end is ejaculation. Emmanuel Reynaud sees this phenomenon in
the larger context of power: The pleasure that a man keeps for himself is
precisely that of power, in particular, power over womans pleasure. . . .
He purely and simply ignores womans pleasure and reduces his own to
mere ejaculation (44).
The connection between ejaculation and pleasure relies heavily on this
relationship between male sexuality and power. For many men sexual plea-
sure has very little to do with sensuality. According to Reynaud, mens
obsession with imposing their wishes and controlling the relationship illus-
trates the extent to which men are sexually inhibited: When he makes
love, he does not let himself get carried away by the experience of two
bodies meeting, but simply gets into position and lives out his fantasies
(51). For many menand the phrase blow job illustrates it wellsexual
pleasure is something to be done with, to get over, and to move on to what
is important in their lives: the next business deal, the Giants game, or
changing the oil.
Mens denial of the sexual pleasure involved in this particular sexual
act is glaringly apparent in the assertion by the president of the United
States that, even though a young woman performed oral sex on him in his
oce, he had not had sex with her. On a slightly more mundane level,
though no less absurd, a truck driver friend of mine once told me that
when he is out on the road, if a woman goes down on him (another meta-
phor, of course), he doesnt feel that he has cheated on his wife because
he hasnt really had sex with this other woman. My question to both Bill
Clinton and my friend is, So, while youre in your oce (or your truck
cab), and some guy is performing cunnilingus on your wife, shes not hav-
ing sex either? Their answer, although I have not been able to ask Bill
this to his face, will no doubt be, But thats dierent.
46 The Language of Male Bonding

More to the point might be this question: And when your wife per-
forms fellatio on another man, thats not sex? Given that for most men
the most egregious sexual transgression of which a wife or girlfriend can
be guilty is not sexual intercourse but oral sex on another man, mens
denial of the significance of such an act constitutes a profound act of de-
nial. Men are frequently in denial about their emotions and about their
sexuality.
One source of their confusion comes from religion, with its demand
that women remain virgins until they are married. Although one could
argue that today this requirement is stressed much less, the quandary in-
fluences the dynamics between men and women. The necessity for a
woman to not have intercourse in order to avoid becoming pregnant (and
to be a virgin for her husband) proposes the alternative of oral sex. An
additional source of turmoil emanates from this option, however: on the
one hand, a young woman wants to satisfy the man (boy) she loves by
giving him sexual pleasure, and in this context fellatio is seen as a sign of
commitment and love; on the other hand, the young woman who performs
oral sex on a boy (or boys) is seen to be a slut or a tramp.
Another aspect of this confusion resides in issues of mutuality and
intimacy. If men contend that a blow job is not sex because it is not
intimate or mutual, how do they defend the position that if their lover does
it to someone else, it is intimate? The virginwhore dichotomy reappears,
confusing both women and men about who they are in this spectrum of
sexual partners and whom they desire.
One constant in all this remains the need on the part of most men to
be in control, and one way to maintain this dominance is to impose a
double standard. The point, of course, is not just the double standard,
though that seems starkly the case. Rather, men possess a profound ambiv-
alence about their sexuality, a deep-seated confusion about what they want
from women and what they want for themselves.
One source of clarity, however, is that what is good for the goose is not
good for the gander. Men want to be in control of their relationships with
women, be they one-hour stands or their relationships with their wives.
By defining what is and what is not sex, they extract yet another level
of domination.
The use of this metaphor as a derisive remark directed against women
and gay men illuminates the extent of mens ambivalence about sexual
pleasure. Although fellatio is pleasurable for a man, the woman who gives
a man a blow job is a tramp or a slut, and men who give blow jobs are
queers and faggots. Many men enjoy the sensation of having their penises
sucked but can hold in contempt the people who provide that pleasure.
The epigraph from Baldwins Another Country illustrates this point. Rufus
focuses on a blow job as symbolic of Janes love for Vivaldo. By concentrat-
 Sex as Work and Labor 47

ing such importance on this one component of their love making, sex be-
comes a series of acts performed, each of which has some kind of symbolic
significance. Rufus does not ask about love; he asks about a blow job,
as if that represents something even more important than an emotional
commitment or even the missionary position, for that matter.
This disgust for the source of ones pleasure may be a displacement of
fear. Men may fear the loss of control they experience and resent having
to rely on others to give them pleasure. As Reynaud points out, Man
does not generally like to think that a woman can use him as she pleases
(56). The woman who performs fellatio threatens the man because she
exercises some control over his pleasure, whereas the man who performs
fellatio threatens the heterosexual man who may indeed have some doubts
about the imperviousness of his heterosexual identity. Fellatio, after all,
presupposes a knowledge of that which gives a man the most pleasure, an
intimate familiarity, that is, with a mans sexual organs that only another
man might fully appreciate. Men fear the obvious, that one man giving
another man a blow job may occasion great pleasure.

BOTTOM LINE
We all know what bottom line means, of course: How much is it going
to cost me, really? In business, where this now commonly used phrase
began, bottom line means the result of any computation or estimate,
especially one showing total costs (Chapman, 41), or literally the bot-
tom line of a companys annual statement: the amount of profit, after tax,
available for distribution among shareholders (Beale, 54). More loosely
construed, though, this term means the final result [or] the main point
(AHCD, 163).
For business this phrase may be helpful in the way it describes profit
and loss and the resultant net outcome or income. Unfortunately, though,
bottom line has become part of the discourse associated with interper-
sonal relationships. The bottom line has emerged in our discussions of
love and friendship. When a woman and her lover talk about their relation-
ship and he says, Okay, so whats the bottom line? the relationship be-
comes just one more business deal, one more experience in which the value
of the relationship is reduced to net gain or loss.
Long before the 1960s feminists such as Emma Goldman and Simone
de Beauvoir pointed out that for men marriage is a way to obtain more
valuable resources. The beautiful talented woman attracts for the man the
envy of his male friends, which gives him power over them. Today, of
course, thirty years after the height of the most recent emergence of femi-
nism, we all know that men are no longer supposed to think that way. Men
value women for their intelligence, their equality, their originality, and
48 The Language of Male Bonding

their independence. Men are no longer threatened by smart women, and

all they really want is an equal in their relationships.
Because we operate in this broad egalitarian context, why does bot-
tom line still persist as a way to understand interpersonal relationships?
The easy adoption of this kind of language may be completely innocent;
it may just be a tidy way to refer to the desire for a succinct picture of the
particular situation. As first and foremost a business metaphor, the adop-
tion of bottom line to our conversations about love and intimacy may
not be all that innocent, however. This particular discourse may, rather,
express that part of the male consciousness that continues to see all rela-
tionships in terms of profit. Profit pervades the American capitalist
worldview, and American men are victims of this Weltanschauung. Greed,
aggression, winning, and the need for succinct clarity dominate the way
American men see the world. The belief that love is a business deal (a
game or a battle or, worse yet, a waralls fair in love and war) that
one wins or loses, and that the dynamics of the situation can be summed
up and articulated clearly without ambiguity, informs the way men per-
ceive their relationships with other people. The bottom line of a love
relationship should provide the kind of information one needs to deter-
mine whether it is time to buy or sell, to invest or divest, to cut the losses
or to take another risk. Unfortunately, this metaphor may throw far more
light on our interpersonal relationships than we want to know or accept.
If your lover ever says to you, Okay, so whats the bottom line? Do you
love me or not? that person is revealing a habit of mind that may repre-
sent values you might want to consider further.

BREADWINNER
One of the defining metaphors for male status, breadwinner, merges the
bread of sustenance and the bread of money with the victor in the athletic
match or the battle (whether an actual military battle or just the battle of
the corporate world or the battle of the sexes). Nowadays this phrase is
virtually synonymous with being a good husband and father, but as early
as the 1800s breadwinner was a British prostitutes slang for the female
genitals, specifically the vagina (Spears, 53). The OED defines this term
as the tool, art or craft with which any one earns his living (1070) and
cites a specific use from 1818.
For the greater part of the past century, though, breadwinner has
referred to the man of the house, the husband and the father. In his anal-
ysis of the rise of the American self-made man, Michael Kimmel points
out that the breadwinner role brought to these men few of its anticipated
rewards. Indeed, the pressure to be a successful breadwinner was a source
of strain and conflict, not pride and motivation (Manhood, 265). The de-
 Sex as Work and Labor 49

structive nature of this male aspiration echoes much of Marxs concern

about the alienated proletariat. The breadwinner became a middle-class
euphemism for the striving competitive world in which men were supposed
to establish themselves as real men but in which they led isolated, lonely,
and fundamentally alienated lives.
Not much has changed for men, even with women assuming corespon-
sibility for family incomes. As I have already mentioned, an unemployed
man views his situation as an assault on his manhood. Men without jobs,
men who cannot be breadwinners, lash out at themselves and at their fami-
lies. As Kimmel points out, men who are bread losers are no longer real
men (Manhood, 118).

DICK

Now that I am out of women to be in love with, I visit the mens

room, where, standing before the long trough, limp dick in hand, my
dribbling is hot and painful.
Richard Russo, Straight Man

In connection with the concept of work, in contemporary America at least,

a dick is an unpleasant person who usually has power over you and
exercises it in a demeaning and frequently cruel way. Hes such a dick
refers to an unfair boss who abuses his position and privilege. Even more
telling for this chapter on male heterosexuality as an economic transaction
is the Wall Street phrase big swinging dick, meaning the guy (or woman,
for that matter) who sells millions of dollars worth of stocks and bonds.8
A dick is also another synonym for the penis, and it may have origi-
nated from an aectionate personification in the same way as Willie or
Peter or John; the use of this word has been widespread in the English-
speaking world since the end of the 19th century (Thorne, 128). Tracing
the evolution of dick from Middle English, Chapman focuses on its use
both as an aectionate nickname for the penis and as a verb that means
to have sex with a woman:
perhaps from the nickname Dick, an instance of the widespread use
of aectionate names for the genitals; perhaps from earlier British
derrick penis; perhaps from a dialect survival of Middle English
dighten do the sex act with in a locution like he dight her, which
would be pronounced he dicked her. (101)

As a metonymy, then, this sense of the word sometimes extended to mean

sex in general or acquired the generic sense of the female need for sexual
intercourse, as in She was crazy for dick (Beale, 123), or sex in general,
50 The Language of Male Bonding

as in Suzy loves dick (Thorne, 128). The equation of the male genitalia
with all sexual desire exemplifies the assumption that male heterosexuality
is both the norm and universal. Why men feel compelled to give their
penises names, to personify them in some way, to remove them from the
rest of themselves, points to a crucial aspect of male sexuality. Certainly,
one of the better-known literary examples of this kind of personification
of the penis is John Thomas, the name the caretaker gives to his penis
in Lady Chatterleys Lover (D. H. Lawrence).
Paul Hoch maintains that many men even speak of their penis as if
it were not a part of the body, but a distinct personality apart. Often, it
is even given a name (Peter). The fact that Peter, but not me, does the
copulating, of course, removes me from any responsibility (68). It also
objectifies the act, removing from it any emotional connections. Indeed,
Badinter takes this one step further when she points out that many men
obsessed by their virility, do not really consider their sex an organ of plea-
sure, but a tool, an instrument in a performance, a thing separate from
themselves. Many also confess to having conversations with their penis,
cajoling it, asking it to stay erect (137). By personalizing their penises,
ironically enough, men objectify them; they treat them like pets they can
train to do tricks, and they relegate them to a place outside their humanity.
When one recalls that Lady Chatterley names her vagina Lady Jane,
and that the childrens primer characters were Dick and Jane, one cannot
help but wonder about the insidiousness of this choice of appellation. Isnt
Dick always on top, asserting his desires, and who is Jane in this story?
How aggressive or self-assertive is she, and how often does she prevail?
The discourse of masculinity is both subtle and ubiquitous.
One possible origin of this term comes from the British armed forces
from the middle to late 1800s and suggests the equation of the penis with
war and with a weapon (Chapman, 100101; Beale, 123). Hoch carries his
analysis one step further when he says of the named penis, He, not me,
is the animalistic one, the savage, the avenger. He represents mankind in
its most carnal aspectthe beast below (68). The penis as weapon per-
vades our assumptions about male sexuality, and when men name their
penises, they give to them personae that can be blamed for their aggressive
behavior. As Hoch points out, the penis becomes another guy, someone
outside himself whose actions the man can countenance with impunity.
Like so many other aectionate terms for the penis, though, dick
also connotes a derisive meaning. Like cock, which means nonsense, as
in poppycock, and like jerk-o, meaning an idiot or an oaf, a dick
is a fool (invariably male) [and] has this secondary sense in common with
most slang terms for the male member, such as prick, tool, etc. (Thorne,
128). Dick has several other pejorative meanings: to do nothing at all,
 Sex as Work and Labor 51

as in to sit around all day and do dick (Thorne, 129); to have no value,
as in not worth dick; to cheat or deceive as in he dicked me around
(Spears, 118); and a despised person (Chapman, 101).
Because of its distance from the self, the named penis becomes the
receptacle for much fear and self-hatred; a dick, or the penis, is a foolish,
lazy, worthless, and hated deceiver. Language has a tricky way of saying
what it may not have been intended to state.

DRY HUMP

You cant dry hump good in the car. Unless youre a midget.
High school student to IT magazine

The act that precipitates blue balls, dry humping refers to a sexual
activity (often performed standing up) in which the partners simulate in-
tercourse while they (or at least their genitals) are fully clothed (Thorne,
156). Thorne goes on to suggest that this phrase refers usually to hetero-
sexuals. This simulation of the sexual act occurs without either person
reaching orgasm, and for the man it results in blue balls.
The word dry in this phrase is in opposition, of course, to the wetness
of sexual activity and in that way may be fairly harmless as a descriptor;
dry sex, though, is certainly not harmless to either participant. Dry also
means unsatisfied or unfulfilled and in this phrase seems to suggest unre-
warding labor. The use of the verb hump seems the most telling in this
metaphor for male heterosexuality, hump being a slang term meaning
to exert (oneself) (Websters, 708). To hump for a job suggests someone
who is hustling to get one or putting forth a burst of energy to secure one.
In the context of the phrase dry hump, hump connotes both quickness
and severity, and dry humping a woman usually occurs as part of the strat-
egy a man implements en route to actually having sex with her. Dry hump-
ing becomes part of the heterosexual males bag of tricks for hustling a
woman to have sex.
The man assumes the role of aggressor in this scenario, convinced that
part of his identity as a man requires him to conquer the woman, to coerce
her into having sex with him. Dry humping reinforces male heterosexu-
ality as uncontrollable, unrelenting, and necessarily on top (why do men
dry hump when they know it will give them that painful condition, blue
balls?). Dry humping, by extension, taints the mans entire sexual expe-
rience with its implication that sex with a woman can be dry (without
foreplay), a quick exertion on his part, and something he hustles (like a
job).
52 The Language of Male Bonding

FAMILY JEWELS

Rudy Yellow Shirt was twelve when the black widow danced up from
the depths of the outhouse and bit him on his gonads. The bite felt
just like someone had speared him with a red-hot sewing needle. He
let out a bloodcurdling shriek and grabbed his family jewels.
Adrian C. Louis, Skins

As an allusion to the economic value of a mans genitals, family jewels

demonstrates the extent to which men view their bodies in terms of busi-
ness, property, and political economy. Referring to the testicles, this
phrase, which may be Victorian in origin (Thorne, 171), derives from
their great value and their role in creating a family (Spears, 149). The
term became common slang in the United States in the 1900s and has
maintained a jocular use to this day. Echoing the point also made by
Spears, Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner define this phrase as
a mans most valuable possession, and the pride of his family, since the
testicles provide progeny (177).
A relatively harmless euphemism for a mans balls, family jewels does,
however, place significant value on the reproductive function of the male. I
cannot think of any comparable slang term for ovaries, although one some-
times hears an allusion to a womans plumbing. This reference clearly re-
flects mens willful ignorance of womens reproductive organs while reduc-
ing the female anatomy to a mechanical instrument. The dierence between
ones plumbing as an apparatus or a mechanical system that can be re-
paired with the right technology or parts and the family jewels, a phrase
that connotes a tradition or a heritage as well as great wealth, both of
which are irreplaceable, may indeed exemplify the dierences in our out-
look on male and female sexual significance.9 If boys joke about the value
of their genitals while listening to older men (their fathers, maybe) deride
womens reproductive organs, males begin their understanding of hetero-
sexuality in a context that already privileges men and devalues women.
Perhaps a form of womb envy and mens fear of a womans reproduc-
tive capability engender this kind of phrase. Although genetically at the
moment of conception men and women are equal, a womans role in the
whole process of reproduction is much more intensive and concrete. Men
may refer to their gonads as jewels to compensate for their latent realiza-
tion that the testicles do not hold the same significance in reproduction as
does the uterus. That is, mens value in work as in reproduction remains
in question and thus a phrase like family jewels is required to assert
mens worth.
 Sex as Work and Labor 53

GETTING LAID

Young guys in their twenties, of course theyre going to try and get
laid, and even if they dont succeed its hardly big news.
Lenny Henry, Time Out magazine

The combination of the verbs to get and to lay bring to this metaphor
particular meanings of some significance. The verb to get means to ac-
quire or to own and implies a transaction of some kind. It suggests, at
least, something outside ourselves that we obtain. The verb to lay in-
cludes two forms: the passive laid, as in the verb describing what one
does with an object, and the active to lie (lie, lay, lain), describing what
one does with oneselfa subject. To lay or to get laid, then, means
to relate to an object in some way, to objectify the experience, in this case
of intimacy.
In the passive form, getting laid means to acquire sexual satisfaction
from something or someone that is apart from us, dierent from ourselves,
an other. This something that satisfies our needs is not necessarily a part
of that experience, certainly not an intimate part of it. It may, indeed, be
something (someone) we buy.10
We get laid and men get a nut o ; we get lucky and men get
it up. Do women get a nut o, or do they have another phrase to de-
scribe orgasm? Get your rocks o, maybe, but here too the verb is to
get, with its associations of acquisitiveness. Today women also use the
phrase getting laid to describe their sexual adventures. Women may also
talk about getting lucky, but even though the clitoris may become hard
from sexual excitement, do women talk about getting it up?
Historicallyand you may be surprised to learn this, especially given
the epigraph for this sectionto get layed, meaning to have sexual
intercourse [was] said originally of the female, and began as part of U.S.
slang at the turn of the century (Spears, 186). The quote from Time Out
suggests, in the first place, that it is only natural for young men to pursue
having sex and implies that women are not part of this natural process.
Indeed, the pursuit is so normal that the simple act of trying to get laid is
at least as important as actually succeeding in having sex.
The original reference to women should not be all that surprising,
though, when one considers that to get laid is a passive construction.
Although now used by both sexes, this phrase was for a long time a refer-
ence applied almost exclusively to men who got laid while women
made love. Male sexual activity as passive seems to abrogate the myth
of men as uncontrollably passionate and in control. As was made clear
54 The Language of Male Bonding

with the metaphor blow job, though, men are in fact ambivalent about
their sexuality, especially when it comes to agency.
The present, more universal usage poses a question about sexual equal-
ity that has informed other debates about gender and sexual exploitation:
Does an equitable distribution of sexual objectification mean sexual equal-
ity? Does, for example, the existence of Playgirl, with its nude pictures of
men, eradicate or equalize the sexual exploitation of women in magazines
such as Playboy or Penthouse?
The present use of this term by both sexes may mean only that the lack
of intimacy in the sexual relationship has now become acceptable for all
of us. On the other hand, maybe there are times when what we really want
is to just get laid, not to be in love, not to share an intimate moment but
to have sex, to get a nut o, to obtain sexual satisfaction, and to move
on. Maybe getting laid is a fine metaphor and one that should be ap-
plauded rather than criticized. Maybe, though, if all we are doing is getting
laid, if love making is an unemotional businesslike transaction, and we are
not capable of intimacy on any other level, we should examine more closely
the language we feel comfortable using to describe our love making.

HUSBAND
Probably the oldest and, I believe, the most insidious metaphor for the
masculine role, husband, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
dates from at least the year 1000 and refers to the master of a house [or]
the male head of a household (1352). The word husband, as a term for
a married man, derives from its meaning to use sparingly or economi-
cally, conserve, as in to husband the resources. A good husband, then,
is a prudent thrifty manager (AHCD, 664) who has evolved, all too fre-
quently, into a stingy tyrant and master of the household.
The insidious nature of this term derives from the extent to which most
of us believe that it is both transhistorical and neutral. A husband is, quite
simply, the opposite of a wife; he is the man who marries the woman, while
the wife is the woman who marries the man. For most, these words have
no other meaning than this, and they connote only the relationship be-
tween the man and the woman in marriage. When one considers, though,
that masculine self-definition is through ecacious production of goods
and services for a family economic unit; [while] feminine self-definition
requires sensitive responsiveness to the familys emotional needs (Haste,
69), one begins to understand the way language works to provide subtle
distinctions and not-so-subtle characterizations.
Although, according to Websters, wife has no meaning outside mar-
riage and refers to a married woman . . . specifically, a woman in her
relationship to her husband (1671), Haste gives some depth to the term
 Sex as Work and Labor 55

wife. In her analysis of four images of woman (wife, whore, waif, and
witch) she points out that at a subtle level woman as wife is relatively
sexless; she desires children, and sex is for that purpose. She is a faithful
helpmate to man, and she is also an object of adoration. . . . Her sexuality
is defused and related to her fecundity (172). Although most women
might rebel against this characterization, the socially acceptable role of
wife is certainly concomitant with that of mother and completely consis-
tent with what Margaret Small refers to as heterosexual ideology. Ac-
cording to Jonathan Ned Katz, who quotes Small at some length, the
unnamed, unpaid, undervalued work that women perform for men within
marriage . . . is specifically the procreation and socialization of children,
and the physical and emotional carethe feeding and fucking of hus-
bands (148). The monogamous heterosexual family seen as the basic unit
of society begins, according to Jerey Weeks, at the middle of the eigh-
teenth century. With this social development the wife becomes increasingly
more dependent economically on her husband, and women see their sexu-
ality defined in terms of male sexual needs, and the intensified emotional
investment in children of the family (15).
The OED provides some provocative insights into the origin of the
term wife. Originally, wife was a general term for woman but in
later use restricted to a woman of humble rank or of low employment
. . . especially one engaged in the sale of some commodity, as in alewife
(3775). The relationship between husband as a manager of goods and wife
as the seller of goods (and, as one involved in low employment, in need
of a manager) exemplifies the institution of marriage as an unequal busi-
ness arrangement. The husband becomes the overseer of the woman, the
supervisor of her financial arrangements.
The catastrophic eect for men of having to be good husbands, shrewd
managers of household resources, breadwinners, has been the subject of
much discussion in some areas of the early U.S. mens movement and
has, unfortunately, identified either women in general or the feminist
movement in particular as the cause of mens unhealthy or even disastrous
situation.11 Although the high rates of heart attacks and suicides in men
can be linked closely to the oppressive role and expectations of the hus-
band in our society, an appreciation of how this term, like so many others
characterizing masculinity, has a specific meaning and a long history may
allow us to redefine the language more positively and thoughtfully. Can a
man be in a relationship that is indeed egalitarian, a relationship that does
not require him to be in control and have most of the power? What would
that relationship look like, how would it function, and what would we call
the people involved in it? How do we get beyond the terms husband and
wife, and what would we want the new titles to connote?
A few men have, over the past century or so, tried to create such alter-
56 The Language of Male Bonding

native marriages. In 1855, for example, Henry Brown Blackwell, marrying

Lucy Stone, renounced all the privileges that the law conferred on him as
a husband that were not conferred on her as his wife, and he insisted on
absolute equality between the sexes in marriage. Together they politicized
their marriage when they read the following vows:

While acknowledging our mutual aection by publicly assuming the

relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a
great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part
implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of
the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an
independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an
injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers
which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should
possess. (Kimmel and Mosmiller, 329)

Other examples of a radicalization of marriage can be found in an experi-

ment conducted by political radicals and bohemians in Greenwich Village
in the first two decades of this century. Max Eastman, Hutchins Hapgood,
and Floyd Dell attempted to create egalitarian relationships with women
based on the then-feminist vision of womens sexual fulfillment . . . [be-
ing] equal to that of mens . . . [in which] heterosexual intimacy would
entirely eliminate separate spheres for men and women [with] . . . women
shar[ing] the public interests of men, and men shar[ing] the private domes-
tic life that had previously been defined as predominantly female (Trim-
berger, 134). Unfortunately, these relationships evolved into fairly tradi-
tional companionate marriages in which intimacy was redefined to focus
on providing the husband with a trusting companion to whom he could
confide his problems and concerns. These unions maintained the tradi-
tional division of labor, with the women remaining keepers of the domestic
sphere, providers of a safe haven in which they remained the good wife
and mother. Thus, although the attempts by both Blackwell and the Vil-
lage radicals turned out to be weak alternatives at best and, more accu-
rately, failures, the existence of a history of men who were trying to create
egalitarian relationships is significant and provides helpful models to con-
temporary men also involved in such eorts.12

JERKING OFF

I went ahead as usual and jerked o into my sock.

Philip Roth, Portnoys Complaint

According to Thorne, this Americanism [meaning to masturbate] . . . has

gained currency throughout the English-speaking world since the late
 Sex as Work and Labor 57

1960s when it became a hippy and student vogue term. The phrase existed
in British English in the 19th century but was never widespread (273).
Other slang terms exist for male masturbation, of course: beating your
meat or jerkin your gherkin, for example. All share the distancing from
sexual pleasure and the reduction of the male genitals to a piece of meat
or an object external to the man.
Jerking o, and even most male masturbation, centers on an objecti-
fication of women as well. The source of many mens fantasies during this
autoerotic act is pornography of some kind or another, whether magazines
or films, and in these images of female sexuality, male supremacy and
objectification of the woman are prevalent.13
Ironically, and as is true of many slang phrases examined in this book,
these phrases become readily identifiable as metaphors when they refer to
a person rather than to an act. When we say, Oh, hes such a jerk-o, we
mean that he is an idiot or an oaf. According to Wentworth, jerk o
means to waste time; to fuck o; to cause confusion; to make many mis-
takes. . . . One who masturbates or wastes time, a dope (290). Thorne
takes this pejorative sense one step further when he defines a jerk-o as
a despicable or obnoxious (male) person (273). Here male masturbation
becomes wasting time or a stupid unproductive activity, and in a world
in which men are supposed to produce goods and create a profit, sexual
satisfaction not connected to male sexual prowess has no value.
The fear of masturbation and the belief in the ills purportedly brought
on by this form of self-pleasure dates far into Western history. The first
book of the Bible warns men against spilling their seed unprocreatively.
More recently, in U.S. history the nineteenth century saw a flurry of admo-
nitions against masturbation, most of which centered on the ancient equa-
tion of sperm with money and the ejaculation of the one with the expendi-
ture of the other. G. J. Barker-Benfield describes at great length the work
of the Reverend John Todd, who saw the ejaculation of sperm, especially
through masturbation but with intercourse as well, as equivalent in some
sense to the expenditure of money (179), because sex no less than any
other function conformed to an economy of the body (169). Kimmel pres-
ents significant evidence that W. K. Kellogg, the cereal magnate, devel-
oped Corn Flakes as a cure-all for male masturbation.14
Although we may not be as hung up on the evils of masturbation today,
the language we use to talk about this experience still relies on a sense of
disgust and alienation. Why, for example, is the gerund jerking used
in this phrase rather than stroking or caressing? Jerking describes
what you might do when you have hooked a fish and you want to set the
hook deep into its mouth, or you might jerk the fishing line free of a snag.
While masturbating, though, men do not actually jerk their penises, they
stroke them, and depending upon how much in touch with their pleasure
58 The Language of Male Bonding

they are, they might even caress their penises. Jerking o, then, like so
many other male metaphors, becomes a way for men to remove themselves
from the sensuousness of sexual pleasure. Consistent with much of the
male heterosexual experience, jerking o provides relief much more than
it does fulfillment. Maybe men use such a mechanical and objectifying
term to describe their ability to satisfy themselves sexually in order to gain
a feeling of control over the experience, but they lose enjoyment and the
sense of a relatedness to their bodies. Men seem to fear masturbation or,
at the very least, to be ashamed of it, and language that allows them to
establish remoteness gives them a sense of safety.
3 Sex as Sport

The arena of sport has always been marked by class, gender, and race,
and marked as a compelling and powerful site for routine investigation
of masculinity. For the male body is the standard currency of sporting
discourse: it is on display, at work, being measured and evaluated
in short, being objectified for the purposes of pleasureas nowhere
else in contemporary life.
Toby Miller, A Short History of the Penis

Sports arenas are Americas living galleries, where we witness all the
beauty and grace and passion of which humans are capable. They
are also asylums, filled with delusional fantasies, misogyny, misplaced
loyalties, racism, homophobia, and unclear boundaries between self
and others.
Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History
of American Sports

