by Sarah Menkedick
The nuance
Of being
Is to
Capture
The
Seed
Norman Mailer, Death of the Ladies
Manwriting is not even about the phallic references, although if you started looking, you could throw together a phallic manwriting tumblr feed faster than you could write “hair down to her fine ass.”
It’s not necessarily about the verbal sizing-up and branding of women with monikers – “blondie,” “lady,” “chick” “sweet-eyed insert-your-belittling term of affection”; this might be one indicator, but not the only one, and not even an essential one.
It’s not really either of these things, although it’s undoubtedly more fun to search for explicit cock references than to try and pick up on the distinct swaggering prose, the certain cocked (inevitable, pardon me) male postures.
With sentences that tend towards the staccato (and that, when they do grow more elaborate, do so not so much to expand and question as to definitively explain or to debunk via detail, to reduce to smirking anecdotes) manwriting is authoritative and conclusive and wise in a let-me-tell-you kind of way. It has it all figured out, and has condensed, simplified, and narrowed the world into the manwriter’s purview. It tucks the emotional and the psychological behind the self-deprecating, the overtly macho, and the sardonic. It uses characters like facts to prove a point, or like simplified archetypes to flesh out the author’s comparative fullness and full understanding.
It commands more than it asks; it lectures, in artful but conclusive ways, more than it explores. Listen to Charles Bowden on a beauty queen ravaged by drugs and violence in Ciudad Juárez:
Charles Bowden, Murder City:
I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts, and she will remain a mystery. Her perfect face will be blank. So will her beautiful eyes cocooned in makeup. By now her hair will have grown out, though I doubt it will cascade to her fine ass. The handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her fine time at the Casablanca when she was doing cocaine and whiskey and then was gang-raped for days. Perhaps she will share with me her memories of the crazy place.
The voice here is beyond questioning; it is decisive and final. It is not just strong (it would be a mistake to confuse “strong” or confident voices with manliness, for the gender stereotypes this implies but also because manwriting is not so much about either strength or confidence but about dominance and attitude): it’s appropriative, taking this woman’s experience and making it the writer’s via a series of “wills.” Her “perfect” face will be blank. Her “beautiful” eyes will be cocooned in makeup. She will retain nothing. Bowden has it figured out. He is telling you how it is. He is telling you how she is. He is telling you what is going to happen and telling you why. He is a man viewing and explaining a woman and a city.
There is no process of inquiry here. There are no fine edges, no hedging or questioning. I know the purpose of Murder City was to act as a lament and a tragic elegy for Ciudad Juárez and what has become of it, but Bowden’s writing in that book is uniformly conclusive and harsh with a repetitive certainty, appropriating whatever it examines, turning it into a tough and unquestionable lecture for the humble reader. Bowden is a sort of lone Western hero coming to town and setting things straight. He is the man shining the bright light of definitive truth on the woman and the city’s experience.
But manwriting doesn’t always have to boom with severity. It can also be falsely disingenuous in a Kerouacian way, jokingly feigning a dumb-guy innocence. Nuanced emotional and psychological realizations are not manly, but they are necessary in literary narratives and in magazine feature stories, so the manwriting way to deal with them is to provide a sort of yo, here I am, just kinda realizing something! self-mockery with plenty of macho asides. Insights have to be pared down to a few pithy yeah-man observations, quickly tempered by irony, humor, and tough-wistful jokes about women.
In Jay Kirk’s story “Hotels Rwanda,” which was selected for the Best American Travel Writing Anthology 2009, the initial suggestion of the story’s larger emotional/psychological theme is couched between ape-y arms and a mountain gorilla being punched in the face.
Jay Kirk, Hotels Rwanda:
He put an arm between the front seats of the Land Rover so we could see for ourselves. Ernest and I agreed: His arms looked ape-y. One expected to be changed by travel; one looked for little symptoms in oneself, signs of alteration, but did this count as a valid transformation? Ernest had never heard of such a thing. Once, he’d had a client who’d come all the way from Australia just to punch a mountain gorilla in the face, but nothing quite like this.
Devon Friedman, in his piece “Will You Be My Black Friend?” has to go so far as wanting to punch himself in the face after admitting that he does yoga. The story’s central question here, about if and how to breach the easy insularity of a particular lifestyle shaped by class and race, gets framed as a comic confessional, culminating with the punch.
Devon Friedman, Will You Be My Black Friend?:
I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I’ve always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it’ll change; it’s probably my wife’s fault. But it’s time to acknowledge that I’ve become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I wear white tennis sneakers from the ’70s. I listen to ambient music. I have dinner parties where I serve Spanish rosé and this softer version of mozzarella that has a lovely, almost liquid center that you can only get at the Italian import store. I do yoga, and I get excited when it’s ramp season. Sometimes I’d really like to punch myself in the face.
Manwriting gathers credibility with macho anecdotes, buffering larger spiritual or sociological insights – like Karl Taro Greenfield’s observation about the hope and squalor in “the seedy rooms used to plot a thousand getaways” in “Hope and Squalor in Chungking Mansion”– behind safari vests and snake’s blood:
Within two hours, we’d fallen in with a Canadian man who described himself as a “Leftenant-General” and told us he knew where we could get injected with a mixture of one part snake’s blood and one part Demerol.
