Man or Mouse

Are you a Man? Or are you a Mouse?

The year is 1986. I’m a senior in high school. At one point during this seminal year of my life, one of my friends — can’t remember who — caught the gambling bug and came up with the idea of having a poker night at his parents’ house. I’d played a little poker before with my family. As we got older, it became a Christmas Eve tradition for us, believe it or not. Gather around the table, deal some cards, and play a little 31 (not poker, but simple for kids) or 5 card draw while we waited for Baby Jesus to arrive. Nickel or dime ante, nothing crazy. Just good, old fashioned, holy family fun.

Well, it only took one poker night for my high school friends and I to get hooked. We enjoyed ourselves so much that first night that it became a regular thing. We’d pick a weekend most of us were available, and the person whose parents were away, or who had parents “cool” enough to let this nonsense happen while they were home, would serve as the host. There were snacks. There was beer. And it was always on a weekend, because my friends and I were either nerds, athletes, or nerd-athletes, a hybrid of Anthony Michael Hall’s and Emilio Estevez’s characters in The Breakfast Club, without Brian’s suicidal anxiety, or Andrew’s douchieness and sculpted physique. We had grades and sports to worry about, so weekends only. Oh, and it was always just us guys. No girls allowed.

What could possibly have made this fun for a bunch of high school guys without girls present, you may ask? It wasn’t the beer or getting shitfaced. Some of us (me) were allowed to drink at home if we wanted, as long as we weren’t going anywhere and didn’t overdo it, so drinking was not a big deal like it was for the elite members of the beautiful-sexy-not-in-honors-classes-but-physically-attractive-social-ninjas-who-held-court-in-the-coolest-most-popular-most-unattainable-clique in my high school, i.e., The Claire Standish Clique. The kids at the cool table during lunch. The studs with game. The girls we fantasized about. Apparently THEY couldn’t drink at home because having parties and getting trashed (and then bragging about it) were a core activity for them.

Anywho, for us, the nerdy athlete virgins who gathered in our Hobbit holes to gamble, drinking wasn’t the draw. We usually only reached a max of low-grade buzz intensity anyway, which was good for shit-talking, but not a goal in itself. Since we were all competitive bastards, we were slightly more compelled by the thrill of gambling with (against) each other. To a bunch of underemployed high schoolers, losing $20 felt like losing $2000. Having your balls clench at the risk of losing a measly 20 bucks is utterly ridiculous looking back, but it was a real fear then, not gonna lie. At $7.50 an hour, twenty dollars was almost three hours of stocking scallions, oranges, and turnips at my grocery store job!

The gambling was exciting, but what really got our motors running was the brutal, ceaseless, and funny-as-fuck, embryonic male machismo shit-talking, which didn’t stop the entire night. The verbal grenades. The ego-busting hamstring shivs about one’s virginity, penis size, athletic ability or lack thereof, grades, looks, ethnic background, height or lack thereof (in my case), piece of shit car, parents, parents’ house, parents’ decor, and basically any personal, sensitive Achilles heel that anyone could expose and exploit. If a modern day psychologist were to deconstruct a converted VHS video of a single night of our verbal assaults from 33 years ago, they would see us probing each other’s defenses with small, relatively harmless jabs at the beginning of the night, with the targets carefully trying to parry the barbs with dismissive retorts while trying to push the spotlight on someone else. By the end of the night, little jabs turned into boozy, exaggerated haymakers that either missed their mark entirely, or hit someone square on the chin, totally pissing them off, and leading to a temporary escalation in words before everyone calmed the fuck down and bro’d it out.

For the most part, everyone gave as good as they got, and no one got picked on for more than a few minutes at a time. We were all FRIENDS after all. Still, this testosterone carousel wasn’t for the thin-skinned. It was literally a Comedy Central roast every time we got together. You learned to prepare mentally, get that social armor on before you showed up. You learned to take a lot of shit, to laugh at yourself, to pivot and distract. You learned how to counterattack when you’d had enough and it was time to decapitate a Big Mouth with your linguistic Hattori Hanzo.

Not long after we started playing poker — I believe it was at the tail end of the first night we met up — someone introduced a new, deceptively simple, and incredibly addictive game called “Man or Mouse.” After a few hands of this quintessential test of the male ego, we never played poker again.

The rules of Man or Mouse were simple:

• You could play with either two or three dealt cards. We typically played with three: two cards down, and one card showing to everyone else.

• There were no flushes or straights. It was all high card, pairs, or three of a kind.

