WHAT MAKES A MAN A MAN - Part 3 - Holding Out For A Hero

Four years have passed, its 1973 and more than my height has changed. The side parting forsaken for centre parted longer hair that never grew quite long enough. My fine hair when grown long became greasy and lanky rather than the full bodied wildly romantic wind blown curls version of my dreams. Deep Purple and Hawkwind were current musical heroes, so the hair, coloured flairs, necklace bling and a denim bomber jacket with badges (not in picture) were de rigueur for any self-identifying fans. Though the pink flip flips, perhaps not.







I'd had a 60's childhood where Cilla Black ruled, by the early seventies Marc Bolan pouting in a pink satin suit was the new queen. By 1973 with much more seemingly at stake masculinity wise, 'macho 'progressive' music ruled my turntable. Full of dramatic, flamboyant musical flourishes and wildly inventive over indulgences. My enthusiasm hovered between envious voyeurism and vicariously basking in the fame and glory of these revered giants. I so wanted to be that hairy.

Five men flaunting frizz, fur and their feminine side

Such musical heroes offered solace. I felt that my abilities and interests largely fell outside the traditionally held areas for boyhood pursuits and prowess. Pop culture presented to my teenage yearning, meaning and purpose, a place crowned with a transient specialness. A wailing air guitar in hand liberates you fron the circumstances of education, class, race, gender orientation and even talent. The classic seventies teenager, I imaginatively performed along with my favourite pop stars, alone in my bedroom, whilst broadcasting my choice of music through a wide open window. For the world will know me through this music and hear it loud and clear.

I was a sixteen year old holding out for a hero, looking for a distinct affinity, someone embodying a myth that I could emulate. The men I hero worshipped, appeared to model aspects of the dreamed of self.  Whilst 'what you are' is still barely mapped as a territory, you can safely imagine yourself as a rock star. Whether you'll have sufficient talent, confidence, ambition, pluck or luck to make that a reality, remains covered in a mist of juvenile hope.  Significant individuals who might help you fulfil your potential, are yet to be found. Encountering the trustworthy male hero is always the tricky bit.

Its hard to keep hold of male heroes, they easily slip off their somewhat wonky pedestals. One of my 1980's heroes, Morrissey, once seemed the charismatic opinionated challenging poetic outsider, has aged into a curmudgeon, spouting nationalistic garbage unbecoming of a supposedly intelligent person. Let alone someone who loves his country so much he lives abroad. Yet I can also see how that youthful waif could become the stodgy middle aged man, things fossilise as you get older.  I adore the music of The Smiths, but that affection has been put under retrospective strain now their former front man has 'gone rogue.' The past and the present now at loggerheads.

An obstacle to admiring the achievements of anyone, can be their less palatable ideas, morals, opinions and actions. In the aftermath of retrospective scandals and revisionism, both judicial, historical and feminist, what a good decent male role model could be is even harder to imagine, let alone maintain. We know far far too much.  Everything, though done to establish a much needed corrective, to create a more balanced view, can still be one sided. Our default position may just  be switching from loyal unquestioning defence to slavishly pandering to puritanical dismissal. In our search for 'the truth' fault finding becomes a compulsion, an addiction to believing that only their worst side embodies the truth about a person.

In traditional folk tales heroes are often initially portrayed as flawed individuals,. The classic 'puer aeternus' - the naive unformed boy/man. This idealistic hero is the impudent possesser of foolhardiness, recklessness and flawed with imperfect behaviour. Paradoxically these help identify with his journey, and reassure us that the human potential for good, though often in a titanic struggle, will re-emerge and assert itself. The difficulties a hero encounters whilst on this quest forge transformative changes in them, as the twilight of childhood moves into adulthood. Sketching the first outline of the mature adult male. This is one male heroic archetype.

