Male Vulnerability

by Alexandra Molotkow

One of the uncomfortable things about male authority is that — if you have the sort of brain that is permanently set to flaw detection (and flaws are fine and great but only as part of a functioning human system), your sensitivities overload when someone flails at something at which they pretend to be expert.

Obviously this is not just a male thing, anyone can posture and delude themselves and then mess up. One of my earliest memories is of dancing to “Jump Around” at my god-cousin’s bar mitzvah in a way like I was vigorously wiping down a car, and everyone was imitating me and I thought it was because they were trying to copy my moves.

But men are supposed to be strong and invulnerable, and they make all kinds of fools of themselves trying to uphold this nonsense.

Some examples of “masculine pathetic”:

– George Saunders in “Al Roosten,” describing a schlumpy guy who is catwalking for a charity auction of “local celebrities”:

Roosten stepped warily out from behind the paper screen. No one whooped. He started down the runway. No cheering. The room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh. He tried to smile sexily but his mouth was too dry. Probably his yellow teeth were showing and the place where his gums dipped down.

Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity whoop from near the salad bar.

Roosten brightened and sent a relieved half wave in the direction of the whoop, and the awkwardness of this gesture — the way it inadvertently revealed how terrified he was — endeared him to the crowd that seconds before had been ready to mock him, and someone else pity-whooped, and Roosten smiled a big loopy grin, which caused a wave of mercy cheers.

Roosten was deaf to the charity in this. What a super level of whoops and cheers. He should do a flex.

– George Saunders in “Sea Oak” describing an employee’s dismissal from a male strip club called Joysticks:

Lately he’s put on weight and his hair’s gone thin. He doesn’t get a call all shift and his hair’s gone thin. He doesn’t get a call all shift and waits zero tables and winds up sitting on the P-51 wing, playing solitaire in a hunched-over position that gives him big gut rolls.

…Poor Lloyd. He’s got a wife and two kids and a sad little duplex on Self-Storage Parkway. ‘It’s been a pleasure!’ he shouts desperately from the doorway, trying not to burn any bridges.

– Ned Flanders crying as the Leftorium shutters.

– William Sanderson’s face.

The feeling this gives me is a special blend of pity contempt compassion disdain physical disgust, as well as dread, both because pathetic men can turn terrifying (which I don’t mean to make light of) and because it happens to me, obviously it happens to everyone.

This is why a part of me feels sorry for MRAs — the MRAs who don’t hurt anybody, to be specific. The ones I’ve known personally, or I mean, the men I’ve known who think feminism is unfair and associate it with a lack of compassion for men, have sometimes been people who are having a rough go of it, or who’ve been through some stuff they can’t see past right now. They feel vulnerable and they don’t want to feel vulnerable because they don’t think they’re supposed to be vulnerable, so when they see women, particular women, doing well and still talking about inequality, they take it personally. In these cases it’s not hatred of women so much as the classic combo of desperation and myopia. I don’t like it but it makes me cringe more than roil.

Everyone’s sometimes vulnerable, but vulnerable people are only pathetic when they believe they shouldn’t be; when they believe they should be better than everyone. “Masculine pathetic” is embarrassing for everyone involved. It doesn’t feel good to laugh. A minor example: I met a lot of cocky dudes at the record store I used to work at — record store counters are great spots to hone your misandry — and some of them were local musicians, who would sometimes come in with burned CDs of work they hoped to sell on consignment. (Many local musicians were sweethearts or even just normal people.) Those of us at the counter would have to listen and decide in real time whether to take or reject.

You might think this would come with a sense of power, if someone was being a dick; and sometimes it did, and you didn’t care about bruising some jerk’s dreams. Other times you felt that rejection land like a thud in their body, and the impact shook the room and in that moment their body was your body.

The embarrassment is, obviously, a form of empathy, and a misconception about empathy is that it should feel good. To be really good at empathy — and I’m not saying I am, but I still have opinions about it because I’m basically a guy — you have to be able to feel it for people you don’t want to be, and who you don’t really like, or who don’t like you.