Reading through the books, articles and magazines of Men Against Sexism (MAS) since 1973, there is ample concern with fathers. And since the mid-1980's there have been numerous accounts of fatherhood. Men have written about their relationships to their fathers, about their own sons, about attempting new styles of parenting, sharing and role reversal. But there has remained a startling omission. Men have passed their mothers over in silence.
Men who proclaimed a pro-feminism in the 1970's were wary of discussing such a contentious subject as motherhood. The accusation of misogyny was standard armour in a sexual moralism that was becoming an integral part of men's sexual politics. It prohibited discussion on anything which may reflect badly upon women. But men's silence about their mothers was also to do with their perceptions about who she was. Mothers had provided a mediating role within the family, their conflict management often protecting the son from his father. She was an ally against the unpredictable figure of the father. She provided comfort for her sons disillusion with him, the confidant who understood the feminised sensibilities of her sons. It was this perception of men's closeness to their mothers and their affiliation to her plight as economically powerless, that contributed to her sons' revolt against the patriarchy. How many men carried her torch - their anti-sexism an attempt to rescue her love from the crassness and emotional aridity of their fathers?
If feminists were seeking new forms of identification with their mothers, then surely men too could reclaim their mothers as a source of strength. It was a desire that quickly foundered as small groups of men shifted from consciousness-raising groups into groups using psychotherapeutic techniques. Here the absence of the mother from men's sexual politics ended, often abruptly. Far from revealing a companion and ally, psychotherapy began to reveal the depth of men's fear, hatred and disgust. Impingement, control, invasion - the language of men's dread of their mothers influence and power in their childhoods was released in a torrent. Not surprisingly, she was an extremely uncomfortable subject to grapple with. Particularly for a group of men opposed to misogyny and the everyday sexism that denigrated women.
Humiliation, shame and a fatalistic dependency are memories of mother. Dear mum, that thin line between love and hate begins with her. The problem with anti-sexist men's insistence on denying and displacing these memories is that they continue to exert their influence unconsciously. They may erupt in deep rage and resentment or they may give rise to desperate attempts to be 'nice' to women, to scurry around in a self-effacing attempt to please them and so assuage the anger and the guilt, ensuring that women, like mother will carry on liking her '1ittle boy'.
Some while ago I had a dream which dwelt on this ambivalence toward women. I was a small child standing in the corridor of a house, my hand hovering over the handle of a door. It shuts me out of the room where my mother is sitting.
She is angry with me. I remain standing by the door, neither opening it nor leaving. In truth I am unable to move. I dare not go in because I think that I am afraid of her anger and rejection. But the dread is of my own rage at her and the urgent need to tell her feelings that I do not believe she will be able to cope with. So I am frozen, immobilised by the fear of destroying her. Yet I am also too afraid to walk away and leave, because without her I will feel abandoned. This is an image of men's lives with women, too insecure to speak their feelings, their anger and resentment, and too afraid to leave. It is a contradictory need for women/mothers and the desire to be free of them; impossible to live without them, yet sometimes intolerable to be with them.
After years of his frantic activity and devotion to his career, Frank's wife left him. For Frank it came out of the blue. It knocked him over, because he couldn't really understand why she'd gone. And he lost his children too. He had spent their lives circling his family like a moth to a flame. Needing them, wanting them, but to have given himself to them would have been like a suffocation. He loved his children but he could only give them so much. He loved his wife but wouldn't let her too near, couldn't say no to her, nor say what it was that he wanted. He felt he did all the giving, but he couldn't face any real connection to them, was unable to express his resentment and deflected their anger and troubled feelings out of his own fear. They experienced him as there but not there, present in body but somehow absent. And Frank remained unaware of this because he was locked into his closed world, playing out the scenario of the corridor existence. Because he wouldn't or couldn't move, they did, exposing him to all the old humiliations of childish fear and dependency that he had strived to order and repress.
Frank was a nice man, someone who could earn the title of New Man. But this caring and consideration is born of a fear and compliance, the desire to protect ones own self by sustaining and providing for a woman, for it is only through her that men can be looked after. Beneath this fear of independence lies an intense rage at women/mothers who are blamed for men's feelings of dependency. Here in men's fears is the source of the 'castrating mother' who sucks away her sons independence, tying him to her apron strings and getting him to dance to her tune, humiliating him in this spectacle of failed manliness.
In 1987, Michael Ryan rampaged through Hungerford killing fifteen people. The following day the press was filled with local peoples comments; 'Mrs Rowland said that the only person she remembered Ryan with was his mother. "I never saw him with a girlfriend", she said. And Denis Morley described him as 'a real mother's boy, a spoilt little wimp'. And the by-line in the Daily Express gave its conclusion to the cause of Ryan's outrage; 'Doting mother's lavish gifts turned Ryan into a spoilt wimp'. A couple of psychiatrists were wheeled out to pronounce Ryan a 'paranoid schizophrenic' and the matter was settled. But perhaps the most insight to be gained on the cause of his violence was this discourse of masculinity which emerged around the event. Central to it was Ryan's failure to live up to the cultural and sexual expectations of masculinity. A failure which was framed in his inability to be free of his mother. Trapped in his own need of her, perceiving her as a persecutor whom he could neither leave nor live with, and humiliated by a culture which demanded a persona of masculine infallibility and self-sufficiency, Ryan exploded.
After the shootings, he finally sought refuge in his old school. Cornered by the police he repeatedly asked after his mother; 'Is she alright?'. He told the listening policeman that he hadn't meant her any harm. It was she who had been his first victim, the personification of his own desperate predicament. Second had been a woman that he had tried to rape. He failed in his attempt. An attempt at heterosexuality which was a grotesque symbol of his desire to be a proper man. From then on 'the enemy was everywhere.
Anyone who is interested in serial killing, a current and popular fascination, will be aware of the significance of the mother in the men who do the killing and cutting up. Contemporary horror acts out a masculine identity crisis in which the body of the mother is a monstrous maw, threatening to envelop and swallow men into a state of non-differentiation and non-identity, in other words to a return to that infant-mother relationship before the Oedipus Complex, when there was only a fragile distinction between self and other. Perhaps this begins to explain why male identity crises in times of social change are acted out in the literal or metaphoric cutting up of women's bodies.
Writing in MAS publications has tended to overevaluate the role of the father in the making of masculine identities. In this, MAS has been part of a wider social redefinition of fatherhood which has sought to re-establish a paternal authority and presence within the family, albeit different to previous historical models. It has, in this respect, remained within the cultural logic of patriarchal relations. But where MAS broke with this logic was in the recognition, by a small but growing number of men, of the significance of the mother in the making of masculine identities. The idea that the psychodynamics of masculinity is determined by the figure of the father is reversed by arguing that he is a defensive figure, protecting masculinity from the threat of the mother and her symbolic equivalents. The silence that has surrounded her presence has maintained the myth that the male subject is ontologically for himself and his masculinity is derived from his own being and authority. What the psychotherapeutic practices of small groups within MAS revealed was that the beginning of men's sense of who they were began with women, with the mother. And that this is a profound influence upon the making of masculinities.
Jonathan Rutherford is the author of 'Men's Silences, Predicaments in Masculinity', [to be] published by Routledge in 1992.
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