“Wouldn’t that kill us?” we asked.
“Demorol?”
The Leftenant-General shook his head. “Best painkiller in the world.”
“No, the snake’s blood.”
“Hasn’t done so yet,” he assured us, thumping the chest of his safari vest.”
“Hope and Squalor in Chungking Mansion” was also anthologized in Best American Travel Writing. It has become de rigeur, particularly in mainstream magazine feature writing – The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, and the handful of other places whose writing is routinely anthologized – to conceal or burrow what could be seen as sentimental or heavy or emotional ideas beneath a very male and often very hipster (i.e., ironic, sardonic, above-it-all, postmodern) posturing.
Here’s Lawrence Osborne in “A Pilgrimage of Sin: Bombs, Booze and Hookers in Islamic Thailand”, published in Harper’s:
My new friends seemed to find the mixture of religious kitcsch and merry whoredom as irresistibly seductive as it was incongruous. In the suffocating cocktail lounge, we compared our phallus-shaped plastic room keys decorated with the words HOT PINK, and I was taught a few useful words of Malay: “Cock” is burung.
Osborne gets at his discussion of terrorism and prostitution in Thailand via this veneer of manly, detached derision.
Yet manwriting doesn’t always have to come with snark. Often it can come across as that one-sided conversation you have at a party with a guy who cuts off your sentences to clarify your point for you, and leaves a pause between conclusions just long enough for you to meekly agree before he’s telling you how it is again.
Paul Theroux, Riding The Iron Rooster:
“I’ve seen you on television, the woman said. “Haven’t I?”
“Probably,” I said, and told her my name.
“Amazing,” she said. “My sister won’t believe this – she’s read all your books.”
Her name was Rachel Tickler, and I found it a relief to tell her I was on my way to Mongolia and then China – yes, to do some writing – and that I had just come from London. What was that about the States? Oh, yes, I did spend part of the year on the Cape – yes, it’s a wonderful place.
…I told her everything, I bought her some tea and we sat up so late that I could be confessional…it did me a lot of good to tell her these things, because I had been so secretive on the tour it was like being invisible…
…In one sense we were like an adulterous couple – or more accurately it was like a one-night stand. It was tender and I was eager to be candid, and she was a good listener.
The puffed male ego is a particularly insidious and central feature of Theroux’s writing, but also indicative of a wider category of travel manwriting in which all other characters orbit around the man and his virility, his ego, the fascinating aura he exudes. Travel writers in general have a tendency to focus on the wonder and awe they invoke the world over, but manwriting – particularly Theroux’s stimulated one-sided conversation above, in which the woman’s voice is excluded and we hear only Theroux’s indulgent responses – takes it to a new level. Observe below how Edward Abbey quickly becomes the center of attention in a scruffy Western bar, setting himself apart as the wise other, the “superior” WASP observer, quickly becoming the focus of attention and the center of both fraternal male envy and female desire.
“You like my girl?” the large fellow said. He was a Mexican, a Chicano, with round, brown, solemn face, dark eyes, the shoulders of a fullback. A Mexican but a big Mexican.
“Now, primo…” the woman began.
“You like her, eh?” The dark eyes were aimed at me – not at the wall, not at the mirror, not at the other guy.
I knew he probably carried a knife, a switchblade. All cholos carry switchblades, everybody knows that. The trouble was he was so big, and ugly, and mean, he wouldn’t need a knife. My sole weapon was my superior WASP intelligence. Which only functions, however, in retrospection.
“I’m never getting out of here alive, I said, to myself but aloud. Primo laughed, gripped my shoulder in his enormous paw, and said, “You’re right, man. You’re not. Better buy us a drink.”
Under the volcano. I was glad to buy time by buying Primo and his Blondie each a drink. Bar buddies. He called me Grizzly Adams; I called him Pachuco.
This category of manwriting, while still central to the travel writing paradigm, has been somewhat overshadowed by the sly and neurotic machismo of gonzo journalism. Instead of emphasizing a barrel-chested ladies man, the latter manwriting takes on the guise of the pseudo self-deprecating Thompson-esque bender: the sinewy journalist recounting his or her feral adventures buying AK-47’s in Kurdistan or running with bounty hunters in Hong Kong, man it was totally f*ed up and I spent forty-eight hours vomiting and then hopped into a handhewn canoe to go down the river with a pig and six crazy barenaked tribesman rocking some badass bows and arrows….We’re meant to think not of smooth Abbey or strutting Theroux but of a wiry VICE photographer or wannabe Kerouac scribbling his red-blooded adventures offhand amidst rebels and prostitutes.