Sports synthesize the male experience of work and of the machine; sports
train men to be successful in the world of business, and sports rely on
technological innovations to improve athletic achievements. These factors,
combined with the ways in which sports are highly competitive, aggressive,
and dominated by masculine values, leave little room to doubt the signifi-
cance of the influence of sports in delineating mens roles in contempo-
rary society.
In addition to the anities between sports and work and sports and
technology, historians of sports have recorded the direct correspondence
between sports and war, and sports and misogyny, both of which encom-
pass a close and mutually supportive relationship.1 Sports provide initia-
tion into the kinds of qualities and characteristics soldiers (and business
leaders) need in order to survive and succeed, and sports furnish politi-
cal reinforcement for a xenophobic political system. Sports also remind
women, children, and nonathletic men that real men, athletic men, hold
the reins of power.
Since their earliest manifestations in pre-Greek civilization, sports have
grown out of a societys need to be proficient in war. Hunting, wrestling,
59
60 The Language of Male Bonding

running, horse racing, and fencing gave warriors a means to improve cru-
cial components of the limited military resources they had at hand. Ideo-
logically, sports have been used domestically to reinforce class dierences
and to encourage men to become soldiers. The hunt, for example, has
been a distinguishing indulgence of the ruling class in almost any settled
society (Mandell, 85) and was symbolic of aristocratic might against the
peasant.
Sports have a rich history, one that has been far from neutral. Sports
have reflected social and cultural norms, and they have been recruited into
the causes of one rising class or another against the status quo. In his
cultural history of sports Richard Mandell points to several examples of
the correlation between sports and social change. As early as preindustrial
society, sports adapted to particular economic and political realities, and
modern sport can be seen as evolving from the same social circumstances
that fostered rationalized industrial production (xv). In tracing the histor-
ical development of modern sports from their origin in early European
history, Mandell distinguishes between gaming and sports as a major en-
terprise: New recreations and games were harmonious adaptations of
new classes to their leisure time and ambitions, and the techniques at their
disposal . . . [while] modern sport has rather particular origins in particular
places and in social and ideological conditions (131). The social circum-
stances included not only the dominant political and economic situation
but technological innovations as well. Sports provided men with an arena
(literally) in which they could play with new toys and improve their physi-
cal fitness, all at the same time. Sports, especially blood sports in which
animals are pitted against each other, gave men the opportunity to demon-
strate their masculinity through a mastery of nature that could be mea-
sured and thus proved. Additionally, technology aected the dissemina-
tion of news coverage of sports events. With the growth of radio and
television, mens superiority could be confirmed far and wide.2
Elliott S. Gorn and Warren Goldstein find an even more insidious mo-
tive behind the role of sports in early American society. Before the rise of
technology, though certainly not before the ideological role of sports, the
gentlemen who arranged sporting contests oered prizes and a feast as a
way to secure the loyalty of their more lowly neighbors . . . binding men
together with shared identity despite the class divisions (8). At various
historical junctures, elites have advocated popular recreations as a means
of social control (13). Mandell reinforces these observations when he
points out that in order to make clear their menacing power to the fixed
population and to maintain or advance their prestige among their peers,
members of the aristocracy . . . developed distinctive and distinguishable
paramilitary sports: the hunt, the joust, the tournament, and the duel
(110). That is, sports are not just neutral forms of recreation. Today, in the
 Sex as Sport 61

absence of the organized hunt, professional sports, dominated by large

fierce men, remind women and children (and smaller or nonaggressive
men, for that matter) who holds power. Even with the growth of female
participation in sports, Mandell argues cogently, sports remain a chiefly
male preserve, one in which even the poorest man who proved his grit, his
valor, his ferocity, reinforced his dominance over women and children (8).
Poor men and even middle-class men, the majority of whom are not
athletes themselves, maintain a semblance of this aura of male privilege
by being active sports fans. In a society where knowledge represents power,
a mans understanding of the rules of the game, his ability to remember
statistics, his knowledge of a sports particular history or an athletes biog-
raphy, represent a form of knowledge. In a world seemingly out of control,
where knowledge has become more and more specialized, a mans under-
standing of a games subtleties provides him with a sense of power. The
discourse of sports is an exclusive language governed by men and repre-
sents power over something they believe, and need, to be significant. The
language of sports allows bored, powerless, ordinary men to obtain a sense
of accomplishment through control over something they see as important.
Men who cannot participate in the manchat of professional sports, who
dont know the players or the standings, are excluded from this domain
of masculinity.
The sports hero embodies this sense of control for the fan who vicari-
ously lives out his fantasy world through the superathlete who has it all:
money, fame, and beautiful women. Spectatorship emerged concomitantly
with the rise of a consumer society and came replete with myths of the
superathlete created by a burgeoning profession of sportswriting for an
audience that sought a sentimental sense of community, not new informa-
tion or good writing (Mandell, 189). This manchat of the sports news is
incorporated uncritically into the discourse of male bonding and goes
hand in hand with what contemporary sports sociologists have identified
as locker-room talk: verbal exchanges whereby male athletes celebrate
heterosexual aggression against women, as a common method of opposi-
tional self-definition (Gorn and Goldstein, 300).3
The belief that we can all become a sports hero (or our son can), even
if only a local one, reinforces the notion that sports are a democratizing
component of society. Sports rarely have been democratic nor, for that
matter, have they been aligned with democratic eorts. On the contrary,
sports remain one of the last bastions of racism and sexism, and their
culture stands out for its homophobia. Konrad Lorenzs belief that sports
are potentially an alternative to war notwithstanding, sports have fre-
quently been at the forefront of the preparation for war, both practically
and ideologically.
As a racist institution, sports have maintained a strong tradition. Early
62 The Language of Male Bonding

in our nations history labor was seen as the burden of blackness, whereas
leisure was the prerogative of whites. In British society where until recently
class dominated race as an index of disparity, sports . . . aid in the repro-
duction of power relations by misrepresenting the nature of major inequal-
ities in Britain (Hargreaves, 9). In U.S. society, where race and class are
closely intermingled, the black athlete has an ambiguous role in sports
today. On the one hand, American society can point to the increased num-
ber of black athletes as evidence of how democratic and inclusive U.S.
society is, while, on the other hand, sport is so inextricably bound up
with the ideology and structure of white male privilege that although it
may appear to advantage blacks, in fact it only confirms that privilege
(Disch and Kane, 286). The ambivalence white men feel about their sexual
prowess also plays out in their relationship to the black athlete, whom they
fear and hate for being what Toby Miller calls the ultimate penis sym-
bol (10). Miller cites Franz Fanon who, in Black Skin, White Masks
(1967), analyzes white projections regarding black male genitals and ar-
gues that everything Negro takes place on a genital level in white imag-
inings of the Negro (Fanon, 157). In the arena of sports the ideology of
equality and team eort mitigates at least some of this ambivalence. The
myth of democracy on the playing field reinforces the belief that all play-
ers, regardless of ethnic background, share the desire to win and to play
to the best of their ability. Ironically, though, to celebrate the black athlete
as a fearsome hitter is also to denigrate him as the primitive other, against
whom higher status men define themselves as modern and civilized
(Messner and Sabo, 105).
Racism finds a counterpoint in the sexism and misogyny of sports. De-
spite the impressive growth in the number of women participating in ath-
letics, sports continue to evolve as an expression of a male culture that
keeps women in their place even while on the playing field. In many ways
sports provide an excellent laboratory-type environment in which women
can be allowed free and active involvement within certain prescribed areas.
Women run track and field, but they certainly do not play football. Al-
though the National Hockey League tried to install a female goalie, maybe
as a test of the limits of womens participation in professional sports but
mainly as a publicity stunt, she didnt last long in the net.
The misogyny of mens sports is even more pernicious. Gang rapes by
adolescent males are perpetrated mostly by high school athletes. Bernard
Lefkowitzs study of the gang rape of a retarded girl in New Jersey exposes
the extent to which high school athletes live in such a reified air of privilege
and adoration that it not only gives them permission to inflict violence but
also ideologically justifies the denigration of anyone they deem inferior. In
most cases those who are perceived to be subordinate are young girls,
female teachers, and gay or nonathletic boys. Pointing to an FBI survey
 Sex as Sport 63

done in 1986, Lefkowitz states that football and basketball players were
reported to police for sexual assault 38 percent more often than the aver-
age male college student (241). Although there remains some disagree-
ment among researchers about whether the force and aggressiveness re-
quired in sports nurture a tendency toward the abuse of women who are
physically weaker than the athletes . . . there isnt any argument that ath-
letes form a special, distinct, and often protected class of adolescents and
young men in high school and college, and that some of these men think
their status entitles them to do whatever they want to women (Lefkowitz,
241). Violence against women on the part of athletes is not limited to ado-
lescents, however. Michael Tysons sense of privilege allowed him to be-
lieve that he actually had the right to rape the woman with whom he met
in his hotel room. An argument might be made that part of what it means
to be a male athlete is to remain, emotionally at least, at the developmental
level of many adolescent boys. In professional football, where the exem-
plary female role seems to be the cheerleader, the perception of women as
decorative and male-pleasing reinforces a social norm that maintains the
assumption that men, and in particular male athletes, are entitled to take
what they want from women, who are there to provide it.
The relationship between sports and war in U.S. history illustrates the
role of athletics as an instrument of oppression and animosity. Gorn and
Goldstein trace the subtleties of this association, beginning with the Amer-
ican Civil War which provided a well of memory, a master metaphor for
the belief that conflict between individuals, classes and nations lay at the
heart of human existence (99). As a moral equivalent of war, athletics
oered an opportunity for young men to get their first taste of glory, and
for older men to renew the tingle of heroic combat (140).
Football exemplifies this arrangement, with its military metaphors and
language of war: drills, training camps, strategy, and tactics. As a prepara-
tion for leadership roles, football provides each of its participants with

the shared experience of violence . . . the risk of injury . . . depen-

dence on his fellows to protect him, the relief at surviving danger, . . .
the sense of having gone through something together that others could
not share [that] gave football players the feeling of being special, dis-
tinct, and worthy. Such feelings are also perhaps the defining char-
acteristics of the bonds between combat veterans of military units.
(Gorn and Goldstein, 163)4

In fact, the decades just before World War I saw a rise of college athletics
that was connected to the martial, jingoistic, and exceptionally masculine
spirit of that time (Gorn and Goldstein, 168).5
The relationship between sports metaphors and the language of war
was not limited to World War I. Americas involvement in the cold war
64 The Language of Male Bonding

produced a whole new discourse of masculinity, and our instigation of the

Persian Gulf War provided one more example of how sports metaphors
influence the way our political leaders conceptualize war as a sporting
event in which their prowess is at stake.6 U.S. presidents since at least
Teddy Roosevelt have been active sportsmen and sports fans. While Rich-
ard Nixon may be the most notable presidential fan in recent history, he
is not alone in assuming the role of the armchair quarterback that so many
American men take on during football season. Nixon, however, took it all
much further than the less powerful working-class or even middle-class
male. Nixon was notorious for his calls to George Allen, then coach of
the Washington Redskins, urging him to try specific plays of presidential
invention. Mandell provides several insights into how this situation
aected U.S. foreign policy under Nixon and how it influenced other men
in high political oce. Mandells observations warrant lengthy quotation:
Nixons public and private life was weirdly colored with, even molded
by, the sports page and locker room rhetoric of team play, playing
the game, strategy, and, above all, winning. It is possible that some
aspects of the recent disappointments that Americans have endured
can be attributed to a tendency among those at the highest levels of
American society to permit sports rhetoric, metaphors of winning and
losing and game dramaturgy to supply patterns for dealing with issues
that are deadly earnest, that have a logic rooted in the real world, and
are not games at all. We know now that the high-level strategy in the
Indo-China adventure was planned and executed on the basis of par-
ables drawn from professional baseball and football. One campaign
for a step-up in bombing was called Operation Linebacker and Nix-
ons code name was Quarterback. (233)

The language of sports pervades the discourse of masculinity and helps

construct the way we see the world, as well as how we relate to such serious
undertakings as war and political involvement.
The influence of sports on the definition of masculine gender identity
is not limited to politics and government, however. Sports metaphors
abound in business as well, where men discuss their game plans, or their
ability to take hits, or complain about Monday-morning quarterback-
ing (Gorn and Goldstein, 208). The language of sports also intrudes on
men in their personal lives. Well-hung jocks vie to score the most women,
whom they see not as equals but as trophies that demonstrate their ath-
letic prowess.
Language and sports share a lack of social and cultural neutrality.
Sports are not just something we do to amuse ourselves, to lose weight, to
demonstrate our superior abilities in a friendly, supportive manner. Sports
have a history and a culture as well as a political dimension. Sports are
 Sex as Sport 65

too often racist, sexist, and homophobic. They frequently do more harm
than good, reinforcing the social norms far more than they undermine
them. Although sports may have the potential to reform certain social
assumptions about race and gender, historically they have helped to sus-
tain dominant social standards, not provide radical alternatives. As Man-
dell observes, Surely American sport is, among other things, disruptive
of some good traditions, the preserver of some bad ones, vulgar, ruinous
to some lives, a diversion from the earnestness of life, expensive, and orally
equivocal. But few protest (280).
Societys unwillingness, even inability, to protest the insidious eect
sports have on social roles in modern society resembles in many ways its
assumptions about language. For most people sports just exist out there in
some indeterminate realm, and we should not take them too seriously
(though many, many fans take them quite seriously, making sports as en-
tertainment one of Americas largest industries).
Although sports, like language, make insidious contributions to main-
taining the social norms, at the same time both possess the potential to
expose the contradictions within society and to introduce alternatives. In-
deed, sports represent a much more complicated cultural phenomenon
than might seem apparent at first glance. While on the surface they appear
to be fundamentally violent, aggressive, competitive, and destructive, Al-
len Guttmann, the eminent U.S. sports historian, emphasizes the erotic
dimension of sports. In addition, even as a male preserve sports may be the
only personal space where men feel entitled to be emotional, and sports is
one of the few discourses that brings men together.7 It is one of the only
areas in which outwardly expressed emotions are permissible for men. It
is one of the few culturally endorsed ways in which men are allowed to
be close.
The homoerotic nature of wrestling and other contact sports intro-
duces, however, yet one more level of male ambivalence about their hetero-
sexuality. In these sports men touch each other a lot; though often violent
contact occurs (behavior that sometimes carries over to their interaction
with women), men also might slap a teammate on the behind or hug one
enthusiastically after he scores a goal or pins a competitor. Although soci-
ety frequently denies or hides the homoerotic aspect of malemale rela-
tionships, especially in sports, athletics frequently allow for an explicit rec-
ognition of male beauty. Early in the twentieth century in the United
States, for example, a bachelor subculture emerged that developed its
own masculine aesthetic that reveled in male beauty (Gorn and Gold-
stein, 74). Our contemporary society is not immune to an infatuation and
glorification of male beauty either, especially by other men. Toby Miller,
in his astute and charming essay on the penis, asserts that today sport
66 The Language of Male Bonding

allows/requires men to watch and dissect other mens bodies in fetishistic

detail. It proers a legitimate space to gaze on and devour the male form
without homosexuality being either alleged or feared (6). The complicity
of sports in homophobia emanates from this broader context in which
men fear homosexuality both in themselves and in other men.8 This fear
manifests itself in violence against males, an aggressiveness frequently ap-
parent in the language men use to talk about themselves and other men.
Sports exemplify an overtly masculine experience, one that trains boys
to become successful businessmen and soldiers and one that reminds
women that men are bigger, stronger, faster, and thus potentially more
successful. Sports, however, expose a deep-seated male ambivalence about
heterosexuality. Like much of the discourse examined already, the lan-
guage of sports and male sexuality resonates with confusion and doubt.

CIRCLE JERK
Formal definitions of circle jerk, what few there are, explain it as either
literally a group of men who sit in a circle and masturbate themselves and/
or others or a boring or time-wasting meeting or other event (Spears,
83). Like jerking o, a euphemism for masturbation that becomes a met-
aphor for an experience at work, circle jerk connotes wasting ones time
or not accomplishing anything.
I have included circle jerk in the chapter on sports rather than in the
chapter on labor and work because it transforms jerking o or masturba-
tion into a sporting event that has winners and losers. The guy who ejacu-
lates first wins the prize. A friend of mine told me a joke recently that
sums up the significance of this male experience:
q: Do you know who the most competitive man is?
a: The guy who wants to place first and second in a circle jerk.
Competition doesnt end there, either. The boy with the largest penis wins
a prize too.
Granted, circle jerks are the experience of adolescent boys and pretty
much disappear from the male experience after the early stages of puberty.
Frequently, this experience is a boys introduction to receiving sexual plea-
sure from another male, and it provides a sexual release at a time when
intercourse with a girl is forbidden. When I look back upon my own expe-
rience with circle jerks, I am embarrassed. The shame may stem from the
association with masturbation in general, and it may be exacerbated by
the implied (if not explicit) intimacy with other males.
In his book, Our Guys, a study of a gang rape in Glen Ridge, New
Jersey, Lefkowitz cautions against placing too much emphasis on the ho-
moerotic nature of this behavior when he points out that
 Sex as Sport 67

some analysts interpret such adolescent behavior not as homoerotic

but as an eort to prove heterosexual dominance and to establish
masculine authority within the group. The real goal is overcoming
your insecurities about sex by impressing your friends with your sex-
ual prowess. To achieve that goal, a guy needs an audience to wit-
ness his dominating performance. A group of appreciative and respon-
sive buddies is essential to build a reputation for sexual control and
domination. (24344)

Male bonding, whether overtly physical as in a circle jerk or covertly

mental as in the use of language, provides men with a source of power and
domination. What on the surface appears to be neutral or natural fre-
quently occasions violence against women in a variety of forms. Adoles-
cent male behavior, whether high school athletics or circle jerks, social-
izes boys to become men who perceive themselves as privileged, superior,
strong, and controlling. Lefkowitzs study of the gang rape in New Jersey
makes clear these connections and warns of the necessity to confront all
such adolescent male behavior early and often if we are to prevent the kind
of adult male behavior that evolves from what we may accept as just boys
being boys.

COJONES

Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice.

Madeline K. Albright, on downing
of a plane near Cuba

The man who has the cojones or the balls to do something has the
courage to win. Although this metaphor might fit just as well in chapter 4,
War and Conquest, I have placed it under sports because the desire to
win, and the sense of what allows one man to win while another loses,
frequently is equated with male sexual prowess. As a metaphor for the
testicles and thus a metonym for manhood, cojones refers to a mans
inherent ability to dominate another man.
Cojones means bulls nuts in Spanish and is best known as a term
used by Hemingway to characterize a courageous man. Slang dictionaries
record similar meanings: John Ayto and John Simpson see a direct correla-
tion between the testicles and courage, guts (40), whereas Robert Chap-
man equates balls with audacity (77).
Madeline Albrights remarks in the epigraph to this section exemplify
the use of this term as connoting bravery and manliness. Albright was
referring to a Cuban military pilots exultant cry after he shot down a
light plane that was alleged to be invading Cuban airspace. We took out
68 The Language of Male Bonding

his balls! the pilot had shouted (Mead, 9), Albright focuses on the Cuban
pilots pusillanimity in the skirmish, pointing out that what he did was
cowardly, not manly, as he had claimed.
Like cock of the walk, and the phrase having the balls, cojones
reduces representations of masculinity to a mans genitals. Courage is not
equated with intelligence or emotional commitment but with testosterone.
The larger a mans gonads (and, of course, his penis) the greater a man he
is. The penis as a metaphorical cudgel, used to beat a competitor into
submission or intimidate the other team, informs the way male athletes
think about themselves as men.
Men who reflect upon a situation and consider the moral and ethical
consequences; men with average-sized or small penises; men who nurture
or care about human life; men who do not hunt or do not kill; men who
think, who read, who write; and men who love in an unselfish and emo-
tionally charged way are not really men. The man who has no cojones is
a wimp or a wuss, a faggot or a queer, not really a man at all. The man
who assumes the validity of this characterization, as is true for the cock
of the walk, and believes that manhood can be understood only in terms
of the size of his genitals lives a diminished existence in which his whole-
ness as a person is negated.
Why dont men ever measure masculinity in terms of having the brains
or having the heart or having the emotions? Why are mens metaphors of
masculinity always reduced to size, power, aggression, and victory? Why
are they so genitally located? These are the questions a close reading of a
metaphor like cojones brings to the surface.

JOCK
Derived from jock strap and meaning, in its narrow sense, an athlete, a
jock, according to Spears, is a male athlete, especially if large and stu-
pid (245). Ayto and Simpson are kinder when they say only that jock
refers to a male athlete, especially at university (114). The American
Heritage College Dictionary expands the definition somewhat when it points
out that this term describes one characterized by machismo (731).
These constitute the popular definitions of the term. The earliest uses
of jock, however, were to copulate with a woman (British slang from
the late 1600s), and the penis (from the mid- to late 1700s) (Spears,
245). Ayto and Simpson concur with the latter usage when they cite one
definition as the male genitals and suggest that it originates around
1790 (114).
Chapman furnishes some helpful etymological information by pointing
out that the basic etymon is jock [meaning] penis, from jack, probably
the diminutive of John, which from the 14th century has been applied to
 Sex as Sport 69

males . . . and male organs (237). John Thomas, as the nickname for
the caretakers penis in Lady Chatterleys Lover, is in this tradition and a
John is, of course, a slang term for a prostitutes client.
The relationship between jock as a synonym for penis and jock
strap as a penis strap provides some insights into the ways in which
language evolves while remaining historically contingent. Jack, in the
phrase jacking o, also takes on new significance. As a metaphor for
male sexuality, though, jock reduces mens identity to that of their bod-
ies while glorifying the athletic and physically strong. The connection be-
tween the jock with a rigid athletic body and the hard-on as a rigid erect
penis cannot be ignored. Men are reminded over and over again of the
importance for their bodies to be like armor: impenetrable, strong, and
emotionless.
As potentially an athletic superhero with the persona of a stud, the
jock projects a sense of power and sexual might. Ironically, though, as a
stupid muscle-bound male, the jock exemplifies male heterosexuality
with its conception of the world as split fundamentally between mind and
body. For many men the body represents the source of their identity, and
the penis dominates that conception. Here too a term that glorifies the
masculine body resonates with contempt for that same body. Mens ambiv-
alence about their physiology, and their doubt that their minds and their
emotions have any relevance in their lives, calls out from this particular
metaphor.

SCORING

The boys used to go to the local dance halls and stand around . . .
until the . . . sexual urge prompted them to score a chick.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

As Don Sabo and Ross Runfola point out in their book on sports and male
identity, Sports and masculinity are virtually synonymous in American
culture (x). Not only are there specific words for referring to certain types
of men (e.g., jock) but men frequently rely on sports metaphors to dis-
cuss their personal and professional lives (e.g., a level playing field,
crossing the finish line, getting to the end zone, hitting a home run).
Adolescent boys talk about getting to first base with a girl, and scor-
ing is the ultimate goal of the adolescent male imagination. Sports domi-
nate the lives of boys and provide a training ground in which they be-
come men.
When sex becomes a contest, a means for domination and conquest,
malefemale relationships are reduced to a game in which there are win-
70 The Language of Male Bonding

ners and losers. 9 The question, Did you score last night, Steve? repre-
sents an extension of male competitiveness in which females are often
perceived as opponents and various strategies or game plans are developed
to get them to submit (Sabo and Runfola, xiv). Men feel comfortable on
the playing field, where they know the rules of the game and can maneuver
a victory. This may be part of the reason many men avoid smart women.
In addition to having their sense of insecurity about their own intelligence
exacerbated, men may also fear losing. A woman who understands the
rules of the game may be too much of an opponent, and male identity may
be too invested in being the winner.
In her book on sexism and the American culture of sports, Mariah
Burton Nelson points out:

From the pinup girls on football players lockers to the very lan-
guage of scoring, many men associate sports with male sexual viril-
ity and female passivity. Men are aggressors; women are things to be
consumed, like food or drink. At times blatantly, at times more subtly,
the manly sports culture equates athletic prowessor even athletic
enthusiasmwith not just sex, but dominance. (86)

In light of recent warnings broadcast around the time of the Super Bowl
about the increase in violence against girlfriends and wives, especially
when the mans favored team loses, Nelsons observations seem even more
pertinent. Several reports, not isolated examples, of college football play-
ers beating up and/or raping their girlfriends also add credibility to Nel-
sons observations. Men are raised not just to be athletes in their own right
but to live out their fantasies of masculinity through athletic heroes. When
these heroes can injure women with impunity, we can indict sports in gen-
eral as a training ground for antisocial male behavior.
In a chapter on scoring in particular, Nelson describes the reprehen-
sible activities of the Spur Posse in Lakeview, California. This group of
teenage boys, mostly football players, turned sex into a sporting contest,
tallying points scored for each instance of sexual intercourse (80). Al-
though these young men took scoring to its most extreme, even to the point
of rape, the idea of sex as triumph and as victory resounds throughout the
discourse examined in this book. In the concluding remarks to her chapter
on scoring, Nelson reflects:
The sex depicted in the sacred sports culture is not sensuous, playful,
spontaneous, passionate, caring, mutual. The message sent in football
stadiums, in sports magazines, in sports bars, and in communities
where boys are athletes and girls are cheerleaders is not just about
exaggerated gender roles or viva [sic] la dierence. Its about domi-
nation. Sex as conquest. In order for men to remain dominant, to
 Sex as Sport 71

remain victorious, women must be in a subservient position. Women

become opponents to defeat. Or they can be trophies: rewards for suc-
cess in the intramale hierarchy. (96)
The behavior of the boys of Glen Ridge High who gang-raped a retarded
girl raises questions about U.S. society in general and athletics in particu-
lar. As Lefkowitz points out:
The Jocks didnt invent the idea of mistreating young women. The
ruling clique of teenagers adhered to a code of behavior that mim-
icked, distorted, and exaggerated the values of the adult world around
them. These values extolled winners . . . [and] they denigrated
losers. . . . Glen Ridge placed the elite kidsthe kids with mas-
culine good looks, the kids who stood out on the playing fieldon a
pedestal. (424)
Indeed, for these young men, the essence of jockdom was a practiced
show of contempt for kids and teachers alike. They tried to humiliate any
wimpy guy who got in their way, but they reserved their best shots for girls
who ignored them or dared to stand up to them (111).
The overarching context for all this pernicious behavior remains high
school sports, with their emphasis on competition, winning, and achieve-
ment. These values are not unique to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and the
violent outcome of this socialization resonates in sex crimes across the
United States. Lefkowitz concludes:

In the community where they grew up and which celebrated their ath-
letic achievements; in their isolation from women and their evolving at-
titudes toward girls; in their fascination with voyeurism and pornogra-
phy and in their actual treatment of young women; and, finally, in their
choice of victimin all these respects, the Glen Ridge Jocks resembled
the contemporary profile of other privileged and popular male groups
that were accused of committing sexual assaults of women. (24849)

Women as the losers to men reinforce the dynamics of the masculinity

game. Losers are reduced to humiliation and powerlessness, and thus, as
Lucy Komisar makes clear, losers take on the classic status of women
(140).
As a metaphor for male sexuality, scoring is used by men who are
interested in keeping track of the number of copulations they have per-
formed (Spears, 385), and the term measures how a mans success with a
woman depends on his being pleasing and convincing (Wentworth and
Flexner, 449). Taken together these two insights make clear the close asso-
ciation between scoring and seduction. Related to the Don Juan myth, in
which numbers and counting become the basis of mens relationship with
women (though today this is not an exclusively heterosexual phenome-
72 The Language of Male Bonding

non), scoring accentuates the male obsession with quantity over quality.
To score points for devising a successful strategy or for winning the game
exemplifies the interest of most men in the goal or the end rather than
in the quality of the experience. The idea of conquest, or of gaining the
trophy in which a woman becomes the prize, reduces male sexual pleasure
to a race or a game or an event for which the primary objective is to win,
to be the best, to score the most points.
Maybe the saying Its not whether you win or lose, its how you play
the game should be the coachs advice we take seriously. If sexual pleasure
can become play rather than work, joy rather than conquest, wonder
rather than triumph, metaphors of male sexuality can encompass the
breadth of erogenous possibility, not the obsession with winning the tour-
nament, closing the deal, buying cheap to sell dear.

WELL HUNG

Death takes the innocent young. And those who are very well hung.
W. H. Auden

Many men compete for the honor of having the biggest penis and the
largest testicles because these same men equate their masculinity with the
ability to do the most harm and intimidate those who do not carry around
a club between their legs. In the locker room, although men are not sup-
posed to look at other mens genitals, the most well hung is usually known
and honored. This bastion of male privilege is not unproblematic, how-
ever. Although the locker-room culture celebrates male physicality, it also
reveals a culture that is fragile: Its fragility consists of the fact that in the
locker room, as on the playing field, male physical superiority is not a
biological given but an ideological construct that must be produced by
ritual performances that promote male narcissism and exclude male vul-
nerability (Disch and Kane, 299). At no time is this vulnerability more
apparent then when a female sports reporter enters the locker room, as
witnessed by the 1990 experience of Lisa Olson, a sportswriter for the
Boston Herald who covered the New England Patriots. A victim of sexual
harassment by several team members, Olson was castigated by the teams
owner, Victor Kiam, as a classic bitch, an epithet later emended by Mark
Clayton, a wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, to a dick-watching
bitch. As a professional journalist and a woman who rejected the tradi-
tional female spectator role of the adoring audience who mirrors mans
performance in such a way as to exaggerate his potency and overlook his
inadequacies (Scheman, 287), Olson threatened the patriarchal myth of
male superiority and invincibility. The vigor of the attack on Olson by the
 Sex as Sport 73

male athletic establishment suggests the level of fear and anger these men
felt from her intrusion on their privacy (and privates, for that matter) and
their male preserve.
This insecurity about the penis as symbolic of male privilege is not
a recent phenomenon. As a synonym for the less-well-known slang term
mentulate, which pertains to a man with an abnormally large penis
(Spears, 286) and more precisely means a man with large or very large
genitals (Spears, 473; Thorne, 555; Ayto and Simpson, 282; Chapman,
462), well hung as a term has been in use for at least two hundred years,
pervading the male imagination as a concept for far longer. The size of the
penis, indeed the belief that the larger the better and the smaller the less
of a man one is, suuses mens fears and insecurities. The latent desire of
many men to be considered studs derives from this fixation but at the
same time reduces a man to an animal, a horse at stud. Men ignore the
significance of identifying with a part of nature the male imagination has
worked hard to control, and they fail to see the connection between the
horse at stud and domesticated slave. Men romanticize the stud as omnip-
otent and lubricious while ignoring the extent to which all domesticated
animals are just that, domesticated. In this idyllic view of the world the
attraction for a man to having a large penis relates to having the capac-
ity to cause harm and destruction; that is, the penis becomes a punitive
weapon of misogyny.
The larger the better informs mens ideas about weapons, of course,
and about engines and boats and other male toys. This obsession with the
penis as a weapon, indeed a large club to bludgeon a woman into submis-
sion, blinds men to their bodies as fragile, sensitive, and soft. The males
preoccupation with size undermines his ability to think about the broad
spectrum of giving and receiving pleasure.

