Menfolk

An exposé of my male menagerie... WIP

I resent all the men I cherish. As I write this foreboding statement, I recall every man I have ever experienced, in their fullness, in their flesh, in their being. I think of the momentous occasions I’ve shared with menfolk that arises almost unilaterally to my being, as a man, I hearken the plight of men undertaken by patriarchal conductors. I recognize that the limitations of man reflect and reify the limitations of the patriarch, that the enmeshment of man to man implies an absence of men, that within patriarchy, dominion is uniform, singular, and mute. I say this to say, I resent all the men I cherish, not because they are men, but because they and we fall short of establishing manhood as a way of being versus a way of acquiescing. You see, patriarchy and racism dictate that we mundanely conform to rigidity in behavioral performance. It postulates that the absence of cultural expressivity to an epistemological standpoint exists as the prelude by which ethnic demographics of men can become; White “men,” are the comparative point of contention through which manhood is defined and standardized. White manhood, and subsequently masculinity, adhere strictly to racial formations of being that envelop, encompass, and employ racist, patriarchal, and sexist modes of being unto recipient othered non-White menfolk demographics.

If this is the case then we face a serious issue as it concerns interconnectivity amongst men, you see, where I reflect on my experiences as a man experiencing other men in sensual capacities seems to be the singular legitimate space where non-White non-Western manhood actualizes, the imagination. I experience many men on a routine basis in varying capacities. Some of these men are acquaintances, some are friends, some are relatives, some are relative, and some just are. Some of these men are working men, some of them my coworkers, some of them are sexual partners, some of them are desires. All of them are men. I am a man, Black, bodied, present. However, I weave in-between manhood and masculine trajectories as fluidly as blood flows through veins. My identity is not fixed, nor does it have the potential to be realized through Western constructs of manhood as the West and the White do not think of me.

Yet, we face a dilemma, as men, where we do not think of one another which is as much a cultural practice as it is a systemic one. Ethnic Black/brown, Native, and non-White men find ourselves entangled in a corrosive web of racial interstices that goad us to subconsciously do the work of undoing the critical thought of man. What is this thought, one may ask, but a proposed form of radicalism that knows many faces. This “critical thought” begs the question of substance, wherein I posit that we collectively lack the generative fervor to even present the question as answerable. Our actions as men are innumerable, most of them destructive, however, it is known that men behold a power and force unmatched in tenacity when honed. I think of all men when I state that criticality lacks in us as beings and that it manifests materially as woeful and willful operative ignorance. Operative here signifies that the ignorance is not subconscious in function, even if subconscious in acknowledgement; this ignorance, slated against what we refer to as the “critical thought” of man, expounds upon the factuality that Western racist patriarchal sexism, and by extension, imperialism and homophobia, reduce manhood, masculinity, and menfolk to unrealized facets of ourselves that lack the mental, emotional, and spiritual fortitude to establish a criticality in manhood.

How could this be actualized, one may ask, to which I would answer there is no answer. No definitive one at least, as what I am proposing within establishing a “criticality in manhood” disposes everything we men are taught to embody, be, and do. A critical establishment in the identification of manhood supposes a global mobilization toward liberating the masculine ideal from White Western tropes that suppress the legitimacy of lived experience as foundational in our being. This means that for it to be achievable, all men must reorient the focus of our being to other men, that we must partake in the dissolution of contrived masculinity in racial hegemonic contexts to intentionally problematize the superficiality of manhood as it exists under Westernism. To that end, there is no absolute answer as to what could and would fully encapsulate a criticality in manhood as it shifts in global social capacities, but only an infinite number of optional realities become resolutions that we have the global and mobile power to actualize through interbeing.

In reflection of this dilemma, I walk through distinctive memories in linkage to personal narratives and theories I have developed over the course of operating under masculine scopes and scrutiny where I hope that my investment in the deliverance of men transmutes into critical thinking of what it means to accept manhood. I am in the throes of a tumultuous juggle with several men in my interpersonal and proximal social circles. It’s an ongoing dilemma that has caused me pain and suffering to an endless and dynamic end, to the point where I find myself cyclically volleying my own manhood as circumstantial to my being, though as indefensible as I may believe my pride to be, I must admit to the truth that my manhood steers, if not dictates, how I exhibit my persona. I must clarify that this is dissimilar to being totally ruled by masculinity, instead what I am proposing as rhetoric is that we, men, face a dispositional regime wherein our liberal divestments from structural masculinity are limited through systemic obstruction. In other words, it is difficult if not functionally impossible to completely deviate from patriarchal modalities of being, though not because of a collective unwillingness but because of the macrocosmic scale of institutional racist sexism that supersedes our desires in tandem with restricting our behavioral ambitions.

I resent all the men I cherish. But I love them the same.