What Men Are And Who They Are
A man would arrive for what was, in every practical sense, an erotic encounter—he had made the booking, he understood the nature of the work, there was no ambiguity about what was offered—and what he turned out to need, at least as urgently as anything else, was to be held.
Not massaged, not brought to release, but simply to have another man’s hands in sustained, unhurried contact with his body. Several men sighed during this, which I mention not as pathos but as evidence. They were not sad, or they did not say they were sad. They were, as one man put it with some effort, relieved.
What I concluded, without certainty, was that these men had not been touched—in any sustained, non-functional, non-sexual way—for a period long enough that the simple fact of being touched had become significant in itself. Not because they were isolated or friendless. Several of them had full social lives, partnerships in some cases, families. The touch that was absent was not the touch of sex and not the incidental touch of ordinary social proximity. It was something else: the touch of deliberate, unhurried physical attention from one person to another, with no specific purpose beyond the attention itself.
I do not know what to call this precisely. Platonic intimacy is the phrase that comes to mind, though the word platonic has been drained of content by overuse and tends now to mean simply “not sexual” rather than the more specific thing I am trying to indicate. What I mean is the physical closeness between men that is neither sex nor its antechamber, that does not require attraction or desire or the management of either, that is simply the bodily presence of one person with another in a way that acknowledges the body as present rather than incidental. What the room had that those men were not finding elsewhere was this.
I have read that the documentary record of male physical intimacy in earlier centuries looks quite different from what is ordinary now. Photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century show men in postures of physical closeness—arms around each other, hands held, heads together—that would, in contemporary Anglophone culture, immediately produce a reading of sexual relationship rather than friendship. I am told, by people who study these things, that the men in those photographs were almost certainly not in sexual relationships with each other. They were simply in friendships in which physical closeness was unremarkable. Something changed. What changed is connected to what I have been tracing throughout these essays—the gradual construction of a boundary between male physical contact and male sexual contact that became, over the twentieth century, so charged that the former became difficult to maintain independently of the latter.
The word homosocial is useful here, or would be useful if it were not constantly being confused with homosexual. Homosocial simply means of or between men—the social world of male company, male friendship, male solidarity. Homosocial space is not inherently sexual. It is simply male. But in a culture that has become acutely sensitised to the possibility that male physical closeness might be sexual, homosocial space becomes difficult to inhabit without the question arising. And once the question arises, the physical closeness tends to diminish, because the question is uncomfortable and the diminishment removes it.
What I noticed in the room was the consequence of this, accumulated over years. Men whose bodies had not been non-sexually touched, in any deliberate and sustained way, for a very long time. Men who had, in their social lives, the company of other men—in sport, in work, in the various rituals of male friendship—but who had not, in those contexts, been physically present with another man in the way I have been describing. The bro-culture that seems to have arisen as a kind of compensation for this—the elaborated rituals of male bonding through sport and drinking and physical play—often involves considerable physical contact, but of a specific and bounded kind: the tackle, the embrace after a goal, the shoulder contact that is always brief and always legible as something other than tenderness. These contacts are permitted precisely because they occur in a context that forecloses the question. They are not intimacy in the sense I mean. They are the permission structure for physical contact in a world where the permission structure has otherwise contracted.
I encountered this, occasionally, in the specific form of heterosexual men who had gay men as friends and who found the friendship, as they sometimes put it, complicated by bodies. Not by sex—the friendship was not sexual and neither man wanted it to be. But by the awareness that the friendship involved two men whose relationships to male bodies were different, and that this difference was never quite off the table, or rather was always on the table and never being discussed. Several men told me about friendships of this kind. What I noticed in their accounts was a particular kind of tension that was not quite discomfort and not quite desire but something between them—an awareness of the body that the friendship could not accommodate without changing its nature in ways that neither party seemed to want.
I notice I am speculating beyond what I can establish from conversations. What I can say is that the men who described these friendships consistently used the language of limitation. Something was possible but something else wasn’t. A particular kind of closeness was available and a different kind was not. The line was never explicitly drawn. It operated as a convention that both parties maintained without naming.
Into this landscape, in the past decade or so, has arrived what calls itself body positivity. I want to be careful here, because the thing being promoted under this name is not always the same thing, and some of what it does is straightforwardly useful. The challenge to the narrowed visual vocabulary—the insistence that the range of bodies that appear in images should be wider, that ordinary bodies should be visible rather than hidden—this seems to me to point at something real. I have written about the narrowing of the archive, about the disappearance of the ordinary body from the images that surround men as they form their sense of what bodies are. Something that pushed against that narrowing would address an actual problem.
What interested me was that even the challenge to body shame seemed quickly to become another way of talking about bodies rather than meeting the men who inhabited them. The challenge to the ideal has been monetised by the same apparatus that produced the ideal. The products that profit from shame have been joined by products that profit from the challenge to shame: the supplement, the programme, the content creator, the wellness platform, the brand that has positioned itself on the right side of a discourse it helped to generate.
This is not cynicism exactly. Markets respond to what is present in the culture and generate products around it, and the presence of shame in the culture around bodies is real and the market response to it is predictable. What I notice is that the monetisation of the challenge to shame is not quite the same as the elimination of shame. It is the incorporation of the challenge into the system that produced the problem, which tends to domesticate the challenge without addressing the system.
The misinformation that has accumulated around male bodies in the past decade or so is harder to describe precisely because it is diffuse and takes many forms. What I have observed, reading what is available online and in popular culture about how men are supposed to look and behave, is a proliferation of confident assertion where confident assertion is not warranted.
The pop psychology that tells men what their body image issues mean and where they came from and what to do about them circulates with a confidence and a reach that the actual evidence does not support. This is not to say the evidence is absent—there is genuine research on male body image, some of it careful and useful. It is to say that the careful and useful research is not what reaches most men. What reaches most men is the algorithmic recommendation of content that has been selected for engagement rather than accuracy, and engagement tends to favour the confident assertion over the careful qualification.
I find myself in an odd position relative to all of this. I spent thirty years with bodies in a room, and what I observed there was specific and concrete and not always consistent with the confident assertions I encounter in the wider discourse. The men I worked with were not a representative sample of anything, and I have said this from the beginning. But they were real men, with real bodies, in real encounters, and the reality of those encounters was considerably more complicated, more various, and more interesting than any of the frameworks that have been applied to it, whether by shame or by the challenge to shame, whether by the narrowed ideal or by the positivity that arose to counter it.
What I keep returning to is the distinction I began this essay with: what men are and who they are. The body is what a man is, in one sense—it is the physical fact, the particular arrangement of weight and skin and muscle and breath that constitutes his presence in the world. But who a man is runs through that physical fact and beyond it, in ways that the body alone cannot contain and that the image of the body cannot represent.
The men who sighed in that room because they had been touched—they were not responding to what their body was. They were responding to something about who they were that the touch had briefly reached. The thing that was reached was not visible in the body. It was somewhere in the person who had been living in the body, waiting, without necessarily knowing it was waiting, for someone to make unhurried, sustained contact with the physical fact and find, through that contact, the person whose life was being lived through that body.
That is what I understood the work to be for. Not the relief—though the relief was real and I do not diminish it. The contact. The particular kind of contact that says: I am attending to this body as the body of a person, and the person is more interesting to me than the body’s conformity to any standard, and the attention I am bringing to this body will not be withdrawn because the body does not meet the standard.
That was the offer. Most of the men who came accepted it, in the end, once they had established that the offer was genuine. Some of them had not had a comparable offer for a very long time. In some cases I was not certain they had ever had one.
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