Moby Dick Backwards: Neandertals, Freak Dancing, and the Case for Cutting Off Hakim Bey's Balls

What does it mean to be male? That's the question I'm mainly going to talk about here. Specifically, I'd like to ask, is testosterone a poison?

It's no secret I have a bit of a Napoleonic complex because I'm 5'5" and weigh between 125 and 130 pounds. For years -- maybe even most of my life -- I've wished, off and on, that I could be more masculine than I am, or more masuline than I seem to be. I've also spent varying amounts of time and energy trying to become more masculine in my own eyes.

Since graduating in May, I've become somewhat more serious about the weightlifting routine that I have been doing, to some degree, since even before high school. This increased dedication has gotten slightly better focus after I got some workout pointers, first from my friend Izzy at Thanksgiving break, and then still more pointers from my friend Luke, who has been working out at a gym. I have combined this with cardio exercise: lots of bicycling in the summer, and more recently, skiing and some stationary-bike work.

I haven't bought protein supplements for a few months, but I've been trying to increase my protein intake and my overall food intake. This has coincided with my no longer eating at the college cafeteria, where I had been experimenting with vegetarianism while investigating Buddhism. Because I now get most of my meals from my parents, vegetarianism is not an option most of the time anymore. And frankly, I had decided that I would not bother with vegetarianism -- for better or worse -- even when not around my parents. This has been largely because of the following:

1. My increased need for protein

2. My parents' serious worry about my being malnourished -- for a while I hovered between 115 and 125 lbs. while at college, both before and after trying vegetarianism (I used to make an exeption the week before I was due to be able to give blood to the Red Cross again; I would eat beef and any other meat and take iron tablets for a whole week to bring up my iron for my red-blood-cell count, as I was borderline anemic);

3. The fact that I usually eat either a) with my parents or from my parents' fridge, or b) with my friends. My parents would NEVER let me be a vegetarian, and my friends -- mainly conservatives -- would just be annoyed at my not being able to eat where they want;

4. A bad personal history with regard to both animals rights and the consequences of following religious rules too closely. See, I've got Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and concern for animal rights once compelled me to do all sorts of crazy things in order to avoid killing insects. I only got over that when I actually forced myself to stop caring about animal rights. Also, I went through a Christian fundamentalist phase in high school that really freaked my parents out and ended up really annoying me myself. Third, when I was a young child, I had gone through an Obsessive-Compulsive "session" in which I thought God was threatening me with hell if I didn't do pointless OCD-type things to prove my faith. Because my vegetarianism was brought on pretty much entirely by my investigation of Buddhism, I was aware of my own history regarding these matters and didn't want to let them get out of hand. Thus, now that vegetarianism would be so difficult to follow, I cannot let myself get dragged into another compulsive schtick based on religion and animal rights.

5. The fact that I cannot avoid the suffering and/or death of both humans and non-humans (ie, my leather hiking boots; all my sweatshop clothes; bananas and sugar; my SUV I can't get rid of yet) making it seem

rather -- I don't know -- illogical to deny myself protein BECAUSE (AND THIS IS IMPORTANT):

6. The similarly illogical yet more closely obeyed feeling that failing to be masculine would mean failing to be moral, and that being veggie and cutting out protein would keep me from being masculine.

Failing to be masculine would be failing to be moral? I can't really explain it, but yes, that's how I felt. I could venture some partial and tenative explainations dealing with my medical deferment from the military and my admiration for both my father and my friends Ryan and Rob, but I can't say for sure that those are the whole story. The point is this: I know (or sometimes think I know) two things about myself. One is that I'm not very masculine. The other is that I'm not very moral. Deep down in my brain, I feel my wussiness and my immorality are linked. Largely this is connected to the ideal of self-sacrifice that I sense most viscerally when I think of men who are brave enough to die in wars.

Now, I know this not one-to-one, and I've kept in mind that I consider to extremely it immoral to be misogynistic or to think women could be inferior (I've often wondered if I have any misogynistic streak, both because I have few females friends and because I used to intensely dislike my sister growing up. I have struggled NOT to be misogynistic). I even think that self-sacrifice--even to the point of death as in war--may more properly be considered a feminine trait because of all that women sacrifice as mothers to their children.