WIMP/WUSS(Y)

Im the pit bull of SDI, you Ivy League wimp!

George Bush to Sen. J. James Exxon

As terms connoting the exact opposite of having cojones, wimp and

wuss(y) characterize the man who is afraid to take risks and probably
does not care a lot about winning. In sports jargon the wimp is the guy
who sits on the bench, acts like a sissy, and avoids being pummeled for
the sake of the home team. In many ways the wimp is anathema to
sports in general, but as a derogatory term for a man, wimp exemplifies
the unqualified, doubtful, even tremulous male who prefers not to be a
sports hero.
74 The Language of Male Bonding

In the early 1900s wimp referred to a young woman or a girl. By

the 1970s, according to Paul Beale, the definition had changed to mean
one who is old-fashioned and behind the times, a square (503). Today
wimp is slang for a person who is regarded as weak or ineectual
(AHCD, 1544). Chapman synthesizes these various meanings when he de-
fines wimp as an ineectual person; a soft, silly person; a weakling; . . .
unmacho (468).
The transition from a weak person to an unmacho man suggests that
men have only these two choices: men can be soft or they can be hard;
men can be weak or they can be macho. Men cannot, though, under any
circumstances be emotional and cry and still be men.
Although the precise origins of the word wimp are unknown, Chap-
man speculates that wimp might have been derived from J. Wellington
Wimpy, a relatively unaggressive character in the comic strip Popeye [or]
from the early 20th century Cambridge University wimp [meaning] young
woman or perhaps from whimper (468). No matter its exact origin, the
meaning seems fairly clear. A wimp is unaggressive, feeble, spineless,
cowardly, and emotional. A wimp is more like a woman than like a man,
and when you elide woman and whimper, you arrive at an intonation
not unlike the word wimp.
The origin of the term wuss(y) is also debatable. Tony Thorne be-
lieves it was probably inspired by puss, pussy, or pussy-wussy, used
as a term of endearment to a kitten (570), whereas Chapman sees it as
the handy combination of wimp and pussy (475). A wuss, not unlike
a wimp, is a weak, feeble person, and by extension a dupe (Thorne,
570). According to Spears, wuss can be seen as a weak, wishy-washy
person (489). In most cases, though, wuss (or wussy) refers to a man,
even though it is derived from pejorative terms for a woman.
Like other metaphors that suggest femaleness (e.g., faggot, pansy,
pussy, and sissy), a wimp exemplifies passivity, thoughtfulness, and
quiescence. As an unaggressive man, a wimp thinks first and considers
others. A wimp, then, is too compassionate and emotional to be a real
man.
In national security discourse, a language that frequently reduces the
potential for war to a discourse of the big game, this point is made abun-
dantly clear. Carol Cohn points out that
You learn that someone is being a wimp if he perceives an interna-
tional crisis as very dangerous and urges caution; if he thinks it might
not be important to have just as many weapons that are just as big as
the other guys; if he suggests that an attack should not necessarily be
answered by an even more destructive counterattack; or, until recently,
if he suggested that making unilateral arms reductions might be useful
for our own security. All of these are wimping out. (234)
 Sex as Sport 75

In the early 1980s, with what Kimmel refers to as the virtual Great
American Wimp Hunt, wimp became a negative model for men to at-
tack. This sensitive New Age guy, who was warm, sensitive, cuddly,
and compassionate [was] . . . poised as a masculine template for the de-
cade, despite his receding hairline, flabby biceps, and enlarging waistline
(Manhood, 29293).
Kimmels sardonic characterization of the postmodern wimp points to
several intrinsic contradictions: the new man emerged at the expense of
women; he was not new enough for a truly egalitarian relationship with an
equally strong woman (Manhood, 293).
Today many people use the word wimp to refer to any weak-willed
person and no longer to just men. Barbara Ehrenreich stresses this when
she observes, Already, in popular usage, the dismissive term wimp is
applied almost as readily to women as to men, implying that the appro-
priate stance for both sexes is tough and potentially battle-ready (230).
Both wimp and wuss are particularly oensive, however, when re-
ferring to men. They are comparable to calling a woman a bitch. Ironically,
though, many self-proclaimed feminists use these terms to refer to men,
even though a man using the word bitch (or chick) to refer to a female
would instigate their wrath.
Ironically, the same people who would confront a friend on the use of
chick to refer to a woman use wimp as a perfectly acceptable term.
But wimp is a sexist reference, let there be no doubt about it. Although
it is used as a universal insult for men and women, its power as an aront
comes from combining two words that connote weakness, with an associa-
tion with femininity. When we call someone a wimp, we buy into the
characterization of women as highly emotional, whimpering cowards and
to men as aggressive and destructive. The guy who takes all the risks to
help the home team win the big game is a man, whereas the guy who sits
on the bench is just a wimp. Ironically, and somewhat tragically, the heroic
athlete may end up doing so much damage to his body he will end up in a
wheelchair or at least walking with a cane. The wimp, on the other hand,
will probably go on to college (even without an athletic scholarship) and,
without the scars from high school sports, will end up walking just fine.
4 Sex as War and Conquest

Wars are not an interminable series of historical accidents, nor the

product of the machinations of evil men, nor yet the result of some
simple single cause like capitalism or overpopulation. Neither is war-
fare merely the heritage of our evolutionary past, an outlet for our
natural aggressiveness. War is a central institution in human civili-
zation, and it has a history precisely as long as civilization.
Gwynne Dyer, War

Whether war is a necessary factor in the evolution of mankind may

be disputed, but a fact which cannot be questioned is that, from the
earliest records of man to the present age, war has been his domi-
nant preoccupation.
J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World

Strip away all of the rhetoric, and the core remains: we expect our
young men to sacrifice their lives for us if war comes, and they are
willing to be asked.
Gwynne Dyer, War

War can be seen as the culmination of the masculine experience, and it

synthesizes the thematic structures I have examined thus far. War provides
the opportunity for mens obsession with the machine and technology to
merge with their fixation on business and economic gain, and war allows
them to realize the training they receive in athletics and sports. In war
men experience the violent, aggressive, and death-defying occurrences for
which they have prepared for most of their adolescent and adult life. That
is, war epitomizes the socially constructed masculine world.
Although the sources of war, its origin, and its role in civilization are
much debated, military historians find common agreement on some as-
pects of the experience. In his most recent book on the birth and death of
war, Ride of the Second Horseman, the distinguished American military
historian Robert OConnell provides a helpful overview of wars pertinent
characteristics:

76
 Sex as War and Conquest 77

There must be an element of premeditation and planning. . . . War

implies direction by some form of governmental structure. . . . Partici-
pants also are presumed ready to apply lethal violence and risk injury
and death in pursuit of [certain] objectives and in accordance with the
dictates of the command authority. Finally, some understanding can
be attributed to the parties involved that the results of war, for good
or ill, will be more lasting than momentary. (5)

Other writers on war have emphasized dierent aspects, pointing to the

necessity for there to be some kind of political purpose accompanied
by weapons, strategy, order, training and discipline, . . . and rewards . . .
brought together into a single art or practice (Gallie, 2930). While many
of these components remain the same today, modern or contemporary
wars also stress the ability to mobilize the entire population for war, the
resources that make that degree of mobilization possible, and the technol-
ogy (Dyer, 43).
Barbara Ehrenreich takes issue with theories such as these and sug-
gests that in fact either no theories of war or far too many exist. In Blood
Rites, her thought-provoking study of war, she analyzes the origins and
history of the passions behind war and provides what she calls a crude
summary [of ] the theories of war which modern wars have left us with:
that war is a means, however risky, by which men seek to advance their
collective interests and improve their lives. Or, alternatively, that war stems
from subrational drives not unlike those that lead individuals to commit
violent crimes (8).1 Ehrenreich rejects the idea of a personality type in-
herently prepared for war, the hot-tempered macho type, for example,
and points out that war is too complex and collective an activity to be
accounted for by a single warlike instinct lurking within the individual
psyche (9).
From Ehrenreichs perspective the amount of time spent on the prepa-
ration for battle far exceeds the actual fighting involved in war. Central to
much of the preparation for war, especially the capacity to mobilize hu-
man resources, has been the role of sports. Athletics has functioned well
as a training ground for both warlike behavior and jingoistic commitments.
As Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein observe, in the early part of this
century in the United States for the first time, organized athletics and
physical education were linked in the minds of leaders and participants
to patriotism and military preparedness (181). The nationalistic rhetoric
surrounding the Olympics, that supposedly neutral sports-centered ritual,
reminds us of how often athletic competition degenerates into the promo-
tion of a sense of national worth and superiority.
That there exists an intimate relationship between sports and war is
not a new insight, of course. Carl von Clausewitz himself, still considered
78 The Language of Male Bonding

the most important military theorist of the modern era, begins his treatise,
On War, by drawing an analogy between warfare and wrestling. For
Clausewitz, War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would
conceive as a unit the countless numbers of duels which make up a War,
we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. . . . War there-
fore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our
will (101). Indeed, W. B. Gallie makes the point that war possesses an
inherent tendency to escalate that is rooted . . . in mens simplest acts of
fighting (6667).
Like so many contact sports, war engenders acts of violence aimed at
conquest and destruction. Men learn to be good warriors and obedient
soldiers through the high school team sports they play and the ideology of
masculinity geared toward winning at all cost, no matter the goal or
objective.
Scholars have documented extensively early transitions from sports to
war. From something as simple as the foot race, which prepared men to
carry messages more quickly, to archery contests that improved their aim,
sports have helped train men to be more proficient soldiers. Hunting,
probably the most significant link between war and sports, provided an
armed group of men with training in tactics and warfare to kill animals
much larger than they. Even for Ehrenreich, whose skepticism about most
theories of war makes her reluctant to endorse any of them, hunting is
an antecedent of war . . . predating it and providing it with many valuable
techniques (21).2 The horse, initially perhaps only a means of transporta-
tion, quickly became a weapon in the hunt and subsequently in battle; the
chariot was designed as a weapon, with chariot races developed as practice
in eective warring techniques. The phalanx, with its emphasis on military
training and men working together as a team, was one of the earliest and
most eective military innovations.
One dominant theory of the origins of war sees it as predominantly a
rough male sport for underemployed hunters (Dyer, 10). Ehrenreich ech-
oes this conception in a chapter entitled, quite tellingly, A Rough Male
Sport, in which she makes explicit the connection between war and sports.
For both writers, war making has to be understood as a means to define
manhood, to establish who the real men really are. This, according to
Ehrenreich, is exactly what we would expect if war originated as a substi-
tute occupation for underemployed male hunter-defenders (127). Thus
war becomes a solution to what Margaret Mead termed the recurrent
problem of civilization, which is to define the male roles satisfactorily
enough (Ehrenreich, 129).
Today sports such as football provide adolescent boys with a sense of
who the real men are, training them to become fierce warriors and obedi-
ent soldiers (and sometimes rapists, as it turns out, which is of course not
 Sex as War and Conquest 79

irrelevant to the practice of war). Fasteau makes this connection when he

observes that in ordinary life, the most violent pursuits are considered
the most masculinefootball and making war, for example (150). As
should be clear from chapter 3, in many ways football in particular re-
sembles war. The language of football resonates with armed services train-
ing and the battlefield.
In a highly perceptive essay on the discourse of Monday Night Football,
Nick Trujillo examines the ways in which it reduces images of the male
body to machines and missiles.3 He provides a long (one hopes exhaustive)
inventory of terms used by the announcers of these games, a list so vivid
it warrants quoting at length:

During the season players were described as weapons, missiles,

shields, rockets, hitting machines, and other instruments of vio-
lence . . . [and] among the terms used . . . to describe what these . . .
weapons (bodies) did on the football field were attack, blow away,
break through, burst, catapult, club, crash, cripple, crunch, decapi-
tate, decimate, destroy, dislodge, dislocate, dismantle, drill, explode,
fire, fly, hammer, hit, hurdle, jackhammer, kill, launch, mortar, mug,
penetrate, plug, pop, pound, push, ram, rifle, rip, shoot, shred, slam,
smash, smoke, snap, spin, steamroll, tattoo, tomahawk, toss, twist,
unload, upend, whack, whip, wound and wreck. (411)

Descriptions of team sports endorse violence as acceptable behavior, just

as the discourse of male bonding sanctions interpersonal relationships
built on fear, derision, and contempt. Men are taught it is manly to destroy
the enemy, whether that enemy takes the shape of a citizen of another
nation, a woman on the street, a gay man, or an opponent on the other
team.
As Ehrenreich makes clear, though, War is not simply a clash of Oth-
ers made possible by an ignorant horror of dierence. . . . Warriors . . .
share the basic tenets of warriordom: a respect for courage, a willingness
to stand by ones comrades no matter what, a bold indierence to death
(141). With its emphasis on competition, force, and honor war provides
men with the ultimate experience of male bonding. Until recently, women
had been all but omitted from the armed services, and men have found in
war an exclusive male club.4 John Keegan points out, in his general history
of warfare, that the best-observed ideals of regimental culture [include]
total obedience, single-minded courage, self-sacrifice, honour (16). Men
are taught to obey those in positions of authority throughout their adoles-
cent and adult lives. Their high school football coaches instill in them
the necessity to be team players, to take risks, and to sacrifice their own
significance to the goals (and honor) of their teams.
On the football field, as in all walks of life for men, the ability to be
80 The Language of Male Bonding

forceful, to be powerful, and to dominate are qualities to emulate. In war,

force takes on even greater consequence than on the gridiron, allowing
men to pursue technological and mechanical innovation. In war, as in in-
terpersonal relationships, for many men force is the ultimate argument
(Dyer, 4). Whether we are talking about Patriot missiles in the Persian
Gulf War or settling an argument with a lover, whether we are concerned
with the front line of the varsity football team or gang rape, force remains
for far too many men the basis for settling disagreements. Although Kee-
gan takes the essentialist position that sees as natural and inherent mens
tendency to use weapons to settle quarrels over insults, property, women
and succession to position (25), we should not ignore his point that men
tend to resolve dierences with the use of force.
Men learn to be violent, however; they are by no means born warriors
or rapists. Certainly, a large part of mens socialization to be aggressive
and violent comes from the emphasis placed throughout much of their
lives on competition. Competition, along with greed, individualism, and
the necessity to win, are, of course, central components of capitalist ideol-
ogy. Men learn to compete for the best job, the largest paycheck, the most
beautiful woman within a broad context of religious and economic rein-
forcements that posit this behavior as emblematic of the human condition.
Men are taught to compare the size of their muscles, their penises, and
their possessions as the source of their social significance. In war the size
of the weapon, its capacity to do the most harm, is a measure of strength,
potency, and, alas, masculinity. When the army teaches a recruit the
dierence between his gun and his weapon, his penis and his rifle, the
message he receives involves a comparison grounded in the power to in-
flict harm.
The concept of honor unifies all this macho warrior ideology and intro-
duces an ingrained warrior ethic that is the heritage of every young hu-
man male (Dyer, 14); as Gwynne Dyer also quite accurately perceives,
Men will kill and die rather than lose face (13). Honor has always
grounded the poetic cult of military might, introducing the somewhat ab-
surd notion that an honorable kind of fighting exists. Drawing a compari-
son between the introduction of the chariot into warfare and the introduc-
tion of the fighter plane, Dyer observes that although warfare is a serious
business, and it may seem incredible that anything so frivolous as one kind
of fighting [can be seen to be] more fun and honorable than another
(48), such perceptions have at times influenced the dominant military style
of an entire era. In World War I, for example, members of the cavalry
remained unwilling to give up their horses long after it became apparent
that the introduction of tanks had made it impossible for the cavalry to be
eective or even to survive, for that matter.
Honor gives men a sense of glory as they bond with other warriors to
 Sex as War and Conquest 81

be real men and not cowards. Honor also provides a basis for perceived
superiority over other men, less well armed or inferior in their training.
Honor, then, like the rules of an athletic event, introduces parameters in
which men play out their role of soldier while demonstrating to their fel-
lows their mastery over women, children, and those males designated as
lesser mendraft dodgers, for example, war resisters, and gay men, of
course.5
The concepts of honor, competition, and force have evolved alongside
the development of better, more destructive weapons and the creation of
new tactics and strategies for successful warfare. Scientific research not
only has improved machines for agriculture and industrialization but cre-
ated more eective weapons of mass destruction. As Dyer observes so
astutely:

At the time of Ceresole [1544], the most powerful weapons in the

world, the great siege cannons, were capable of killing perhaps a half
a dozen people (if they stood close together) at a range of a few hun-
dred yards. Today, less than four and a half centuries later, the modern
counterparts of those weapons, the intercontinental ballistic missiles,
can kill several million people at a range of seven or eight thousand
miles. (54)

Although, according to Dyer, only in the modern period has this kind of
destructive capacity been dominated by technology, it seems clear that
mens desire to create bigger, more forceful weapons has informed strate-
gies of warfare throughout human history. Lewis Mumford, we may recall
from chapter 1, Sex as Machine, sees the military drill as a prime ex-
ample of how the technological imagination has influenced the way armies
were conceived and trained.
The male fascination with technological innovation has, unfortunately,
been directed toward destruction and the control of nature (especially hu-
man beings) more often than it has toward the betterment of humanity.
This desire for control manifests itself in social organization and finds
some of its greatest expression not only in armies but in businesses. Busi-
ness, in the broadest sense of the wordnot just modern corporations but
earlier trading and merchant endeavors, with their drive to acquire more
land and goodsmotivated war eorts. The structure of these business
arrangements aected society in general and influenced the way wars were
fought: The commercial unification of the world immensely enlarged the
scale, the stage, the rewards and the motives of wars between industrial
nations (Gallie, 43). Indeed, warring is generally attributed to the central-
ization of power in society. According to Gallie, military thinking and the
thinking of businessmen or of scientists is at the heart of the war-culture
we have inherited (67).
82 The Language of Male Bonding

Dyer highlights this same point in the caption to a photo of military

personnel in Saigon who are viewing graphs on an overhead projector.
He points out that the temptation to believe that all the human impon-
derables of combat can be reduced to neat equations was especially strong
in the United States and exalted the role of the manager and planner
over that of the traditional fighting commander (see figs. following
p. 153). Commerce, business, and science merge in their eorts to perpetu-
ate wars in much the same way that they influence social values and gen-
der arrangements.
Although considerable debate over the sources of war remains, scarcity
has been identified as a primary one. Whether it was scarcity of land, food,
or women, men have fought wars to obtain some form of property they
believed to be their inalienable right. OConnell, for one, maintains that
war began as raiding, imperialism and enslavement (23), along with the
desire to obtain territory, property, and labor (29): The inescapable
nature of wars snare would eventually be predicated on nowhere else to
go and its corollary, a population too high to go elsewhere (46). J. F. C.
Fuller sees the fundamental causes of war as biological and economic.
The more prolific the herds and flocks, the more frequently had new
grass-lands to be sought. . . . Similarly, the more prolific the city popula-
tion, the more food was needed and the more land was necessary for its
cultivation (2). Men fought for land, food, and slaves to do the work
required to sustain life. In addition, men battled to obtain products un-
known to their communities, and men went to war to acquire goods that
served only as badges of prestige and warrior prowess: war, that is, served
not only to enrich the victorious community as a whole, but to enhance
the status of a specific group within it: the men who fought or led the
fighting (Ehrenreich, 123).
Although some confusion remains about how exactly individual men
came together in groups to fight battles and to undertake such a significant
project as a war, anthropologists point to what is apparently an inherent
proclivity among human males to bond in pods that scrupulously exclude
women (OConnell, 30).
On a broader scale evidence suggests that the dominant trend in the
history (and prehistory) of human culture has been the creation of larger
and larger groups within which each member is defined as one of us: a
kinsman, a fellow tribesman, a fellow citizen (Dyer, 6). From the tribe to
the battle regiment may not have been such a great leap, especially in light
of the existence of small all-male hunting groups. While the regiment is
really a modern invention of war, the intimate male-centered band of hunt-
ers/warriors has been around for thousands of years. Although the hunt-
ing hypothesis, the belief that hunting has always been an exclusively male
activity and that it was the sole motor of human evolution has declined
 Sex as War and Conquest 83

recently to the status of myth (Ehrenreich, 39), we cannot deny the ramifi-
cations of men bonding together in exclusive control of weapons, and with
a distinct agenda in mind. Indeed, Ehrenreich focuses some attention on
how a change in hunting strategy that coincided with the first arms revo-
lution initiated a new sexual division of labor that demoted women. In-
stead of the communal hunt undertaken by the whole band, there was now
the male hunters sub-band, with women relegated to the less glamorous
job of processing the meat . . . brought back by men (111). This change
to a male-only hunting strategy may have precipitated the use of violence
as the exclusive prerogative of males. Concomitant with this development
was the practice of treating women as booty [which] may well have en-
couraged misogyny in the victors (Ehrenreich, 130).
Men bonded together thousands of years ago to further their agenda
in ways not unlike (though slightly less sophisticated than) the regiments,
sports teams, business clubs, social lodges, and college fraternities in ex-
istence today. Although, initially, these secret mens associations artifi-
cially tried to maintain the old glory and comradeship which formerly
existed during hunting expeditions (Ehrenreich, 124), today these men-
only groups still provide networks for employment as well as a foundation
for the continuation of male privilege.6
This male-dominated social arrangement we find in our society is nei-
ther without historical precedent nor is it neutral in its ramifications for
women. As Dyer observes, this new form of social organization has as
its most striking features . . . the dominance of a warrior classand the
depoliticization of women (8). Indeed, according to Dyer, an inherent
relationship exists between the administration of a state and patriarchy,
both of which provide the illusion of absolute power embodied in one man
or a small group of men who are backed by the right and ability to punish
or even kill those who disobey (Dyer, 17). While Dyers statement may
be too extreme to apply to contemporary life, the modern state maintains
a similar eectiveness with the use of more subtle means of control, not
least of which is discourse.
The right to control social behavior and inflict harm on those who
imagine or live out alternative social roles gains legitimacy through the
appropriation of language. Discourse is, of course, a powerful weapon
in the war between the sexes, a war really directed against the female,
whether embodied as woman or as gay man. Fullers insight that an armys
main weapon [is] terror (9), coupled with Gallies observation that all
serious wars are decided by superior strength, whether actually deployed
and demonstrated or irresistibly threatened (59), highlights the signifi-
cance of the discourse of male bonding in mens struggle against women.
Indeed, the discourse of male bonding represents a potent example of
how language polices behavior. While terror based on such overt weapons
84 The Language of Male Bonding

as spears, clubs, and guns provides an even more explicit message of who
controls society, discourse oers a subtle, even veiled, reminder of who
has power and how that power is maintained. When that discourse takes
on the form of visual representations and symbolic meaning as in pornog-
raphy, slasher movies, and music videos, the war between the sexes esca-
lates into the realm of explicit subjection and conquest.
Although the discourse of male bonding is a means of waging war
against women and gay men, gang rape and pornography represent even
more overt examples of male violence against women. As frequently one
of the more valuable currencies of war, women are the prize men fight for,
both to act as their protector against the brutality of other men and to
serve as victims of mens own assaults and rape. For Genghis Khan, cer-
tainly one of the more notorious warlords, happiness lies in conquering
ones enemies . . . in outraging their wives and daughters (Dyer, 45). Lest
we dismiss this quote as outdated barbarism, the civil war in Bosnia re-
minds us that rape remains one of modern mans more evil wartime out-
rages. And rape, especially gang rape, reminds women that small regi-
ments of men (frequently, in civilian life, adolescent boys on the high
school football team) can and will assert their power over them at will.7
Mens ability to terrorize women is not limited to rape, however. Men
have a significant influence over culture in its varied manifestations, and
men quite literally control the streets. From the relatively innocuous bill-
board displaying the beautiful blond prize selling Black Velvet to the rep-
resentation of rape as normal male behavior in contemporary American
literature, mens control of the images of male heterosexuality continues,
despite womens advancement. The ambivalent attitude toward rape . . .
[and] the use of the penis as weapon in such literary works as A Streetcar
Named Desire (Gilbert and Gubar, 50) continue to reinforce mens assump-
tion of male privilege and superiority.
Recently, with the continued strength of the feminist movement, men
have become even more open in their opposition to female equality. James
Gibson makes the point, in his study of violence and manhood in post-
Vietnam America, that the changing relations between the sexes encour-
aged some men to dream [and] to fantasize about the powers and features
of another kind of man who could retake and reorder the world (11). The
hero of all these dreams turns out to be a paramilitary warrior. Although
this extreme level of fantasy fortunately does not infect most men, the
confusion about privilege, power, and superiority preoccupies many among
us. Part of mens compensation for their fears and doubts registers in the
language they use to talk about women and other men, a language that
reduces intimacy to warfare and implies that love is really only a battle
between the sexes.
 Sex as War and Conquest 85

BLUE BALLS

Sex will relieve testicular congestion, or blue balls.

Playboy

Nothing for a dirty man

but soap in his bathtub, a
greasy hand, love
nut
perhaps. Or else . . .
Robert Creeley, All That Is Lovely in Men

In their perceived need to inflict their sexual desire on a woman, men do

violence to themselves. In this scenario unsatisfied sexual conquest of the
female causes harm to the male perpetrator.
Xiao Zhou, in an essay on virginity and premarital sex in contempo-
rary China, relies on military language when she describes the manipula-
tive strategies used by Chinese men to seduce women. Her observations
about how the blue balls syndrome works in these situations provides
insights into how this particular metaphor characterizes male heterosexual
behavior. Referring to the blue balls syndrome as a myth, Zhou points
out that while engaging in heavy petting, the young man becomes sexu-
ally aroused; he tells his girlfriend that he will become very sick if no
sexual intercourse follows. Some men tell their girlfriends that they are
experiencing terrible physical pain (285). In the course of her discus-
sions with Chinese women Zhou found that many women fell for the
blue ball and severe pain syndromes (285).
As a strategy designed to make a woman agree to have sex with a man,
the term blue balls fits easily into the discourse of conquest in both war
and sports. Blue balls, as a ploy to manipulate victory or to score,
describes a conception of masculinity bent on winning the fight and en-
joying the spoils, as opposed to losing the battle and suering the turgid
and painful condition of the testicles due to sexual excitement and frustra-
tion (Chapman, 34).
Blue balls occur when a man rubs his genitals against a woman (i.e.,
dry humps her) while both are clothed. Although neither party obtains
sexual satisfaction, a commonly known phrase for the womans condition
is not in use.8 The word blue in the phrase refers to bruised balls, as in
black-and-blue. If you have ever had blue balls (or lovers nuts, as this
condition is also called) you would know that it is both real and painful.
But what causes a man to act in such a way as to get blue balls?
86 The Language of Male Bonding

Part of the impetus behind this self-infliction of pain comes from one
of the basic premises of what it means to be a man: that is, to be possessed
of an uncontrollable need to experience sexual release. Another influence
is the belief that when a woman says no, she really means yes. When I have
experienced blue balls, both assumptions were at work. In my adolescence,
when this phenomenon was more prevalent than in my adult years
(though, to be honest, it did not disappear upon my eighteenth or twenty-
fifth or even thirtieth birthday), I got blue balls because I was committed
to the necessity of penetration and unwilling (or unable) to hear what the
woman was saying. It took a long time to hear what women are saying
(in all areas of my life), and much of my resistance came from certain
presuppositions I had about the entitlements of being male.9
As a metaphor for male sexuality, blue balls captures succinctly the
social assumption that men must get laid or become damaged in some
way. This metaphor identifies mens uncontrollable sexual passion in which
blue balls can be seen as one stage on the spectrum of coercive sexuality,
a spectrum that in this case may culminate in date rape. The connection of
blue balls with the imperative male need for penetration masks alternative
sources of sexual pleasure. Robert Creeleys poem explores this situation
and suggests in its closing words the threat to which the frustrated
working-class male may have to resort to gain some means of sexual satis-
faction other than masturbation with his own greasy hand. The poem
has a tone of uncertainty: the Or else at the end of it intimates self-
doubt, a sense that a shabby and thus unattractive man, the proletarian,
will not find sexual satisfaction with a woman. Blue balls, or in the case of
this poem, lovers nuts, may be symbolic of male sexual confusion.
Men are not the only victims of this confusion; women are also ac-
costed as a result of this particular brand of male obsession. Many women,
not only the Chinese women interviewed by Zhou but others, have suc-
cumbed to this male ploy; that women can be victims of these kinds of
assumptions clearly is not an overstatement.
The denial of the womans experience, concomitant with the emphasis
on the mans condition, exemplifies our assumptions about male and fe-
male sexuality. Mens passion is out of their control, to the point of in-
flicting pain upon themselves, and women must be in control not only of
their own passion but of the mens as well. Men also maneuver women
into assuming a certain amount of responsibility for mens pain.
Zhou focuses her criticism on the devious behavior of Chinese men but
says little or nothing about how repressive sexual mores and the denial of
adolescent sexual desire might contribute to this unfortunate circum-
stance. Robert Chapman describes the outcome of this sexually frustrating
situation but refers neither to the blue in the phrase or to the context in
 Sex as War and Conquest 87

which the condition occurs. If a womans desire not to have sex were to be
respected, adolescent sexuality was not denied, premarital sex was not a
sin, and womens sexual desire was acknowledged (and not just manipu-
lated), blue balls and its unspoken female equivalent might become ob-
solete terms. Men and women might make love without fear of reprisal,
and men might even evolve to the point where they take control of their
passion.

