Labels anyone?

Three quite separate events have got me thinking about masculinity today (actually as a gay man I do quite a bit of thinking about men but here I am referring to the concept of maleness). You will notice by the way that regular bloggers will use this technique to fashion a column – if you try hard enough you can find a thread to link something to anything: Paris Hilton to global warming for example. Well actually I can’t off the top of my head find a link there but if you do, please write to me!

So what are these three events you ask? The first is a whole brouhaha about initiation in schools here in the Gauteng province of South Africa. More specifically, a youngster was subjected to a rather brutal beating as part of his “welcome” into a new grade in his school. Apart from the fact that this seems a rather bizarre way to make someone feel at home (even though some homes are like war zones!), the reaction to this event has been fascinating, disturbing even. The mum has opened a court case because she feels the school, and the boys, have not taken appropriate responsibility and she has been vilified in many quarters. There has been a stream of support from parents, ex scholars and various pundits, basically all saying that “initiation makes a man out of boys” or “it didn’t do me any harm” or “it prepares men for the hard world out there”.

Event number two revolves around a dinner party I attended last night. There we are, five gay men and one straight woman. Apart from the gender imbalance (and perhaps this is the topic of another column: are gay men either misogynistic or fatally enmeshed with key women in their lives?) we covered such a broad spectrum of masculine presentations. Our host is what you might call “butch” – straight acting and straight looking as those ads in gay dating sites trumpet (why this is a bonus is material for yet another column!). One young chap looks like a hip straight young man until he gets excited and his high pitched giggles and spontaneous rearrangements of gangly limbs suggest a more feminine presentation (of course as I write this I acknowledge the normative limitations of the words masculine and feminine). His friend seems quite a manly chap but when he declares that alcohol makes him very emotional we all groan – I mean weeping into your wine is just so “girly”. And while my companion for the night is somewhere on his own scale of butch and femme, as he confounds easy definition, I think I too have my own issues with androgyny. Having said this, my companion is determined to see me as “the man” in our friendship, a label I find rather awkward because of all the baggage that comes with this.

And then the third “event” is a column in The Guardian online. The writer talks of two stars in the football pantheon, Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham, as exemplars of “homoeroticism”. His evidence for this? In Ronaldo’s case it’s a paparazzi shot of him with Paris Hilton (yes her again) but instead of Paris’s hand on his groin, it’s Ronaldo’s. And as for Beckham’s latest Armani underwear ad and that “phallic” rope, need we say more?  Whatever happened to the days of yore, he bemoans, when the lads could all be naked in a post match bath together – I am not making this up – and this would be about homoerotic as Morecambe and Wise in bed together (for you younger folk, these are two British comedians, straight as a die no doubt, who had a long standing comedic partnership)?

Apart from the quaint and vaguely homophobic (as opposed to homoerotic!) nature of these last comments, they tell a story about what is perceived to be a “real man”. A real man does not touch himself or do underwear ads. A real man endures a humiliating beating and in passing this test of manhood, moves easily and confidently into a world where not only is he the boss but he tests other men for their “real” manliness too. And what do us gay men do? Well if we are evolved we shrug off all this rubbish and assert our right to be as manly or girly as we damn well want. Or, more often, we buy into these binaries (butch is good, girly is bad) and stick these stupid labels on each other. It’s depressing that we’re still asking ourselves what a real man is in 2009 – why does anyone care and what difference does it make!