In fact, I had come up with a theory that not only preserves the importance of both masculinity and femininity, but also contributed to making me want to be more masculine. The idea goes something like this:

There are character traits that our society wrongly or at least partly wrongly believe to be either masculine or feminine. Some of these stereotyped traits are virtues, and some are vices (in whatever objective morality there is, not in society). Some of these supposedly masculine traits are virtuous -- courage, the ability to get things done, tough love, maybe even "energy and drive". Some of these "manly" traits are bad -- aggression, lack of empathy, basically the last 4000 years. Likewise, some of the supposedly feminine traits are virtuous -- empathy, gentleness, nurturing, lack of aggression, being slower to anger, self-sacrifice (which men mainly shown in war), not committing the vast majority of murders and assaults. And some of the stereotypically feminine traits (according to men), whether or not any notable number of women exhibit them, are bad -- cowardice, excess prissiness, lack of know-how, and basically everything you saw in the movie Mean Girls.

Of course, it is not my concern here whether most people of either sex have the stereotypical traits for their sex without any for the opposite sex. And I most emphatically deny that women are cowards, because history has shown innumerable women being brave, and scientific studies have shown women take pain better than men; how many men go through anything as painful as childbirth on as often a basis? The point is, whatever the sex of the individuals to whom these traits attach, some are good traits and some are bad. Society -- rightly or wrongly -- says some of these are masculine and others feminine, but what a person of either sex trying to be moral should do is acquire as many of the virtues and and as few of the vices as possible, without regard to whether the virtues being acquired or the vices being renounced are stereotypically of the opposite sex. That is, we all should try to be brave, have savoir-faire, energetic, empathetic, kind, nurturing, forgiving, and slow to anger -- no matter what sex we are.

Anyway, I digress. The main point here is that I thought I needed to be more masculine because I thought I basically had all of the vices of both sexes without much in the way of the virtues of either; the worst of both worlds. See, I've always had a temper; although the only two times I tried to assault anyone happened in elementary school (and didn't hurt the intended victims either time), I do have a history (mainly before taking Paxil for OCD) of screaming, saying mean and stupid things, even crying, and sometimes hitting things like doors and walls when angry.So I thought becoming more masculine would solve my problem. That is, I used to.

I'd heard of the book Demonic Males, and I knew that so much of masculinity in our culture revolves around having the ability to hurt people physically, which of course makes you a bad Buddhist. Ever since I started learning about Buddhism maybe a year ago, I've wondered about the implications and interconnections of anger, violence, and the "masculine" cultural flotsam I like, especially my favorite heavy metal music. So the idea that testosterone might be a poison did not come upon me all at once, not really. Until recently, I'd comforted myself by thinking of my theory that masculinity and femininity both have virtues.

However, what really brought home to me that being masculine might not be a good thing was a novel -- Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer. It is a science fiction book --the third in a trilogy called The Neanderthal Parallax -- but a small portion of the book talks about what happens to one of the characters, a formerly very angry man who had raped two adult women; the man's testicles are removed as punishment for his rapes, and in this section, he looks online for information regarding the effects of castration. Here are some excerpts:

Sawyer, Robert J. 2003. Hybrids. New York: Tor Books (Tom Doherty Associates, LLC)

note: there are not quotation marks around the outside of the text, for reasons of clarity regarding quotes within quotes in the text. The text of the book is shown here in green. Gaps where I did not record the text are indicated by [...]; places where the text itself has elipsis dots are indicated as they are in the text, with: . . .
--------------------------------------------------------------
p. 87 -- He had spent years being livid over this.
[...]
Now, he was just angry: an anger that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, seemed to be under control.
[...]
The answer, apparently, was yes. As he continued searching the web, he found an article from the New Times in San Louis Obispo, interviewing Bruce Clotfelter, who had spent two decades jailed for child molestation before undergoing surgical castration. " 'It was like a miracle,' Clotfelter said. 'The next morning, I realized I had gone through the night

p. 88 -- without those horrible sexual dreams for the first time in years.' "
[...]
Some more spelunking took him to the Geocities page of a person born male who underwent castration, with no hormonal treatments before or for years after. He reported: "Four days after my castration . . . it seemed that waiting for traffic lights and other little annoyances did not bother me so much . . .
"Six days post castration I retured to work. This workday was unusually hectic . . . and yet I still felt so calm when the day was all over. I was definitely feeling the effects of castration and most certainly felt better all the time without testosterone.
"Ten days post castration I felt as a feather floating around everywhere. I just kept feeling better and better. For me the serenity was the strongest of the castration effects, followed by the decrease in libido."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought about my own lifelong struggle with my temper. I had recently lost my temper, in a sense, on the

e-mail listserv for the Ohio Working Group on Latin America (OWGLA), in an argument about whether the other listserv members' support for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is justified (I said no). In the course of my e-mail communications on Chavez with the listserv, I used some cuss words. I don't remember anything besides "damn" in one of my earlier e-mails -- ironically, however, the big commotion came after I had calmed down somewhat, but still wanted to make a point.