COCK OF THE WALK

Although not all the slang dictionaries contained a specific reference to
cock of the walk, those that did centered on the word cock as a syn-
onym for the penis, especially the erect penis. The first volume of the
Dictionary of American Regional English refers to cock of the walk
obliquely through the term cock-a-doodle-doo, a term for a ranch fore-
man or boss, whereas cock of the walk means, quite simply, one who
dominates (Cassidy, 708). Tony Thorne suggests that the origin of the
term cock of the walk may derive from cock-sparrow, or from the
image of a brave fighting-cock . . . the image of the male member . . . as a
strutting fighter (102). Consistent with Thornes suggestion of the penis
as a strutting fighter, Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner see the
cock of the walk as a swaggering boastful male (112). J. David Sapir
points out that to call a man the cock of the walk is to say that he is
vain and presumptuous . . . an old goat . . . [or] a dirty old man (11).
The walk may be almost as important as the cock in this phrase.
These vain, boastful, and presumptuous men dont trundle or stroll or me-
ander, they strut and they swagger as they assert their superiority. The
image of the army drill instructor, the chief executive ocer, even the col-
lege professor who struts his stu is a reminder to us all of those who
assume a right to dominate others. These cocks of the walk assert their
inherent privilege based on their possession of a penis.
The connection between the erect penis and authority is both obvious
and crucial. The cock of the walk suggests that the man with the largest
and hardest penis (cock) is the one in control of all he sees. To view the
erect penis as a weapon or as a source of power is not a new insight, and
the suggestion that a males power exists in direct proportion to how many
women (hens) he controls, and satisfies sexually, should come as no sur-
prise. The expression cock of the walk, though, makes explicit mens
reduction of their importance to their genitals. As the rooster who must
constantly reassert his stature as the biggest and the meanest and the most
sexually proficient male in the yard, to be the cock of the walk becomes a
responsibility that no man can uphold, nor should desire to assume.
88 The Language of Male Bonding

COLD COCK

They cold-cocked him, and left him unconscious.

James T. Farrell, Young Manhood

Although the precise origin of this phrase is debatable, the common defi-
nition means to knock someone out, usually with one blow. Chapman sug-
gests two possible sources for it: perhaps from the hammering of caulking
into a boats or ships seams; perhaps related to Canadian lumberjacks
put the caulks to someone, stamp in someones face with spiked boots
(77). The use of violence informs all these definitions: to cold cock some-
one means to hit someone hard, to knock someone out (Cassidy, 708)
or to knock someone unconscious, with the fist, a club, etc. . . . always
without warning, in order to render the person completely incapable of
action (Wentworth, 114).
The word cock, a word we know as a euphemism for the penis, here
applied to a weapon used to knock someone out, suggests the experience
of rape, a kind of violence wielded against women. Specifically, this term
refers to an act done quickly before the victim can resist (Chapman, 77)
and exemplifies mens confusion about the dierence between making love
and getting laid.
As should be clear by now in this book, the penis as a weapon creeps
in everywhere in male discourse. This metaphors suggestion that an imme-
diate and devious assault on someone has a direct reference to the penis
illuminates the deep-seated equation of male heterosexuality and violence.
When the penis becomes a fist in a boxing match, its function as the great
equalizer becomes explicit.

GANG BANG

Tear the place apart, leave the owner for dead, gangbang the waitress.
Joan Didion

As with many phrases examined in this book, gang bang has several
meanings. The American Heritage College Dictionary alludes to the vio-
lence of such an act when it defines it in the following way: Rape or sexual
intercourse involving one person and several others in succession. But it
also defines the term as sexual intercourse involving several partners who
change indiscriminately (56). What strikes one almost immediately about
these definitions is how nongender specific they are and how the second
definition de-emphasizes the violence. To read the first definition one
 Sex as War and Conquest 89

might infer that men are victims of gang bangs as frequently as women or,
more absurdly, that a man might be gangbanged by a group of women.
The second definition holds a much dierent meaning than the one I
am familiar with, although the suggestion that gang bang refers to group
sex is consistent throughout many of the dictionaries I used. My own
knowledge of the term is as a reference to many men having sex with one
woman during a fairly short period of time. Interestingly, the popular
definition I have acquired, and I believe this is consistent with the male
imagination, has never acknowledged rape as a part of the experience but
rather emphasized the womans willingness, and even desire, for such an
activity. Gang bang takes on an even more powerful metaphorical dy-
namic when one realizes that it implies not only the violence and distanc-
ing of the heterosexual male understanding of love and intimacy, but the
idea that women have an uncontrollable libido.
At the risk of buying into these assumptions about female sexuality, I
want to suggest a distinction between gang bang and gang rape. This
is a risky point to make but one worth attempting. Rape occurs when a
woman who has said no to sexual intercourse is forced to have sex anyway.
But what about the woman who agrees to have sex with more than one
guy over the span of an hour or two? If we categorically deny this as a
possibility, we reject a dimension of an active female sexuality that may
scare many of us but at the same time may be real.
Certainly for the woman who says she wants to have sex with several
men in a row issues of self-esteem and the desire to be popular may furnish
unfortunate motivations, but we need to be careful that in our desire to
characterize female passion as only the outcome of uncontrolled male de-
sire, we do not deny the possibility that some women want to be more
sexually active than others. We have only to look at nymphomania, a
term used exclusively to describe women, to encounter another example
of how female sexuality is policed in our society. Mens fear of female
sexual desire is most notably epitomized in the image of the vagina den-
tata, expressive of the anxiety that the female genitals will literally devour
them. In our haste to censure one form of group sex, we need to be careful
that we do not fall to a fear of female sexuality very similar to this one,
which has dominated most of Western culture.10
All this is not to deny the disturbing significance of gang bang as a
metaphor for male heterosexuality, a phrase eliciting several associations,
most of which focus on the injustice endemic to the experience. The lan-
guage itself couples the violence of the word bang with the overwhelm-
ing power of a gang. Reducing the sexual encounter to a spectator sport,
a gang bang makes sex both an event outside the personal intimate experi-
ence of two people and emphasizes the fleetingness, or the immediacy, of
the sexual moment. During a gang bang each man has sex with a woman
90 The Language of Male Bonding

until he comes (as quickly as possible), and then he leaves to let another
man take his place. There is no foreplay, no lingering caress, no intimacy
of any kind. The gang bang is getting laid with a vengeance; it is a violent,
alienated, and momentary experience and in this way may embody at least
part of the myth of male heterosexuality.
The most recent application of the phrase gang bang to mean the
activities of a street gang in, among other places, Los Angeles, is not seren-
dipitous but rather consistent with its original meaning. Gangbanging by
urban gangs describes the violent, and at times inhumane, activities of a
group of young males (in many cases still boys). The development from a
gang bang meaning [to take part in] sex involving several males sequen-
tially with one woman (Thorne, 196) to a 1980s term used by and about
the members of street gangs in Los Angeles in which the bang in question
is a gunshot [and] shooting a victim is often part of the initiation process
(Thorne, 196) relies on the violence of both endeavors. This connection
also equates murder with sex, giving killing an erotic allure.
Let there be no doubt about it: gang bangs can be intensely violent.
When a gang bang becomes a gang rape, it constitutes a denigration
of the woman and a crime against her humanity. My own experience with
gang bangs, which was not firsthand, occurred as a young boy growing up
in northern New York State. This was one way young boys became sexu-
ally initiated, and if you did not participate in this ritual, your manhood
was in question; your reluctance might very well elicit the label faggot. 11
Where I grew up, gang bangs, getting drunk, and fighting were all part
of the initiation rites of the adolescent male. Tragically, as became appar-
ent not too long ago in Gouverneur, New York, gang rape remains an
acceptable practice for young men as well. Gouverneur is a small, poverty-
ridden, quintessentially rural community just eighteen miles from where I
graduated from high school and the scene of one of the more notorious
gang rapes in recent history (outside of war, of course).12 I know Gouver-
neur, though, and I know the men and boys who live there.
I dont have friends or acquaintances from Gouverneur, because when
I was growing up even the tough guys from Canton High School avoided
socializing in Gouverneur. They avoided high school dances there for fear
one of the Gouverneur guys might think they were going after their
woman. Girls were seen as property thirty years ago, and in some circles
their status hasnt changed much even today. Many wives are still seen
as property, but many more have rejected that role and are perspicious
enough to be involved with men who honor their new status as individuals
with their own rights and freedom.
An unmarried woman, however, or in the case of the woman raped by
five men in a bar in Gouverneur, a divorced woman, remains fair game for
the sexual exploits of men who want to see themselves as holding all the
 Sex as War and Conquest 91

power, even if their power is relatively insignificant. Indeed, precisely be-

cause so many men in the United States have so little real power, it is so
important for them to assert dominion over women, to victimize them,
that is.
As it happens, violence against women, and in particular wife beating,
occurs more often in Gouverneur than in any other community in the
county. For the last ten years St. Lawrence Countys reports of domestic
violence have been more numerous than those of the two neighboring
counties. Maria Ruiz Groh, the director of the countys domestic-violence
center, Renewal House, says the center sees three to four hundred victims
of spousal abuse every year (Avenoso, 106). Indeed, Gouverneur was fa-
mous where I grew up for providing more prisoners in the county jail than
any other town in the county. It was seen as a lawless town populated with
violent men.
The Neanderthal mentality of the men in this one-horse village, with its
real men in the guise of hunters and long-retired high school athletes, is
dierent from the attitude that allowed the boys in northern New Jersey to
rape a defenseless young woman in another recent and well-publicized case,
but the sense of male privilege and right are similar. The communities
complicity in this violence is also comparable. In Glen Ridge, New Jersey,
in Gouverneur, New York, a double standard prevailed about what is con-
sidered acceptable behavior for boys and what is acceptable for girls. And
both communities struggled to reabsorb and forgive [the womans] assail-
ants: People say the boys have suered enough. Theyve lost jobs be-
cause of it one woman explains. Theyve been punished (Avenoso, 105).
Clearly, as Lefkowitz observes in his study of the New Jersey crime,
gang rape is seen to be just another boys will be boys prank, not an act
of violence that serves to remind all women that men have the power in
our society and that they will use it whenever they are inclined to do so.
Indeed, according to a 1994 national sex survey, womens perception of
what constitutes forced sex diers significantly from mens perception of it:
22 percent [of the women surveyed] report being forced to do something
sexually at some time . . . yet only 3 percent of men say they have sexually
forced a woman, indicating that the schism between how men and women
define forced sex is disturbingly large (Obermiller, 36).13 The other mes-
sage implicit in gang rape is that as long as women remain passive obedi-
ent wives and mothers they do not need to be put in their place. Single
women, women unprotected or not owned by a man, risk the rage of men
who believe these are available for mens sexual needs and desires.
As a teenager, gang bangs were not only incomprehensible to me but
frightening. Maybe I was just insecure about my sexual prowess or the size
of my penis, but even at the tender age of fourteen sex was not a spectator
sport for me. Sexual intimacy was not an event that included more than
92 The Language of Male Bonding

two people, nor was it a sport in which other boys would cheer me on. The
gang bang was an experience I could not identify with, and one I put a lot
of energy into avoiding.
I remember the name of the young girl my friends wanted to gangbang,
even after twenty-five years, and I remember trying to have sex with her
alone one night on the football field. I figured she was easy, at least, so
maybe I could get lucky. I remember that it didnt work, or I didnt work.
I couldnt keep it up at the age of fourteen or fifteen, not with a girl who
still had her pants on and the two of us sliding down a muddy hill while
cars went by with their radios blaring.
Although I resisted the brutish experience of the gang bang, I had still
been aected profoundly by the socialization that teaches young boys that
getting laid is what it takes to be a man and that women are just vehicles
to that end. As a metaphor of male sexuality, the gang bang exemplifies
the callous, selfish, violent, and ignoble assumptions men have not only
about women but about their own sexuality.

HAVING THE BALLS . . . OR NOT

Just keeping a handhold and staying where you are . . . even that takes
tons of balls.
Martin Amis, Money

Not unlike cojones, this phrase equates a mans gonads with courage.
Balls, of course, is a euphemism for the testicles, and ballsy, for
example, means courageous (Spears, 18). According to Ayto and Simp-
son, this predominantly American phrase suggests determination [and]
(manly) power or strength (11). Once again the euphemism reduces mas-
culinity to the size (or existence) of a mans gonads (or, by extension, geni-
tals), and courage becomes identified with virility, or strength and power.
A mans mind or intelligence does not guide him to do what is right, and
his heart (or compassion) does not lead him to take a risk; he has the balls.
The American Heritage College Dictionary refers to the reckless[ness]
or great presumptuousness (104) of this kind of courage, and Wentworth
and Flexner see this phrase as an expression of incredulity, disappoint-
ment, [and] disgust (17). Thus here too a certain ambiguity about what
this phrase really means highlights mens confusion about masculinity. On
the one hand, having the balls refers to what is assumed to be a positive
male quality of being recklessly courageous, while on the other hand this
term connotes bewilderment and abhorrence of manhood.
A man who has the balls to do something may indeed not have the
brains not to do it. Cohn, in her essay on wars, wimps, and women, stresses
 Sex as War and Conquest 93

this point in her discussion of the jargon of the U.S. defense community
that was developed by men for whom in their informal conversation it
was not their rational analyses that dominated their response, but the fact
that for them, the decision for war, the willingness to use force, is cast as a
question of masculinitynot prudence, thoughtfulness, ecacy, rational
cost-benefit calculation, or morality, but masculinity (23637). Having
the balls may be an antonym for having the intelligence, and thus mascu-
linity emerges once again as stupid, oafish, and ultimately insensitive.
Women should be careful that they not become victims of the same
characterization. Paul Beale points out that this term can be used to de-
scribe a dominant woman in a home (19), and Thorne suggests that even
in spite of the anatomical inconsistency . . . the [term] may now be ap-
plied to women (24). In his personal history of the Salomon Brothers
demise on Wall Street, Michael Lewis provides an excellent example of
this kind of transference. A big swinging dick, the title reserved for those
who sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bonds, is coveted by
both men and women. Although this phrase may suggest a humorous im-
age, as it did for Lewis, the desire to gain this appellation was not restricted
to men: Everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women.
Big Swinging Dickettes (46).
The insidious power of language to determine meaning gains strength
when it becomes part of the general discourse. When having the brains
replaces having the balls or big pulsing heart replaces big swinging
dick, the possibility for intelligence and compassion to take the place of
testosterone as the guide for many of our decisions may have emerged.

PRICK

His nakedness and limp prick . . . were new properties of the chang-
ing room.
Anthony Burgess, M/F

They have good jobs, big futures. And the pricks wont even do their
service.
Mario Puzo, Fools Die

As a slang term for the penis, prick has been in use since at least the
sixteenth century and was probably coined with the image of a thorn in
mind, from the shape and the image of penetration evoked (Thorne, 405).
Like the phalanx of the ancient armies, the prick is an eective weapon to
penetrate an enemys fortress. In this case the fortress the prick wants to
penetrate is either the vagina or the assertiveness of a female colleague.
94 The Language of Male Bonding

Men fight womens attempts to gain equality. One of mans primary weap-
ons is his penis: as a literal weapon to inflict rape or the metaphorical
phallus that reminds women of who in contemporary society is entitled to
privilege and power.
According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, prick means:
1. a. the act of piercing or pricking. b. the sensation of being pierced or
pricked. 2. a. A persistent or sharply painful feeling of sorrow or remorse
(1085). By extension, then, in this term the penis becomes both something
that pierces the woman (maybe, or especially, her hymen) and something
that elicits the sensations of grief and regret. Like so many euphemisms
for the penis, a prick is a weapon with which men inflict pain and even
humiliation on a woman. In war, especially, the penis becomes a battering
ram to penetrate (i.e., rape) a woman.
This ambivalence about the role of the penis in heterosexual relation-
ships is apparent also when prick becomes a term of contempt or abuse
for a man; a fool or jerk (Ayto and Simpson, 178). As an oaf, an oen-
sive male [or] a hard taskmaster (Spears, 355), and as a fool, [or] obnox-
ious [and] contemptible male (Thorne, 405), a prick takes on the aura
of contempt that men (and women) feel about male heterosexuality in
general.

PUSSY WHIPPED

Some men are pussy whipped from the day they are born, some have
it happen to them later in life, some never.
Judith Krantz, Scruples

Whereas the dominant discourse of war and conquest arms mens superi-
ority over women, in this term a reversal of power occurs that locates the
source of dominion in the woman. The man who is pussy whipped is
under the control of a woman and dependent upon being in her good
graces to get sexual favors. Indeed, the definitions oered by all the dic-
tionaries I used tend to emphasize the pejorative nature of this phrase and
refer almost exclusively to the sexual power the wife or female has over
the man. Pussy whipped, according to these references, means the man
will not do anything for fear of not getting sex from his wife or lover. In
these definitions sexual favors, or sexual pleasure, becomes a weapon a
woman uses to control a man.
The phrase certainly lends itself to this kind of interpretation. Etymo-
logical evidence suggests a connection between pussy whipped and both
pistol whipped (Thorne, 409) and horse whipped (Spears, 362); Beale
believes that in the early twentieth century pussy was a synonym for
 Sex as War and Conquest 95

the cat-o-nine-tails. This association strengthens the link between pussy

whipped and domination. To be whipped is to be punished or beaten,
and when the vagina becomes the whip, this phrase becomes one more way
in which men gain control over their situation with women. By naming the
weapon used against them, and applying a derisive synonym to womens
genitals, men can still hold women in contempt and maintain their sense
of dominion. Indeed, as a disparaging term for a woman or a vulgar
slang [term for] the vulva (AHCD, 1112) the term pussy allows men to
insult the person who supposedly holds power over them and in that way
assert a form of control over their personal lives.
Usually, though, the phrase pussy whipped is used by men about
another man. A man would not characterize himself as being pussy
whipped but rather would sneer at another man for allowing himself to be
controlled in that manner. Not unlike the social function of sexist jokes
among the guys [which] control[s] the threat that individual men might
form intimate emotional bonds with women and withdraw from the group
(Lyman, 158), phrases like pussy whipped help men to police masculin-
ity to make sure that all men remain within the group of real men. Men
who prefer to be outside that oppressive group still fear the power of the
group to put them down as men, to question their masculinity.
In the larger context of mens unwillingness to give up power, a phrase
like pussy whipped emerges as a way for men to protect themselves from
any kind of power a woman might be supposed to have. In the discourse
of manliness the only real power women possess lies in their sexual favors.
A man has trouble acknowledging that he is in love with a woman or
prefers her company. Love threatens male power; it makes men weak and
puts them in a position in which they may no longer feel in control.
Ironically, a pussy-whipped man is under someone elses power. In-
deed, most formal definitions see this term as synonymous with hen-
pecked. Chapman, for example, says this phrase describes a man who
is dominated by ones wife or female lover; obsequiously uxorious; hen-
pecked (344). Henpecked obscures the complexity of this phrase, how-
ever. Although pussy whipped may suggest henpecked, it is usually
more specific to the sexual power a woman has over a man. Henpecked,
according to the American Heritage College Dictionary, means to domi-
nate or nag (ones husband) (633) and refers frequently to everything
from taking out the garbage to not tracking in mud. Nagging is an im-
portant component of the definition. Pussy whipped does not mean or
even imply nagging. Indeed, a man who is henpecked may not be pussy
whipped at all because pussy whipped refers quite explicitly to the wom-
ans sexual power. Henpecked as a synonym for pussy whipped ig-
nores the latters application to the newly married man who may prefer to
be at home making love with his wife rather than to be at the bar hanging
96 The Language of Male Bonding

out with the guys (or playing softball, or participating in any number of
other male bonding rituals). A mans use of such a debasing term as pussy
whipped allows him to believe he is still in control. The irony of language
is that it frequently tells us more about our fears and our doubts than most
of us care to know.

SHOOTING BLANKS
A reference to a mans inability to impregnate a woman, this phrase por-
trays male sexuality as reducible to a military or at least firearms-related
experience. Combining the slang term to shoot, meaning to ejaculate
(Spears, 396), with another slang term, shooter, a reference to a gun
(Thorne, 458), the phrase shooting blanks figuratively diminishes sperm
to a form of ammunition that cannot kill anyone.
The sterile man, one who cannot produce children, has no posterity,
having no possibility of heirs. Without an heir a man cannot pass on his
wealth or his accomplishments or his masculinity, for that matter. The
sterile man, not unlike the impotent one, becomes less than a man solely
because of his inability to perform sexually in the way that is expected of
him. Without the production of sperm, as with the absence of an erection,
a man borders on being a eunuch, an object of ridicule, half a man.
Considering that I was reminded of this phrase by a self-identified fem-
inist colleague, the insidiousness of language becomes even more apparent.
With the emphasis of feminism on how we refer to women, you would
think those lessons would carry over to both genders. To reduce a mans
reproductive capacity to an ability to fire his gun/penis eectively rein-
forces the pervasive idea that male sexuality is characterized by associa-
tions of inflicting harm on someone, in this case his wife and the potential
mother of his children.

SHORT-ARM INSPECTION

Before you go to bed with a guy, give him a short arm. . . . You strip
down his penis, you know, like youre masturbating him, and if theres
a yellow fluid coming out like drippage, you know hes infected.
Mario Puzo, Fools Die

This reference to the penis originated in the armed services where it was a
euphemism for a medical examination for symptoms of venereal disease.
The use of the word arm reflects the common notion of the penis as a
limb (Thorne, 459) but derives as well from the term small arm, in the
sense of a handgun. Wentworth and Flexner suggest that this phrase may
 Sex as War and Conquest 97

be based on the frequent inspection of the soldiers rifle or arm (471),

and Beale speculates on there being a pun on pistols (400).
As a sidearm or a pistol the penis evokes a weapon, and in the parlance
of army basic training the relationship between male anatomy and permis-
sion to rape with impunity becomes even more apparent. As Adrienne
Rich points out in her essay on the Vietnam war and sexual violence:
This is my rifle, this is my gun [cock]; This is for killing, this is for fun
is not a piece of bizarre brainwashing invented by some infantry sergeants
fertile imagination; it is a recognition of the fact that when you strike the
chord of sexuality in the patriarchal psyche, the chord of violence is likely
to vibrate in response; and vice versa (Caryatid, 115).
Male power is once more at stake here. The suggestion that the penis
resembles an arm, even a short arm, suggests an organ with a muscle that
can be flexed and thus used as a club to bludgeon (or cold cock) some-
one. In the army (or in the locker room) men are naked, and that exposure
elicits comparison. Characterizing the penis as a short arm accentuates a
mans insecurity about the size of his penis while at the same time provides
a generalization that suggests equality and fraternity. This reduction gives
a man a sense that he has a large enough penis because it is at least a short
arm. As an arm, though, the penis remains an isolated part of the body,
and the erogenous is limited once again to a singular organ. In this case
the isolated organ is turned into a short muscular arm or a pistol empow-
ered to wrest control and assert domination.
5 Sex as Exclusively
Heterosexual

The terms heterosexual and homosexual apparently came into com-

mon use only in the first quarter of this century; before that time, if
words are clues to concepts, people did not conceive of a social uni-
verse polarized into heteros and homos.
Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality

In [the] context [of ] a private conversation among male friends it could

be argued that to gossip, either about your sexual exploits with women
or about the repulsiveness of gay men . . . is not just one way, but the
most appropriate way to display heterosexual masculinity.
Deborah Cameron, Performing Gender Identity: Young Mens
Talk and the Construction of Male Heterosexuality

Today, one of the most obvious characteristics of masculinity is

heterosexuality.
Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity

The hostility and the devaluation implicit in the usage of homophobic

terms . . . occur by virtue of the assumed correctness of anything
heterosexual.
James Armstrong, Homophobic Slang as Coercive Discourse
among College Students

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of heterosexuality is a fairly mod-

ern development. The current dominant, and assumed to be natural, dis-
tinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals had no significance until
the twentieth century. According to Jonathan Ned Katz, whose book The
Invention of Heterosexuality traces the historical evolution and changing
definitions of heterosexuality, the term homosexual was not invented
until around 1868 while the first use of heterosexual listed in the Oxford
English Dictionary Supplement dates to 1901 (10). Katz goes on to explain
that these terms gained common usage only in the first quarter of the
98
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 99

twentieth century and had no operative existence in ancient Greece

(11).1
Originally, the concept of heterosexuality referred to a perversion, not
to our common use of the term as a sexual relationship between a man
and a woman and not to the focus on procreation that the term eventually
acquired. The earliest known use of the word heterosexual in the United
States occurs in an article by Dr. James G. Kiernan, published in a Chi-
cago medical journal in May 1892, in which heterosexuality is referred to
as a perversion and thus not equated with normal sex. Kiernan linked
heterosexual to one of several abnormal manifestations of the sexual ap-
petitein a list of sexual perversions properin an article on Sexual
Perversion (1920). Heterosexuality as a perversion informs much of
the early literature on sexuality. As late as 1923, for example, when the
word heterosexuality made its debut in Merriam-Websters authoritative
New International Dictionary, it was defined as a medical term meaning
morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex. Homosexuality had
been listed fourteen years earlier in 1909 when it was defined as a morbid
passion for someone of the same sex (Katz, 92). The general assumption
todaythat homosexuality is the perversion and that heterosexuality is
normaldefies historical evidence with its common emphasis on morbid
passion and underlying assumption that all sexual desire is somehow
diseased.
From its original characterization as a sexual perversion heterosexu-
ality became identified with sexual reproduction, which eventually be-
came a justification for sexual pleasure between the sexes. While it is cer-
tainly true that the Judeo-Christian tradition beginning with Leviticus
sacralized reproductive sex in opposition to nonreproductive sex, only
during the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first years of
the twentieth did Freud and other medical men help establish what Katz
refers to as The Heterosexual Mystiquethe idea of an essential, eternal,
normal heterosexuality (82). In fact, the first quarter of the twentieth
century saw a consolidation of the concept of heterosexuality as normal.
Although heterosexuality as both normal and normative dominates
our views about sexuality, as John DEmilio and Estelle Freedman show
in their history of sexuality in the United States, sexual meanings have a
history associated with a range of human activities and values. Katz too
makes the point that the word heterosexual signifies one time-bound
historical form . . . one specific way of organizing the sexes and their plea-
sures (34) and goes on to identify several societies not organized around
the heterosexual matrix. Ancient Greece provides one model, as does New
England in the years 1607 to 1740. Greek society did not have such mod-
ern terms as bisexual, homosexual, and heterosexual to describe
what Katz refers to as freemens problematic, pleasurable intimacies with
100 The Language of Male Bonding

women and with boys (34). The formative years of the United States saw
a sexuality dominated by the imperative to reproduce that was engendered
in an operative constraint . . . between fruitfulness and barrenness, not
between dierent-sex and same-sex eroticism (38). Katz cites other his-
torical examples of American societies not organized according to our
heterosexual law. Overall, his research suggests that the overt distinction
between heterosexual and homosexual that appeared in 1892 did not
emerge out of the blue. As Katz makes clear, in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, with the medicalizing of sexuality, a tradition emerged
in which the abnormal was equated with homosexuality and the normal
with heterosexuality.
When seen as compulsory or constructed, a matrix and/or invention,
heterosexuality emerges as a one-sided conception of gender relations
linked to a particular historical period and its economic and social
agenda.2 Part of that agenda was to denigrate the feminine in order to
keep women in their place. As Sally Johnson demonstrates in her feminist
analysis of language and masculinity, one important element in the con-
struction of heterosexual masculinity will be the perpetual denial, subjuga-
tion and exclusion of the feminineas symbolized by both women and
homosexual men (22). Heterosexuality as the rule, both in law and as
acceptable behavior (such as speech, clothing, and appearance in general),
reinforces straight male privilege by acting on a variety of levels.
One important component of this ideological construction is masculine
identity itself. In providing a broad historical perspective on masculine
identity, Badinter asserts that since the birth of the patriarchy, man has
always defined himself as a privileged human being, endowed with some-
thing more, unknown to women. He believes he has more strength, is more
intelligent, more courageous, more responsible, more creative, or more ra-
tional. And this more justifies his hierarchical relationship to women, or at
least to his own woman (4).3 Cultural examples of this characterization
abound in Western literature, but U.S. popular culture has played an even
greater role in strengthening our bifurcated ideas about gender. Television,
movies, and rock videos reinforce the distinction between the genders by
positing this polarity as based on commonsense assumptions, meanings,
and definitions. Indeed, in the seventy or so years from the introduction
of the term heterosexual in the 1890s to the progressive decade of the
1960s, both heterosexual and homosexual gained precedent in Ameri-
can popular culture: constructing in time a sexual solid citizen and a
perverted unstable alien, a sensual insider and a lascivious outlaw, a hetero
center and a homo margin, a hetero majority and a homo minority. . . .
The term heterosexual manufactured a new sex-dierentiated ideal of the
erotically correct, a norm that worked to arm the superiority of men
over women and heterosexuals over homosexuals (Katz, 112). The neces-
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 101

sity for men to define themselves as not feminine, as we have seen amply
demonstrated, resides at the center of the heterosexual regime. Indeed, the
only real man has to be the straight man. Consequently, men must never
show any sign of such supposedly feminine traits as tenderness, passivity,
or care giving, and a man should never find another man attractive. On
the contrary, men must exhibit qualities considered as at the opposite pole
to the feminine, like a preoccupation with being strong, independent,
hard, cruel, polygamous, misogynous, and perverse (Badinter, 4647).
Although we have already examined at great length most of these
learned male qualities, the occurrence of perversion in the masculine
experience (defined here as the failure to conform to the heterosexual
norm) is far more frequent than in the feminine, which raises important
questions about what it means to be a man in Western society. So-called
perversions in the form of fetishism, transvestism, and transsexualism
aect far more men than women: transsexualism, indeed, aects boys
almost four times as often as girls (Badinter, 39). Contrary to Badinters
essentialist explanation that this dierentiation occurs because nature
[has] more diculty dierentiating the identity of the male than that of
the female (3334), it seems more likely that this male proclivity results
from the terror boys are raised to feel in becoming men and thus not fe-
male. Dierences in rigidity of gender roles between men and women also
might be partly responsible for dierences in reaction to perversion or
dierences in the incidence of perversion.
The other important question that must be posed here, of course, is
why cross-gender identity must be conceived of as a perversion in the first
place. I would argue that male perversion in the form of cruelty, misogyny,
homophobia, rape, and violence in general appear to be the perversions
in need of analysis. If more men felt comfortable wearing a dress or caring
about someone else, we would all be much better o. Indeed, perversions
of that form should be encouraged, not ridiculed or psychoanalyzed out
of existence.
In their struggle to repress any feelings or qualities associated with the
feminine, however, straight men assume a masculine identity associated
with possessing, taking, penetrating, dominating, and asserting oneself, if
necessary, by force (Badinter, 97). Chapter 4, on war and the metaphors
of conquest, confirms this paradigm, illustrating the pricks fixation on
penetration and the cock of the walks obsession with domination.
Misogyny asserts itself once more in the form of homophobia, a behav-
ior that reinforces the assumption that a real man is free of the taint of the
feminine. In our modern society a real man prefers women exclusively, as
though possessing a woman reinforced the desired otherness by distancing
the specter of identity: to have a woman in order not to be a woman. In
the eyes of some, the very fact of not being homosexual is already an
102 The Language of Male Bonding

assurance of masculinity (Badinter, 97). The discourse of male bonding

reinforces the necessity to be unambiguous about ones heterosexual mas-
culinity. Straight men remind their colleagues of their membership in the
heterosexual club by disparaging other men with insults characterizing
them as gay.
In addition, the seemingly apparent contradiction in Badinters obser-
vationbetween the latent hatred of women as inferior and their desir-
ability as matesis resolved in male heterosexual ideology and behavior
with far more men identifying women as their best friends rather than
men. A man feels more comfortable expressing his intimacy and commit-
ment to a woman than to a man because, according to Michael Silverstein,
he can reveal himself and make himself emotionally dependent only on
someone who is not a potential rival, but who, on the contrary, has been
trained to be emotionally supportive of men rather than competitive with
them, and to expect a position of dependency (117).4 For most men, the
closest friend, the person they talk to about emotional and personal prob-
lems, is a woman. Men trust women to be caring, not to judge them, and
certainly not to ridicule them about perceived weaknesses.
With the transition from an agrarian to industrial society at the end of
the nineteenth century, men could no longer easily demonstrate their real
maleness by toting that barge and lifting that bale when they were instead
confined to an oce. Men lost a tremendous amount of confidence in that
societal transition, and with the emergence of the term homosexuality
at the beginning of the twentieth century, male anxiety about masculinity
became much more pronounced than previously. As heterosexual men
began to define themselves in opposition to all that was soft and wom-
anlike (Kimmel, Manhood, 100), the definition of the real man dwindled
to qualities like hardness, competitiveness, unemotionality, and omnipo-
tence. As a side-eect of this anxiety of resistance to a dreaded other-
ness, however, men also began to experience such emotions as rage, fear,
impotence, perversions, self-hatred, and the hatred of others. A defensive
strategy was to develop certain images and metaphors of women and the
feminine that would help shape their male identity by negating women.
Men sought thereby to assuag[e] their anxieties about masculinity
(Haste, 208). According to Badinter and others, mens fear of passivity and
of the feminine are especially strong because mens most powerful and
deeply repressed desires lie in the forbidden domain (5455).5
Hatred of the homosexual man coincides with the male heterosexuals
dread of the feminine. While homophobia expresses fear of ones own ho-
mosexual desires, it also replicates a fear and hatred of the feminine. For
Badinter, homophobia is the hatred of feminine qualities in men whereas
misogyny is the hatred of feminine qualities in women (115). By treating
homosexuals as the other, straight men confirm their heterosexuality. This
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 103

corroboration is especially important in all-male groups, where the expres-

sion of prejudices against gay men can garner the approval of others.
Straight men use homophobic slang as a weapon to signal their true het-
erosexual masculinity. James Armstrongs study of coercive discourse
among college students corroborates that those who use this language in
public frequently are young heterosexual males: Often in public interac-
tions, people who might not think of openly attacking homosexuals use
language that derogates homosexuality. . . . In some contexts this language
asserts male (heterosexual) dominance by confirming presumed masculine
values, while degrading presumed feminine gender attributes (32627).6
Men lash out against all that is feminine in an eort to prove their legiti-
macy and superiority, and the male arsenal is replete with eective weap-
ons, not least of which is the language they use. The discourse of homo-
phobia, a set of phrases examined in this chapter, demonstrates some of
the ways in which language is an act that can be violent, exclusionary,
and coercive (Armstrong, 326). The loaded use of lesbian as an insult
levied against women who refuse any particular mans advances is an ex-
cellent example of this kind of retribution.
Armstrong also observes that part of the power of homophobic slang
is the way in which it renders gay men invisible, partly by coercing partici-
pants in the conversation, straight or gay, to adopt the same values or
speak the same language. The discourse of male bonding excludes women
and gay men as the enemy against whom straight men reinforce their frag-
ile masculinity. Evidence for the fragility of this gender identity is reflected
in how frequently disparaging remarks about gays (men or women) appear
in everyday conversation. In this case, surely, the man doth protest too
much.

