Both getting mugged and watching a girl get beaten has made me question myself, my masculinity, and what that means. I had the waking-fantasies of leaping into a fray to a protect a woman and winning, or being mugged in the street and fighting back and winning, but reality has made me aware of reality.
My traditional role as a male is to be a provider and protector. My raised role is an emasculated version of that: a provider, sure, but also a caretaker, sensitive, literate, wise, worldly but not tough. Well, mentally or emotionally tough, but not physically tough. As mentioned in both the book and film Fight Club, “your average person will do just about anything to avoid a fight.” And avoid I did, not leaving my seat as a girl was hit over and over in front of me, giving my money and cell phone to two men on a dark street when they hit me and demanded it.
And because I am loathe to be violent, or, rather, because I am loathe to be hurt by the violence in return, I have found that power has been given over to those who are willing to be violent. America is a bubble, parts of it anyway. Inside that bubble, men can be the emasculated metrosexuals that America asks us to be. Our violent tendencies are sated by movies and video games and we are pacified.
Oh yes, I don’t think that movies and video games create violence, I think they’re outlets for it. The violence is inside us, males especially, and those movies and video games are just channels for it. There is talk of nature and nurture in our makeup, but I have no doubt that basic things like anger are all nature. Studies on testosterone leave no doubt as to it’s effects, and males are full of it. It’s nurture, society, that asks us to avoid violence, to ask us to reason, to bargain. But there is no bargaining with a man hitting a woman in a rage, with two men willing to hurt you until you give them money. And in both those situations, I was not as tough as I needed to be. I was cowed and complacent, as I’ve been told to be.
On a larger scale, this makes me sound like George W. Bush, retaliation, preemption, violence to protect against violence, violence breeding more violence. My jury is out on all that, but that’s not what I’m referring to. Large scale, I feel, is different, although I’m willing to hear arguments. What I’m specifically referring to is that, for the streets of Ukraine, I was not bred tough enough.
Logic, sure enough: I was alone in that club. Stepping in to protect that girl could have landed me in the hospital or dead because there were at least three of them and no one would have helped me. Fighting back on the street could have landed me in the hospital or dead because there were two of them an no one would have helped me.
But sitting here, now, unhurt and weighed heavy, I still feel like I should have been more of a man. The mugging, I can live with. It would have been nice to beat the shit out of those two guys, but it was just money. With the girl, though, I made the wrong choice. I did not fulfil my role as provider and protector. When the time came, I bowed my head.
Had I known the girl, would I have jumped in? I hope so. Had a girl been with me when I was mugged, and they were trying to hurt her, rape her, would I have fought back? I hope so. At one point that would have been a yes, but now I question my own resolve. I want the answer to be yes. I hope to never have to test that fact, but I want to regain the surety, and this time have it be for real.
Society, nurture, is just a thin gloss coat over the primal instincts that let us survive long enough to make societies. And it is those instincts that shake like apes in a cage, teeth bared and screaming to be let out. I think with nurture we gained and we lost, and maybe we lost too much. For we should be sensitive, literate, worldly and wise, but also ready to throw or take a punch when needed, ready to tap that primal source as called for. Is it not under the lacquered bubble that we look out at the rest of the world and fear? The rest of the world is dark and dangerous and we hide in self-built cities of glass. So built up is that fear that when the ape in a cage is released, it isn’t channeled, it lashes. It slaps down thirty year jail sentences for drug sales in the ghettos we fear, launches military assaults at countries that never hurt us.
I joined Peace Corps in part to see how tough I am, to see how well I could live outside the bubble. And the world has responded. The answer is that I’m no longer sure how tough I am, but it’s not as tough as I once thought I was. But rather than slink back home, I know that I want to be stronger. I don’t want to be a raging ape in a cage, and I don’t want to be stupid or callous or ignorant, but I do want to know that if I need to be a protector, of others or myself, that I am tough enough to be so, am strong enough to rise to the challenge.
I never want to watch a girl get hurt like that again.
I want to be as tough as that.