I had signed off on a calmer, slightly apologetic later post with a farewell I thought was tongue-in-cheek and which I believed would convey the residue of anger I still had, as well as reminding the old hippies that we don't have to be so boringly unexcited even when we're pacificistic. Instead of "sincerely," I ended the e-mail with "Namas-fucking-te", a play on the traditional hippie salute of Namaste, taken from India. A few of the other listserv members chastized me for cussing, and one of them told me about how Martin Sheen, the liberal activist Catholic and movie star, carried a rosary he used whenever he cussed. I more-or-less told them that if we couldn't cuss, we weren't much different than the fundamentalists. I realized now that this was majorly stretching it, but nothing makes me more angry than being told not to be angry, especially by a bunch of hippies who are trying to essentially shout down my argument by telling me to lower my voice. That kind of languid schtick gives pacifism a bad name, I had thought. Then, after more e-mail exchanges, I was told that the OWGLA listserv just isn't the venue for cussing, not that cussing is wrong. This made me feel calmer, and I apologized (I hope I did a better job than at first time).

Anyway, the OWGLA argument happened over a couple days around the time I was reading Hybrids. I thought about my temper. Suddenly the lesson of Demonic Males was brought home to me. Now I wondered, is testoterone a poison? I used to think I wasn't masculine enough, and pretty much only thing to put a break to this feeling was the metaphorical idea of Buddha and Gandhi tsk-tsk-ing about my death metal CDs. After reading Hybrids, though, I had an even stronger sense I was too masculine.

Maybe discouraging all anger and cussing is only languid and weak if you look at it with the ideal of masculine "hardness". Adjectives of limpness and weakness came to mind when I was stewing over the OWGLA folks telling me not to get angry--actually, I thought I understood Nietzsche's complaints against "priestly morality." Maybe if I was a woman, the idea of never being angry wouldn't bore me.

I may be a failure as a man where it counts to be a man, but I'm still just enough of a man to have all the faults that go along with balls. I later read on Wikipedia that some sexual predators have still committed such crimes after removal of their testicles, but that's all I know for now, and Wikipedia's not always right.

Okay, backtrack. A few days before reading the above section of Hybrids, I had just read an interesting article on the web titled "Religion and Revolution", by a man named Peter Lamborn Wilson, writing under the pen name Hakim Bey. I thought this article was inspiring. For a couple of days I wanted to find out more about Hakim Bey on the web, but didn't get the chance. Then I read the Hybrids excerpt above, which was sort of a downer. Finally I got the chance to look up more on Bey/Wilson. I hoped that some of what he would have to say might cheer me up and give me hope despite feeling that I was dirty and sinful for being male.

Well. I found out Bey is a goddamn pedophile. I haven't found any info on whether he's ever been accused of molesting a specific child, but in his writings, he does sometimes try to defend pedophilia, and other writings of his describe children in erotic terms. Just for the record, I REALLY do NOT like that shit at all in any way. I want to make it as clear as possible that I deeply and totally hate anything related to hurting children.

Needless to say, now I was really pissed off. I still don't know what to do about being male. In the days since these events first happened and I started writing this, I've more or less come out of my funk, like I always do. I get in a bad mood over some abstract philosophical problem for a day or too, and then I explain it away or stop thinking about it. That's basically what I've done now; I've lately been telling myself that my original theory about masculinity and femininity both having necessary virtues is good enough for now.

