Global warming may rank as this decade’s hot topic, but the spectacle of public men making public apologies has grabbed almost as much media attention. From comedian Michael Richards’s racist out-burst to Isaiah Washington’s slur on gays to clutches of surprisingly randy Republicans caught pants down, each year outstrips the last in the “Year of the Apology” sweepstakes. The chill of male silence has apparently thawed, and full masculine disclosure is set to join naked self-portraits on MySpace and no-holds-barred reality shows as prime exhibits in this new era of confession. We seem to be entering a time many women have longed for — that golden age when men finally “talk about their feelings.”
But so much self-exposure also reminds us that when little is concealed, little of substance can be revealed — a solid argument, maybe, for holding your tongue. And for most men, what could be easier than silence? Although I pride myself on being a man who can express what he feels, in fact I often don’t. My sons and daughters can’t guess what dad’s thinking but they know for sure he’s thinking something: feelings trail over my face like a news crawl, punctuated by raised eyebrows and furrowed forehead.
Sending mixed messages like these, stewing in silence, or apologizing in public isn’t a wide range of options for communication. But obscured by the media coverage of kiss-and-tell is a flurry of more thoughtful offerings on what it feels like to be a man. At first men seemed more comfortable talking to a woman, as journalist Susan Faludi found when she interviewed a wide cross-section of men about their failed dreams for her classic portrait, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. And last year columnist Norah Vincent ventured deep into the hearts of American men when she disguised herself as one, a gender-bending experiment that Vincent, a lesbian, describes in her provocative book, Self-Made Man.
Faludi and Vincent empathetically channelled the feelings of their correspondents, but male writers themselves are now taking the plunge and appropriating the personal memoir to write intimately. Typical is the recently published essay collection What I Meant to Say, edited by Globe and Mail feature writer Ian Brown and alluringly subtitled “The Private Lives of Men.” Brown had already blazed a trail through the North American male interior in his own book Man Overboard, but this time he decided to use Dropped Threads, the hugely popular anthologies of personal essays by Canadian women, as his model.
The personal memoir is a literary genre traditionally dominated by women, and indeed the writers in Dropped Threads seem completely comfortable unzipping their psyches in print. But Brown was worried that memoirs (especially male) don’t top men’s must-read lists. Female readers, on the other hand, might be more receptive, so he asked his contributors to imagine they were writing for women. This made marketing sense since women buy most of the books anyway: the game plan was to pitch the book to them and hope it bounced to the other side of the bed.
A subway ad for What I Meant to Say played on the stereotype of male silence and addressed women directly, cheekily posing the question “Men: Isn’t it Time They Explained Themselves?” On my way to work one morning I found myself staring at this ad and getting pissed off at the assumption that I had untold guilty secrets, and at the implied message to all men: “Shape up, assholes!” But the ads were in sync with the book’s apologetic title and its ambiguous meanings — “What I really meant to say when I said what I said” or “What I wanted to say if I’d said something but I didn’t.”
Marketing aside, what did the writers end up revealing? Of the twenty-nine essays in the collection, most are about love and various aspects of sexuality. If I omit love and limit the topic to sex, the number drops to ten. But when I open the three anthologies in the Dropped Threads series, out of more than a hundred essays only eight by my count tackle sex head-on. Unlike their female counterparts, who cover topics ranging from sock-darning to glass ceilings, many of Brown’s contributors seem compelled to drive one last stake through the strangely resilient mindset that sex is shameful.
Brown prefaces his own chapter on forays to strip clubs with the battle cry “I wanted to be an enemy of shame.” His intentions are honourable and his candour admirable, but shame in its various elusive guises — sexual, familial, marital, paternal — still haunts many of the essays in What I Meant to Say. Unpacking this is a challenge because it seems there’s an inherent contradiction in trying to overcome shame by talking or writing about it: shameless soul-baring is at best embarrassing to all concerned and at worst self-serving. As the English cultural critic Steven Connor wrote in his essay “The Shame of Being a Man,” “Shame is never so shameful as when it owns itself.” Shame is a sham, Connor implies, and should properly be considered “the secret name of pride.”
Viewed in this light, traditional male silence appears to be less a matter of manly resolve than a shamefaced cover-up for something they’d rather not admit to — and sex is the most likely culprit. Maybe it’s that male thing about always having sex on the mind and always looking for it but not getting it the way you want it. If so, I can relate: a husband and father of four, deep into middle age, with an active superego and Shame as my middle name, I’m the kind of guy who takes ten years screwing up the courage to enter an adult video store, only to pick the least explicit disc on the rack.
Even admitting that much makes me shudder. It’s surprising that in this supposedly enlightened age sexual shame is so hard to eradicate, but the theme is nothing new. In Les Confessions, a tell-all classic from the libertine eighteenth century, Rousseau describes the erotic joy he felt as a young boy when he was beaten by his female guardian. In his later love affairs, he longed for a repeat performance but couldn’t bring himself to express that desire to a woman: “I have never, during the whole course of my life, been able to force myself, even in moments of extreme intimacy, to confess my peculiarities and implore her to grant the one favour which was lacking.” Elsewhere he reflects, “It is the ridiculous and the shameful, not one’s criminal actions, that it is hardest to confess.”
