‘Masculinity’ can be sweet and generous, too
Toxic men exist, but don’t blame all of manhood
It never occurred to me that traditional masculinity could be harmful, as the American Psychological Association recently proclaimed, or toxic, as movements such as #MeToo and ads like the controversial Gillette commercial released this week suggest.
The commercial shows two sorts of boys and men — those behaving badly (by bullying, resorting to physical violence and sexist behaviour) and those behaving well (by intervening, by being gentle, by calling out other men).
It’s the latter category I suppose I know, and it’s why I like the commercial so much: It shows how the men I know always have behaved, which is why I love them, I guess.
Psychiatry, or much of it anyway, basically says we are all creatures of our childhood; in other words, of our parent or parents and our upbringing.
Well, my late father was of course many things, but what he was mostly was a preposterously gentle man.
He was truly of his generation, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” in that he subsumed his personal needs pretty much his whole life for those of family, friends, country. He’d disagree with that description, of course, because it never felt like sacrifice to him and he had tremendous capacity for joy.
He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served as a navigator in the Second World War, though he was well past the age when he would have been expected to sign up when the war broke out.
Thus his nickname among his crew and comrades — “Father.”
By the time he returned to Canada from overseas, a stranger, my brother was already a toddler, and burst into tears at the sight of him, briefly breaking his heart. But they must have persevered, because my brother grew up to be in all the important ways the sort of man our father was.
He returned to the company, the now long-defunct T. Eaton Co., where he’d worked before the war.
In the old-school quid pro quo way of those days, Eaton’s had held a job for him, as promised (if indeed the new job was in a then-pretty remote mining town in northwestern Quebec), and as promised, without complaint, my father gladly took it and with his little family, moved north.
He loathed the job — it was selling fridges and stoves — but stayed at it long enough to repay what he saw as his debt to Eaton’s. Then he found the job he was meant to do, running the town hockey rink.
I came along somewhere in between those jobs, and he was a stellar father — always engaged and paying attention and always supportive (though thank God that word wasn’t invented then) of whatever I did. I never doubted that he loved me insanely.
Disciplining children was left, in those days, to the father, and my dad was absolutely horrible at it.
He’d get home from work, my mother would fill him in on whatever misdeeds I’d committed that day, and my dad would attempt to paste a stern look on his face, as I would try to adopt a look of contrition. But we were incapable of maintaining the façade and my rare spankings invariably ended in us giggling together.
In later years, all he had to do was say he was disappointed in me, and I felt like my heart had been pierced.
As a rink manager, both in the town where I was born and after we’d moved to Toronto, he always had a small staff.
To my knowledge, in his whole working life, he had to fire only one person.
Among many other sins, as I remember it, this fellow had stolen from the rink; there was proof. My dad recognized he had to go; the rest of the staff were all but begging him to do it. Yet it took him weeks to summon the stomach. It gnawed at him before and after. He simply couldn’t bear inflicting pain on someone else.
I often wonder what he would think of the modern cost-cutter, who chops jobs by the dozens or hundreds, with what looks like ease.
Once, when I was a teenager and our puppy had been spayed and a botched job it was, we lay on the cold linoleum in the kitchen with her that whole night, my dad on one side and me on the other. We rushed her back to the vet the next morning, but she couldn’t be saved.
And one time at the Toronto rink, when the annual skating carnival was on and the joint was in darkness, the little kids sparkling and twirling in their costumes on the ice, I caught him at the end boards, weeping at the beauty of it all.
He was such a sap, with such a tender heart.
He was in a world war. He loved my mother unreservedly. He played football as a young man and later coached my brother (and the infamous blind backfield) in that game and me swimming. He worked mostly with men and loved their company and practically lived at those hockey rinks. He taught me how to swear (here, I believe I exceeded all expectations) but more important, and how weird is this, he taught me what it is to be a good man.
My male friends, my former husbands, so many of the men I know are much like him. There may be individually toxic men, as there are toxic women, but traditional masculinity is quite glorious.