However, I should mention that the blame against testosterone for aggression is at least partly justified, as can be seen in this excerpt from the Medical Science Monitor article:

------------------------
Testosterone is a determinant for the onset of aggressive behavior
in animals and in man. This assertion, drawn from
empirical observations, has been confi rmed by several experimental
studies performed in animals and man. Testosterone
receptors in the CNS are located above all in neurons belonging
to the hypothalamic nucleus, which is involved in
aggressive behavior. After testosterone links to its receptor
it is aromatized into estrogens within the neurons. The estrogens
determine the increase in aggressiveness in animals.
In order to show aggressive behavior in adult age, the presence
of adequate testosterone quantities in the fetal period
in primates and in the prenatal period in other animals is
essential; the aromatization of testosterone into estrogens
in this period of life steers the brain in a masculine direction,
not only from an endocrinological, but also a behavioral
point of view. The effect of testosterone is correlated
with the infl uence that it exerts on some neurotransmitters
and neuromodulator levels, as well as on their own receptors.
In particular, an inverse relation between plasma and
cerebrospinal fl uid testosterone levels and brain 5HT levels
exists, as a lack of brain 5Ht leads to an increase in aggression
in all the considered species.
It is necessary, however, to apply common sense when extrapolating
the convincing experimental data from animal
to man. In the case of the latter, it is indeed also necessary
to take into account the environmental, social, and cultural
factors which can attenuate or increase the infl uences of
biological factors.
------------------------------------------------

So there's that.

I should add some more stuff that, in timeline, is going to make all this more confusing. About maybe a month before I read either Hakim Bey or Hybrids, I had gone dancing up at a club in Akron; it had been only my second time ever going clubbing. That night, I had danced with a lovely young lady in what can most modestly be described as the contemporary style. This had been the first time in maybe eight years that a young woman had even demonstrated attraction to me, to say nothing of freak dancing. I had a great time, and I extend my deepest thanks to the mystery woman wherever she may be. Nonetheless, this messed with my emotions and my mind for a couple of days afterward; the following night, I broke down weeping for no reason. Then the month past, and I read first "Religion and Revolution" and then Hybrids, and also had my OWGLA argument. I worried about testoterone poisoning for a few days, then cooled down through rationalizing it like always.

Then came New Year's Eve, which as I write the words of this very sentence, was just last night (other parts of this post have been written at different times). In a better mood about my maleness, I freak danced with three different young ladies, whom I extend my most gentlemanly graditude here in cyberspace. I had also tried to initiate dances with some other women there; I had (more-or-less) tried not to be too invasive of any young women's personal space without their consent, although I know a few of the other women with whom I tried and failed to dance most likely did not appreciate my advances (I was completely sober and drank nothing all night or earlier, by the way).

I wonder if I had seemed creepy to any of the women who had rebuffed me. I also wonder if I'd done anything too wrong in the minds of the women I did dance with. I did make the mistake of being a bit too forward with my first dance partner, who gently redirected my explorations (which may or may not have led to her walking away from me a little later). The next two times, I let the ladies take the direction of such matters to a larger extent, and I think the results were more pleasing to them. At any rate, I hope I didn't come off as too much of a boor. I've heard some women say they don't like having men grind on them while dancing, and I don't want to have made anyone uncomfortable in that sense. I don't know however much these two nights of dancing relate to how sinful my masculinity is, but it's another factor in the equation.

In closing, the jury is still out in my mind as to whether it's a sin to have balls, but then, there are several everyday not-thought-of-as-sinful things that may or may not be sinful. Some things are for sure, though: rape, child abuse, murder, and many of the other things that have unfortunately gone along with having balls are most definitely a sin in my view of the world. And I hope I am "man enough" to live righteously, whether cussing out Martin Sheen's rosary, cutting off Hakim Bey's balls, or just cutting a rug with those of my fellow human beings called women.

Some websites related to this post are:

An exposé and denunciation of Hakim Bey as a child molester:
http://libcom.org/library/leaving-out-ugly-part-hakim-bey

"Religion and Revolution", the article by Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson):
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/millennium/religion.html

The Medical Science Monitor article quoted above, in PDF format, about testosterone and aggression:
http://www.medscimonit.com/pub/vol_11/no_4/4259.pdf

A news article about a violent rapist who wishes to be castrated to stop his desires to hurt women. The story quotes real-life castrated convict Bruce Clotfelter. I believe this might be the article refered to as real-life infor source in the excerpt from the fictional book Hybrids I quoted above:

http://newtimes-slo.com/archive/2003-09-11/archives/cov_stories_2002/cov_04252002.html

Moby Dick Backwards

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Neandertals, Freak Dancing, and the Case for Cutting Off Hakim Bey's Balls

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