Every now and again House of Pain’s bombastic 1992 single, “Jump Around,” still gets played on the radio. Naturally, I turn it up full blast and wait for the opening of verse two, at which point I rap along with Everlast to my favorite single line of lyrics in record industry history: “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe”
Unpacking the lyrics’ impact first requires tearing off the sport of tennis’ country club veneer to reveal the truth at its core, captured precisely by David Foster Wallace when he described tennis as a hybrid of chess and boxing. In other words, tennis is the ultimate combination of physical and mental combat. And yet the force of the lyrics is almost entirely embodied by McEnroe, if not the sport’s greatest player, certainly its singular genius, as perhaps best described by Dick Enberg’s remarks that “everyone else plays tennis, McEnroe plays music.” So, McEnroe was artist and, per D.F. Wallace’s definition of tennis, warrior. But, just as importantly, he was also quite infamously the anti-hero. And because we all tacitly acknowledge that almost every hero is on some important level a fraud, leaving anti-heros as, to borrow a phrase from Princess Leia, “our only hope,” we loved McEnroe not in spite of, but precisely because of all the Sturm und Drang. Artist, warrior, anti-hero. In evoking John McEnroe, Everlast has captured the three primary elements of contemporary masculinity. “Jump Around,” then, becomes the response, twenty years later, to Helen Reddy’s 1972 smash hit and the unforgettable lyrics, “I am woman, hear me roar.”
Would that we could stop there, declare “Jump Around” the yang to “I am Woman’s” yin, and celebrate our enlightened post-feminism. But the potpourri of art, war, and anti-heroism that makes up contemporary masculinity has a certain stench to it. And the odor wafts right out of “Jump Around,” in particular those opening lines of the second verse; “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is but the first half of a couplet. Completing the rhyme is this: “If your girl steps up, I’m smacking the ho”
That “Jump Around” pairs the definitive image of really existing masculinity with violence against women is, I would suggest, no coincidence; there are any number of words that end with a long-o sound. The couplet could just as easily have been, e.g., “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, and my girl drops elbows like as if she fights for G.L.O.W.,” (G.L.O.W., of course, standing for the quite real Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), or “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, if you step to me in battle you’ll get doused by my flow.” That’s battle as in freestyle rap battle folks, which, based on the quality of my imaginary substitute “Jump Around” lyrics, is a battle I am clearly not yet ready to wage. But you get my drift, which is that when Everlast penned the lyrics that would come to define modern man, he had no choice but to complete the definition with the second half of the couplet. I.e., language was speaking through Everlast, as it so often does with all of us, when the picture of today’s man was paired with the image of male violence against women. Language knows what so many of us pretend ignorance to. Language, the Symbolic Order that Jacques Lacan (rightly) suggests is the cost of doing any human business, knows that “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is the dictionary definition of the word man, and “if your girl steps up I’m smacking the ho” is the picture in the dictionary next to that definition.
How exactly have we arrived here, here being the time and place where manhood is not just inextricably linked to violence against women, but in fact emerges out of violence against women? Because if art, war, and anti-heroism dominate the foreground of masculinity, that foreground is thrown into sharp relief by the backdrop to it all, a background scene of symbolic and actual violence against women perfectly captured by Everlast’s “smacking the ho.” (See “smacking” for the actual physical violence, and see “ho” for the perhaps more dangerous and inevitably more potent symbolic violence.) Author Judy Y. Chen’s new book, When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, offers some new insight into just how we’ve taken this extraordinarily wrong turn. (Full disclosure: when I went to pick up When Boys Become Boys from the local bibliotheque, it was already checked out. So we are relying here on the informative review posted at http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7231. ) Chen’s research-based thesis is that boys become boys “in opposition to femininity,” i.e. a boy is that which is not a girl, but, more specifically, not a girl by virtue of aggression, and, ultimately, aggression towards the feminine.
Just so, Chen (as quoted in the mentalhelp.net review) writes that "…boys' socialization towards cultural constructions of masculinity that are defined in opposition to femininity seems mainly to force a split between what boys know (e.g., about themselves, their relationships, and their world) and what boys show. In the process of becoming ‘boys,’ these boys essentially were learning to disassociate their outward behavior from their innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.” Moreover, Chen’s research supports the disturbing reality that the split between what boys (and men) show and what they know plays out as violence against girls (and women), as per the mentalhelp.net review:
“Another significant find in her study was the fact that one of the high status boys in the class came up with an all boy group named ‘The Mean Team.’ The Mean Team targeted girls in the sense that they teased them or were mean to them. Being a successful Mean Team participant ensured a higher status and participation in a group and became another way for the boys to establish hierarchy and segregate themselves based on gender.”
Being one of the boys, which is precisely how one becomes a man in this culture that has no truck with rites of passage, requires joining The Mean Team. That is to say that the harsh reality is that men are The Mean Team. And the even harsher reality is that this includes just about every last one of us, which sounds confusing given the relative abundance of nice guys, until one realizes that nice guys are the good cops to the overtly mean guys’ bad cops. While bad cops busy themselves “smacking the ho,” and while good cops go about the business of making nice to only those women the world deems “good girls,” rest assured that they are both policing female bodies and the symbols that represent those bodies. (As an example of this policing, see every 13 year-old good girl who wears skirts and shorts that would make even Daisy Duke blush in the desperate hopes of earning the attention of the nice guys in 7th grade.) If the only way forward is to first admit that you have a problem, then the unvarnished problem is this: like the doctrine of the privation of good, which holds that evil is the absence or lack of good, masculinity as we know it, and as understood in the work of Chen, is the absence of femininity. To connect the dots, masculinity as we know it, is, to the degree that it is constituted in the absence of the feminine and then organized in aggression towards that very constitutional lack, evil.
The monumental task before us is to reinvent masculinity so that, returning to an image from the third paragraph of this essay, masculinity at long last takes its rightful place as the yang to the feminine’s yin. Building on Chen’s work, masculinity must be reinvented such that it is no longer born out of opposition to the feminine, but instead, building on the concepts inherent to the yin and the yang, blooms in complement to the feminine (with, to be clear, both masculine and feminine paths open wide to people with either sets of genitalia, although I would maintain that it is certainly reasonable to expect certain sets of genitalia to generally gravitate towards one pole of the masculine/feminine continuum- at least for now). Borrowing from the idea that real human history will only begin once a genuine socialism has taken root, I would argue that authentic masculinity will only begin once genuine nonviolence has won the day. But in a time when “world peace” has been reduced to clichéd punch line, global nonviolence isn’t even a glimmer in our collective third eye. So, we need to take the very first baby steps towards reinventing the masculine and undoing the current chokehold of evil. In planning these very first steps we would be wise to note that 98% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are women, as are 81% of elementary and middle school teachers. Is it any wonder that boys are defining themselves in opposition to women, when there are quite literally little to no men around to model themselves after? If you are a man with even the vaguest sense of commitment to nonviolence, and if you want to (again quite literally) save the world, you should take a job in any primary school that will have you. It is a place to begin now, in a hurry, before we find that the show is abruptly over.
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