• You got what you got. You couldn’t change cards.

• After the dealer, everyone went around the table in order and had to declare whether they were a “Man,” in which case they stayed “in” and had a chance to win the pot, or a “Mouse,” in which case they folded and lost their ante and a chance to win the pot.

• Every “Man” had to show their cards. The winner took the pot. The loser(s) had to double the pot. The pot was limitless unless we put a cap on it. When it got up to $25-$30, we usually capped it.

• If everyone “Moused,” the pot went back to a quarter ante, which totally sucked, especially after a huge pot. Total deflation.

What made this game so great (at least to us) was the enormous cajoling and peer pressure involved in trying to get at least 2 people to “Man” to keep the pot growing. Having the pot double as much as possible was everything in this game. Again, winning $20 felt like winning the lottery to us. Trying to get two idiots to “Man” without putting yourself at risk of doubling it yourself was an art form. It was positively Rasputinian. Toxic male persuasion at its finest. The type of back-and-forth negotiation and bullshitting you’d see at a Pakistani rug bazaar, a hot, stinking, verbal steamroll. And it usually worked, especially on the weak-minded. We all knew who they were. If you were buzzed enough, or if you showed any sign of weakness or wavering when it was your turn to Man or Mouse, the table was on you like a bunch of angry sand flies. Even for the most stubborn and strong-willed among us, it was REALLY hard to withstand the mass male ego/peer pressure onslaught:

Be a Man! Don’t fold, you fucking loser! There’s only $5.00 in the pot – you don’t have $10 fucking dollars? Jesus Christ. He only has a 7 showing! Come on! Be a fucking MAN, you pussy!

Yes, words like “pussy” (and worse) were used. A “pussy” is the worst thing you could be. No one wanted to be a pussy. But it didn’t matter what you did. You were screwed either way. If you Manned It Up (what we called it when we Manned) and lost and had to double the pot, you were humiliated and pissed off the rest of the night for being mentally weak and listening to a bunch of assholes.

If you Moused and God forbid, whoever took the pot had a WORSE hand than you, the humiliation was waaay worse. You were anointed a eunuch. A cuck. Sans testicles. Unworthy of procreation. A fucking idiot. A PUSSY.

Still we played Man or Mouse, over and over and over again, and we mostly loved it. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s safe to say that I have rarely felt that type of male bravado, machismo, ego overload, whatever you want to call it, in one place. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed the shit-talking, but it’s possible time has sanded down the edges of my memory. What I do remember is that tight feeling in my gut when I had to decide whether to be A Man, or A Mouse. The looks on my friends’ faces. The chants:

Be a Man!

Be a Man!

Be a MAN!

Be a Man. Even in the Year of Our Lord 2020, men still hear this phrase at some point in their life. A declaratory challenge, nay, a demand, to spur the genesis of testicular fortitude, a spontaneous generation of two balls composed of any one of the heavy metals: iron, cobalt, zinc, lead. Or, for you young guys, something more modern: Uranium balls. Kevlar balls. Titanium balls. What’s that substance they have in Wakanda? Vibranium.

(Sidenote: I’d love to be rocking a pair of shiny vibranium balls – how great would that be? I’d probably need to wear stronger underwear though. Definitely something in the spandex family, with a 4-way stretch. Either that or I’d have to get Black Panther to create a lightweight, easy traveling pair of vibranium balls. Then again, what would happen at a TSA checkpoint when I have to get on a plane? How would I explain it? Would they let me fly? Something to think about.)

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah.

Be a Man!

Maybe you heard it from your soccer coach when you twisted your ankle on a slide tackle and squeezed out a few tears. Maybe it was ingrained in you by your father or mother. Maybe your girlfriend said it when you couldn’t figure out how to do a non-controversial breakup. Or alternatively, when she dumped your ass when you weren’t expecting it, and left you crying a puddle on the floor. Or… when she CHEATED on you (gasp!).

If you think this Be a Man expectation has changed in our modern era, I have news for you: I have heard professional women, women I’m friends with and respect, my Ex, ex-girlfriends, strong women, my mother, my sisters, even vocal, proud feminists, refer to their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends along the following lines: “He’s not a man. He needs to be a fucking man. He needed to man the hell up. I married a boy, not a man.” And if they weren’t saying it to me, they sure as fuck are saying it to their female friends. I feel this deep in my bones.

Every time this happens, my antennae go up. I think: Wow, it’s still there. This traditional notion of manhood, of masculinity, of being A Man. It’s not dead. Even today.

