Somewhere in Ireland is the manliest man in the country, someone giving a virtuoso performance of the gender, who adheres to all we consider the masculine norm. He’s possibly happy and healthy, unconscious of the criteria he fulfils, that these criteria even exist. Being comfortable, honestly, in that performance paradoxically requires disregard or disavowal of these standards, as well as an unknowing dip into the odd characteristic outside their boundaries. To paraphrase Yasiin Bey, he doesn’t hate players, doesn’t love the game, but he’s the shot clock, way above the game.
He doesn’t pay attention to the degraded portrayals of gender staged by the Tate brothers and Conor McGregor. Equally he has no more than a casual awareness of the recent British ruling on gender and doesn’t concern himself with the associated triumphalist commentary from the Supreme Court’s new fans in media and political communities.
Believers in the Tates and McGregor, in the unreality of their public personae more WWE wrestlers than men, and those who welcomed the British Supreme Court judgment that trans women won’t be considered women under the British Equality Act – the spokespeople for both movements and the public they lead don’t like admitting the connection and values they share.
All are invested in the imposition of rigid, retrograde conceptions of gender and the supremacy over those they consider lesser that follows. These conceptions are used to divide working people, the somewhat and less privileged, into categories in competition with each other and to render any real challenge to power impossible.
Author Ursula Le Guin once wondered what the world would be like if men and women were “completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in self-esteem”. She connected persistent gender inequality to other forms of structural oppression and said “our central problem” is “the problem of exploitation – exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth. Our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance. Divisions are insisted upon, interdependence is denied.”
Were we to achieve true gender equality, instead of further accepting and adopting the binary and stereotypes used to divide us, wrote Le Guin, “The dualism of value that destroys us, the dualism of superior/inferior, ruler/ruled, owner/owned, user/used, might give way to what seems to me, from here, a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integrity.”
That destructive dualism that Le Guin wrote of suits the ruling class, which across the west increasingly disclaims never-realised aspirations to societal consensus in favour of explicit dominance, actual authoritarianism and genuine attacks on freedom of expression. Some members of the willing public, happy to surrender to ideologies that blame the less fortunate than those at the top, line up to choose their victims: some indigenous pick immigrants; some in the global north choose those in the south; others decide to go after those who, it’s been decided, don’t adhere to the gender-based conventions used to split labour and organise whole populations for the benefit of capital.
We’re having a chat
Against all that we’re having a conversation about masculinity. A public conversation. C’mon fellas. We all need to watch Adolescence. The Tate brothers and Conor McGregor fill newspaper columns, panel show segments and pollsters’ surveys, fulfilling their roles as villains. It’s a debate chaired more than anything by the profit motive and the incentives to which mainstream media is run, editors and presenters descending into fascination with just how bad these men are, knowing coverage will similarly fascinate their consumers. McGregor’s mooted presidential run, which won’t materialise – procedures aside, it’s a joke even to him – picks up the kind of free advertising for which left candidates like Catherine Connolly (a real threat to power) can only hope.
We have good men to challenge our McGregors.
I’m no man for standards. But there’s something undignified about Simon Harris, our tánaiste, calling out a figure as debased as McGregor, giving him what he’s asked for, saying, “He represents the very worst of toxic masculinity,” which seems a mild way to describe a man found liable for rape this year. McGregor doesn’t “represent our values”, says Harris, but what are Fine Gael’s, what are Harris’s?
It doesn't have to be about good men like Harris and bad men like McGregor, who occupies the cultural space that used to be Roy Keane’s.
There was a time, around the late 90s and early aughts, when Keane could’ve claimed to be the best player of his position in the world, not that he would’ve. Since he’s retired he’s been subject to a certain revisionism (which he has at times encouraged with self-effacement) that remembers him as a wrecker and a runner rather than orchestrator he was. He’s written out of conversations about his era’s greatest Premier League central midfielders. That debate focuses primarily on the merits of (Englishmen) Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes. Not the Paddy.
These revisionists remember his brutality and impetuousness: the stamp on Gareth Southgate; the popped vein shouting at referee Andy D'Urso in a match against Middlesborough; the throw of the ball against Alan Shearer’s head that brought him red; that tackle on Alf-Inge Haaland popularly spoken of as a career-ender.
They don’t remember the beautiful parts of his game that made him the most important player of Alex Ferguson’s dynasty: his way with a 20-yard grounded, forward pass; the ability to decide not just the exact pace at which he would play but the tempo for everyone else on the pitch, opponent and teammate alike; the kind of leadership and will that allowed him to just decide what he was going to do, like scoring that headed goal against Juventus in a Champions League semi-final, all 5'10 of him, no problem; even his brutalisation of Marc Overmars in a World Cup qualifier was intelligent, designed to impose his will on the game and executed just violently enough to avoid an early yellow card.
Along with all that was a fragility, even a sensitivity, which came out in the tears at the side of the road when Ferguson decided he was no longer of use. “I cried when I left Manchester United that morning. I cried in my car,” he has said. Left out of the relitigations of Saipan is the explanation that Keane, captaining his country in the prime of his career, couldn’t quite handle that pressure, that expectation, and took his frustrations out on (the hapless yes man) Mick McCarthy. Stick it up your bollocks.
‘Violent, prosaic and romantic’
A central midfield colleague of Keane’s, Zinedine Zidane, was capable of the same trifecta of beauty, brutality and fragility. His display against Brazil in the 2006 World Cup semi-final was as pretty a showing of midfield play ever performed. A game later, in the final, he delivered brutality with a headbutt on Marco Materazzi.