Today celebrity can rise up really quickly. We then observe their subsequent sins and often ignominious tumble from grace. For Jung, there is always a darker shadowy side to any human psyche. The principled often sitting uncomfortably perched upon the knees of the unprincipled. As the shadow side of a hero passes by, it bristles the hairs of our own shadowy side.  What we consider heroic is an archetype being projected onto the face of fallible human beings. If they are to remain a hero they'd have no impure thoughts in word or deed, which is well nigh impossible for even the best of us.

Generally we find it hard holding uncomfortable moral contradictions, of the wholesome and the unwholesome when they are present in ourselves. so god help anyone else. The active presence of both pleasure and aversion towards someone, demands a resolution we cannot always find. Its easier to go into denial or dump our heroes as being altogether worthless. Is it feasible to fully face the complex messy mix of a person's qualities without writing them off completely because they failed the perfect hero test? Heroes, once fallen, are rarely forgiven or allowed redemption from past stains upon their character.  As we are currently finding out, many talented men, brilliant in one particular sphere can be serial abusive sex pests in another. Talent, power and hubris leading them to believe they live 'divinely gifted lives' outside the application of normal moral standards. Yet on a collective level there is also social catharsis going on, as we put the archetypal 'bad man' into the stocks to give them a well deserved public kicking.

To maintain any human being as a hero requires selectivity in what we focus on and value. To admire the best in someone, without endorsing any of the dodgy stuff. This is morally tricky ground to traverse. But generally, if we already admire someone, we will, at least for a while, turn a blind eye towards anything that stains or contradicts our favourable constructed viewpoint. It's been common practice for a man's talent or genius to be used as a get out of jail free card, skipping over violent abusive behaviour as insignificant or even excused as eminently reasonable, for a man.

The painter Caravagio was an aggressive, tempestuous person, known to have murdered at least one man. Yet his artistic reputation and career survived this, for his paintings remain striking and significant pieces of art despite his recklessness in a sword fight. So many artistic heroes of the Renaissance were talented but violent street thugs. Genius, talent and, one has to say, historical distance, diminish how their frankly shitty behaviour is now seen. Too quickly overlooked or excused. Perhaps it is easier when you've never known someone personally and only admired their artistic output, to gloss over what a pain in the ass they were towards friends and lovers. Male reputations have undoubtedly benefited most from this. Yet this selectivity in what we focus on when turning people into heroes, is a process that goes on regardless of our gender. The heroic image always requires careful curating in order that it stays 'on message'.

No one who is truly human gets their lives morally correct in every respect. Male or female, we are all erratic beings, exhibiting a wide range of moral contradictions. However, in the anti-hero, human fallibility, eccentricity, of not conforming or fitting in, become the very stuff of greatness. We cheer as they cry 'fuck off' to the world even if they exhibit tendencies of being an cruel gangster. The anti-hero is an impure archetype, the shadow side of the pure hero. Living outside conventions, unwilling to conform to other people's social codes of behaviour, by nature self-indulgent, aberrant individuals with lives teetering, often drunkenly, on the edge of the gutter. You gotta sat yes to another excess, turns their lives into a squalid magnificence, It can be just a pose these days with self appointed anti-heroes everywhere. For the real authentic thing just examine the life, times and writings of the poet and author Charles Buckowski. a deeply rough cut man with more than a few irredeemable features.

Charles Buckowski on the loo

Tribal communities would ritualise the bringing of men and women into adulthood. This entailed removing young men and women from their parents and putting them into the hands of female or male elders. And its probably true that for the guiding mentor role your Mum and Dad are often not the best people. Parents stand too close, hampered by their love and the flaws in their own sense of themselves, they tend to see what you need to do through their own needs of you. So it usually falls to someone one step removed such as a grandparent, uncle, teacher, or an older more experienced friend, who might share a similar enthusiasm, spirituality or talent as yourself. And if this starts to raise safe guarding issues in your mind, this reveals another element bedevilling a masculine mentoring role - the default mistrust of masculine motives. Not without its own history and justification. But it has a consequence that further muddies the waters of how to recognise 'a good man's' face.

