I had the best body I've ever had – so why did I feel so much shame?
In a recently resurfaced 2007 interview from The Ellen Show, Ellen Degeneres is shown upbraiding guest Celine Dion for allowing her then six-year-old son to grow his hair long. “He is beautiful,” Ellen says, “but look at that hair! When are you gonna cut that hair?” Initially, Dion’s feathers get ruffled (“Do you have a problem with that?” she shoots back) but ultimately she seems hesitant to take anything resembling a political position. What’s more surprising is Ellen’s policing of gender expression here – particularly when considering that she herself is a gay woman who openly flouts gender norms.
But patriarchy and its prerogativesare not solely the province of men. Women can and often do claim them – just as any disenfranchised group will do what they can to cling to power. Throughout my childhood, I watched my own mother turn male prerogatives against herself without realizing it. There was an invisible line she would never cross, and I learned not to cross it either.
Watching the Ellen clip evoked a childhood memory. I couldn’t have been older than five or six, and my mother had taken me for a haircut. When the hairdresser asked me what hairstyle I wanted, I told him I wanted long hair, “like my mother’s”. When I saw the look in his eyes, I knew instantly I’d made a terrible gaffe. I saw my mother’s response in the mirror – her taut discomfited smile, the combination of dread and sangfroid in her expression, like she’d taken a sip of spoiled milk. “No, no,” my mother corrected. “You don’t want that, honey. You want short hair, like a boy.” I vividly remember the brief nonverbal exchange between the hairdresser and my mother, the reams of emotional information they managed to compact into a single look.
This was my earliest experience with shame. I cannot describe precisely what the shame felt like, because shame eludes precision; I cannot describe the precise violence done to me, only that it was unbearable. It was a feeling so threatening, so terrifying, I knew I had to bury it for my emotional survival. I knew not to cross the invisible line.
Though I buried the feeling, I kept the lesson: that my desire for long hair was uncivilized, but even more crucially, my love for my mother was unnatural. There was something deeply offensive in a boy’s love for his mother, his desire to emulate her. This idea formed the murky basis of my understanding of masculinity – which I came to see not in terms of any positive attributes, but as a negative impression, a series of prohibitions. And shame was the way to enforce those prohibitions.
Shame and masculinity have a reciprocal relationship – and they share the same vague contours.What makes shame powerful is that it lives so deeply in the unspoken. If emotions like anger or happiness are fairly easy to define, shame lives in a more complicated, hard-to-reach space.Shame has a vagueness that, instead of diluting its power, only intensifies it.Because it is so hard to name or pinpoint, shame magnifies in the mind. If one attempts to interrogate its workings, the shame compounds and redoubles. Men are shamed into hating anything feminine in themselves and the world, and if they dare to question that hatred, they are forced to relive the shame.
This is the double bind of masculine identity.
Like most young people, I wanted to feel I belonged; I was eager to align with power.I taught myself to hate what was feminine, just as certain women I knew came to hate anything that smacked of femininity in young boys. When I turned eighteen, I began to mimic men who objectified women so I could participate in a sphere of male power – but my efforts never amounted to anything. For one thing, I liked women better than men. For another, my performance was all wrong; men’s hatred of women wasn’t robust or conscious in the way I pantomimed it – it was more a wafting scent, and I’d doused myself with the bottle.
I still felt the urge to become masculine, though I wasn’t quite sure if or how this was possible. Then, when I turned twenty-one, I had a realization. I realized my body could be made to do things I hadn’t asked of it previously, things that I believed would make me a man. If long hair exposed like an X-ray my inner deficiencies, the perfect muscled body I could forge from sheer will – from my powerful masculine mind – would redeem me.
I became a gym rat. I ran 10 miles a day. I took diet pills and protein powders. I starved myself. I took drugs that made my heart pound as I lay sleepless in bed. My happiness was not a consideration, for I knew masculinity was something to be inflicted – a wound or brand that would empower me; and I did feel powerful. My body was toned and sculpted. The muscles in my arms bulged with ropy blue veins. But at the same time I felt held hostage to my body, hostage to the promise of this vague concept, this masculinity I might one day inhabit.
In Sam Fussell’s excellent memoir, Muscle, the sport of bodybuilding becomes a metaphor for the construction of masculinity – and it’s all theatre. Increasingly threatened by the wave of violent crime riddling New York in the early 80s, Sam decides to join a gym and “toughen up”. The group of bodybuilders he befriends thereall play characters – they invent personas, change their names to things like “Mousy” and “Portuguese Rambo”. Sam, too, reinvents himself to participate in the theatre of masculinity. He lowers his voice, stalks the corridors of his office with a menacing new walk. He goes from meekly answering the phone to shrieking “Speak!” after the first ring. “Much of being a bodybuilder,” writes Fussell, “was playing at being a bodybuilder”.
Eventually, Sam quits his job in publishing to become a professional bodybuilder. He begins to treat his body as “an abstract concept, a shell to be plucked and polished with regularity”. He injects the body with drugs, pumps it with steroids, starves and feeds it – not because his body needs these things, but because in manipulating the body he can force it to signify something he believes he lacks: that is, strength.
In Muscle, the body is reconfigured as a kind of armor, but ultimately, Sam’s “strength” obliterates him. Practically hallucinating from hunger, he’s reduced to shuffling the aisles of grocery stores with his emaciated face and pro-tanned body, tormenting himself with all the foods he can’t eat. By his finaltournament, Fussell is so weakened from diets and drugs he’s lost the pads of fat on the bottom