Men

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

To J.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of these pieces had earlier incarnations; my thanks to the editors who helped shape the ideas and writing the first time around: “Scumbag,” Joy Press (
Village Voice
); “Con Man,” Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage (
Jump Cut
); “Trespasser,” David O'Neill (
Bookforum
); “Juicers” and “Cheaters,” John Swansburg (
Slate
); “Lothario” and “Gropers,” Meghan O'Rourke (
Slate
); “Victim” and “Humiliation,” Michael Miller (
Bookforum
); “Critic,” Ann Hulbert (
Slate
); “Hillary,” Amy Grace Lloyd (
Playboy
); “Women Who Hate…,” Jennifer Szalai (
Harper's
).

Many thanks to Jacob Weisberg, who first enlisted me at
Slate,
which was a great stomping ground and a place to experiment with ideas. Thanks also to my agent, PJ Mark, and to Connor Guy at Metropolitan for his careful readings and attentions. To my fabulous editor, Sara Bershtel: words (and grammar) fail me, or are at least totally inadequate to convey my gratitude, which extends far beyond the stuff on the page. And thank you to Jim Livingston, for being brilliant, unstinting, and a sweetheart.

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

PREFACE:
Regarding Men

I.
OPERATORS

The Scumbag

The Con Man

The Trespasser

Juicers

II.
NEUROTICS

The Victim

The Lothario

Humiliation Artists

The Manly Man

III.
SEX FIENDS

Gropers

Cheaters

Self-Deceivers

IV.
HATERS

The Critic

Men Who Hate Hillary

Women Who Hate Men

CODA

Also by Laura Kipnis

About the Author

Copyright

 

PREFACE

Regarding Men

Men have fascinated me, maybe too much. They've troubled me. They're large and take up a lot of space—space in the imagination, I mean. They force you to think about them. A daddy's girl who grew into a wayward woman, I wasn't that surprised to find, when I started rummaging around in the essays and criticism I'd written over the last fifteen or so years, that it wasn't the random, unsystematic tangle I'd recalled; instead a lot of it seemed to cluster around the subject of … men.

What
are
men to me? Rereading led to rethinking, which led to rewriting—it was like taking a cross-country trip to look up old husbands and boyfriends, then setting up housekeeping with a different one every few weeks: getting to say all the things you wish you'd said years ago, admit where you'd been wrong, maybe be a bit more generous (or in some cases, less). They were a pretty motley lot, as you'll see—politicians, pornographers, writers, jocks.… Some were slobs, some big loverboys, a few were complete shits. It was odd to realize what a different person
I'd
been with each of them—this one brings out your funny side, this one you're so uninhibited with, this one you could never stop judging and correcting. Writing about someone is a kind of intimacy, after all: as in any relationship there's a lot of projection. It goes without saying that we make other people up according to our own necessities and imaginative horizons, writers no less than spouses, nonfiction writers no less than novelists. What strikes me most about these essays is my covert envy of men, including the ones I would also like to thrash and dismember. Men have always wrested more freedom from the world and I envy that, even when it's a stupid kind of freedom.

Obviously I'm not the only writer in the world preoccupied with men; it's been one of those big literary subjects, most of the time for men themselves. Take Martin Amis, who's said that the most persistent theme in his work is masculinity and opens his own collected essays with a certain mordancy on the subject. Amis is particularly attuned to the specimen he names the New Man, whose appearance he dates from 1970 or so. What's new about this New Man? He makes “all kinds of fresh claims on everyone's attention,” says Amis. “Male wounds. Male rights. Male grandeur. Male whimpers of neglect.”

No doubt I like this formulation because it weaves my own fascinations into the tenor of our times: I've been writing about men because they forced themselves on my attention. I was walking down the street minding my own business and they grabbed me from behind, Your Honor. Though what's actually most new in Amis's account of the New Man is his self-irony about these masculine travails. When you contemplate the old literary emblems of manhood, they're not exactly insouciant on the subject of male wounds. In the lacking-insouciance camp—and I've lately been rereading many of the bigger guns—Hemingway probably comes first to mind, a writer whose every sentence was scaffolded by such masculine angst he'd be a flattened heap without it; self-irony would be tantamount to yanking out his own vertebrae. In this lineage, the perennially embattled Mailer vies for another top berth, someone else who writes as though castration really was an ongoing threat and not just something invented by Freud. Though unlike Hemingway he could also be quite funny on such fates, antic even: perversely energized by the idea that women wanted to take his pen away, as bemused by the role of phallic avenger as he was committed to it. In the notorious Town Hall debate about women's liberation in 1971, Cynthia Ozick brought down the house by asking Mailer from the audience, “In
Advertisements for Myself
, you said, ‘A good novelist can do without everything but the remnants of his balls.' For years and years I've been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” Mailer graciously concedes the round to Ozick, adding that if he doesn't find an answer in a hurry he'll have to agree the color is yellow.

