Becoming a Man - Part 2

John Stoltenberg

John Stoltenberg’s book ‘Refusing to be a Man’, adopts a very different perspective to that of Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John’ which I explored here. If patriarchy for Bly is a lost mythical belief system, for Stoltenberg it is a real structure of oppression, based on father right.  It is a system of ownership of other human lives, that begins with “ownership  by adult men of the only means of producing those lives, the flesh and blood of women.”   

Stoltenberg demonstrates how infants grow to understand that although their mother gave them life and nurtures them, their father (whether or not he is physically present) owns them. Girls learn how to be owned, and boys learn how to own.

“The boy will be a witness as the father abuses his wife… and the boy will be filled with fear and helpless to intercede. Then the father will visit his anger upon the boy… and the boy will wonder in agony why the mother did not prevent it. From that point onward, the boy’s trust in the mother decays, and the son will belong to the father for the rest of his natural life.”

As the boy grows up, he learns to embody his whole sense of self with his penis, something that differentiates him from his mother.

“This is male identity, defined by the father, defined against the mother… The sexual-political content of the relationship of father to son is essentially to divide the son against the mother so that the son will never stop trying to conform to the cultural specifications of phallic identity.”

Refusing ’manhood’

This is a very different perspective on the break with the mother from that of Bly, and the prescription is very different too. “This servitude must cease. This inheritance must be refused. This system of owning must be destroyed.” Our sense of ‘manhood’, Stoltenberg insists, is not something we are born with, but something we create by our actions. And when we understand this, we learn that we can change how we act. “One must change the core of one’s being. The core of one’s being must love justice more than manhood.”

Much of the content of the book centres on our need as men to truthfully examine the choices we are encouraged to make - to consume pornography, to objectify, to control, etc - and to confront their effects, both on women and on our sense of what it is to be a man. Only by facing these truths, Stoltenberg suggests, can we start to unlearn the lies we have absorbed.

As one might expect from the life partner of Andrea Dworkin, Stoltenberg’s analysis of pornography is particularly insightful……

“All pornography exists because it connects to some man’s sexuality somewhere…. When one looks at any pornography, one sees what helps some men feel aroused, feel filled with maleness and devoid of all that is nonmale. When one looks at pornography, one sees what is necessary to sustain the social structure of male contempt for female flesh whereby men achieve a sense of themselves as male..… Pornography tells lies about women. But pornography tells the truth about men.”

…… as is his understanding of how pornography shapes what most men imagine to be ‘good sex’ - performance oriented and emotionally distant.

“Men learn from sex films how to have the kind of sex that is observable from without, not necessarily experienced from within … Once a man’s ideal sexual experience has been mediated by photographic technology, he may become unable to experience sex other than as a machine-like voyeur who spasms now and then. And since the relation of voyeur to viewed is implicitly a power imbalance, such a man may be unable to perceive ‘good sex’ where there is no implied domination.”

Refusing biology

What is problematic in Refusing to Be a Man is there in the ambiguity of the title. For much of the book, the refusal is a refusal to go along with the construction and perpetuation of a sexual identity based ultimately on father right. But alongside this are suggestions that the refusal should be one of biology - suggestions that are developed further in Stoltenberg’s Introduction to the 2000 edition of his book, which is available online here.

Confusion about biology is particularly apparent in a chapter titled ‘How men have (a) sex’. This chapter is full of misconceptions that have become familiar to us with the development of queer theory and gender identity politics - that sex is a spectrum not a binary, that sex is socially constructed, that sex is assigned at birth. The source, a footnote explains, is a series of interviews Stoltenberg conducted with psychologist John Money, published as ‘Future Genders’ in a science and science fiction magazine that had been founded two years earlier by Kathy Keeton and her partner, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione (Omni, May 1980).

Stoltenberg would, during these interview sessions, have become fully aware of Money’s theory that everyone has an inherent sense of gender identity, which may or may not be correlated with sex — a theory that has become an important building block in the development of ‘transgender’ ideology.

By the time of these interviews, at least part of Money’s now notorious medical abuse of a young boy, the Reimer experiment, had become public knowledge. Bruce Reimer was an infant whose penis had been damaged by a botched circumcision. His parents referred him to Money, who in 1967 surgically castrated the then 22 month old infant. Money told them to raise Bruce as if he was a girl, Brenda. Money’s abuse of the boy did not end there - he made Brian, Bruce’s twin brother, simulate sexual penetration of Brenda when they were both 6 years old, claiming that ‘childhood sexual rehearsal play’ was needed for ‘healthy adult gender identity.’

Brenda, however, never felt comfortable in ‘her’ synthetic identity as a ‘girl’, and was terrified of Money. He told his parents that he would take his life if they made him see Money again. His parents revealed to him, at the age of 14, that he had been born a boy,  and he accepted that he was one, and decided that he wanted to be called David. David eventually committed suicide, aged 38. His parents blamed Money for this, and for the earlier death of Brian.

Stoltenberg didn’t refer in either edition of his book to Money’s abuse of Bruce/Brenda Reimer, who was the victim of a cruel experiment aimed at validating a flawed theory of gender identity. Instead, he chose to relay that flawed theory.

It is ironic that, as with Bly and Tatchell (see my last post, here), the flaws in Stoltenberg’s analysis can be traced back to his drawing a veil over the abuse of young boys by older men.

It is also telling that, since Andrea Dworkin died in 2005 , Stoltenberg has suggested, against compelling evidence, that if Dworkin, his life partner, were still alive, she would have opposed contemporary radical feminists, because they are not ‘trans allies’.

Part of Stoltenberg’s argument is that Dworkin wrote favourably about transsexuals in her book Woman Hating (1974). This was in Chapter 9 where she also made positive comments about bestiality and incest. The comments on incest were prefaced by a quote from Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry Dworkin had admired since her teens. Less than a decade later, when she met Ginsberg at her godson’s bar mitzvah, she challenged him over his advocating the sexual abuse of children - including his pointing at 12 and 13 year old friends of her godson and telling her they were old enough to fuck. Ginsberg complained that the right wanted to jail him for supporting child pornography. Dworkin replied “Yes, they’re very sentimental. I’d kill you.” (Heartbreak, 2006)

Dworkin changed her mind, radically, about much of what she had advocated in Chapter 9 of Woman Hating - including transsexuality and transvestism.

Stoltenberg not only did not change his mind about Money’s discredited theories of gender identity, he became a fully signed up, biology denying, pronoun displaying, ’trans ally’.

My next post will explore the role pornography plays in the construction of masculinity, particularly in the age of the internet.