A little presumptious, perhaps

I feel a little like I did the first time I put down Kant. I was was all of about 16. I'd picked up my father's copy of "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals" and put it down, I'm sure, within the first ten pages. I've now read that little opus—but can't say I understand much of it. Now in my mid-twenties, I feel a similar uncertainty when it comes to being a man.

After writing the initial post on this topic, I sat down, with a semi-conscious comical determination, to arrive at some pronouncements on manhood. Following my first impulse, I began a list of adjectives. It made it to three long before I stopped the absurd endeavor. What next, I thought?

Well, it's been more than a week and I've little furthered the investigation. But I can perhaps glean something from my impasse. In this initial stage of investigating the question, it seems to me that my difficulty has two primary, and unrelated, causes. First, there is the simple reason that I don't know what I'm talking about, i.e. I don't yet have an answer formulated in words (even if I feel like I occasionally manifest some version of the answer in practice). Leave that aside. The other is more interesting. Whenever I began to formulate an answer, I feel, or at least worry, that I am breaching some PC norms. Is it, for example, acceptable to claim that to be a man one must in some way manifest power. That is, are power and manhood firmly entwined? Forgetting whether it's acceptable, is it even true? As importantly, does it do anything to distinguish manhood from womanhood? Should I instead be talking of masculinity vs. femininity? To what extent am I heading towards a definition of manhood, and by contrast also of womanhood, rooted in sexual dynamics and am I privileging a heterosexual view of experience?

Returning to the question of power, if only because it's the only place I've thought of to start. Could I equally gloss the quality in question as confidence? Off the cuff, I'd say that were we to do that, we'd have failed to distinguish manhood and womanhood as both require a certain confidence in oneself. This doesn't mean a person must be self-described as confident. Indeed, self-assessment has little, if anything to do with it. Plenty of people act with confidence, and in so doing appear to others as confident, even when inside they quiver with self-doubt. Similarly, many who proclaim their own confidence or manliness do so, it seems to the rest of us, because they have none at all. But enough of the aside. Confidence seems intrinsic to being an adult, to having come of age, and to stepping out into the world. Whatever all of these mean, and whatever relation they bear to actual experience aside, it seems that despite the verbal tiredness of such phrases, there is a certain truth in them, and part of that truth somehow relates to confidence. I say "somehow" because I don't really know how, and I don't want to pretend to greater clarity than I have.

So confidence is necessary, but not sufficient. Power still evokes and includes something else. Real world power is an obvious aspect, but that would be not only uninteresting as a final conclusion, but also plainly false. Take, for example, Tony Montana, Al Pacino's character in the movie Scarface. While he has yet slough off his adolescent naivety—the "young whipper-snapper" quality—he is clearly, at the movie's opening, well on his way to being a man. He has confidence and poise, a certain flair that appears as though it may come from knowing himself or at the very least comes from a fearlessness that indicates worldly experience. By the time he utters his most famous line, "All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don't break 'em for no one," it's clear he's become not just a man, but a man with power, which is perhaps to say more of a man. One can trace the trajectory of Tony Montana many ways, but among the most interesting is as a depiction of manhood and power. At the beginning, Tony has no power, but he's quite the man. With the "my balls and my word" line, he goes from powerless peasant to "man with a plan," and, crucially, man acting on his plan. And this continues for a good while, with many other memorable pronouncements on some version of manliness, "Orders? You giving me orders? Amigo, the only thing in this world that gives orders is balls. Balls. You got that?"

But eventually Tony loses his manhood even if he's still got balls. It's a progressive dwindling, caused chiefly by cocaine abuse and increasingly erratic judgment, but the clinching finale that also initiates the third act, the collapse of his real world power, comes in a scene in his garish bathtub room, where he is first left by his wife, and then by his friend and right hand man, Manny. As Manny walks out, Tony yells, "Eh, fuck you, man! Who put this thing together? Me, that's who! Who do I trust? Me!" and then to himself, "I don't need him; I don't need her. Everything is roses; I don't need nobody!"

But take a step back to act two. What's most interesting there is how Tony loses his manliness before it becomes certain that he's going to lose his empire and all the power it bestows. What happens?

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That's as far as that one's going for today. But two other thoughts

To the extent that the view of manhood I've been exploring in Tony Montana is just a cultural caricature of "being a man," it's not what I'm interested in. Could the nerdy Bill Gates be a man in Tony's world? How about a professor of English literature? Whatever understanding of manhood I come to cannot be tied only to what a person does—there's something important about the way one does it. A quick gloss of this would be, "with dignity" or, in Tony's words, "All I have in this world is my balls and my word."

Second thought: Returning to the essentialist question from the first post: It occurred me that the existence of transgendered people suggests there is a fundamental difference between being a man and a woman. Not that I ever thought this ought to be in dispute. But occasionally people start to wave flags of sexism when the topic is raised and difference is claimed, though many of them would never do so if it were someone talking about a sex change.