If you’re a man who is ever unlucky enough to hear this phrase directed at you, it’s an emasculating insult. Indeed, fewer insults carry more megatonnage to a man than for a woman he cares about to suggest/declare that he is not “A Man.” Because those three words allege in very clear terms that the male to whom they are directed, currently, at that moment in time when the words are being uttered, is NOT A Man. They further assert that some type of internal emotional/physical process needs to take place in order to transform the target of this accusation from his current Non-Man status into A Man. There’s no guarantee he’ll ever get there. In fact, the older and more set in his ways the recipient of this insult is, the less likely it is that he will ever become A Man. It’s a known fact that, as with most things, the potential for evolution into Manhood declines with age.

And yet, the utterer of the phrase, the Declarant of the absence of manhood, sees himself or herself as a helpful catalyst of this male conversion process. They are letting the male target know that he is still a pupa, a prepubescent boy whose balls have yet to descend, an emotionally unintelligent jackass. They believe that it’s a public service to inform this insufficient male that he needs to change, evolve, and grow into A Man. It’s an invitation to personal growth, they believe. Or maybe they’re just really pissed off because of something the guy did, and they want to cut his balls off with their words.

I’ll go with Door Number 2, Monty.

So let’s ask: What does it mean to be A Man in 2020? Ask 5 people and you’ll get 5 different answers. Boys and teenagers acquire and develop their notions of manhood from any number of sources: fathers, mothers, siblings, friends, the small screen, the Big Screen. We collect these ideas of what men are supposed to be from mentors and male role models whom we respect, or secretly wish we were like, and the strong, idealistic, leather-faced, rough-edged, heroic characters we see on television or in the movies: Steve McQueen driving that kick-ass Ford Mustang in Bullitt. Clint Eastwood taking no shit in the Dirty Harry movies. Roy Scheider facing down a Great White in Jaws. John Travolta dancing on cars and a rainbow dance floor in Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Harrison Ford’s comical bravado in Star Wars.

I’m dating myself here, but these Hollywood characters were some of my childhood male role models. But Hollywood is fantasy. An occasional foray into what we imagine we can be like if there were no limits. In reality, boys acquire most of their ideas about manhood from their fathers and through their daily relationships and interactions with other men and boys, i.e., their male friends, frenemies, and rivals growing up. I know I did. My biggest male role models were my father, of course, my Uncle Saverio (more about him later — there’s so much material there, he needs his own entry), and most of all, my male friends and enemies.

In a major sense, boyhood and manhood is about survival; learning to fit in, not being the odd one out, assimilating. Almost every boy gets teased by other boys at some point, even bullied. The only way to survive this brutal process is to look around, get the lay of the land, find male allies where one can, and most importantly, learn to shield and hide one’s weaknesses and develop one’s strengths. The only thing most boys want the world to see, especially their male friends and rivals, ARE their strengths. Weaknesses are supposed to be hidden and buried. Exposing them is social suicide.

Let me get this out here now: I hate the phrase “toxic masculinity.” I fucking hate all simplistic phrases like that, actually. Not because masculinity, like femininity, isn’t sometimes toxic, but because catchphrases like this often become lazy, rhetorical weapons that “woke” people (another word I hate) use to attack, pigeon-hole, and categorize people or behavior they don’t like. If people truly want to understand where today’s men come from, how they became who and what they are, how misogynists and egomaniacs and narcissists are born, they need to put down the linguistic cudgels and self-righteousness and take an honest, non-judgmental look at how boys are being raised, and the daily messages, mixed signals, and misguided advice and modeling boys, teenagers, and men receive from the world starting at the age of 5. Let me tell you, it’s a confusing, chaotic, often tragic mess.

I can only speak from my own experience, but an article I recently read in The Atlantic (one of my all-time favorite magazines — highly recommended) described what boys deal with growing up really well and is what got me thinking about this entire subject:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/the-miseducation-of-the-american-boy/603046/

But where are we now? What is “A Man” today, in this age of gender equality awareness, two-income households, increasing parental parity, #MeToo, and the slow evaporation of traditional marital roles? What does it really mean to be A Man today? What are men expected to be? How much deprogramming needs to happen to address the “unhelpful” messaging, modeling, and social experiences indoctrinated into many (most) men their entire lives? How and when is this supposed to happen? And what should men be today in relation to women, children, the workplace and the world around them? Is there even an objective “should,” or is this just a hopeless/moot exercise?

