Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Manly?: Examining Paul S. Kemp's Criteria for "Masculine" Characters


I lied when I wrote that I hadn’t been reading anything while writing We Don’t Always Drown. One of the most interesting things on the web in the last couple weeks was Paul S. Kemp’s attempt to explain why he writes “masculine fiction,” which promptly exploded in a feminist fireball. Kemp is not an author I read frequently, which made his explanations more interesting because they were purely theoretical. They were also grossly gender-prescriptive and problematic.
My idea of a manly character.

Kemp has been taken to task by many writers, including Teresa Frohock and Sam Sykes. Most responses have either been contrasting his ideology with their own fiction, or yelling “Screw you.” Both are understandable responses. But I’d like to break down one specific paragraph from his post, in which Kemp listed criteria for what makes a character “traditionally masculine.” 

So brace yourself for some meat-headedness and follow me to the bold quotes.

 “They answer violence with violence.”
-That sounds like boring storytelling, but is hardly exclusively masculine. I know plenty of women who both respond with and instigate violence. What’s worrisome about this being the first criteria is the possible inference that women have another default – particularly that they may cower and be passive in the face of violence. If that’s your inference, you instantly resent Kemp. I hope, naively, that he means women have a broad range of reactions to violence rather than always punching back, so that some characters in his world are dynamic. But we doubt that’s what he means, right?

“They’re courageous in the face of danger.”
-No feminist is listening to you after this point. If courage in the face of danger is masculine and not human, then some other response is feminine. Even if he didn’t intend it, holy shit does it sound like he means that traditionally women are meek and need saving in the face of danger. Is it true? I don’t know, nor do most of the people who are mad at him right now. Most don’t care because the misogynist inferences are too easy, especially after…

“They’re stoic in the face of challenges/pain.”
-A marginally less offensive version of the highly offensive previous item. This one I’ve also never considered masculine because I’ve known so many women who are stoic in the face of challenges. And not to downplay the misogyny of his claim, but it’s also incredibly harmful to a young male reader’s psyche depict men’s default response to pain as stoicism. More of that in the next item.

“They have their emotions mostly in check.”
-This one speaks to me. For my whole life I’ve felt like American culture was telling me to bottle up or strangle my emotions, and that feeling and sharing were privileges for girls and women. “Be a man” means shut off your heart and serve. It’s messaging that screwed me up and several men who have been dear friends of mine, not all of whom are still alive. And thus this is the most troubling item on the list, because it suggests Kemp writes stories endorsing this psychologically scarring horse shit.

“And they act in accordance with a code of honor of some kind.”
-Hey, most of us like codes of honor, at least safely removed from our world and cemented in fiction where it never revenge-kills our families. This is the one where I’d need to be a Kemp reader to know what the heck he’s talking about. I hope that he’s not writing stories in which men are the only ones with honor or morality. However, I don’t know a tradition in which women have none of this. Systems that seek to strip it from them, yes, but that’s something grotesque that also deserves ripping apart.

"Thematic elements in a lot of my work that square with this involve the obligations of fatherhood, the depths of friendship between men who’ve faced death together, the bonds of brotherhood (figuratively)."
-If this is what he led with and emphasized, I’d be down. Who would blame any one author for being interested in these themes? That’s half The Iliad right there. But it’s hard to read it as just “my interests” after so much hard gender-prescription in front of it, and Kemp later tries to justify it by saying he believes men should die on ships before women and children, and if that doesn’t convince you, also offers the credentials of being irreligious and a Democrat.

There’s the temptation to yell at Kemp, but there are two sides to this. It’s a great service to see a man name off the things he thinks are expected of him, and Kemp makes it plain in the comments that he feels these sorts of behaviors are expected of a man. The aggravating element is that he’s also endorsing these things, and endorsing them as gendered. Saying women “can” do these things but they are still more masculine is so frustrating that… well, the internet might yell at you for doing it.

16 comments:

  1. I think everything that needed to be said about it's pretty much covered between these posts. I like your breakdown of it. In a nutshell - yup.

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  2. Excellent deconstruction, John. The funny thing, most of those attributes describe Sura. Except the stoic part, but she responds with passion rather than hysteria.

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    1. Emotional reactions tend to be more entertaining than cold ones, at least to me. I got over "coolness" in high school, though it still can be pulled off.

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  3. Thank you John. Complete agreement.
    And my work on a crisis line reminds me, often, how dangerous it is for men to believe that showing emotion is unmanly and wrong. Emotions stifled too often erupt in dangerous ways. Like violence (to self or others) aggression and/or depression.

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    1. And thank you for the work you've done. The world needs more empathy and outreach.

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  4. I wasn't aware of this issue going on. I need to read the original argument, but your response makes total sense. These days a dude is more likely to scream about a spider than a girl, or perhaps run instead of fight where a woman would kick some ass. Generalizations just don't work.

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    1. I linked Kemp's original piece above and recommend checking it out, as well as other authors' responses. I'm happy to have it pointed out when I'm wrong. But I am fiercely against broad prescriptions like these.

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  5. Have to agree with Elephants Child comment above.
    My first thought was 'the Larry & Stretch novels are guy novels'. I can see the point and the humour but I don't want to read a second one while there is a Fay Weldon one on offer.

    As for his "men keep their emotions in check", until there is a mass shooting by a female, I have to disagree.
    As for "stoic re pain" most women may not be, but most Mothers are. and that brings us to "courage in the face of" ... oh screw him. He has got it wrong.

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  6. If a man has his emotions in check, then he wouldn't respond to violence with violence, because that's an emotional response.

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  7. Eh, I'm weird, I guess. I don't agree with all his points, but I do think that men have been sorely mistreated in our culture in recent days. As a guy, it's no longer "okay" to act "manly" - somebody once said of the feminist movement, "We have finally become the men we always wanted to marry." And that's the heart of the problem I have with the way men are treated. Watch a TV show, a movie, a commercial, or listen to the contrast between a Mother's Day sermon and a Father's Day sermon (for crying out loud!). Men have been marginalized and turned into objects of scorn in most media these days. The men in my life are capable of great tenderness, compassion, and actually talk rather a lot and share their feelings. But they are also guys who like to go to the shooting range and climb mountains, and are constantly on alert if we're walking down a street at night and there's a street lamp out.

    I think Kemp's "box" can be every bit as dangerous as swinging the pendulum the other way, but at least he's not putting men down for being men.

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    1. What I don't grasp about your disagreement is "at least he's not putting men down for being men." I'm a man by virtue of feeling a gender association, not because I hit back or keep my emotions in check. Anything I do is the behavior of a man. The issue here isn't shaming men for mountain climbing, but insisting that mountain climbing is male.

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  8. I'm not a feminist but that list still makes me want to yell at Kemp. Not for endorsing gender stereotypes (and harmful ones, as you rightly point out) but for endorsing any stereotypes at all. Isn't the whole point of writing to NOT fall into stereotyping? To find the unique, individual qualities of a character that make them stand out? I think a "masculine" character in Kemp's description is just as frustrating as a "Mary Sue". I.E. neither are ones I want to read about.

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  9. A tempest in a teacup, if I ever heard of one. Kemp is right on target. This hullabaloo is yet another cringe-worthy reaction. Why does everyone have to lash out like this?

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    1. If by "right on target" you mean that what he identifies is primarily or exclusively male, could you demonstrate any of it? Otherwise your non-argued dismissal seems suspect.

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