FAGGOT

Austin had been given the keys to a luxurious, metal-and-velvet fag-

gots lair with enormous mirrors on the bedroom ceiling.
Richard Ford, Women with Men

In common American usage faggot refers to a gay man, a homosexual,

but the derivations of the term and the contradictory observations about
its origins and use are informative. To begin with, what faggot has in
common with at least two other metaphors examined in this book (wimp
and wuss) is its early use as a synonym for a woman. According to Tony
Thorne, faggot was used in seventeenth-century Britain to refer to an
unattractive or disreputable woman (170), and The Oxford English Dic-
tionary defines faggot as a term of abuse or contempt applied to a
104 The Language of Male Bonding

woman (20). The Dictionary of American Regional English identifies the

origin of this term as coming from a British dialect in which faggot [was]
a term of abuse for a woman or a child [and was then] transferred to an
eeminate or unmasculine man (334).
The evolution from a derogatory term for a woman to a homosexual
man is not a dicult one to follow. A gay man is, at best, half a man and
certainly not a real man; in the dominant discourse he is as low as a
woman, as reprehensible, and as weak. This characterization of the gay
man as less than fully a man is reinforced when you consider that faggot
has also been used to refer to a person temporarily hired to supply a
deficiency at the muster, or on the roll of a company or regiment; a
dummy (OED, 20). As a stand-in for a man, and in particular a soldier,
a faggot was decidedly less than a complete man.
Today the youth who prefers to take on a role other than that of high
school athlete risks similar denigration. Lefkowitz points out, for example,
that at Glen Ridge High, male members of the high school band were seen
as worse than a nobody . . . and widely known as band fags, even among
many parents (62). Mariah Nelson comments also on the use of the term
faggot in her discussion of football speech where this popular deroga-
tion . . . refers . . . to weakness, timidity, cowardiceand femininity (87).
Straight men, young or old, consistently police male behavior with the
constant threat of being labeled too feminine.
Faggot may also derive from the word fag, which refers to a first-
year male student at a British private high school. There seems to be con-
siderable debate about this association, though; Thorne maintains that
there is no discernible connection with the British public-school term
meaning a junior boy performing servant duties (170), and often sexual
duties as well, whereas Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner believe
that the use of the word, fag a boy servant or lackey has been common
English schoolboy use since before 1830, and may be the origin of fag
homosexual (176). The connection between fag as a synonym for a
cigarette and the word faggot should not be overlooked since cigarettes
were considered eeminate by cigar and pipe smokers when they were first
introduced at the end of W.W.I (Wentworth and Flexner, 176).
Literally, though, faggot means a bundle of sticks bound together.
As we think about this term, we should remember that an emblem of
power for the fascists was the faggot (from fasces, the Roman bundle of
sticks); the bundle symbolized the collectivity of the nation. Although a
direct correlation between this symbolic use of the fasces by fascism to
todays use as a reference to gay men may not be a clear one, the OED
emphasizes with respect to faggot the special reference to the practice
of burning heretics alive (19). Homosexuals were victims of the Nazis
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 105

genocide program and continue to be a major target of skinheads and

fundamentalist Christian and neofascist groups today. Historically, women
as witches (heretics) and homosexuals (as in gay bashing) share the heri-
tage of victimization at the hands of religious fanatics and political zealots.
Even in the United States, land of the free and so forth, homosexual men,
as faggots, have been and continue to be victimized by heterosexual men
troubled by living in a society that derogates homosexuality and who
sometimes resort to the dogma of Christianity to defend their hostility.
These men enact what is socially sanctioned in their experience, in their
beliefs, and in their language.
An excellent example of this heterosexual male confusion and its
resulting enmity can be found, according to Susan Faludi, at The Citadel,
the infamous military academy in Charleston, South Carolina, that tried
for years to exclude women from enrolling. In an article in the New Yorker
Faludi describes the Treehouse, a mixed bar in Charleston, with an up-
stairs gay bar and nightly drag shows on the weekends that is frequented
by cadets who, according to one customer, love faggots like me [and] go
for the drag queens (Naked Citadel, 8081). Faludi visited this bar to
inquire about cadet violence against gay men, which she assumed was in-
evitable. Her findings, though, suggest a much dierent reality, one that
warrants turning to her account:
There are thousands of cadets, presumably, who have not dated drag
queens, but in two visits to the Treehouse I could find only two drag
queens, out of maybe a dozen, who did not tell me of dating a cadet
and that was only because these two found Citadel men too emo-
tional. Cadets can also occasionally be dangerous [my informant]
told me. You can get the ones who are violent. They think they want
it, then afterwards they turn on you, like you made them do it. None-
theless, a drag queen who called himself Holly had been happily in-
volved with a cadet for three years now. Marissa, another drag queen,
the reigning Miss Treehouse, 19931994, had gone out with one ca-
det, broken up, and was now in the throes of a budding romance with
another. A third drag queen, who asked to be identified as Tiany,
was known to be a favorite of cadets. (81)

As a haven of macho masculinity, The Citadel manifests many of the con-

tradictions men experience in their lives, especially those centering on the
meaning of manhood. Although straight men, trained to be soldiers and
athletes, husbands and fathers, learn to internalize as masculinity that
which is not femininity, Faludis research exemplifies the ambivalence men
feel about the burdens of such a restrictive masculinity and echo an obser-
vation made by James Baldwin in a 1971 discussion: Straight guys invent
faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves
106 The Language of Male Bonding

(Katz, 103).7 Ironically, though, and what should be clear from my earlier
discussion of blow job in chapter 2, who would know better how to
perform fellatio than another man?
The use of the term faggot demonstrates clearly both the confusion
surrounding the parameters of being a real man and the extent to which
language is never neutral. Faggot is not just some word; it is a term with
a violent history and a particular and hostile reference to gay men. These
terms are not without eect on heterosexual men. To return to the study
of college students in the particular scenarios Armstrong evaluates, he
points out that the use of the term faggot is generated by the association
between caring about the well-being of children and being eeminate, in
contrast to the manliness of speeding down a residential street (i.e., risk
taking) (331).
If gay men represent undesirable male sexuality and straight men em-
body the only acceptable male sexuality, all men become victims of the
language passively adopted to describe authentic masculinity. This kind
of language does not allow us to entertain the thought that there are alter-
nate forms of masculinity to the heterosexual.
If men concentrate their energy on not being called a faggot or a
pansy, they ignore the more constructive enterprise of creating a new
way to describe themselves. A language that neither denies our femininity
nor derides men who have other than just traditional masculine traits or
normal sexual proclivities would be liberating to us all.

LETTING HIS LITTLE HEAD RULE HIS BIG HEAD

The phrases letting his little head rule his big head, thinking with his
dick, and being led around by his dick lend an intelligence to the penis
and suggest that it has a mind of its own.8 The head of a penis (a metaphor
in itself, of course) is smaller than the head in which the brain resides, but
in the case of sexual desire the penis (or this small head) controls a mans
behavior. Indeed, as Badinter observes, the penis, as a metonymy for the
man, is also his obsessive master. The part lays down the law to the whole
since it defines the whole (137). As metaphors for male sexuality, these
terms reinforce once again the insistent assumption that men have an un-
controllable need for sex and that their genitals are preeminent in their
relation to women.
The characterization of the penis as having a mind of its own is consis-
tent with the dualistic model of the rational head and the irrational body
[and] allows for separation, so the rational mode, thinking, is dominant at
certain times, the less rational mode of love and sexual feeling is appro-
priate at other times (Haste, 168). The dichotomy between lust (i.e., phys-
ical passion) and love (i.e., emotional passion) in which only love is femi-
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 107

nized echoes this distinction between the rational and the irrational.
Although both feelings are irrational (lust and love), only emotion is femi-
nized, and polarity is maintained. This metaphor, letting his little head
rule his big head, favors the irrational (love and sexual feeling) but also
lust over love which, by being feminized, is removed from the discourse.
Mens ambivalence about their sexuality emerges in these metaphors
where the omniscience of the penis provides a rationale for uncontrolled
male desire. On the one hand, men always want to be in control of their
passionto be emotional flirts too closely with being femininewhile,
on the other hand, men want an excuse for being out of control. Much like
the drunk who blames his bad behavior on alcohol, the man who hands
over his intelligence to his sexual organs can behave as a brute (or a rutting
animal) without having to take responsibility for it.

PANSY
This disparaging term for a homosexual male connotes, specifically, the
passive partner in a homosexual couple: especially [the] receiver, ac-
cording to Spears (327), or the one who plays the female role, according
to Wentworth and Flexner (374). Consistent with this interpretation, this
slang term refers more broadly to a weak or eeminate man (Spears, 327;
Thorne, 382).
In the early part of the twentieth century, fear of feminization was a
preoccupation of the American male, whether middle class or working
class. In their eorts to prove that they were men among men, these
men frequently reassured themselves of their regular guy status with a
preoccupation with the obverse; men felt in constant danger of being
called something unmanly: a mollycoddle, a sissy, even a pansy (Kimmel,
Manhood, 124).
Literally, though, as a hybridized garden plant, a pansy has rounded
velvety petals of various colors (AHCD, 898); it is a popular annual or
short-lived perennial obtained by hybridizing and selecting forms derived
from viola tricolors crossed with various other species (Perry, 278). The
etymological origins of the word date to Old French, however, and may
come from pensee, meaning thought, or penser, to think (OED, 427); the
American Heritage Dictionary suggests pensive as a synonym (898).9
In this broad linguistic context a pansy becomes a thoughtful, reflec-
tive, brightly colored, attractive man. These qualities (intelligence, sensitiv-
ity, beauty) are commonplace characterizations for women in our society,
as is passivity. When a man uses his mind before he acts, feels concern
for someones plight, considers the consequences of his behavior, or pays
attention to how he looks, he distances himself from the norm of male
heterosexuality. Although some censure of color has relaxed in recent
108 The Language of Male Bonding

years, a well-dressed man, especially one wearing particular colors such as

pink, purple, or a bright green or blue, would leave himself open to ridicule
as a pansy. The restrictive nature of male fashion still helps police mens
behavior however, constraining them from even flirting with what might
easily be construed as gender transgression.
In their examination of the relationship between changes in fashion
and our evolving ideas about masculinity and femininity, Claudia Kidwell
and Valerie Steele caution the reader not to draw simplistic assumptions
about the complex processes of gender socialization [that make] it di-
cult . . . to understand past and present changes in fashion (plate 1). Hav-
ing said that, though, the authors point out that in the 1950s, for example,
the males dark business suit contrasts sharply with the colorful, curva-
ceous female silhouette (plate 1). A half-century later, not all that much
has changed. After describing how women easily don garments based on
traditional masculine forms and materials, Kidwell and Steele make clear
that men are much less likely to wear clothes drawn from feminine tradi-
tion (159). In U.S. society, at least, heterosexual masculinity has clear
boundaries across which an individual male advances at risk of self-exile.

PUSSY

I always thought you were a pussy, said Aaron. Look at you. Big
as a fucking house, but youre just a pussy. All fucking righteous now,
arent you? You werent so righteous when we started this, were you?
Now, you decide. Were going to kick some more ass, arent we?
Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer

Although used predominantly as a reference to the female genitals, and

thus more accurately a metaphor women live by, pussy has two mean-
ings as a slang term: as references both to the vulva and an eeminate
male. The precise origin of its use as a reference to the female genitals
remains inconclusive; Thorne believes pussy or puss was first recorded
in the sexual sense in the 16th century (409), whereas Spears (361) and
Chapman (344) locate its origin in the 1800s. Not only are the origins of
the term unclear, its meaning is somewhat confused: as a reference to
the vulva, according to Thorne, pussy derives from the resemblance
of pubic hair to fur, perhaps reinforced by male notions of aection,
but Thorne characterizes this word as an unromantic male term used in
the same indiscriminate manner as tail, ass, etc. In this generic sense, the
term may be expressed as pussy, some pussy, or occasionally a piece of
pussy (409).
The suggestion of a connection between pussy and male notions of
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 109

aection needs some discussion: does this aection refer to petting a cat
or a dog, or does it mean skinning an animal for its pelt? And what dier-
ence does it make? The implication advances the idea that a womans geni-
tals should be seen as either a pet to be taken care of (not unlike the
contemporary term chick) or the skin of an animal to be valued. As a
pet or as a pelt, this meaning reduces a woman both to her sexual organs
(a recurrent theme, it seems, in heterosexual male notions of aection) and
to a helpless animal in need of protection and looking after, in need of
a husband.
This implication carries over to the use of pussy to refer to a weak
or harmless man. A man who is not an aggressive or skilled athlete or not
a ferocious warrior may find the epithet of pussy raining down upon
him. Nelson describes the experience of Julie Croteau, the only woman to
play baseball on a mens team through three years of college, before she
resigned because of sexual harassment. For three years, though, Croteau
watched and listened to some of the more horrendous ways men initiate
other men and boys into the world of sports and masculinity. According
to Nelson, Croteau was horrified. Not so much by the you bat like a girl
remarksshe had become accustomed to such ordinary sexism in Little
Leaguebut by how sexual the comments were, how vulgar. You pussy.
You cunt. You whore (83). Male discourse relies on the denigration of
women as a means to teach little boys how inferior and disgusting the
female is. For after all, as Badinter quite accurately observes, a mans first
duty is: not to be a woman (47).
The military is, of course, another powerful site of male bonding. Carol
Cohn, in her essay on the discourse of war, observes firsthand the use of
pussy to describe a weak or harmless man when she identifies this term
as another popular epithet, conjoining the imagery of harmless domesti-
cated (read demasculinized) pets with contemptuous reference to womens
genitals (235). According to Cohn, a male civilian defense analyst who
raises questions about the other sides casualties might be referred to as a
pussy and thus learns rather quickly not to ask such a question: Atten-
tion to and care for the living, suering, and dying of human beings . . . is
again banished from the discourse through the expedient means of gender-
bashing (235).
A man relegated to the status of a woman, or a pussy, can then
experience the same kind of violence women have to fear all their lives.
The Citadel again provides an excellent example of this kind of retaliation.
There, according to one cadet, They called you a pussy all the time . . .
or a fucking little girl. . . . Virtually every taunt equated him with a
woman. . . . The knobs even experienced a version of domestic violence.
The upperclassmen . . . would go out and get drunk and they would come
home and haze, and you just hoped they didnt come into your room
110 The Language of Male Bonding

(Faludi, Naked Citadel, 70). As in so many examples already discussed,

any man who reveals himself as a gentle, timid, or harmless person (Chap-
man, 344) may become tainted by the feminine, and men must control the
female no matter what form or incarnation it takes. The resultant violence
against women and against gay men is the most blatant example of this
heterosexual male fear. Were women to become subjects and not just sex-
ual objects, and heterosexual men secure in their identities as men (what-
ever that might be), women and nonaggressive nurturing men might no
longer have to harbor fears for their lives. Here too a language that de-
scribed us as subjects, as whole people with minds and feet and kneecaps,
rather than just holes and poles, could move us closer to an appreciation
of ourselves and others as equals.

SISSY (MAMAS BOY)

As early as four and five, boys learn what is expected of them as males
and restrict themselves. . . . What this means in large part is not being
like a girl, or, what is the same thing, not being a sissy.
Marc Feigen Fasteau, The Male Machine

Yet one more synonym for a cowardly, weak or eeminate boy or man,
the term sissy also frequently connotes a homosexual man (Wentworth
and Flexner, 478; Spears, 410; Chapman, 391). Obviously, an extension of
the word sis and by derivation sister, a sissy equates an eeminate
man with a powerless woman (or girl, even), someones (a mans) sister (or
his mother). Understood in the larger context of the adage boys dont
cry or men dont show their emotions, sissy can be understood in juxta-
position to the phrase taking it like a man (Seidler, 151).
Michael Kimmel traces the historical evolution of this term from its
origin in the 1840s as an aectionate term for sister. By the 1880s, how-
ever, the term had become a derisive description for spineless boys and
men and by 1900 had become clearly associated with eeminacy, coward-
ice, and lack of aggression (Manhood, 100).
Calling a man a sissy as a means to question his masculinity has re-
mained a powerful insult for well over one hundred years. A manhood
defined by courage, generosity, modesty, dignity and aect can easily
feel threatened by the specter of the sissy, with its connotations of weak-
ness, dependency, and helplessness; from Raord Pykes diatribe against
sissies in the 1902 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine to Thomas Wolfes 1976
essay on Honks and Wonks, the requirement that the American male be
tough, muscular, aggressive, and hard has remained a singularly powerful
one (Kimmel, Manhood, 122).
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 111

The similarity between the use of sissy (to reflect cowardice and
weakness) and mamas boy (dependency) and that of pansy (flam-
boyant) and pussy (eeminacy) should be apparent. I have included
sissy here because it represents another disparaging label for a man who
challenges the traditional masculine role. Men who are not clearly mascu-
line are womanish, and women, according to the male imagination, are
subordinate. Thus the language of masculinity posits unequivocal distinc-
tions, and anyone who steps outside those boundaries risks the fate of the
servile and the inferior.
Ironically, though, in sibling relationships older sisters can wield a lot
of power. Sissy, then, exemplifies the use of language to enforce the no-
tion that women are powerless and sisters weak, in contradiction to the
reality that older, and even younger, sisters may be disconcertingly power-
ful. Language can reconfigure experience to conform to ideology. The ide-
ology of masculinity relies on these unambiguous dierentiations to re-
main in power. Once the delineation between master and slave becomes
obscure, the ability to rule is threatened.

STUD

A notorious seducer; a ladies-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short,

a stud.
Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children

The word stud has several meanings, not all of which relate directly to
male heterosexuality. A stud is the two-by-four in the wall that provides a
framework to which Sheetrock is nailed, and a stud is a small ornamental
button mounted on a short post for insertion through an eyelet, as on a
dress shirt (AHCD, 1348). A stud also refers to that part of a pierced
earring that goes through the ear lobe.
Clearly, though, as a metaphor for male heterosexuality, stud derives
its meaning from a male horse used for breeding purposes. When a man
is referred to as a stud, it relates to two things: the desire to have sex
with as many women as possible and, concomitantly, a sense of sexual
prowess that attaches to him. Although stud no longer refers exclusively
to heterosexual men, having currency in gay male discourse as well, I in-
clude it here because of its original and primary use, since at least the
1890s, as a reference to a womanizer (Ayto and Simpson, 249). In the
discourse of heterosexual male bonding, stud designates a promiscuous
straight man who has several female lovers.
Thorne provides the most extensive definition of the use of this slang
term for a male: a sexually active, powerful, potent male. Only slang when
112 The Language of Male Bonding

applied to men as opposed to (real) animals, the term often indicates a

degree of approval or admiration, even if grudgingly. In black American
street parlance the word was sometimes used in the late 1960s and 1970s
simply to mean guy. There seems to be no female equivalent that stresses
sexual power rather than degeneracy (499). Thorne raises several impor-
tant points: the lack of a word used in a similar way to describe a woman,
the implication of this term as a positive male characteristic, and one origi-
nal use of this word (by blacks) to refer to a black man.
The closest comparable expression for a woman might be slut, but
even though it means promiscuous and having sexual prowess (the word
prowess refers exclusively to men, however), slut is a pejorative term
for a woman. Here, as in the epigraph to this section, the language re-
inforces the acceptability for a man to be sexually active and the rejection
of a similar freedom for a woman.
As a positive male quality, the phenomenon of the stud was certainly
a part of my own adolescent experience. Although I was never a stud,
not being large enough or masculine enough or athletic enough, I did seek
male acceptance through my ability to have several girlfriends at the same
time. That girls found me attractive and were willing to have sex with me
gained me status in the world of young boys trying hard to establish them-
selves as acceptable males.
Where I grew up, young boys secured a position in the world of man-
hood in three ways: getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting laid.
Boys as drinkers, as bullies/athletes, and as ladies men were accepted
into the fraternity of masculinity. I was no fighter, so I drank and screwed
my way into deserving maleness. I have struggled against these early in-
fluences throughout my adult life, and I have my feminist female friends
and lovers to thank for my partial liberation from these oppressive male
roles. The image of the man as stud pervades our popular consciousness
so deeply, though, that an individual mans struggle to jettison such a role
remains a constant battle. Although many of us laugh at the absurdity of
such a role model, and chuckle at how our physique compares to the guy
in the Calvin Klein commercial, we still aspire to get the beautiful exotic
babe and have sex with her until we drop (or she begs for mercy).
The exotic and the masculine are fused in the conjunction of the term
stud and the black man. Ayto and Simpson echo Thornes suggestion
that stud was used originally to describe a black man, and both Chap-
man, and Wentworth and Flexner identify its origin in 1930s jive talk
(Chapman, 421) considered to be a fairly common cool use (Wentworth
and Flexner, 526). Chapman also points to the attractiveness of the male
who is called a stud, whereas Spears lists four characteristics associated
with this term: virility, stylishness, sex appeal, [and] sexual success with
women (428). Thus the word stud, usually used by men in a friendly,
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 113

congratulatory way to describe a pal who has several lovers or gets laid a
lot, reverberates with sexist and even racist overtones.
Helen Haste, though, seems to suggest that the sexism of this term is
minimal and certainly not misogynist when she observes that

the macho stud figure is trapped in a particular image of sexuality

crude scoring, and performancebut he is not guilt-ridden. . . . Fem-
inist ideas may challenge his simple world-view, but macho studs saw
the benefits of the permissive society, and misinterpreted the message
of feminism as an opportunity for even more free-and-easy sex. Such
chauvinism is unthinking, sexist and exploitative, but it is fueled by
at worst indierence and incomprehension towards women, not fear
and hatred. (166)

Hastes suggestion that the macho stud is not motivated by fear and hatred
of women seems problematic indeed. The language of sexual oppression
creates victims, and while an argument can be made that men are also
victims of their discourse, to ignore the extent to which women are its
primary victims disregards the significance of how we talk about ourselves.
The stud as an animal whose exclusive function is to breed with many
females reduces men and women to animals who either fuck or are fucked.
This kind of relationship rests on alienation at the very least, and most
likely fear and hatred lie at the root of it.
This term refers not only to a stud horse that is free to just have sex
without having to work but also derives from the white male fantasy about
the sexual prodigiousness of the black man. According to this fantasy, all
black men are studs if for no other reason than that, it is assumed, all
black men have large penises. In his essay on the history of the penis,
Toby Miller points to the mythology surrounding penises of color that
illustrate(s) white mens sexual inferiority, a contradictory mass of feel-
ings that combines an elevation of the phallus to omniscience, and a hatred
of the black man for being the ultimate penis symbol (10).
The antagonism between the dark villain and the white hero is almost
universal in Western culture. In his book, White Hero Black Beast: Rac-
ism, Sexism, and the Mask of Masculinity, Paul Hoch discusses this polar-
ization at great length. According to Hoch, The conflict between hero
and beast becomes a struggle between two understandings of manhood:
human versus animal, white versus black, spiritual versus carnal, soul ver-
sus flesh, higher versus lower, noble versus base (45). These dichotomies
result in the achievement of manhood by the conquest of hero over beast
[an achievement that] became the allegory for the struggle of civilization
against barbarism, white Europe against the dark continent of Africa,
West against Eastand of the civilized consciousness over the dark, bes-
tial sexual forces in its unconscious (Hoch, 47). Hoch argues further that
114 The Language of Male Bonding

these dichotomies are at the heart of the interracial competition for

women and that the super-sexualised black stud, so dreaded by the rac-
ist, represents an unconscious projection of those aspects of his own sexu-
ality which society has made taboo (54).
The reduction of the black man to an animal whose dominant charac-
teristic or quality is to breed highlights the ambivalence white men have
about their sexuality. In their imagination many men want to be seen as a
stud and wish that all they had to do all day was have sex, but at the
same time they are doubtful of their ability to assume this role. Are their
penises large enough, do they have enough stamina, can they perform well
enough, are they really animal enough to take on this function? These are
the questions concealed behind the simple label of stud, questions men
prefer not to confront as they hide behind an epithet that obscures more
than it elucidates.

STUDMUFFIN
The only dictionary reference to this fairly new metaphor for a man ap-
pears in Spears, who defines it simply as a good-looking, sexually attrac-
tive male (429). The combination of stud as a sexually active man and
mun as an edible treat seems to suggest a male who is both sexy and
tasty. This comical term juxtaposes stud (power and sexuality) with
mun (cute and sweet) and in this way defuses the power aspect of the
metaphor. It is an ironical metaphor that undercuts its own significance.
As a term coined and used by women (not men) to describe an attrac-
tive and youthful masculinity, studmun may say more about the current
situation of female sexuality than it does about male sexuality: that women
want to control the discourse of their sexuality as a way to define it for
themselves.
Lesbians also use this metaphor to refer to an attractive, masculine-
type, or butch, lesbian, but in this context studmun seems to uncriti-
cally reenact a dominant notion of masculinity while acknowledging the
female. According to Kath Weston, whose book Render Me, Gender Me
includes several references to the term studmun: If butch brings to
mind nothing more than a hackneyed picture of some truck-driving diesel
dyke, you probably wont know what to make of the paradoxical figure
of the studmun. As precious as shes butch, a studmun could be you
(depending) or me at a moment when butch collides with femme (4).10
The paradox of such a term as studmun is significant, whether it refers
to a man or a woman. Its power, however, may come from the seemingly
passive and cute image it brings to mind.
The sound of this metaphor, the way its enunciation suggests its mean-
ing, makes it eective. Studmun sounds almost poetic. It suggests an
 Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual 115

image of a powerfully built, slender, dark young man in tight jeans looking
seductively into the camera. On the one hand, this image is a counterpart
to the recurrent photograph of the female model in the Guess clothing
commercials with that Come fuck me look; now we have a cultural icon
of a man making the same suggestion. The studmun, as the sexually
exploitable male body there for the womans sexual pleasure, may be a step
toward sexual liberation, and that it is a phrase owned almost exclusively
by women certainly proposes such a reading. On the other hand, this meta-
phor highlights one of the great failures of the liberal feminist perspective.
The view that women are just like men, that they can assume male roles
and all will be well with the world, fails to attack the source of these roles
or the implications of why contemporary dominant male roles emphasize
certain qualities and denounce others.
As a metaphor that is synonymous with boy toy, studmun rein-
forces the predominant notion of the male body as an erection, as a non-
feeling sexual machine. Does a studmun talk, does he cry or laugh or
defer? Or does he sit there unmoving with a perennial hard-on, just waiting
to be the stud who is eaten, the sexual plaything of the compulsorily het-
erosexual woman? Ironically, even though studmun originates as a fe-
male fantasy relying on what women say he wants, as a metaphor for mas-
culinity it resonates with the great male heterosexual fantasy writ large:
the man who wants to be used sexually by the beautiful, hungry, insatiable
woman. Does he think beyond his penis, or does he see himself as the
popular culture encourages most American men to see themselves: as one
large, irresistible erection?

