My Man Card

So a friend of mine works as a secretary for a few weeks every summer for an office of nuclear engineers and scientists. One of her jobs is to take care of catering/food for office snacks, meeting appetizers, and lunch meals. I came across this facebook post this week, and laughed in light of our focus on gender theory and Winterson's Written on the Body. The idea that a guy might lose his "man card" or manhood because he is eating fresh fruit (instead of a hearty steak and baked potato??) is kind of laughable.

It seems that one of the ways that man's gender is constituted is through a set of rules pertaining to food. Ideas exist that men should not care about the calories or fat content of their food; we should eat big, hearty meals, salads are for chicks, meat should make up a majority of our meals, and (apparently) fruit is not manly. Over and above the food expectations, there is also a conceptual identification of what it is to be a man, the "man card," and breaking the conventions of manliness can get one temporarily banished from the club or brotherhood of man. These cultural expectations are so ingrained that a very common joke about losing your "manhood," acknowledges that there are rules, and an exclusive club, to which mainstream men belong, and that one can be ostracized or expelled from this group if the rules are broken. Your man license can be revoked.

Judith Butler cites Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and writes, "the surface, the skin, is systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed the boundaries of the body become . . . the limits of the social per se" (167). The male body, seen historically as a more pure than a female body because it is not penetrated (in heterosexual relationships) and because it does not leak (menstruate), can become "contaminated" or "polluted," according to Douglas. Douglas writes that there are "pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself and which punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate" (qtd. in Butler 167). Others have noted that AIDS was seen by culture as the pollution resulting from a "boundary-tresspass that is homosexuality"; the male body which is not supposed to be penetrated and so was seemingly punished with the "gay disease" (Butler 168).

In the example above a male gets mocked by a woman for contaminating his body with a food that doesn't fit the hearty meals of the man stereotype. He is polluting himself and being punished by a woman who is perpetuating the binary man/woman constructs of gender. My friend recognizes this, and so does the commenter who sees that woman as "reinforcing [women's] second class citizenship." It is interesting that the male commenter unabashedly notes that he lost his man card long ago and voluntarily removed himself from the club. I think that American culture has given women more stringent rules regarding their beauty, but--as has been said in class--maybe men have stricter guidelines regarding what it is to "be a man" or hold a respectable place among those of his gender.

I feel some of that pressure every time I have car trouble and can't fix it, or find a household handy man problem I can't repair, or find myself ignorant of a sport that others have been watching with interest. Interestingly enough, one area where I find that I do not feel the pressure of normalized male gender is in eating healthy food in order to stay fit. Which means that I am ultimately as baffled about the comment above as my friend who posted about it on facebook.