So most men continue to hold on to the traditional narrowly defined version of what it is to be a man. Even though this appears more and more like a doomed captain going down with his sinking ship. Its possible this may be concealing a more troubled level of conflicted impulses over quite what is best to do. What from the old style of manhood can stay, what must really go, and how will this all hang together? Alternative guidance for what any new type of man might be like, lacks clarity. There are so few reliable mentors and no manuals. Insecurity then may be making men stay put, holding on grimly, even aggressively, to that which is familiar. Modern masculinity would then seem stuck in this bardo of indecision, a between place, that is neither here nor there.

Robert Bly once commented that young men lacking adult guidance and a defined route into adulthood, will try to create one for themselves. They'll form gangs, cults, allegiances to niche groups of one sort of another that come together to share a task, a lifestyle, a political ideology, an enthusiasm, or ownership of a space, and forge a collective sense of personal identity from it. Bly also said that this attempt at collectively growing up would inevitably fail, as it is the blind leading the blind

I certainly used my taste in music to define me. I constructed an image of myself as the sort of guy who liked weird arty music, the more outlandish and challenging the better. The downside was that there was no obvious gang for this, very few people to share my enthusiasms with. But a singular isolated individuality, alienated from the general mainstream, can also serve a dysfunctional function, creating a vision for oneself as this distinct individual with an 'extra special perception.' Obscurity creating a delusive aura of uniqueness. The hidden, unacknowledged man, self defining, the isolated loner, living in a fantasy world of their own creation, this is an all too common occurance.

To have not encountered beneficial role models, nor found a vocation, nor feel yourself purposeful is sad. Yet to over identify with the trash you own, the team you idolise, the computer games you play, the music you revere, the lifestyle you possess, as compensation for this shortfall in fulfilment can be even sadder. Underneath all of their frontal bluster, all men understand what a shallow unexamined life looks like, because its seen in the dim lifelessness of their eyes that faces them every morning in the mirror.

What makes any hero a hero appears to be a willingness to go beyond a narrowly defined sense of themselves, to push out into less familiar territory. To feel themselves moving forward towards something, as yet undefined, that could be better. This does not sit easily with the sense of stability and creature comforts that comes through staying put. Yet just keeping going requires stoical heroism. Humanity stagnates whenever it stands still for too long. Refusing to adventure or move on prevents the evolution of who we are. This is when masculinity turns toxic.

I've been writing here about heroes mostly in a knowingly mono gendered way. When I look at my own list of heroes there are a some fabulous women present there too. Women whom I admire, and exemplify qualities or talents I'd love to see more of in myself. Whilst I believe it is important for men and women to find heroes and role models within their own gender, because it helps us understand that gender, what it is and what we can become, it's also clear that this doesn't have to be exclusively the case. Heroes can transcend gender designation. Heroes in the broadest sense imaginable can help form ourselves into a more rounded human being.

What is heroic in a man can extend way beyond the narrowness of the macho male cliche. Yet what is it to be heroic now? Is there a heroism that goes beyond the stereotypes?  Heroism manifests across humankind, regardless of culture, time period, gender, race or class, rich or poor. What a shame it would be, should we fail to discover the life changing inspiration of another human beings life, because we were wearing racial or gendered blinkers at the time, or were expecting them to be perfect in every aspect of their lives.





'Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life!
Larger than life'

***

Except from the lyrics to Holding Out For A Hero

written by Dean Stanford & Jim Steinman.  

PS.
Cliche ridden lyrics written by men, sung by a woman with a voice rubbed in coarse grade sandpaper. Yet they do highlight other pressures to conform outside of men's expectations of themselves and from other men, such as women's expectations of men. However, women appear to be lumbered with the role of having to keep pushing rather reluctant men to change their views, not just of women, but also of themselves and how they operate in the world. Yet in the desire to liberate themselves from their own gender's stereotyping, men in general are still barely half awake and lagging way way behind.

That doesn't appear very heroic to me.

.