WHISKEY DICK
This phrase underscores a mans ambivalent relationship with alcohol by
alluding to him as being too drunk to get an erection. Spears, the only
slang dictionary to include the term (of the six I use), defines whisky
dick (British spelling) as: an impotent penis due to too much alcohol
(476).
Among the limited options boys have available to them as a means to
demonstrate their masculinity, getting drunk, getting laid, and getting into
fights vie for their attention. The less athletic, more pusillanimous boys
can still remain viable males in the eyes of their peers by drinking just as
much as anyone else and being successful with the girls.
Hoch stresses the importance of alcohol consumption as one of the
most common ways of certifying ones manhood in what are frequently
all-male institutions as a defense against the feminine elements within
the male psyche (85). Kimmel echoes Hochs observation when he views
drinking as a form of masculine resistance to feminization (Kimmel,
116 The Language of Male Bonding

Manhood, 124). One reason men get drunk, that is, is to assert their stereo-
typically belligerent and imperious masculinity.
Hard drinking, then, becomes a badge of manhood while releasing a
mans inhibitions about approaching a woman. Alcohol makes scared men
brave, but too much alcohol makes drunk men impotent. It also makes
them violent and aggressive; alcohol brings out the worst in men, ex-
acerbating, as it does, their socialization to be bullies and warriors. Men
use alcohol as an excuse for their worst behavior and then coin a phrase
like whiskey dick to provide them with a rationalization for their weak-
ness and their subsequent embarrassment.
The irony of such a phrase as whiskey dick arises from the confusion
and inadequacy it reveals in mens relationship to women. Men are afraid
of women, they fear rejection, and they fear love with its attendant loss of
autonomy. Whiskey dick identifies a situation in which a man confirms
his masculinity by his ability to consume large quantities of alcohol but
experiences inferiority as a real man by describing his inability to obtain
an erection. The tragedy such a metaphor conveys is mens bewilderment
about the stress placed on the importance of the erection in the definition
of what it means to be a man. If a man were to feel secure enough in his
masculinity not to feel the need to get drunk, treated a woman as an equal
and not as a target of conquest, and focused less on the role of his erect
penis in making love, whiskey dick would disappear from the discourse
of male bonding because men would no longer feel compelled to get drunk
in order to have a conversation with a woman, much less seduce her.
II Beyond the Present
6 Insidious Humor and the
Construction of Masculinity

When a logonomic system allows a statement oensive to women to

be read as a joke, this signifies a particular structure of gender rela-
tions, one in which males are dominant as a group in relation to fe-
males but need to mask their hostility and aggression towards them.
Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics

Joking reflects and partially compensates for our failings, dissatisfac-

tions and self-alienation.
Christopher Wilson, Jokes: Form, Content, Use, and Function

Formalised humour will generally fulfill an ideological function in

supporting and maintaining existing social relations and dominant
ways of perceiving social reality.
Chris Powell, A Phenomenological Analysis of Humour in
Society

The title of this book, Studs, Tools, and the Family Jewels, frequently elicits
laughter, a laughter related to embarrassment or shame. Some people
smile, others smirk, some cough, some even blush, but all the people to
whom I have told the title have at least chuckled, and many have rolled
their eyes as if to say, You cant talk about that in public, its private,
forbidden, and the domain of the select few. In this case the select few are
men, and their discourse of sexuality gains power in direct proportion to
their ability to control language. Humor empowers that control.
Humor has the potential to be liberating, though, and in my conclud-
ing remarks to this chapter I try to identify ways in which we can harness
humor toward positive ends. Satire may be the best source for this liberat-
ing form of humor, and ridicule in the form of reverse victimization may
also serve as a potent weapon. The problematics of any victimization must
be considered, and at the end of the chapter I reflect upon the complica-
tions that result from this particular option. Primarily, though, I am inter-
119
120 Beyond the Present

ested in the power of humor to liberate us, just as I am convinced that new
metaphors can change the way we think about ourselves as men.
Indeed, jokes and metaphors have much in common. Both rely on lan-
guage as a means to provide incongruous comparisons, and both require
an audience.1 Puns may be the best example of the play on words endemic
to both jokes and metaphors, but profanity provides another instance.
Freuds work on humor, and in particular his analysis of profanity, brings
together the disjunctive use of language with the necessity for there to be
an audience. Freud observes that a favourite definition of joking has long
been the ability to find similarity between dissimilar thingsthat is, hid-
den similarities (Jokes, 7). Much of one of his chapters, The Technique
of Jokes, examines the process of condensation with substitution-
formation and double meaning arising from the literal and metaphorical
meanings of a word (Jokes, 31, 39).
In his analysis of smut Freud recognizes the need for at least another
man to be present in order for a joke to work and thus introduces an early
and profound insight into the dynamics of male bonding. Although Freud
views smut as prefatory to a wooing speech (117), and thus quite consis-
tent with what he sees as the dierence between mens and womens libidos
(the former active and the latter passive), he recognizes that smut is sexu-
ally aggressive and can become positively hostile and cruel (117). When
women resist smut, the third person . . . acquires the greatest impor-
tance. . . . The onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to whom
the smut is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is already near
to assuming the character of a joke (118). The third person, the audience
for this kind of harassment, must be a man.
Men bond around the sexual disparagement of women, and insidious
humor empowers male bonding. The discourse of male heterosexuality can
be quite funny. Humor distracts people from the real purpose of this lan-
guage; it disarms them and thus fosters a subtle control over interpersonal
relationships (both heterosexual and homosocial). In comparison to other,
more heavy-handed methods of control, humor may be seen as compara-
tively benign. The sly treachery of male humor, and the extent to which it
is frequently more dangerous than may at first glance seem evident, inten-
sifies its force. However, the sense of playfulness attached to humor exacer-
bates its insidiousness. Michael Mulkay, the author of an important study
of the nature and place of humor in modern society, maintains that in the
domain of humour mens control over and sexual domination of women is
exceptionally stark and unrestricted (141). Mulkays point is in danger of
generally being overlooked, however, because humor works best the more
insidious men manage to make it. Indeed, I believe it is this balance be-
tween the stark and the subtle that characterizes much male humor and
enhances its eectiveness.
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 121

I want to begin by sharing with you two incidents I recently witnessed

that, I believe, show how men use humor insidiously in their ongoing at-
tempt to control women by degrading them. The first occurred while I was
out to dinner at a local restaurant some months ago. I overheard two men
at a table nearby exchange some words with and about the young woman
who was the hostess. One of the men (who might have known the young
woman) asked her, jokingly, why she never agreed to go out to dinner with
him. In an attempt to defuse the situation she responded by saying that
she worked late, too late for dinner. He told her that he liked to eat late,
to which she said something like, Well, its too late for me.
At this point, after she had left their table, the guy who had been con-
versing with (or harassing, depending upon how you look at it) the young
woman, turned to his buddy and said, It would never be too late to have
her for dessert. His buddy laughed snidely, and the two of them continued
to exchange what they considered to be humorous remarks about her
desirability.
The second incident occurred in the lobby of a large hotel where two
businessmen, dressed in suits of course, were sitting on a sofa waiting for
another guy to show up. When he arrived, also dressed in a suit, he said
to his friends: Well, are you ready to go to the mall? One of the other
guys responded sarcastically, Yeah, lets go spend the day shopping, and
all three burst out laughing.
The second anecdote seems the most straightforward. Essentially, these
men are laughing about their belief in the contrast between mens and
womens roles: that women waste their time happily shopping all day, while
men have to work hard at making dicult business decisions. Their in-
sidious laughter characterizes the exchange as much as do their cultural
assumptions. The laughter signals that all three men share the same pre-
suppositions about their social and economic importance and, concomi-
tantly, womens relative insignificance. By laughing together, the men bond
around the degradation of women while sharing the belief that men and
their work are consequential.
The first story is a bit more complicated though not much. These two
men bond over the reference to the young woman as a sexual object. What
makes the story a trifle more complex, though, is the suggestion that a
man might want to give a woman pleasure through the act of cunnilingus
(having her for dessert). By contrast, the tone of the remarks communi-
cates the sense that what the man really wants to do is molest the young
woman, to use her for his pleasure, to relegate her to a sexual body upon
which (whom) he will exercise his right to make her his domain. Together
the tone and the content make the source of the bonding both reductive
and aggressive.
The lexicon of male bonding is by its nature predominantly aggressive;
122 Beyond the Present

it is mean and at times even terrorizing.2 The use of humor enhances the
eectiveness of male bonding. As D. E. Berlyne points out in his social
psychological study of the relationship of laughter, humor, and play, by
serving to express agreement and undermine the morale of those against
which it is aimed, humor acts as a means of control, [that] is used to . . .
develop common attitudes, indicate safety or friendship (811). That is,
humor functions in a purposeful way to manipulate the outcome of the
interchange among men and between men and women. Laughter, ac-
cording to Christopher Wilson in his study of jokes, provides a consensus
and expresses a shared sentiment that evokes a sense of solidarity be-
tween group members and against the butt of humour (214).
In the two anecdotes I have just described, the butts of the jokes and
the victims of the humor are women. Men bond around certain assump-
tions about women (that they are stupid and that they are sexually avail-
able, to name just two), and in this bonding they gain approval by other
men in the group.3 This communal approbation empowers the group to
graduate to the more satisfying expression of direct disparagement (Wil-
son, 227). When men move from the relatively confined exchange among
themselves of dirty jokes to overt kinds of shared aggressive sexual bad-
gering of women (or verbal rape), their disparagement of women becomes
terrifying. Individual men can also use humor as a weapon against a lover
or wife, but in either situationthe man alone or in a grouphumor no
longer remains just a joke. It becomes threatening and violent, and much
male humor actively and intentionally victimizes women. Here is but one
example:
q: What do you tell a woman who has two black eyes?
a: Nothing, shes already been told twice.
Men can also be the butt of the jokes, and ironically the insidiousness
of male humor empowers men to exert control over each other. In the
restaurant scenario I described, for example, if the guys friend had not
laughed with him about the young womans desirability, the friends credi-
bility as a real man would have been in question. Had there been three
men at dinner, two might well have ganged up on the other one and ridi-
culed his treason to the group as evidence of his being a faggot or impo-
tent or some other term that questioned his heterosexual masculinity. The
two men would have laughed hilariously over their attack on the other
guy and bonded around the implicit recognition that they, at least, were
real men.
This reciprocal policing of male behavior in turn allows men to domi-
nate women by giving men a sense of their collective power (as a result,
they present a unified front). If, as Wilson suggests, joking reflects and
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 123

partially compensates for our failings, dissatisfactions and self-alienation

(231), male humor must be seen as an eective form of retaliation. Male
bonding, through the use of humor, allows men to use their sense of power
in a way similar to that of the bully. Most men in U.S. society, while cer-
tainly privileged, have little real power. By elevating their group status,
male bonding compensates for the fear of individual impotence that results
from mens sense of powerlessness and alienation.
Relying for the most part on degradation and shame, most male humor
hurts someone. Dirty jokes, for example, although usually too overt to be
insidious, demonstrate the extent to which the male sense of humor victim-
izes women. Mulkay observes that
dirty jokes depict the relationship between men and women in terms
of a radical form of sexual, social, and linguistic domination of
women by men. The very words used to refer to women endorse and
exemplify this domination. . . . The domain of humour is a world
where the male voice constantly triumphs over that of the female and
where women are made to exist and act only as appendages to mens
most basic sexual inclinations. (137)

Although, as Marcel Gutwirth points out, the joke must be seen as pre-
eminently a bonding narrative, a make-believe framework for the permis-
sible expression of objectionable sentiments, jokes are not neutral or just
fun. 4 They reinforce a social agenda and, as Peter Lyman finds from his
case study of what was supposed to be a humorous encounter between
some fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, the defense that jokes are
play defines aggressive behavior as play (158). Abuse and degradation
between men are just part of the horseplay and backslapping that struc-
tures male behavior. Men need to keep their interaction with women frivo-
lous, and the joke provides a socially acceptable means to express aggres-
sion (Wilson, 206). To wit:
q: Why do men speak to women?
a: Because they have a cunt.
As all of us have had occasion to observe, when feminists resist complicity
with this aggression, they earn the reputation of humorlessness, a humor-
lessness that evokes fraternal laughter.5
Male bonding engenders power and control, and humorinsidious
humorintensifies that domination. From the commonly used response,
its only a joke, to the commonly held belief that humor allows us to talk
about otherwise socially unacceptable experiences, humor reinforces the
inequality of the sexes that remains central to U.S. culture.6 The male re-
sponse, its only a joke, indicts the critic for lacking a sense of humor.
124 Beyond the Present

Powell, in his phenomenological analysis of humor, sees this rejoinder as

being concerned with the mitigation of social hostility or tension via the
re-establishment of a joke framework (102). The ideaprevalent in the
studies of humor from Freud to Charlie Chaplinthat humor is an ac-
ceptable way to exchange information about sexual activities unmention-
able in our societyignores completely the nature of the information be-
ing transferred.7 According to Wilson, for example, sexual themes and
obscenities that are unacceptable in serious conversation, are amusing
when incorporated in jest and attributed to absent or fictional third par-
ties (187). Although Wilson goes on to observe that jokes among men
usually express and foster the particular values of the male group (188),
not enough has been said about the pervasiveness of male dominance in
sexual humor and the role of humor in sustaining the status quo.
The by-now-famous joke attributed to Harvey Sacks about the three
daughters whose mother spies on them on their wedding night provides a
prime example of this kind of one-sided interpretation. In case you have
not heard this joke, here is a quick overview: three sisters who are married
on the same day return to their home with their new husbands to spend
the wedding night. The mother listens at each bedroom door and the next
morning over breakfast they have the following exchange:
Mother: Sally, why were you crying so hard last night?
Sally: Because it hurt so much.
Mother: And Cindy why were you laughing so hysterically?
Cindy: Because it tickled.
Mother: And Susy why were you so quiet?
Susy (hesitates): Well, Mother, you told me never to talk with my
mouth full.
Granted, my rendition is a truncated version, but it provides enough of
the joke to raise questions about the exchange of information interpreta-
tion of humor. The obvious question is, whose information and for what
purpose is it being exchanged? At least two-thirds of this joke is about
penis size, one of the great male obsessions. The husbands penises are
either too small (so it tickles) or too large (so it hurts). Maybe, though, the
latent and truly subversive message in this joke is that a large penis may
cause pain, not the unequaled pleasure Playboy magazine wants us to be-
lieve women are dying to experience, and that the small penis may produce
joy because it tickles.
But the joke scarcely focuses on that information: it concentrates on
fellatio as a source of shame, as it taps into the notion of the dumb blond.
People who laugh at this joke do so because they are embarrassed for the
woman who has to admit that she was performing oral sex on a man. Part
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 125

of its humor also arises from the suggestion that the third daughter reports
performing oral sex as if she didnt know she had.
Something none of the many and varied interpreters of this joke have
pointed out is that throughout the entire joke the men remain silent: they
are silent in bed the first night and they are silent at breakfast the next
morning. One could infer from the story (again subversively) that they
were all silent because, like Susy, they all had their mouths full. It seems
more likely, though, that the men are silent because the predominant as-
sumption about men, the information we have about them, tells us that
men simply are silent when they make love. Men are not known to scream
in orgasm or cry out with the pleasure of love making. They must remain
in control, and one of the subtle messages of this joke is the underlying
premise that men are both silent and in control when they have sex. Mens
control often comes from evasion, avoidance, and absence (particularly in
the aftermath of orgasm), and in this joke the men all but disappear.
The joke presupposes too that the outcome of sex for men is never in
question. When men have sex, they are assumed to have pleasure, whereas
womens orgasms are always experienced as problematic. This male anxi-
ety about womens ability to enjoy sex pervades mens humor and acts as
a defense mechanism against their fear of being a bad lover (or, worse yet,
impotent). Thus another layer of this joke suggests that Susys mouth is
stued (she is silenced) by her subordination to male desire. This keeps
her from expressing anything, much less a sexual message of her own.
Womens humor diers from mens humor, which may be a result of
the fundamental dierence between the way men and women experience
the world. Unlike mens humor, which is frequently grounded in notions of
competition, aggression, humiliation, and ridicule, womens humor usually
lacks hostility and forgoes the necessity to belittle others as a means to
enhance their own status. According to one anthropological study of hu-
mor and laughter, women do not express a need to humiliate others either
psychologically or physically, and women rarely engage in such common
male forms of humor as verbal duels, ritual insults . . . practical jokes
and pranks (Apte, 70). A shared feature of many cultures is womens
mockery of mens pretensions to sexual prowess. Thus womens humor can
scarcely be characterized as primarily conciliatory and gentle or concerned
exclusively with the niceties of love and romance. This misreading of wom-
ens texts, according to Regina Barreca, relies on the belief that women
are actually incapable of producing the challenging, angry and subversive
comedy that they do in fact write (5).
At the same time that womens humor diers from mens, it diers also
from feminist humor. Gloria Kaufman, editor of two collections of femi-
nist humor and satire, provides a helpful distinction:
126 Beyond the Present

In contrast to feminist humor, nonfeminist womens humor is fre-

quently survival humor. It accepts a status quo regarded as inevitable.
The empowerment derived from such humor is far less than that of
revolutionary humor, which points toward change. . . . Feminist hu-
mor celebrates modes of power quite dierent from masculine societal
norms. Indeed, it regularly satirizes as puerile or illogical the common
equation of force and power. In the feminist view, the man with the
gun, lacking persuasive power, lacking imagination, insecure in him-
self, is weak, not powerful. (viiiix)

Nonfeminist womens humor still laughs about ugly women and fat
women, women who shop too much, and women who are just dying to
find the right man. Womens survival humor (e.g., the early Joan Rivers)
relies on the social norm, what Adrienne Rich has referred to as compul-
sory heterosexuality, and provides a means by which women can accom-
modate these oppressive expectations. Reactionary humor, whether pre-
sented by men or by women, perpetuates the notion of a natural sexual
division in which men are and should be in power. Survival humor, from
any oppressed group, allows these groups to remain disempowered by giv-
ing them a way to laugh at their own oppression. Frequently, this humor
laughs at the oppressor as well, but that ridicule remains cathartic, not
revolutionary. One example of this genre recently made the rounds in
cyberspace:

Eleven people were hanging onto a rope that came down from a heli-
copter. Ten were men and one was a woman. They all decided that
one person should get o because if they didnt, the rope would break
and everyone would die.
No one could decide who should go, so finally the woman gave a
really touching speech, saying how she would give up her life to save
the others, because women were familiar with giving up things for
their husbands and children, and giving in to men.
All of the men started clapping.

In contrast to what Kaufman calls mainstream masculinist attack hu-

mor, feminist humor seeks to empower people by presenting them with
information. Intended to improve people, not damage them in some way,
feminist humor invites its victims to change their behaviors and join the
laughter (ix). Brett Butler, the southern feminist comedian, relies on her
origins for her repertoire of redneck jokes in her video called Brett Butler:
The Child Aint Right. Reflecting on her bubba first husband, she says that
after that marriage was over, what she learned is, You let one dog get
away, youre going build a taller fence and put better food out. Which is
not to suggest that feminist humor is passive and kindly: feminist humor
can be hostile to men, certainly, and to patriarchy in general. Indeed, it
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 127

can be said that when womens humor lacks open virulence, perhaps it still
panders to male supremacy.
Like female humor, feminist humor tends to be less ego obsessed than
mens. Feminist comedians tend to deal with such issues as sexism, ho-
mophobia, racism, and the homeless, not with how many times they got
laid last night or how good they are in bed. By focusing on the world
out there, much feminist humor reflects a stronger sense of security about
themselves as women than women can express in another milieu. Marlo
Thomass famous line, A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruth-
less. All a woman has to do is put you on hold, and Erica Jongs, Show
me a woman who doesnt feel guilty and Ill show you a man, demonstrate
a feminist humor concerned with the job site and the broader framework
of gender socialization.
Whoopi Goldberg exemplifies a feminist humor concerned with social
issues. In the character of Fontaine, a strung-out heroine addict, she ex-
plores class and gender through the greed of corporate America and the
hypocrisy of fundamentalist Christian men opposed to womens freedom
of choice. In an airport scene in the video Whoopi Goldberg, Fontaine/
Whoopi tells us, I passed this big dude walking around in a circle with a
picket sign talking about stopping abortion, so I said, Motherfucker, when
was the last time you was pregnant? And he looks at me and says, I dont
have to discuss that with you. Because I have the answer to abortion, I
said, Shoot o your dick. I said, Take that tired piece of meat down to
the ASPCA and let them put it to sleep. And I feel better then because I
know he put his money where his mouth is.
But womens sense of humor appears to dier materially from mens.
According to one study designed to have male and female students identify
their favorite dirty jokes, the male students preferred aggressive or sexual
jokes, while females identified more jokes with social or intellectual func-
tions (Ziv, 158). Frank MacHovec observes that in the realm of the dirty
joke, forms of humor that deal with love and romance are by no means as
widespread as jokes featuring an explicit sexual content or direct associa-
tion with sexual function (148). That is, dirty jokes tend to focus on such
male obsessions as physical endowment and sexual performance.
In fact, most dirty jokes are retailed among men, reinforcing the role
this kind of humor plays in fostering a shared set of values. As a symbolic
form of verbal rape, mens humor in general, and the dirty joke in partic-
ular, frequently imply the availability of women for sexual pleasure. As
Gershen Legman, who has written extensively on the dirty joke, puts it,
mens humor relies on the reduction of woman-as-vagina (374) and ex-
emplifies the primacy of coitus (236) that underlies almost all male hu-
mor: the tendency to degrade womens anatomy and blame women for
precisely the promiscuity men impose upon them.8
128 Beyond the Present

This kind of disparagement, especially in the form of ridicule, repre-

sents one of the more prevalent forms of male humor. Wilson discusses
ridicule at great length in his chapter called The Use of Abuse and
points out that ridicule is the prerogative of the powerful, not an option
for the weak and the oppressed. By supporting existing status and power,
ridicule reinforces the dynamics of male bonding: The amusement evoked
by ridicule provides a shared sentiment that serves to cement feelings of
criticism or dislike within a group. The threat of becoming the target of
ridicule, and suering the consequent feelings of isolation, will tend to
enforce conformity within a group (Wilson, 213). Ironically, this particu-
lar kind of humor engenders yet one more configuration of mens violence
against themselves while forging a way for men to bond against women.
Misogynist and homophobic humor, while not always overt, certainly pro-
vides a potent weapon that men can use to protect themselves.
All-male groups and organizations manifest this kind of aggressive
behavior, and Peter Lymans case study, The Fraternal Bond as a Jok-
ing Relationship, elucidates the role of sexist jokes in male group bond-
ing. Lymans essay focuses on an incident in which an entire mens frater-
nity (forty-five men in all) broke into the dining room of a sorority house
during dinner, surrounded the 30 women residents, and forced them to
watch while one pledge gave a speech on Freuds theory of penis envy as
another demonstrated various techniques of masturbation with a rubber
penis (148). The women remained sitting at the table, passive and silent
for about ten minutes, until the graduate resident in charge of the house
walked in and demanded that the men leave. It was not until the men had
left that the women got angry. About this same time, the guy who made
the penis-envy speech returned and said, That was funny to me. If thats
not funny to you I dont know what kind of sense of humor you have, but
Im sorry.
Lyman explains that the penis-envy ritual had always been a successful
joke at this college and analyzes why it did not succeed that year. The
women thought the joke had failed not because of its subject but because
of its emotional structure, the mixture of sexuality with aggression and the
atmosphere of sexual intimidation in the room that signified that the
women were the object of a joking relationship between the men (149).
In contrast, the men argued that the special male bond created by sexist
humor is a unique form of intimacy that justified the inconvenience caused
the women (149). Clearly, the young womens consciousness had been
raised to the point where they were no longer willing or able to accept the
assumption that violence against women is okay.
Mens belief in and commitment to the sanctity of a male friendship
defined by the exclusion of women (and gay men) takes on a stark reality
in this assertion by young college-educated middle-class males. This in-
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 129

sight into male thinking contradicts the assumption that the discourse of
male bonding is restricted to working-class lushes who hang out in the
local bar or at amateur sporting events. Abusive male discourse, in a vari-
ety of forms, cuts across class barriers. Men bond around a joyful assertion
of the exclusion and abuse of women, and frequently that subjugation
gains legitimacy as it becomes funnier. 9
As he uncovers the emotional dynamics of male friendships, Lyman
finds that jokes are never just stories, humor is never neutral. Jokes, in
particular, provide a theater of domination in everyday life, and the suc-
cess or failure of a joke marks the boundary within which power and ag-
gression may be used in a relationship (150). This shared aggression to-
ward an outsider allows a group to overcome internal tension and arm
its solidarity. For men, sexist jokes against women help to maintain the
gender domination prevalent in all domains of mens lives.
Lyman also sees the joking relationship that governs much male bond-
ing as a response to mens fear of work and of women. Mens resentment
about the constraints imposed upon them by, for example, marriage and
corporate America suggests that sexist jokes may function as a ritual sus-
pension of the rules of responsibility for men, a withdrawal into a micro-
world in which anger about dependence upon work and women may be
safely expressed (157). Jokes about women and money conflate these two
anxieties: shopping jokes and jokes about women spending a lot of money,
handing over the paycheck to the wife jokes, alimony jokes, and jokes
about women as gold diggers all represent this form of humor. This form
of humor, once so prevalent in public comedic discourse, is now largely
confined to private jokes and exchanges between men.
A further function of mens sexist jokes is to forestall the possibility
that some men might form intimate emotional bonds with women and
withdraw from the group of men. In their humor men split intimacy o
from sexuality to create what Lyman calls an instrumental sexuality that
they direct at women. This eroticized male bond, this erotic of shared
aggression among men (158), is directed at women as a means for men
to remain in control of a life that they experience as more and more com-
plex. Robin Williams makes fun of this by ring on alcoholism and male
bonding in beer commercials, which always show manly men doing
manly things: youve just killed a small animal, and now its time for a
light beer. And as men continue to drink, the next thing you know youve
got your friend in a headlock going, I love you, you little fucker, I love
you (Robin Williams).
One significant facet of the complexity men face is the emotional as-
pect of male experience. Long considered the realm of the female, this is
an area in which many men feel powerless. (The feminist comedian Elayne
Boosler [Showtime] plays o exactly this aspect of the male experience
130 Beyond the Present

when she tells her audience emphatically that she knows what men want:
They want to be really close to someone who will leave them alone.) As
outsiders to the emotional, and thus frequently overwhelmed by this hu-
man dimension, men fight back with ridicule and sarcasm. By deriding the
emotional, men assert some kind of control over it, and this allows them
to feel a little more secure about the legitimacy of what they believe to be
an omnipotent masculinity.
Many men prefer to remain adolescents (a charge leveled against men
for any number of reasons), and it is true that male humor often resonates
with a sexuality frozen at the emotional level of the teenage boy. It may
not be coincidental that adolescence is also the point in psychological de-
velopment when sexual jokes are more than just frequent (Ziv, 17). Ado-
lescent male sexuality abundantly reflects a consciousness about sex and
sexuality fraught with fear, confusion, and shame. Many adult men retain
this ignorance and insecurity about their sexuality and find in the cover of
laughter a safe haven in a world beset with complication and emotional
confusion. Teenage boys who make jokes about sex, and laugh at their
lack of experience as a means of maintaining their position as virile hetero-
sexual men, may be forgiven some of their sexist humor; they are but boys
after all, and they will outgrow this stupidity. Adult men, on the other
hand, for whom sexist humor becomes misogynist, homophobic, and vio-
lent (against anyone who is not clearly a heterosexual macho male), ought
not be forgiven for giving vent to so pathetic and destructive a masculinity.
Can humor make a contribution to eradicating this kind of injurious
male behavior, or is humor intrinsically conservative and oppressive? Does
humor have to injure someone to make us laugh? Can there be a humor
that does not require a victim? These are tough questions but ones that
force us to think about the potential for humor to be a progressive force.
Theorists of humor from Henri Bergson to Charlie Chaplin have
stressed the educational quality of humor and suggest that, in pointing out
the absurdities of everyday life, humor can help to reform the world.
Chaplin, according to Ziv, believed that comedy can sharpen our sensitiv-
ity to the perversions of justice within the society in which we live (40).
Although Chaplin was far more concerned with class than with gender,
clearly he saw humor as a means to transform societys abusive and reac-
tionary tendencies. As does Robin Williams. Speaking of South Africa in
the days of apartheid, he says, Pretty soon Lester Maddox will have to
go over there. Hell say, Mr. Botha, Mr. Botha, let me explain something
to you. There are fourteen million blacks here and three million whites.
Does the name Custer mean anything to you? (Robin Williams).
As I tried to demonstrate earlier in this chapter, the general assertion
that humor functions as a source of valuable information is both problem-
atic and self-serving. As Karl Marx points out in the third thesis on Feuer-
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 131

bach, we cannot ignore the issue of who educates the educator. In the case
of humor (as is true for almost all education), the educator usually reflects
the ranks of those in power. With humor the education derives overwhelm-
ingly from the male point of view that reinforces the basic social assump-
tion of womens inferiority.
Some contemporary theorists of humor remain skeptical about the po-
tential for humor to become a form of eective resistance to the status quo
of male power. Powell, for example, understands the problematic nature
of the use of humor by the powerless to eect any real change. He claims
that, ultimately, radical humor may amount to nothing but a resigned
expression and cheerful demonstration of the subordinates very weak-
ness (103). But Powells pessimism ignores some rather significant evi-
dence that a radical, even transformative, humor already flourishes. The
political cartoon, for example, has been a vital source of a radical humor
(e.g., Herblock, Feier, Garry Trudeau, and Tom Toles, and certainly for
feminist humor, Nicole Hollander, bulbul, and Etta Hulme). Indeed, the
mere existence of women stand-ups of high quality and persuasiveness
like Lily Tomlin, Kate Clinton, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracey Ullman, Rita
Rudner, Ellen DeGeneres, Elayne Boosler, Brett Butler, and others repre-
sents a reformation of the humor scene that has begun to rob male misog-
yny of its monopoly on sexual humor.
Humor remains, if not the only weapon of the oppressed, certainly one
of the more powerful sources of retaliation. Bertice Berry, a stand-up
comic, sees the common denominator of laughter [as a great source] of
power (Warren, Revolutionary Laughter, 25), and Kaufman believes that
feminist humor, insofar as it indicates (or inspires) change, is obviously
concerned with the transfer of power from those who have it overwhelm-
ingly to those who have too little (viii).
With these caveats in place, humor in general, and satire in particular,
have been and continue to be potent vehicles for political consciousness
raising. Comedy can take issue with the status quo and pour out ridicule
on prejudice: Molieres School for Wives, Fieldings Tom Jones, and even,
in its way, Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest.10 Today a satire of
masculinity that raises mens consciousness about the ludicrous inade-
quacy of their beliefs about women would certainly be a step in the right
direction. David Mamets scathing satire of mens roles in Sexual Perversity
in Chicago represents one attempt to expose mens more hostile behavior
toward women, even if the play is at times too heavy-handed and certainly
not very funny. But satire can be funny, and when it succeeds it disempow-
ers those who assume a position of superiority. Kate Clinton, the well-
known lesbian feminist comedian, points out that there is a window of
vulnerability that opens up when people are laughing. They let down their
guard and new ideas can come in (Warren, Revolutionary Laughter, 54).
132 Beyond the Present

