While I was always attracted to girls - even at six years old, I found a girl friend, until she moved away. From grade four onward, I would fantasize the girls in my classes walking around naked. This despite not having any idea what 'sex' really was.
It was the summer after grade 9 - waiting for 10 that fell in love. Of course, by then I had no confidence and little charm - other than my own sort of innocent earnestness. Let me quote McLuhan here, from his essay "The Mechanical Bride" in his book of the same name:
To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power
points which she has been taught to tailor but as parts of the success kit
rather than erotically or sensuously. …
They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience.
On the male, this display of power to which he is expected
to respond with cars and dates has various effects. The display of current
feminine sex power seems to many males to demand an impossible virility of
assertion.
To this current exaggeration of date-bait some people reply
that the glamour business, like the entertainment world, is crammed with both
women-haters and men-haters of dubious sex polarity. Hence the malicious
insistence on a sort of abstract sex.
This was written in 1951 - it was still relevant to my experience as a male in high school in the 60s and for much of my life. Up until my 30s, I wished for the old days of knights and chivalry where what a male had to do to be worthy of female desire/attention was 'simply' kill the dragon. :) It is difficult to attain that requisite glamour-worthiness with which I felt I could earn love.
So the short sad story. I fell in love with a girl during the summer holidays, we became friends, I introduced her to my very best friend, my hero (he was silent, talented, handsome) - I was his Pancho Villa, his side-kick. We all became friends, although I confided my love for her to him. Sometime during grade 11, I found out that - he had moved where I couldn't - and was now her 'boyfriend'.
This was a truly dark time - one of the darkest of my life - as he was central to my 'tribe' and now I was now unrequited, betrayed and exiled from my closest and only friends.
My fear of my own impossible virility of assertion - unworthiness of love - plus the betrayal of my friend and my hero - had led me to choose a paralysis of lack of confidence. Fear and doubt of my own power had contributed to a projection of my own desire of the girl I love (and her desirability) onto my friend.
As it turned out - he later betrayed this girl for another which he ultimately married and again later betrayed. I never have really analyzed his baggage. What I did do, eventually is realize how I had made my own castles in the sand (I know this is trite - but the metaphor enabled me to have a real revelation about the power of my own contribution to this sad tale).
Referring to McLuhan again:
This organic character of the machines, he saw, was more
than matched by the speed with which people who minded them were taking on the
rigidity and thoughtless behaviorism of the machine. In a pre-industrial world
a great swordsman, horseman, or animal-breeder was expected to take on some of
the character of his interests.
Many of the Frankenstein fantasies depend on the horror of a
synthetic robot running amok in revenge for its lack of a ‘soul.’ Is this not
merely a symbolic way of expressing the actual fact that many people have
become so mechanized that they feel a dim resentment at being deprived of full
human status?
This quote makes me think of masculinity as a mask of machine-like power, reducing a male to the strong-silent machine (even the dildo). The lack of a full humanity is so much of the masculine - a fear of men.
No comments:
Post a Comment