A lot of women find these phallocratic divas insufferable: they take the bluster to heart, or just think them buffoons (Mailer especially suffers this fate—short pugnacious men are easy to mock). But I've always felt more complicated about it. When Mailer pauses in the scabrously hilarious
Prisoner of Sex
to remark of his feminist critics that the best women writers write like tough faggots (he meant it as a compliment), I know I should be stamping my foot along with other offended parties, but I shriek with delight every time I read the sentence. It vibrates with such anxiety, and Mailer wrests such bounty from the condition, he achieves a sort of sublimity.

Of course, it can escape no one's attention that there are as many complaints from women about the New Man as there were about his predecessors: the updated versions of male panic are no less irksome than the old. Today's male is listless, it's said—emotionally paralyzed, indecisive, and insufficiently libidinal, on and off the page. The lack of libido is particularly insulting: male desire may have been a little scummy in its heyday, but if it's on the way out, that would not be exactly satisfactory either. Novelist Benjamin Kunkel, a kingpin of the younger ranks, advises women to go on sexual strike as a protest against male apathy, but … wouldn't this be redundant?

In any case, the inevitability of an ongoing mismatch between the sexes is apparently our little tragicomedy to endure, though on the plus side, it makes the other sex so much more alluring. The capacity to be disappointed by someone confers on them a special emotional force, at least as much as being merely gratified. It's an enduring bond. However, my sorties with the natives lead me to suspect that the general advancement from old-style masculine angst to the self-ironies of the New Man has been a lot more jagged than Amis's insouciance or Kunkel's amiability let on. It's those jagged edges—where irony fails and male melodrama begins—that these pieces chronicle.

Something about the poetics of masculine panic, old school and new, just draws me in; these transits between anxiety and excess yank on something similar in my own makeup, I guess. It intrigues me, in a voyeuristic, overly avid way. We've heard a lot over the years about men objectifying women; I offer myself as illustration of the distaff case. But it would be a pretty diminished imaginative life if we were constrained to identify with one gender alone, wouldn't it? I recall once saying in a semi-drunken state to a badly behaved male writer of my acquaintance: “I never know with guys like you, if I want to fuck you, or be you”—which pretty much sums up the situation of a female writer writing about men, I think. By situation, I mean the elasticity of fellow-feeling that stretches to accommodate jealousy, longing, affinity, antagonism, erotics, and every stop in between.

But fellow-feeling aside, men are still a foreign country. The existence of two sexes is the most routine, banal fact of being alive (some would say more than two—not everyone's so easily assignable)—though it's also completely weird. I'm not one of those people who believe in built-in gender differences—that men are rational and women emotional, or other variants on the theme: that way lies cliché. No doubt having different bodies gives us different experiences in the world. But every society in history has also invented a different list of differences between the sexes, and which trait is assigned to which side of the divide keeps changing. Sometimes men are the lusty ones, sometimes women; sometimes men are practical, sometimes it's women, and so on. So a dearth of sweeping theories about the differences between the sexes will be found in the pages ahead (even though I know there's a thriving market for them). But the existence of an “opposite sex” is still pretty riveting—who are these bizarre creatures? These
others
? Masculinity may be a role, but it's no less exotic when you know that.

If the question I should also be addressing in this preface is “Why these particular men?”—why these particular operators, neurotics, sex fiends, and haters (the categories my subjects conveniently grouped themselves into)—it strikes me, rereading these essays, that I keep coming back to a certain kind of man in an involuntary way, like a dog picking up high-pitched whistles. The book is full of disreputable characters: unruly, often a little morally shady. They've stepped out of line, or crossed one, in ways large and small; their relations with women are problematic; there's a lot of emotional chaos and failed self-knowledge on display. There are a few writers who, like me, grapple with their own dubious attractions and repulsions, or are felled by ambition. (There are a few women too, whose relations to men are also especially vexed in some way or other.) As to whether this is a ledger of attractions, aversions, or alter egos, I can only say: all of the above.

So who are these guys to me? “You should of course find the kind of writing in which your pliancy is greatest and your imagination freest,” Saul Bellow advises in a letter to someone, and it must be the case that writing about rogues and reprobates made me feel more pliant and unleashed than other available subjects. In the famous Aristophanes tale about love, we're all just severed remnants of our original selves, rummaging among the fragments of other humans for the parts that will make us whole. I suspect it works in a similar way with writers and what they write about. Without vicariousness, without these clashes of attraction and disavowal, would there even be words to put on the page? We're trying to find ourselves in our subjects, or to reconcile with what's missing, even if it's always some version of mistaken identity in the end.