Satires of masculinity that allow men to laugh at themselves, and in that

way learn about the glaring contradictions in their relationships with
women, could raise mens consciousness and change their behavior. These
satires by men are disappointingly few, although Dave Barry and some of
the work of Garrison Keillor represent a promising trend.
Ridicule may provide a further potent weapon against male domina-
tion. Although ridicule is almost always the prerogative of the powerful, it
might also be used sympathetically, not just punitively. Wilson alludes to
a forgiving ridicule that a group might use as an alternative to more
extreme sanctions. The ridicule would mark and criticize the social
oense without being severely punitive to the oender (Wilson, 2067).
A humor that excoriates men for their sexist and homophobic behavior
would simply ostracize the jokers. Brett Butler quotes Pat Robertson as
saying, AIDS is Gods way of controlling the homosexual population.
Adds Butler: Like, right, they reproduce like bunnies (Brett Butler). But
women cannot do it alone. Here men must take an active role in ridiculing
their male buddies.
Some feminist humor already relies on ridicule. Butler, star of the now
defunct TV sitcom Grace under Fire, acknowledges that she is comfort-
able with humor that often makes others uncomfortable. She remarks on
how guys watch fishing shows as if both narrative and suspense are in-
volved. Two guys in a boat, repeatedly casting and reeling in, turn to each
other and say, It dont get no better than this. Apparently theyve never
seen a nipple up close before (Brett Butler). Joy Behar sees a dick joke
[as] a beautiful thing (Warren, Revolutionary Laughter, 39, 15). If more
humor ridiculed the male fixation on sexual performance as a race to the
finish line, and mens conviction that more is better in all aspects of their
lives, men might well begin to rethink some of their assumptions about
themselves as men. One example of this kind of progressive ridicule is
evident as a recurrent theme in much contemporary feminist humor about
the absence of men from and their ignorance of womens experiences of
orgasm.11 This kind of critique, couched in a humorous mode, might sug-
gest to men the desirability of slowing down and making love in a way
that is attentive to their partners needs.
In fact, a humorous theme that identifies mens ignorance of the male
orgasm would be a major contribution to mens sexual liberation. More
humor about the ways men oppress themselves might contribute to mens
becoming more cognizant of the ways in which they abuse their own sexu-
ality. A male humor that laughs at power, its institutionalization, and its
myths would help all of us to move beyond self-hatred and alienation.
Robin Williamss famous lineGod gave man a brain and he gave man
a penis . . . and, unfortunately, only enough blood to run one system at a
timeexemplifies this kind of humor.
 Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity 133

Although some seem to suggest that this alternative humor is the re-
sponsibility of the womens movement, I believe that the creation of a radi-
cal humor has to be the responsibility of men as well.12 Unfortunately,
mens contribution to a humor of liberation does not so far appear to be
forthcoming. With the exception of Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Eric
Bagosian, Sinbad, Alan Alda, and maybe Steve Martin, it remains dicult
to think of many mainstream male comics whose comedy does not suc-
cumb to sexism, racism, or homophobia (or all three).13 The popularity of
such sexist and homophobic comedy presented by entertainers like Eddie
Murphy, Howard Stern, and Andrew Dice Clay suggests that the appeal
of these kinds of jokes is still quite widespread.
So long as humor remains predominantly male humor, a humor of ag-
gression and victimization, a humor of the oppressor, progressive social
change will be hampered. Feminist humor represents a clear alternative to
a masculine humor of injury and exploitation. We need more humor like
George Carlins and Dick Gregorys that ridicules those in power and ex-
poses the evils of American society: a humor that extends beyond the indi-
vidual inconveniences of middle-class existence and reveals how capital-
ism, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism work together to perpetuate
sexism, racism, and homophobia. We need a humor expressed in public
discourse and mirrored in private discourse that focuses on the complicity
of these institutions in the advocacy of greed and individualism as basic
human values, a humor that illuminates how crime, drug addiction, and
the homeless are products of this society, not aberrations. We need a hu-
mor that exposes how, in the United States, more minority men are either
in prison or in the army than have jobs. We need a humor that shows how
violence against women and gay men continues as unabated underpin-
nings of this society.
In this way humor can transcend the insidious and become overt; hu-
mor can express the evils of American society and the contradictions that
produce these social ills. The most enduring works of American humor
have done just that (e.g., Twain, Parker, Vonnegut).14 A humor that asks
us to think about the powerful and not blame the weak and disenfran-
chised, a humor of sexual and social liberation, would focus our attention
on growth and change, not a celebration of the normal and natural.
It is possible that humor can only oppress and victimize and injure and
that the task of sexual and social liberation may be beyond humors reach.
Maybe humor can serve only as an activity for us to critique and through
that critique better understand where we are in relation to social change
and progress. But it is also possible that humor can do more, that humor
can build, and create, and take us somewhere we have never been before.
I want to believe that humor is a potent political weapon against the
status quo in all its manifestations. I want to believe that if we ridicule
134 Beyond the Present

enough men in enough bars, we will change the way they think about
women and about themselves; I want to believe that one great wave of
satire of male heterosexuality might bring down the patriarchy. But I dont
want to be naive. I will settle, therefore, for a humor that reaches out to
those who are victims, rather than just continuing to make new ones.
7 From Theory to Practice
New Metaphors of Masculinity

In the search for new definitions of masculinity and femininity the

first task is to challenge received wisdom, received symbols and the
metaphors which explain and justify the traditional patterns.
Helen Haste, The Sexual Metaphor

To stand outside of heterosexual ideology and to develop an alterna-

tive way that male-female relationships could exist is an incredibly
creative act.
Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality

Metaphor, deliberately invoked, intensifies languages characteristic

activity, and involves, quite literally, the creation of new reality.
Terence Hawkes, Metaphor

Part of the motivation behind this project is the assumption that if we

understand the sources of these terms, their history, and the complexity of
their meanings, we will begin to comprehend the insidiousness of their
usage. Within this broad critical context we can begin to re-create the lan-
guage with which we discuss our sexuality and our identities as men.
While the development of progressive forms of humor might constitute
one major contribution to changing mens roles, the creation of new meta-
phors could have positive consequences as well. As should be clear by now,
language, and discourse in particular, do not exist in a vacuum. In order
to invent an original discourse of male sexuality we need to revise some of
the fundamental social experiences constructing manhood. If we were to
reconceptualize our situation with work, for example, an oppositional vi-
sion of masculinity could emerge. A ubiquitous metaphor for masculinity
other than the machine would also introduce a dierent conception of
manhood.
Male sexuality is not separate from mens experience as human beings,
and in a society where competition, greed, and being on top dominate the
135
136 Beyond the Present

way we relate to the world around us, these governing social values are the
source of the metaphors we create about our lives and the lives of others.
New metaphors require broad new cultural experiences, and the way one
conceives of work aects profoundly the range of alternatives we can iden-
tify for our lives as men. Kai Erikson poses a provocative question when
he asks, Are we ready to move into a world where the way one plays, the
way one consumes, the way one volunteers or helps out or raises children
can supply identity and a feeling of usefulness? (12). Men spend a large
proportion of their waking hours at work, and that encounter structures
their vision of themselves as men. Erikson suggests a new conception of
manhood derived from a unique understanding of work.
In their eorts to revitalize work into a more humane and cooperative
experience, men can aect who they are as men. Out of these new circum-
stances can emerge dierent metaphors for their involvement with work.
The juxtaposition of craftsmanship and the artisan to the alienating expe-
rience of work as routinized drudgery alters our conception of work. A
sense of work that involves creativity and play, and one with a strong com-
mitment to cooperation, would change radically the construction of Amer-
ican manhood. If men were taught to help each other build the better
mouse trap rather than destroy each other on the way up the corporate
ladder, our view of manhood would be altered radically. While some prog-
ress has been made in this direction, especially since the influence of the
counterculture of the 1960s, a dominant competitiveness still informs
much behavior in American society. Sadly, this kind of behavior is not
restricted to men, though they do seem to be strongly aected by a desire
to win and to be a success. There are exceptions, however: the growing
number of young men choosing to work at home and be househusbands,
who are truly active as care givers to the children, or the artisan master-
carpenter, suggest movement toward a new conception of masculinity as
opposed to victory at any cost.
These are not new ideas, of course. In the early 1950s the American
sociologist C. Wright Mills articulated a notion of work centered around
play and craft: The simple self-expression of play and the creation of
ulterior value of work are combined in work-as-craftsmanship. The crafts-
man or artist expresses himself at the same time and in the same act as he
creates value. His work is a poem in action. He is at work and at play in
the same act (12). When work becomes creative, satisfying, and playful,
men will be better prepared to see their sexuality as an artistic, creative
activity and approach sexual ability as a craft rather than as a product.
An emphasis on cooperation rather than competition can help us re-
structure all the ways we conceptualize social roles, whether as men or as
women. A society based on cooperation could jettison the heterosexual/
homosexual division, for example, because there would no longer be a
 From Theory to Practice 137

need for heteros to stand above homosexuals in a social hierarchy of su-

perior and inferior pleasures (Katz, 187). That is, a society built on equal-
ity among all genders and all races, a society based on cooperation among
all its citizens, would be a society capable of true tolerance and authentic
liberation.
A discourse of masculinity suused with metaphors of concern for the
whole person as a subject possessing qualities of quiescence and calm,
sensuality, beauty, and care would engender a very dierent conception of
manhood and of male heterosexuality from the one examined in this book.
This is not to suggest, as Ellen Willis warns against in her discussion of
pornography and erotica, a view of sex that is sentimental and goody-
goody or that love making should be restricted to being beautiful, roman-
tic, soft, nice and devoid of messiness, vulgarity, impulses to power, or
indeed aggression of any sort . . . [or that] the emphasis should be on rela-
tionship not (yuck) organs (224). What I am proposing, though, is the
necessity for men to think about love and sexual pleasure in ways that are
not exclusively possessive, controlling, dominating, and alienating.
Central to this project of reimagining masculinity lies the realization
that much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and
since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, meta-
phor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us (La-
ko and Johnson, 146). Although changing the metaphors we live by is a
monumental task, in order to create new metaphors we must do no less
than seize the language. We must write our own poetic discourse of mascu-
linity and create new and positive speech to describe our lives as men.
Although the terms examined here represent only part of the discourse
of male bonding, they are a powerful component of it nonetheless. Male
hatred is obvious in this language, a language that pervades the way men
relate to women, to other men, and even to themselves. Men poeticize
their sexual activities as a way to cover guilt and to hide fear. In the meta-
phors analyzed in this book men strive to conceal their desire, their pas-
sion, and thus their vulnerability as they objectify their sexuality as a way
to control it. This form of masculine poetry derives from certain as-
sumptions about manhood and male desire, which expose a deep ambiva-
lence about male heterosexuality.
Indeed, several tropes examined here have double meanings, character-
izing male heterosexuality in a positive (or at least powerful) light while
having negative connotations. Most notably, dick, prick, and cock of
the walk exemplify this confusion, but metaphors possessing an economic
subtext also reduce masculinity to a regressive common denominator.
When love has a bottom line and gonads are equated with expensive
gems, male heterosexuality turns into a cost-eective experience in need
of a tally sheet and maybe even insurance. The overwhelming emphasis on
138 Beyond the Present

performance and the portrayal of the penis as a mechanical device,

whether tool or weapon or machine in need of manipulation and repair,
reduces masculinity to values of hardness, power, and control.
Men are victims of this heteronormative discourse of masculinity, a
discourse that acts as a policing action wherein men control the behavior
of other men and reduce male conduct to a homogeneous behavior. This
situation raises the questions of how (or why) men who adopt this language
and rely on this misogynist discourse continue to create relationships with
women and what eect this language has on those relationships.
Fitzgerald points out that men who feel that they have to be dierent
from both women and homosexual men construct an oppositional identity,
an identity based on negative (opposite) poles, rather than positive ones
(112). He ponders the costs and benefits of this kind of a view of sexual
self . . . so negatively formulated (121). Michael Kimmel sees this male
behavior as men viewing themselves as martyrs for the male role. He
suggests that only when men come to understand the extent of the negative
consequences of relying on an oppositional identity for their sense of self
will personal change for men become possible.1
Our refusal to be complicit in any form of misogyny would be a power-
ful form of resistance to the regime of male bonding and the practical
manifestations of this discourse. But we cannot be naive about how di-
cult this task will be. As Lefkowitz makes clear in his study of the subur-
ban gang rape in Glen Ridge, parents, teachers, social workers, ministers,
and law enforcement agencies can easily conspire around a code of silence
that allows them to believe that insensitive and even cruel behavior by
boys against girls does not exist. This denial is not unique to one New
Jersey suburb, however. According to Lefkowitz, Schools across the coun-
try just didnt think the everyday treatment of girls by boys was a serious
issue that merited discussion among faculty and students (79). This con-
spiracy of silence haunts us all.
One strategy for opposition to these kinds of destructive portrayals is
to confront our friends about the phrases they use when referring to
women and to men. This may force us to refuse to bond with sexist, and
in this case, misandric language. Many of us have become sensitive to
racist jokes and some of us even refuse to give our consent to those who
tell them. We do not laugh at racist jokes even though our resistance to
this kind of humor may make us appear to be antisocial.
I confess that I find it more dicult to not bond with sexist humor than
to reject racist humor, but that probably says something about me and
about where the nonsexist movement is historically. Remembering that
feminists who have over the years refused to laugh at misogynist jokes
have earned the appellation of humorless may empower me to join this
defiant contingent. Maybe by identifying how our language oppresses me
 From Theory to Practice 139

as a man, maybe by seeing myself as a victim of this discourse, I will be

more eager to defend myself against this particular tyranny. Although, as
Carol Cohn points out, to have the strength of character and courage
to transgress the strictures of both professional and gender codes and to
associate yourself with a lower status is very dicult (231), this kind of
confrontation is certainly one place to begin.
Another potent area of confrontation is the political arena and in par-
ticular the legal field. As Frank Mort asserts, The law must remain a
central arena for struggle and contestation over sexuality (49). All of us
need to be vigilant in opposing any legislative attempts to control sexuality
in general and, in this day and age, especially legislation aimed at homo-
sexuals and at womens bodies. We should not be naive about the signifi-
cance of new repressive legislation, and we should be active in our support
of laws that provide equal rights to all, regardless of sexual preference,
race, religion, gender, or age. Political struggle is crucial, and we should
not underestimate the importance of even small changes. If we wish in all
seriousness to get the government out of the bedroom, at the top of our
list of human rights should be abortion rights, the rights of single parents,
womens rights in general, and the right of gay couples to marry and share
benefits such as health, retirement, and insurance.
The task this book sets forth, however, culminates in the necessity of
identifying dierent metaphors that describe masculinity in a positive way.
Badinter urges us to sing the praises of masculine virtues . . . [such as]:
self-control, the desire to surpass oneself, a love of risk and challenge, and
resistance to oppression (184), and even Pat Califia, the guru of lesbian
sadomasochism, has some nice things to say about masculinity. After pro-
viding such necessary qualifying remarks as men are not my favorite crit-
ters, and pointing out that straight men can be crude, violent, hateful,
misogynist and insensitive, Califia praises the fact that men do things:

They go out in the world and work. They make things. They compete
with one another without getting bitchy. And when they want to, they
can cooperate on teams or in packs to play games or hunt. Men take
it for granted that they have to protect their stu. They are capable of
being caretakers. And when ugly and scary things start to happen,
men know they have to get o their asses and go meet fire with fire.
They are physically brave in a way most women cant imagine. (96)

While it is certainly reassuring that not all male characteristics are repre-
hensible, mens ability to be brave, to win wars, and to succeed at competi-
tiveness all come back to their obsession with power. So even despite
Califias kind words (which buy in to some traditional stereotypes), as Fitz-
gerald points out, it is dicult to break the cultural pressure to make our
lives as males fit the metaphors that give the imagery of power to our
140 Beyond the Present

existence (117). Men need to establish specific metaphors that provide a

new vision of masculinity.
If a new conception of work can change the way men conceive of them-
selves as social beings, the river as an alternative to the machine metaphor
might aect the way we imagine ourselves as men. I conceive of the river
not in its Huck Finn motif as a source of escape from responsibility but
as a fluid, sustaining, vital image of masculinity. In place of the metaphor
of the machine, the river provides an organic, exciting, moving, and chang-
ing conception of manhood. With its flowing channels, plunging water-
falls, and deep ravines, the river suggests a masculinity that is dynamic,
forceful, and receptive. The languid marshlands and the plummeting
whirlpools, racing currents, and serene bays allude to a sexuality based on
periods of both activity and rest. The flowing, surging, rippling river with
its islands, beaches, and sandbars presents an image of manhood associ-
ated with vitality, subtlety, and complication, that is, a masculinity that
appreciates the dynamic in life, the give and take, the complexities, dan-
gers, and satisfactions.
The river introduces the heron as an alternative to the woodpecker as
a metaphor for the erect penis. Although I am convinced that the new
discourse of masculinity has to de-emphasize the penis altogether, and
certainly the erect penis as the site of male sexuality, we cannot deny that
a male erection is one source of pleasure.
The quiet gracefulness of the heron as it lifts o the ground and soars
into the sky presents an image of a penis that arises slowly and calmly, not
abruptly and with a vengeance. In her short story, A White Heron, Sarah
Orne Jewett describes this bird as a single floating feather [that] grows
larger and rises . . . with [a] steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender
neck and crested head (678). A penis that soars quietly like a feather and
then glides softly before landing on the wet shoreline to blend into the
marshland suggests a gentle, indistinct presence.
The otter, another inhabitant of the river, provides an alternative meta-
phor to such dominant male labels as jock and stud. As a graceful, furry,
and lustrous animal that plays and swims and frolics, the otter suggests a
masculinity intent on joyful exuberance.
Seamus Heaney captures many of these qualities in his poem, The
Otter, where he describes a fine swimmers back and shoulders / surfac-
ing and surfacing again. As the lover sits on shore, dry-throated on the
warm stones, he or she experiences the the slow loadening / When I hold
you now / We are close and deep / As the atmosphere on water. With its
palpable, lithe / Otter of memory / In the pool of the moment, this beau-
tiful and graceful animal turns to swim on its back, Each silent, thigh
shaking kick / Re-tilting the light / Heaving the cool at your neck. The
otter moves suddenly intent as ever / Heavy and frisky in your freshened
 From Theory to Practice 141

pelt. As a strong, muscular swimmer who dives under water only to sur-
face with the intensity of love and passion, the otter represents a playful
winsome lover who is both supple and sincere. As it splashes around in
the river, it reminds its lover on shore of its beauty and its sensitivity.
As a metaphor for masculinity, the otter appears also in Kerry Green-
woods short story, Salmancis, where the male lover is described in the
following way: Sleek as an otter, with green eyes like chips of emerald,
strong fingers, a sweet mouth. His kisses are deep. I can feel his eyelashes
flutter as he opens his eyes against my breasts (65). Here the otter pos-
sesses a silken smoothness not unlike the penis itself, and its eyes are beau-
tiful and transfixing. The strength of its hold is matched by the intensity
of its aection, and its touch is sensual and exciting. The otter gives mascu-
linity a playful enthusiasm matched by a soft richness.
Water in general and the moist in particular oer another source of
masculine imagery. A masculinity that celebrates the moist as a nice place
to be, as a source of life and pleasure, suggests a manhood derived from
pliancy and appeasement. The river reminds us that what is moist is beau-
tiful, powerful, and gentle. While it is true that you can drown in a river,
it is also true that you can float and swim and dive below the surface. As
metaphors for male heterosexuality, these activities oer a conception of
manhood more diverse, playful, and sensitive to the other than the ones
with which we are most familiar. Indeed, the soft and the moist suggest
the penis after ejaculation when male tumescence is disempowered, and
the penis is at rest. This tranquil moment, when the man is both worn out
and satisfied, produces a peaceful image of masculinity.
In everyday language the juxtaposition of flaccid to erect dominates
and limits the way we can think about male sexuality. Metaphors that de-
emphasize the necessity for the penis to be rigid are a welcome source of
liberation from that lie. These two conceptions of the penis do not have
equal status, however. The flaccid penis equates with impotence while the
hard-on symbolizes male sexuality or potency with all that term con-
notes. When cooked spaghetti becomes an acceptable metaphor for the
penis and replaces such phrases as hard-on and dick, we will have
made progress in reconstituting the way we think about male sexuality.
Words like quaggy, flabby, droopy, limpy, weary, puny,
slumpy, and silky (a new seven [or eight] dwarfs) can replace prick,
dick, pecker, hard-on, and tool. Quaggy has little poetic reso-
nance, and related as it is to quagmire, it means, literally, like a marsh,
soggy (AHCD, 1012). When, however, the penis can be accepted as soft
and wet, and even irrelevant to sexual pleasure, men and women will be
able to enjoy love making in a more subtle, more tactile, more polymor-
phous way. An emphasis on the silky softness of the penis (even when
hard), a consideration of its condition when droopy and limp, as having
142 Beyond the Present

the same importance as when turgid, would refocus the way we talk about
one aspect of male sexuality.
A reliance on the experience of touch, as in I was touched last night
instead of I got laid last night, suggests a more positive way of conceiv-
ing the experience of making love. To touch or the touch, expresses what
is sensuous and erotic in the experience, in contrast to the jabbing, the
poking, and the driving forward of getting a nut o.
In her nationwide study of female sexuality, Shere Hite found that one
of the most basic changes women would welcome in physical relations
involves valuing touching and closeness just for their own sakesrather
than only as a prelude to intercourse or orgasm (553). Women are not
alone in this preference. According to Badinter, in a recent survey of men
a majority reported that they wanted to be warmer, gentler, and more
loving, and that they despised aggressivity, competition, and sexual con-
quests (143).
The moment when two bodies come togetheras orgasm, yes, but
through touch as wellidentifies a dierent source of pleasure. When
your skin brushes gently across anothers, and when your body caresses
ever so lightly your lovers body, that is a wonderful, exciting, and delight-
ful sensation. The emphasis on tactile sensitivity that the word touch
suggests oers the basis for a positive discourse of sexual experience. To
fondle or stroke your lover stresses a delicate intimacy quite dierent from
penetration and urgency.
Melt as an alternative conception of making love also counters the
notion of penetration that pervades our thinking about heterosexual plea-
sure while focusing on the mutuality of the experience. Although as a slang
term melt is a synonym for ejaculation (Spears, 28586), to melt liter-
ally means to change from a solid to a liquid state, generally by heat; to
dissolve, to disintegrate . . . [and] to merge gradually . . . soften; make or
become gentle and tender (Websters, 917). In this conception melt be-
comes a term emphasizing a mutual coming together, an embrace, and
a commingling.
Another potential avenue for changing the way we talk about ourselves
might be derived from dierent flower metaphors. We all know about
pansy and its homophobic use, but maybe we should look at other flow-
ers as metaphors for masculinity. Ginu Kamani, in her short story Swol-
len Tide, refers to the erect penis as a flower when she describes the fol-
lowing scene: Plainly visible for all to see was the rigid straining organ of
a newborn male, so milky translucent on Omis dark skin, so pure and
innocent between her rounded feminine thighs that it could be mistaken
for a flower (122). This beautiful story of Shiva, the Hindu god of cre-
ation and destruction, depicts the annual rebirthing of its lingam, or phal-
lus. This miracle, dislodged from orange petals (121), provides a meta-
 From Theory to Practice 143

phor of androgyny while suggesting a manifestation of power and love

(122).
In our own rather mundane world, among the subgroups of wildflowers
identified by the Audubon Society (Niering and Olmstead), elongated
clusters provide the best source for metaphors of erection. He had such
a wonderful blazing star might provide a transitional metaphor for men
who are still a bit reluctant to cavalierly jettison the erection fixation. Then
we could introduce the metaphor of the common mullein or the nodding
trillium as a step toward ridiculing the necessity to always have an erection
and, more positively, toward emphasizing the beauty of the flaccid penis.
My own favorite alternative metaphors might go something like this: His
downy false foxglove was so gentle and soft I hardly knew it was there,
or He has such a wild lupine (with its blue and red veins) that I was
transfixed by its beauty.
Another option might be to liberate the pansy metaphor. We could
silk-screen a t-shirt that says something like: We are all pansies.
How much, though, do you know about the pansy? Pansies are richly
colored annuals that serve as a border along sidewalks or in front of a
home. They are short stocky flowers, and they are fairly hardy. This is not
a bad metaphor for masculinity, when you stop to think about it. Maybe
the t-shirt should read: You should be so lucky as to be a pansy, or You
think youre a pansy? Prove it. 2
The point, of course, is that we often speak without really knowing
what we mean. We need to look beyond the given and ascertain what
would work better, how to speak more accurately and more positively.
Men have to assume the responsibility for re-creating the language of mas-
culinity. The discourse of heterosexuality pervades our society and our
culture in such a way as to make it dicult for the victims, women and
men, to transcend it easily. We must be vigilant and critical if we are to
invent a truly new language of male sexuality.
In order to do this men need a kind of courage that is only exhibited
by those who have no doubts at all about their manhoodand that is
the courage to assert their humanity (Komisar, 142). Men need to see
themselves as sensuous caring human beings, and to facilitate that con-
sciousness we need to do no less than to seize the language.
Indeed, the politics of everyday speech suggest that we can change
our language and that we can imagine new metaphors. We can reimagine
masculinity by creating a new way to describe manhood and to live as
men. Men must, as Paul Smith recommends, write our imaginary (37).
This new image of masculinity cannot be ahistorical or, as in the case of
Robert Bly and his compatriots, transhistorical. The metaphors of the war-
rior and the king are reactionary. They rely on retrograde images of mascu-
linity and move us backward rather than forward.3
144 Beyond the Present

We should not underestimate the power of metaphor to help us imag-

ine a new masculinity. In place of the warrior, the machine, and the busi-
nessman/husband, metaphors of the gardener, the artisan, the guide can
help move men beyond the current belief in the importance of competition,
aggression, and rigidity as central to the masculine experience. Men can
share a vision of masculinity informed by equality, not rivalry, caring
about other human beings, not subordinating as many people as possible.
When these assumptions inform male heterosexual behavior, a masculinity
dierent from todays notion of manhood, which is structured around as-
sumptions of superiority and conquest, can emerge. A discourse of male
male relationships that does not exclude women and is not concerned with
bonding at all will further our struggle against the irrationality of unques-
tioning submission to misogyny and homophobia. A discourse of anity,
compassion, and cooperation will allow men to create a masculinity based
on love, not war, a masculinity of hope, not despair, a masculinity of shar-
ing and caring and tenderness.
Notes
References
 Notes

