I was walking my ever faithful hag, Lynn, to her apartment on my way to see that piece of crap the Wachowski brothers took and labeled The Matrix: Revolutions Wednesday night when we spotted the BU Masturbator. Hopefully, you know who I’m talking about he’s the guy who sits in a silver car with porn on his steering wheel and his hands on his bishop and two rooks. He waits engine running, windows down and dashboard lights on for young women to walk by on the Beacon Street or St. Mary’s Street bridges.
As we were walking by, I became overwhelmed with rage, painted in anger. I grabbed Lynn’s elbow and rushed her forward. I just kept walking, staring straight ahead for fear that if I looked back, I’d walk up to his car and beat him senseless. I don’t know what came over me. His more than appalling act sparked this aggression in me that my normally tame male instincts didn’t recognize. I wanted to kill him for violating my best friend that way. This girl with me. Every girl that ever saw this bastard.
This isn’t some I’m-a-tame-guy-who-bugs-out-when-I-get-angry story. Fear not. I’m not some Incredible Hulk (damn you, Ang Lee for ruining that movie, too!) that breaks free of social norms to deliver justice. Still, what happened forced me to think about this apparent side of my personality.
Was this reaction normal? Acceptable? Instinctual? Bad? Alarming? Human? Or was it masculine? If the latter is correct, did I become the traditional, protective man in my relationship with Lynn? While I have no doubt that Lynn can protect herself in a variety of ways, I looked at her for those eternal 15 seconds as a woman who needed a man to walk her home. I think that women are just as strong and capable as men to protect themselves, but why did I snap like that?
In my Women’s Studies class, we discuss breaking these sexual stereotypes, and I almost felt I don’t know shameful for the way I reacted to this guy. I instinctually behaved in a way I never thought I could, would or should behave.
But then I went to Take Back the Night on Thursday and witnessed women (and men) speaking about how what they did or didn’t do that ‘one day’ shaped the course of their lives. How one moment changed the way they look at men forever. I saw the ways these women were changed by the actions of one man in a fleeting speck of time, altering their being and violating their bodies, and I inherited their anger. I soaked up their rage and made it my own.
In a world where Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters pound women’s strength into our heads where ‘Sex and the City’ pounds women’s freedom into our heads where is there room for a man’s instincts? In no way did I believe that ‘I should have been there’ line when I was standing at Marsh Chapel hearing these women’s stories, but I realized I was just as violated by the BU Masturbator. That violation turned to anger in what I’ve always interpreted as an improper reaction.
You may laugh, but I’ve always agreed with the Tim Allen ‘Home Improvement’ model of a modern man. He spent his life with a very strong woman, maintained his masculinity, but still shattered the rigid standards of a stereotypical male hunter.
Take a break to laugh and get back to me.
OK. That’s cheesy as all hell, but you get my point, nevertheless. I still believe in this model, as there is still room for masculinity in our increasingly ambiguous society, just as there is still room (maybe even pressure) for femininity. I didn’t wig out last Wednesday night in an attempt to prove the size of my masculine member, nor did I do it to save the lady next to me. This rather tame homosexual did it to protect the strong, female best friend at his side.
The class, Take Back the Night and this event have not shaped me into a man-hater. I’m no feminist, by normal definitions. I simply do not feel that protecting the people around you is a bad thing. If anything, these feelings and events make me accept my masculinity, accept my manhood (in that non-BU masturbator kind of way) and admit that part of my gender.
At any rate, I discovered that what I was looking for in taking a women’s studies class was not to learn more about the ways of the woman, but to study the ways of the man. This man. Me. I think it’s important that men take a class like that, as it has forced me to sort out the stereotypes of what men are supposed to be in today’s world and take from it what I could. While I learned I shouldn’t walk down the Beacon Street bridge at night, I also learned that my penis isn’t such a bad thing and neither is following my instincts.
Brad Jones, a junior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. His email address is somaobi@msn.com.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