Who the fuck knows? I’m still trying to figure it out myself. I don’t pretend to have the answers. If I’m speculating, I think men are having to adapt to a new social reality based on some of the things I listed above while still being expected to comply with, and adhere to, this stereotypical/traditional Hollywood/parental/societal idea of what men are supposed to be: strong (physically and mentally), competent problem-solvers, unfazed by shit hitting the fan, protective of those we care about, and most importantly, UNEMOTIONAL unless absolutely necessary. As cliche as that sounds, it’s still true (in my opinion) that real Men are not supposed to cry in front of people. At the very least, the permitted reasons for them doing so are reeaaaaalllly limited: the death of a family member, divorce, birth of a child, and having your favorite sports teams lose a playoff game. That’s pretty much it. Can you cry in front of people if you get fired or laid off? I’m not sure. That’s borderline I think. Men definitely can’t cry in public for the myriad reasons that women can.

Generally speaking, men still are not supposed to show weakness, especially in front of other men. If a man ever feels the waterworks coming on, he’s supposed to find the nearest room with a door, quietly close it when no one’s looking, and let all of his tears and emotional shit out alone, where no one can see him. Do not take that shit public.

“If tears fall in a dark room, and no one is around to hear them, do they make a sound?”

These are touchy subjects (which is why it took me so long to post this in the first place). This isn’t a gender thing, and I’m not trying to get people to feel sorry for men. Men can be animals. They are physically stronger than (non-trans) women, abuse women emotionally, physically, and mentally. Men rape and kill women. Men with money and/or power have been some of the most egregious abusers of women, and I am so goddamn happy that they are finally STARTING to pay a price for the things they’ve done. Thinking about Harvey Weinstein in Rikers and Bill Cosby rotting in prison for the rest of his life makes me smile. Thinking about Jeffrey Epstein getting murdered to protect all of the other powerful predators and pedophiles he knew about makes me angry. A big part of why I despise Donald Trump so much is that he is a serial abuser of women and a sociopath. I also believe he, a friend of, and partier with, Jeffrey Epstein, raped at least one underage girl during the 80s or 90s. Google “Donald Trump” and “Katie Johnson” and watch her deposition on YouTube if you can find it. It’s not easy. And he’s the President of the fucking United States!

I’m not talking about those men, the criminals who should be locked up for life. I’m talking about men in the generic sense. The non-sociopathic men and boys around all of us. Fathers, sons, cousins, uncles, friends, co-workers. The men they are, the men they will become, and the men we should be raising them to become.

People can disagree with me, but I believe the above stereotypes still hold true for men in 2020. People certainly are more tolerant of men showing emotion than they were in 1955, but it’s still not entirely accepted, and you sure as hell better not be showing public emotion with regularity. I should probably clarify what I mean by “emotion.” Tears, sadness, and depression are bad. Anger is still a totally acceptable emotion for men, to a fault. You just can’t take it to the level of domestic violence or worse.

I would go further and say that even in 2020, men still want to be perceived as strong, tough, confident, and carrying some amount of gravitas; someone who stands up to life’s beanballs and throws them back at the pitcher; someone who takes no shit and stands up for himself and people he cares about. And I don’t care how “woke” you are, how modern your gender sensibilities are, deep down in the reptilian part of their brains, men still want to be men, and on some level, whether they admit it or not, I believe that heterosexual women still want men to be Men too, just without the domestic abuse, stalking, roofies, sexual assault, rape, and murder.

The world still wants A Man. Not a Mouse.

This is the struggle for men today. Assuming new and evolving roles in a world of rapidly changing expectations. Balancing all of these social tensions and pressures, most of which are unconscious, while learning to respect girls and women in deeds and words, learning to make a place for them at the professional table and as PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (shout-out to Hillary and Liz!), recognizing our inherent gender bias, and calling out misogyny whenever we see it around us, ideally without using that word because it makes too many men defensive. For now, we should focus on correcting behaviors and emphasizing right and wrong, not using labels.

It’s not an easy balance, and I don’t think a lot of women understand how hard it is, or much care really, given how much shit they have to deal with just trying to protect themselves from men. Totally understandable, but it creates more distance and lack of understanding between genders.

But I submit that there’s one relatively easy way to bridge these two worlds and move this ball forward. Men can start making it their affirmative duty, a part of their definition of manhood, to protect girls and women from verbal and physical abuse by other men whenever they encounter it, whether girls and women are present or not.

What could be more Manly than that?