Philosopher Jean-Philippe Toussaint recognised the contradictions of this headbutt, as masculine and aggressive a gesture as you can get, but which was driven by The Melancholy of Zidane, as Toussaint titled an essay on that night. “A decisive gesture, violent, prosaic and romantic: a perfect moment of ambiguity beneath the Berlin sky, a few dizzying seconds of ambivalence, in which beauty and blackness, violence and passion, come into contact and create a short circuit with an original gesture. The form, right now, resists him – and it is unacceptable for an artist, we are familiar with the intimate bonds that unite art and melancholy. Incapable of scoring a goal, he will mark minds,” he wrote.
Zidane was 34, in decline (aren’t we all), when he headbutted Materazzi. He was no longer the young fella gliding round Euro ‘96, giving pass after pass needlessly off the outside of his right rather than the more pedestrian inside, nor the man capable of flight, when required, in the France ‘98 final.
He couldn’t go on. The headbutt was a reckoning with and acknowledgement of his failures and limitations. It involved only a minor act of violence against a man who’d assailed Zidane’s sister with the kind of verbal abuse you can guess at. A headbutt, how bad, not ideal maybe, but it was an attack on an equal rather than the vulnerable.
The Kid from Akron, LeBron James, is in the 22nd year of his NBA career. Silver in his beard, bald patch on his crown, athleticism no longer shocking and (almost) incapable of the acrobatics of his early career, he now relies more on the mental than physical, A couple months ago he caught a lob pass from a teammate and threw it down, an alley-oop, a move typically reserved for younger men. “That dumbass lob set me back three days,” he said after the game, icing one of his 40-year-old legs. The teammate responsible told him he wished he’d played with him 10 years ago, back when James was in Miami, younger and wont to pull off the impossible.
James is fallible. He’s failed in the NBA Finals, losing six times, something Michael Jordan didn’t do once. He’s on the brink of failing again in this year’s playoffs. These losses are held against his credible claim to the greatest – insofar as any such claim is credible – rather than considered for what they are, signs of his mortality. He kept his humanity with each setback. (The problematic) Ernest Hemingway wrote, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” and James – unlike McGregor, whom Khabib Nurmagomedov truly defeated, sending him to his Vegas Elvis period but without Presley’s charm – has indeed lost but never been defeated.
‘Motherfucker! You can’t fucking guard me!’
And he’s comfortable no longer being his team’s number one. That’s his new teammate: Luka Dončić, a guard who, in one of his first games for the Lakers, was told by James in the huddle, “Luka be your fucking self. Don’t fit in, fit the fuck out.” Dončić is also an image of the fallible masculine: too emotional and self-indulgent, too fond of beer and hookah, too likely to mouth at referees and fans in the stands.
His old employer, the Dallas Mavericks, traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers three months ago in a move that shocked not just basketball but sport itself. In an attempt to justify their inexplicable decision that infuriated fans, the Mavericks have since engaged in industrial slander of Dončić, briefing media that he wouldn’t play defence, wouldn’t take care of himself, that he was overweight. "You don't perform like that... if you're a fat, drunk pig," one of his friends recently told ESPN.
All that anger we’re told animates our young men, it’s in Dončić, maybe even more so since that trade and those smears, but he takes it and turns it into something else. Hatred and fury go in and beauty comes out, beauty that sometimes doesn’t even seem to bring him joy.
In the playoffs last year he hit a game-winner over perennial defensive player of the year Rudy Gobert. It was beautiful: picking up possession and goading Gobert into coverage; languidly moving him back and forth on what’s known in basketball as the island, somewhere you don’t want to be with Dončić; releasing the ball with dainty, parallel flicks of his right wrist and foot; the ball hanging in the liminal space between potential and confirmed game winner before swishing the net.
Winning the Western Conference for your team. A happy moment. Making the shot didn’t bring Dončić exultation but something that looked more like hatred. You don’t have to be a professional lip reader to decipher what he, face crumpled, screamed at Gobert. “Motherfucker! You can’t fucking guard me!” before turning, to no one in particular, and roaring, nothing in particular. He celebrated the win backstage in the arena with his father Saša and a can of beer that was taken from his hand by a Mavericks executive, a member of the leadership team that later decided to ship him off to Los Angeles because of what they considered his shortcomings.
On his return to Dallas this month the Mavericks played a pregame video tribute to him. When he first started playing for the team, at 19 years old, he was barely a man. Sitting on the bench, looking at footage of his debut season seven years later at 26, he looked more a boy: his eyes filled with water, bottom lip began quivering; he bowed his head, wrapped it in a towel and gave in to tears. After the game, in which he delivered a performance Dallas fans thought worthy of a standing ovation, he was honest, no stoicism. “I don’t know how I did it. Because when I watched that video I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m playing this game,’” he said. He’d been hurt.
It’s a synthesis
What these men share, or at least what their images share, is an embrace of a full spectrum of personhood, of masculinity. Author Joshua Cohen called it a wrestle. “If I have any notion of what it means to be a man, it involves another kind of wrestling: not WWE, but, say, Jacob with the angel. Or a wrestling with your appetites, your desires,” he’s said. Referring to Trump (but it might as well have been the Tates and McGregor) Cohen said the US president “doesn’t wrestle that way. He’s just surrendered, making everyone the victim of his appetites and desires”.
There are options other than these WWE wrestlers and the good men chosen to challenge them in mainstream debate, options that include a recognition of the full gamut of experience. Like Søren Kierkegaard said, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.” That manliest man in Ireland likely doesn’t care about that synthesis. But he synthesises all the same.