Introduction
1. Although the subtitle of my book echoes that of Lako and Johnson, I do
not follow their methodology closely at all. Their approach to metaphor relies on
quite specific linguistic mappings from an identified, explicitly language-linked
Source Domain to an explicitly language-linked Target Domain. The metaphors I
examine are categorized more loosely by the domains of experience from which
they are drawn or to which they most centrally relate. Thus the book is in no way
intended as a contribution to cognitive linguistics.
In tracing the metaphors to their original domains, I try to elucidate their im-
plications for our understanding of ourselves as men. In a sense, this represents an
analysis of key metaphors, and the domains to which I assign these metaphors,
especially sports, work, and war, are the key metaphor domains of masculinity in
American English.
2. I wish to thank James Armstrong for pointing out the necessity to clarify
my position on the relationship between discourse and cultural behavior. He pro-
vided this and other helpful insights in his thorough and critical readers report.
3. Hawkes points out that for Landar, language expresses . . . the manner in
which society as a whole represents the facts of experience (81).
4. See de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, where she examines a variety of ways in
which women have been complicit in their oppression. Bourdieu also makes the
point that the language of authority never governs without the collaboration of
those it governs, with the help of the social mechanisms capable of producing this
complicity, based on misrecognition, which is the basis of all authority (113).
5. See Lako and Johnson, p. ix, and Carol Cohn, p. 230.
6. The Dictionary of American Regional English maintains that this term is a
common reference to female genitalia, especially in the American South: It seems
that cock also has mixed references, depending on the region. At a point roughly
the same as the Mason-Dixon Line, there is a division in meaning. . . . . Missouri
is a border state in which both meanings are used (Cassidy, 707).
7. Which is to say, the metaphors included in this book come from my memory
of the language used by men as I was growing up. That is, I did not go through
slang dictionaries to find phrases to analyze. This language has been part of my
maturation as a man, not the result of a research project or a keyword search.
8. For an insightful look at gay mens English that focuses on the linguistic
practices underlying gay mens conversations, see Leap. This text is helpful too as

147
148 Notes to Page 10

a reference to other studies of gay language that have centered on vocabulary, word
history, and folklore.
One question implicit in my book is, What are the metaphors women live by?
Although I believe men should focus their attention on the ways in which they are
aected negatively by a patriarchal society, this analysis should not be a mono-
logue. Men still have a lot to learn about how their discourse oppresses women,
and insights into particular metaphors aimed at women would help us to move
beyond that kind of language.
Among the metaphors used to talk about women, especially in their relation-
ship to men, are the following: bitch, broad, cock teaser, cunt, gold dig-
ger, maidenhead, nymphomaniac, slut, tomboy, and wife. This list is in
no way exhaustive, but it provides a sense of how language constructs interper-
sonal relationships in another closely related context. For a comprehensive study
of the vocabulary of culture and patriarchal society that focuses on the language
of womens oppression, see J. Mills, and for an analysis of women in contemporary
slang, see Sutton. For insights about lesbian discourse see Moonwoman-Baird and
Queen.
Lines of cross-over from the discourse I examine and other ethnic groups might
also be a rich area for analysis. How this discourse influences or is translated into
rap music, for example, could provide insights into the depth and breadth of male
bonding. Though nothing has been written specifically about this subject, for those
interested in such concerns I recommend Costello and Wallace, and Rose.
Other cultural variations among dierent definitions of masculinity could
broaden our understanding of the discourse of masculinity. For assistance with
this particular topic, the reader should examine Brandes, Cornwall and Lindis-
farne, and Gilmore. In the Cornwall and Lindisfarne book, I recommend Shires
essay on Zimbabwe in particular.
9. Before the early 1960s, with the publication of Blacks Models and Metaphors,
the significance of metaphor as a literary device had been all but ignored. Although
its centrality to any poetics was made clear as early as Aristotle, and despite the
crucial role metaphor played in the poetic vision of the Romantics, critics in the
modern period have demonstrated an interest in it only relatively recently.
Since the early 1970s, however, metaphor has assumed far greater prestige as
an important literary concern. Several provocative essays have been written, and
books exclusively on metaphor have been published (e.g., Black, Booth, Bred, Co-
hen, Cooper, Culler, Eco, Embler, Frye, Lako and Johnson, Ricoeur, Ruegs, and
S. Sacks, among others). For the most part this critical work focuses on literary
metaphors while ignoring the metaphorical nature of everyday speech. At the same
time much of the debate about metaphor centers on its significance in a wide range
of tropes, most notably its relationship to metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (see
White, in particular). In addition, analyses of the social construction of metaphors
have come predominantly from anthropologists (e.g., Crocker, Fernandez, Quinn,
and Sapir). All these thinkers recognize the importance of context for interpret-
ing language.
10. See Fiedlers Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). Fielders classic
study of representations of manhood in American literature has spawned many
other studies. Millets important critique of men and masculinity in literature,
 Notes to Pages 1027 149

Sexual Politics, has to be mentioned, and the first volume of Gilbert and Gubars
trilogy, No Mans Land, should not be ignored. For a collection of essays on the
literary construction of masculinities, see my anthology, Fictions of Masculinity:
Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities.
11. Clearly, animals as a source domain for metaphor have an important
place in cognition, and their appearance in metaphors for masculinity is not acci-
dental. I have tried, though, within the themes I use, to examine the relationship
of the metaphor to its animalistic connections.
12. See, for example, Faludi (Backlash), Gibson, and Nelson.
13. See Ayto and Simpson, Beale, Chapman, Spears, Thorne, and Wentworth
and Flexner, in particular, although the American Heritage College Dictionary was
also helpful.

1. Sex as Machine
1. Feminists today discuss the emergence of the third wave of American
feminism. Profeminist men may wish to consider the American mens movement
to be at least in its second wave. Michael Kimmel and Thomas E. Mosmillers
book, Against the Tide: Profeminist Men in the United States, 17761990: A Docu-
mentary History, makes a powerful case for the existence of a first wave of men
conscious of and sympathetic to feminism long before the 1960s and 1970s. Many
men associated with the profeminist mens movement may wish to distance them-
selves from the Im okay, youre okay mentality pervading much of the writings
from the early years of what I would refer to as the second wave of profeminist
males (1960s to the present). Those ideas, and even Robert Blys reactionary ex-
plorations, have to be seen as part of the evolution of mens thinking about the
social construction of masculinity. Recently, profeminist men, both American and
others (certainly British and Australian), have stopped apologizing for their in-
volvement in the struggle for feminism, however, and the ways in which feminism
radically elucidates the male experience.
Continued study of how mens positive engagement with feminism spans at
least two centuries and constitutes a rich tradition will provide the profeminist
mens movement with a sense of its positive contribution. Against the Tide, after
all, focuses on American men and thus does not attempt to include many earlier
(and later) European profeminist men (e.g., Condorcet, John Stuart Mill, William
Godwin, Friedrich Engels, Havelock Ellis, and others). At a time when the loudest
men tend to be right-wing demagogues, a heritage of profeminist men should be
celebrated, not denied.
2. In her 1994 book, The Sexual Metaphor, Helen Haste traces the equation
of mechanism with masculinity [to] the Aristotelian definition of the soul as well
as the Platonic view of knowledge being gained through the communion of
equals (74). For Plato, only men can be equals.
3. For more on this see Changs The Tao of Love and Sex.
4. The stories by Kamani, Torr, Warden, Wertheim, and Yolen provide some
excellent examples, as do the poems by Lifshin, especially Years Later Lorena
Thinks of the Penis She Had for a Day.
5. See, for example, Gilbert and Gubars The Madwoman in the Attic, which
150 Notes to Pages 2836

begins by posing the question, Is a pen a metaphorical penis? (3) and goes on
rather quickly to suggest that male sexuality . . . is not just analogically but actu-
ally the essence of literary power. The poets pen is in some sense (even more than
figuratively) a penis (4).
6. Another metaphor, whiskey dick, highlights this situation as a reference
to a mans inability to get an erection because he has consumed too much alcohol.
See the separate section on this metaphor in chapter 5.
7. Mumford observes: In still another way did the institutions of the Church
perhaps prepare the way for the machine: in their contempt for the body. Now
respect for the body and its organs is deep in all the classic cultures of the past. . . .
This armative sense of the body never disappeared, even during the several tri-
umphs of Christianity. . . . But the systematic teachings of the Church were di-
rected against the body and its culture: if on one hand it was a temple of the Holy
Ghost, it was also vile and sinful by nature: the flesh tended to corruption, and to
achieve pious ends of life one must mortify it and subdue it, lessening its appetites
by fasting and abstention (3536).
For another, much more sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of this tra-
dition, see Elaine Pagels.
8. Fasteau reinforces this observation when he characterizes the posture that
men often assume toward women, at least as they describe it to other men, [as
tending] to be one of uninvolved mastery. Fasteau cites such phrases as a cool
bitch, a groovy chick, and a great piece of ass as terms that convey detach-
ment, a relationship based on standardized assessment of a womans assets rather
than ones own feelings for her as a person (61).
9. Although the Diagram Groups book, Mans Body: An Owners Manual, was
published in 1976, not much has changed since then. A recent book by Gilbaugh,
Mens Private Parts, uses the subtitle, An Owners Manual.
10. Frequently, mens health is more the responsibility of women (wife, lover,
mother) than their own. Dr. Sarah Brewers book, The Complete Book of Mens
Health, exemplifies this situation with its tag line on the cover: The Essential
Guide of Men and Women. When was the last time you saw a book on womens
health that was suggested as reading for men? Women are supposed to take re-
sponsibility for their health and their mans health, whereas men ignore their
health and everyone elses. The myth of masculinity entails not only strength and
potency but invincibility, sometimes to the point of insentience (literally and
metaphorically).
11. Brewer takes the Kinsey reports analogy one step further and makes a
not-so-subtle connection in her chapter called Sex as Work/Business, when she
maintains that eventually, nature will take control and sperm past their sell-by
date will be discharged via a nocturnal emission (wet dream) (57).
12. Although Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin do not suggest it, a correlation
may exist between the academic field in which one earns a doctoral degree and the
frequency of wet dreams. Do doctoral degrees in English or psychology cause the
greater number of nocturnal emissions? Are the experiences of political scientists
or physicists, or philosophers or economists paradigmatic? This could be a rich
field of study, indeed.
 Notes to Pages 3744 151

13. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin find, for example, that in the male, noctur-
nal emissions or wet dreams are generally accepted as a usual part of the sexual
picture (518), and go on to assert, in 1948, that by nearly all moral philosophies,
nocturnal emissions provide the one form of sexual outlet for which the individual
is least responsible (527). Further, they maintain, the condemnation of nocturnal
emissions has not been great (527).
Although wet dreams do not account for a large portion of mens orgasms,
according to Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, a high percentage of males experience
nocturnal emissions at some time in their lives (519). Specifically, they find that
wet dreams are most frequent before marriage and that in all social groups, noc-
turnal emissions are primarily an outlet of younger adolescent and older teen-age
boys (523). The incidence of wet dreams declines significantly after age thirty
and are largely out of the picture after age forty (523).
14. Ellis, for example, suggests the following causal relationships: Physical,
mental, or emotional excitement, alcohol taken before retiring, position in bed (as
lying on the back), the state of the bladder, sometimes the mere fact of being in a
strange bed, and to some extent apparently by the existence of monthly and yearly
rhythms (117).
One explanation, seemingly popular at midcentury, maintained that the nerve
centers that control ejaculation are in the lower spinal cord, and [that] . . . sleeping
on ones back . . . may increase the frequencies of emission (Kinsey, Pomeroy,
and Martin, 528). Other influences believed to aect the incidence of wet dreams
ranged from tight clothing to a warm bed, but Kinsey hastens to point out that
none of these relationships has been scientifically established.

2. Sex as Work and Labor

1. For a much more extensive history of work, see Tilgher, Homo Faber: Work
through the Ages, and for a brief overview see De Grazia, Of Time, Work, and
Leisure.
2. Here too I wish to thank James Armstrong for his helpful suggestions about
how best to tighten my arguments about work in this chapter. While any remaining
weaknesses are solely my responsibility, Professor Armstrongs critique helped me
strengthen my position.
3. For a fuller discussion of this aspect of manhood, see Gould. This belief is
matched by the convention that women are gold diggers and devourers of male
substance.
4. See Tannens book, You Just Dont Understand, for an extensive analysis of
conversational style dierences between men and women (14).
5. The relationship between ejaculating sperm and spending ones resources
has been examined carefully by Barker-Benfield in his study of male attitudes to-
ward women and sexuality in nineteenth-century America. In his book The Hor-
rors of the Half-Known Life, he points out that men believed their expenditure of
sperm had to be governed according to an economic principle, a principle he
refers to as the spermatic economy (181).
6. For more on this see Reynaud, p. 43.
152 Notes to Pages 4557

7. For instruction regarding this approach to male sexuality, see Changs The
Tao of Love and Sex.
8. See Lewiss observation that to this day the phrase brings to my mind the
image of an elephants trunk swaying from side to side. Swish. Swash. Nothing in
the jungle got in the way of the Big Swinging Dick (46).
9. As a metaphor for womens anatomy, plumbing devalues it by suggesting
the lower bodily functions of defecation and urination.
10. For more on love and sex as commodities that are reduced to the power
of money to buy, see Marxs Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: That which
is for me through the medium of moneythat for which I can pay (i.e., which
money can buy)that I am, the possessor of the money. . . . What I am and am
capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can
buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for the eect
of uglinessits deterrent poweris nullified by money (167).
With this insight in mind, it becomes clear that the term getting laid is not
just a harmless phrase. When we conceptualize an activity as intimate as sexual
intercourse in such reified language, we reduce love and passion to that which can
be bought and sold. In this discourse all love making becomes prostitution, a point
several feminists have made over the past century (cf. de Beauvoir, Dworkin, Gold-
man, and Rubin, to name just four).
11. For more on men as victims see Goldberg, although there are many others.
12. For other examples and mens writing on this subject, see Kimmel and
Mosmiller, pp. 32334.
13. In an essay centered around poignant rhetorical questions about male het-
erosexuality, Stoltenberg addresses the significance of the male gaze in its reduc-
tion of the female body to an object of his possession and control. One paragraph
in particular addresses what is no doubt the predominant heterosexual male expe-
rience with jerking o: When with one hand a man is paging through a magazine,
a magazine containing photographs of naked and nearly naked bodies, bodies
posed with their genitals concealed and bodies posed with their genitals showing,
bodies posed with props and with other bodies, bodies posed with their faces look-
ing at the camera and not looking at the camera, bodies posed by a photographer
to look available, accessible, takeable, in color and in black and white, and with
his other hand is masturbating, and he is searching from picture to picture, search-
ing from body to body, from part of body to part of body, from pose to pose,
rhythmically stroking and squeezing and straining, seeking some coalescence of
the flesh he is looking at and the sensations in his own, imagining his body and
one of the bodies attached, joined tenderly or forcefully, and he masturbates until
he is finished, and when he is done he is done looking, and he stores them away
until next time, the magazines, the pictures, the bodies, the parts of bodies, what
does that mean? (42)
14. For more on Corn Flakes as breakfast saltpeter, see Kimmels Manhood in
America, where he suggests, Corn Flakes, for example, were designed by J. H.
Kellogg as a massive anaphrodisiac to temper and eventually reduce sexual ardor
in American men (129). For a humorous novel about Kellogg and the antisex
movement, see T. Coraghessan Boyles The Road to Wellville.
 Notes to Pages 5966 153

3. Sex as Sport
1. For two helpful general histories of sports that examine all four of these
areas, see Mandells cultural history of sports and Gorn and Goldstein on Ameri-
can sports. For an extensive analysis of the relationship between sports and work
that characterize[s] modern sports not as the heroic alternative to industrial-
capitalist society but rather its mirror image, see Rigauer (ix). Focusing on the
achievement principle in both sports and in work, Rigauer traces the ways in
which achievement has become a socially sanctioned model of behavior related
to high productivity, economic competition, material rewards, vocational practice,
and social mobility (15). The literature on sports and misogyny is too copious
to list here, but I suggest the work done by Messner and Sabo as a place to
start, especially in light of the general theme examined in this book. For a smart,
critical, insightful examination of one of the more overt examples of the male ath-
letes fear and hatred of women, I highly recommend Disch and Kanes essay on
Lisa Olsons sexual harassment by members of the New England Patriots football
team.
2. Sporting events in which animals are pitted against each other to fight to
the death (e.g., cock fights and dog fights with pit bulls) also demonstrate the low
regard with which many men view nature, and contribute to their sense of superi-
ority over nature.
3. For more on locker-room exchanges as a source of shared male power see
Disch and Kane, and Curry.
4. For a more recent example of how these feelings of superiority on the part
of high school football players can turn into horrendous violence against women,
see Lefkowitzs book on the gang rape of a retarded girl in Glen Ridge, New Jersey,
where high school athletes violated the young woman with a broomstick and a
baseball bat.
5. At about this same time a new group of impatient, anti-genteel, sexually
charged epithets . . . became popular, say Gorn and Goldstein (16869), who
credit the examples they cite to the author John Higham: sissy, pussyfoot,
cold feet, and stued shirt.
6. I say more about this in the next chapter, Sex as War and Conquest, but
I suggest here that provocative insights into the language of the military-industrial
complex as a masculine discourse can be found in Cohns essay on War, Wimps,
and Women.
7. Fasteau observes that sports is . . . one of the few things men feel they are
allowed to become emotional about (110), and Gorn and Goldstein maintain that
along with the ceremonies and conduct of war, sports in the public arena are the
only place in which men are expected or permitted to express vulnerable emo-
tions (208).
8. Miller cites Prongers notion of the paradoxical play of masculinity as
developed in his important study of the social construction of the myths of gen-
der, sexuality, and athletics as they appear in contemporary North American and
Northern European middle-class culture (Pronger, 7). Focusing on an interpre-
tation of gay and athletic experience, Pronger uses sport as a vehicle for explor-
154 Notes to Pages 7085

ing the meaning of homosexuality [and] . . . more broadly, sex and gender in our
culture generally (ix).
9. For more on sex as a contest, see Komisar (138).

4. Sex as War and Conquest

1. As a freelance journalist, and not a professionally trained military historian,
Ehrenreich brings a fresh perspective to the study of war that elicits unique insights
into both why war began and why it persists. It is not necessary to agree with her
thesisthat war originated as a response to humankinds experience as prey to
large, ferocious animals, and that that experience is written in the roots of our
memoryto appreciate her assertion that war continues because war is a self-
perpetuating phenomenon; we fight wars because we have always fought wars.
2. Ehrenreich qualifies this observation, however, and reinforces her overall
thesis when she points out that man-the-hunter no doubt invented war; at least
he invented the weapons of war. But for the tendency to sacralize violenceto
ritualize the slaughter of animals and bring religious feelings to warwe have to
go back further, to a time when man was an object of prey (57).
3. Ehrenreich reinforces this point in her chapter The Rough Male Sport in
a subsection entitled Masculinity and War, where she observes how war is seen
to have been an inevitable outgrowth of male aggressiveness, with the weaponry,
the thrust of spears and missiles, the piercing and explosions, all mimicking the
phallic side of sex (125).
4. For an excellent analysis of the role of women in (and around) war, see
Elshtain.
5. Including gay men on a list with other supposedly dubious real men, espe-
cially in the context of the armed services, is complicated by the history of gay
men in the military. On the one hand, a tacit acknowledgment exists that gays
(both men and women) constitute a major presence in the military and that they
perform heroically. And yet at the same time an overt attempt to deny their contri-
bution, and in many cases to expel them, dominates much of their experience.
6. Of course, the branch of the contemporary mens movement established by
Robert Bly and his Jungian followers, a fairly conservative one as it turns out,
endorses initiation of young boys into manhood through rituals constructed in an
all-male weekend escape into the wilderness. Re-creating such male roles as war-
rior, king, and father-knows-best, these initiation rites both reinforce traditional
male roles and seek to assuage mens anger at women for undermining their privi-
lege. Even Gibson, in an otherwise fairly radical critique of the rise of paramilitary
groups as attesting to a cultural need of many American men to wrest control
of their lives from foreigners, women, and government bureaucrats, endorses the
necessity to create new initiation ceremonies for young men (305). For Gibson
these ceremonies create new kinds of adventures for boys (3078) while endorsing
new myths (306) and excluding women (307).
7. For an extensive analysis of how often and why adolescent and college-aged
male athletes, especially those on football and wrestling teams, perpetrate crimes
against women, see Lefkowitz.
8. The phrase pelvic congestion is a pseudomedical term describing a wom-
 Notes to Pages 86100 155

ans condition of being sexually stimulated for awhile and not getting release. But
when was the last time you heard someone say Oh, yeah, she was out with a new
guy last night and got a terrible case of pelvic congestion?
9. In addition to the women who taught me to shut up and listen, I want to
acknowledge an important essay in my personal and political evolution: Bob
Lamms Learning from Women (1976). If you have not read this short essay, I
urge you to do so.
10. This caveat echoes the same concerns U.S. feminists had during the 1980s
and 1990s with the purity wing of the womens movement and the contemporary
debate about pornography and erotica. Any suggestion of control of female sexual-
ity has to be scrutinized carefully, as historically it has been used to deny female
desire or to depict women as uncontrollable sexual monsters.
11. Fasteau reinforces this point when he observes that the fastest way to
provoke a demonstration of [macho] masculinity is to suggest that it is lacking,
that its pretenders are faggots (154).
12. For a well-documented, thoughtful, and radical examination of another
gang rape, this one in New Jersey, see Lefkowitz. And for yet one more example,
this time in California and perpetrated by a group of adolescent boys who called
themselves the Spur Posse, see Nelson.
13. Obermillers article summarizes the findings of Edward Laumann, John
Gagnon, Robert T. Michaels, and Stuart Michaels, published in a pair of books:
The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Univer-
sity of Chicago Press), and Sex in America (Warner). The former, according to
Obermiller, is written for social scientists, counselors and health professionals,
while [the latter] . . . a collaboration with New York Times science writer Gina
Kolata, is intended for a more general audience (34).

5. Sex as Exclusively Heterosexual

1. I rely heavily on Katzs book for the introduction to this chapter as his study
is both exhaustive and succinct. I want to acknowledge his important work here
and recommend it to any reader interested in the subtle dynamics of how our
ideas about homosexuality and heterosexuality have taken on many and varied
definitions throughout the history of Western civilization.
2. The conception of heterosexuality as compulsory was introduced by Adri-
enne Rich in a 1983 essay; seeing it as a matrix comes from Judith Butler; Janet
Halley describes its construction; and, as stated in note 1, Katz traces it as an
invention. For Rich, heterosexuality needs to be seen as a political institution that
encompasses violent strictures [that are] . . . necessary to enforce womens total
emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. . . . These forces range from
literal physical enslavement to the distorting of possible options (18283). Butler
builds on Richs conception of compulsory heterosexuality while focusing her at-
tention on phallogocentrism, or how language constructs the categories of sex
(ix). Butlers work introduces a subversive potential that can enable a critical
challenge to [the dominant] masculinist sexual economy (x). I also want to men-
tion the work of Gayle Rubin, whose early essay, The Trac in Women, is an
important text on heterosexuality as an oppressive ideology, and I recommend
156 Notes to Pages 100122

again Katzs book, which provides an excellent introductory overview of some of

the more important classical works in the critical engagement with heterosexuality
(e.g., Ti-Grace Atkinson and the Radicalesbians).
3. Badinters book is not unproblematic, however. Her reliance on a couple of
founding texts from the American mens movement gives the book the sense of
being a survey rather than an important original contribution to the critical en-
gagement with masculinity. In addition, her belief that the problem of masculinity
is less acute in France than elsewhere (5) remains highly debatable. Even with
these qualifications, though, Badinters book is well worth reading for its insights
into some subtleties surrounding the creation of manhood in contemporary society.
4. For a collection of interviews with men exploring what men derive from
their male friendships . . . what men admire in their friends, what they want from
friendships, what stands in their way of making friends, or simply how widely they
vary in their relationships with other men (vii), see Maas. And for a critique of
Maass book see my 1989 review essay.
5. In addition to Badinter, see Hoch and Reynaud, to name just a few who
make this point.
6. The methodology that relies on surveys of college students by the professor
or by students or by a combination of the two seems to be gaining in popularity.
For other examples see Cameron and Eble.
7. For Baldwin, according to Katz, The macho mentruck drivers, cops,
football playersthese people are far more complex than they want to realize.
Thats why I call them infantile. They have needs which, for them, are inexpress-
ible. They dont dare look into the mirror. And that is why they need faggots. . . .
I think it is very important for the male homosexual to recognize that he is a sexual
target for other men, and that is why he is despised, and why he is called a faggot.
He is called a faggot because other males need him (104).
8. I dedicate this section to Bill Clinton, who seems to exemplify this condi-
tion.
9. In modern French pensee means pansy, the flower.
10. Through a critical engagement with interviews of lesbians from a variety
of class and racial backgrounds, Weston problematizes the recurrent dichotomy
between flu (femme) and stud (butch). Pointing to the common problem
lesbians face by taking the heterosexual male as her object of imitation (81),
Weston suggests that like a man occupies a key position in the meager vocabu-
lary available for talking about gender and power. It is a phrase thrown around all
too lightly, never designed to bear the weight of complex negotiations or to cover
such a multitude of situations (80).

6. Insidious Humor and the Construction of Masculinity

1. Michael Mulkay, in his study of the nature and place of humor in modern
society, observes the ways in which men use analogues and metaphors . . . to
make fun of womens bodies (148). Ted Cohens point about the necessity for
there to be a community in which metaphors work remains pertinent, of course.
2. Lyman, in a case study of male humor gone awry in a fraternity-sorority
exchange, a study I rely on later in this chapter, makes the point that when, as men
 Notes to Pages 122129 157

often do in their humor, they combine sexuality and force it [is] terrifying to
women (152). While terrifying may be too strong a word, women can be scared
by this kind of humor, and they certainly are disgusted and even repulsed by it.
3. Mulkay observes that a male-centered conception of sexuality dominates
mens jokes along with the notion of female stupidity which features widely in
mens jokes about women (150). Apte suggests that according to a folk belief in
American culture that is shared by both men and women, women cannot tell sto-
ries or jokes correctly (75). Perhaps this has to do with an unshared notion of
what is funny.
4. Professor Gutwirth shared this insight with me in a personal communica-
tion. Anyone interested in laughter and the comic would do well to read his book,
Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic.
5. See Frances Gray, especially her introduction, for a detailed critique of the
belief that women have no sense of humor (3), as well as some of the techniques
used to shut women out of the comic arena altogether (8).
6. Apte provides some background for mens dominance of the public domain
of humor in his anthropological study of humor and laughter: Humor fairly reli-
ably indicates the inequality of the sexes. Although women are no less capable of
developing and appreciating humor than men, women have been denied similar
opportunities for publicly engaging in humor. Because modesty, passivity, and vir-
tue are associated with ideal womanhood, women have been confined to the pri-
vate domain, with many constraints imposed upon them (18). While Aptes study
is fifteen years old and some things have changed, the fundamental truth he de-
scribes remains pretty much the same.
For an excellent example of this kind of restraint upon women see Mulkays
summation of James Spradley and Brenda Manns, The Cocktail Waitress, an en-
lightening case study of the interaction between bartenders and female servers at
a particular bar.
7. The idea that humor provides a much-needed medium for sexual education
resonates with the suggestion that pornography is an important source of sexual
information. If dirty jokes and pornography are the basis of mens sexual educa-
tion, that might explain why so many of them are reportedly such lousy lovers.
8. Legman provides many critical insights into the use of the dirty joke as a
means of social control. He points out, for example, that under the mask of hu-
mor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone and against everyone (9).
Regarding what he refers to as the male approach, Legman maintains that one
fact strikingly evident in any collection of modern sexual folklore, whether jokes,
limericks, ballads, printed novelties, or whatnot, is that this material has all been
created by men, and there is no place in it for women except as the butt (217).
While there may have been changes in the past twenty-five years, the bulk of folk
humor overwhelmingly retains the residue of this tradition. Unfortunately, Leg-
mans insightfulness is often marred by his acute homophobia.
9. While slapstick may be one component of this humor, victimization is
certainly another aspect. Men laugh at women, whites laugh at blacks, straight
people laugh at gays as a way to make clear their dierence (and assumed superior-
ity), but what makes violence funny at all remains an issue central to the question
of what humor really is.
158 Notes to Pages 131143

10. Here too I wish to thank Marcel Gutwirth for this observation.
11. A joke I heard recently exemplifies this theme:
A little girl comes running into the kitchen after school and asks her mother,
Mommy, Mommy, whats an orgasm?
The mother thinks for a moment and then says, I dont know, dear, ask your
father.
There are many more of these kinds of jokes, all of which point to mens igno-
rance of the female orgasm.
12. One example of this kind of assertion comes from Michael Mulkay, who
proposes the necessity for the development of an alternative humour [as] an
important task to be faced by the womens movement (150). In Mulkays defense,
though, his general work on humor supports an alternative view of humor that
emphasizes its victimization of women. Although I doubt that Mulkay would op-
pose mens involvement in the development of an alternative humor, his statement
does de-emphasize the need for men to be involved.
13. Not much radical humor by men exists. King, Warrior, Magician, Weenie,
Peter Sinclairs collection of contemporary mens humor, promised to fill at least
part of this void (not that one collection can do that much work, of course) but
falls far short of the mark. Its failure as a collection of supposedly feminist humor
by men may indeed be foreshadowed by its title. As an obvious reference to Robert
Blys reactionary mythopoetic mens movement, the source of Sinclairs humorous
collection is clearly limited from the onset. Sinclairs book is published by the
Crossing Press, the same house that puts out several collections of feminist humor
edited by Roz Warren; one would think that a book of mens humor would live up
to the same standard. Sadly, Sinclairs collection tells us more about the status of
mens humor than we may wish to know.
14. For this insight I wish to thank Nancy Walker, who provided it in a per-
sonal communication. Anyone interested in womens humor and American culture
should see her pioneering work, A Very Serious Thing. Also, those doing work in
humor and American literature should see Neil Schmitzs smart and lucid study,
Of Huck and Alice.

7. From Theory to Practice: New Metaphors of Masculinity

1. For further discussion of the masculine self based primarily on opposition,
see Fitzgerald, and Kimmels essay on rethinking masculinity in his anthology,
Changing Men.
2. The t-shirt presents a powerful means to distribute alternative metaphors.
For a sampling of progressive slogans already available on t-shirts, see Roz War-
rens Glibquips: Funny Words by Funny Women. Women have used this forum to
respond to at least one metaphor they live by: Im not a bitch, Im THE bitch.
Other pertinent examples are Okay, the joke is overshow me your real pe-
nis! and I dont sleep with men whove named their dicks.
3. For further discussion of Blys reactionary position, see Murphy (review of
Iron John) and Kimmel (Politics of Manhood ).
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