Thus the posture has perhaps shifted from the distinctly macho – one of the best Theroux man-lines is his description of Indians in Uganda “airing their women and letting their children run” – to the squirrely, gonzo macho, but manwriting follows the same patterns, tending towards the detached and the all-knowing: all the other poor dopes in the story are taking things seriously, and the manwriters alone can see, with a prim or poignant or disaffected and derisive but unfailingly erudite distance, the truth of the matter. Keruouc perfected this:
“Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”
Manwriting’s descriptions are constantly, slyly and definitively placing the writer a cut above the described, which seems like a disingenuous thing to say because most nonfiction writers’ descriptions inherently place them a cut above their subjects (writing is an aggressive act, according to Joan Didion, who is incidentally the first writer brought up whenever one mentions the predominance of manwriting in the MFA classroom: “But what about Joan Didion?”), but in the case of manwriting there is a particular, cool, smirking superior male edge. Marylou is a “sweet little girl” and her “smoky blue country eyes” are “fixed in a wide stare.”
It is as if, described in manwriting, characters are simmered down in a reduction of the writer’s own coolness. This is nowhere more obvious than in Colson Whitehead’s “The Republic of Anhedonia,” written for Grantland:
There was one woman at the table, a quiet 60-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her.
If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid did not get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed.
For three years I was cursed with sitting down in the exact wrong seat at group dinners. Wholly and inescapably hexed. Adjacent to a blowhard lush, between two narcissistic twerps, face to face with the mime. You look at what you’ve been dealt and think, This will end badly, and check out of the convo and endure until next time.
In Whitehead this reduction of characters to stereotypes is supposed to be sardonic, tongue-in-cheek, and we’re meant to understand that Whitehead is aware of this reductionism as he’s writing, but ultimately his and our meta awareness of the tactic being employed doesn’t make it any less macho or cloyingly self-infatuated. Ultimately, the effect is one of placing the hip male writer at the center of a universe of one-dimensional stereotypical characters who serve as sounding boards for the writer’s all-knowing intelligence, for the writer’s ego and quest. They are not so much people as they are opportunities for the writer to play around, to make a wry point. They’re bemusing, they’re sweet, they’re ridiculous, they’re bumpkins, but they’re never really foils for the male narrator, never up to his level.
This reductionism can also come via silence. John D’Agata is the master of this technique, the lyric use of extremely sparse and staccato language to convey a concept, and to reduce characters almost to symbols. D’Agata admits he uses composite characters, and while this generally doesn’t violate my personal nonfiction ethics in his case I think it is indicative of a larger tendency to treat characters as mere representations of an idea, or as amusing anecdotes. In About a Mountain he writes:
As we drove toward the mountain in the white Jeep that day, two black jets in the distance sped by. They swept low against the desert. Then each dropped a bomb.
“Fuck yeah,” said a guard as we paralleled the explosions.
“Fuckin’ A,” said the other.
A fascination with how the world will end is not particularly new.
It is almost bullying in its composition of the facts, in its descriptions and juxtapositions. It is curt, cutting and precise, not giving a single character more than an incisive line that definitively sums him up. D’Agata uses characters the same way he uses facts: as things to play around with to get at an idea he’s developing. His writing is all the more imposing for the faux diffidence of its understatement and its silences.
Finally, there’s the straight-up manly strut, about which there’s not much more to say than, Hey, there’s a man in this prose!
Whitehead:
I realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, some real hobo shit.
“How many chips do you have?” I started hearing that a lot more, this locker room check: Who has the bigger dick?”
And of course, Mailer:
Definition of a lady
She grasps
the root
While kissing
The bud
Definition of a hero
He
Thrives
In
Dikes
People always ask, when the subject of manwriting comes up – as it has quite often recently in the preparation of this article – “What about women writing?” and they give examples of cuddly afternoons of gingerbread cookies and sisterly bonding, of relationship triumphs and grumpy dads weeping at graduation ceremonies and my response is, “Yeah, but that stuff doesn’t end up in Harper’s. Or GQ, or The New Yorker, or the mainstream publications.”
But manwriting does. It’s not considered manwriting like a syrupy Ladies Home Journal article about redemption through gardening is considered women’s writing. It’s just the norm.
So if you’re a woman writer, or rather, a writer who happens to be a woman, wouldn’t it frustrate you that manwriting is simply equated with the normative standard of intelligence, of insight, of style; that “Who has the bigger dick?” isn’t a question reserved for some marginalized men’s mag (because let’s face it, men’s magazines – GQ, Esquire, Outside – are part of the literary mainstream while women’s mags are out there in fluffland) but rather a normal question at the center of the literary scene; wouldn’t it frustrate you that even though perhaps you’d like to be told how it is by a woman from time to time, only 21% of articles in Harper’s, only 16% of articles The New Republic, only 14% of articles in The New York Review of Books, only 35% of features in The Paris Review, only 26% of articles in The New Yorker, are written by women?
I’m not suggesting some sort of feminist attack here, a banning of phallic references or a cry for real heartfelt emotions from our nation’s male writers but rather, a touch of perspective – so often, what we take for granted as writing, as feature writing, as magazine writing, as the literary writing of our generation, is manwriting, and what does that mean?
Where does that leave us?
Caught with our dicks hanging out?
Or maybe, perhaps, we can think of a better metaphor.
Sarah Menkedick is a nonfiction MFA student at The University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has been published on Amazon’s Kindle Singles, World Hum, qarrtsiluni, Perceptive Travel, and a number of other online and print publications, and she is the founder of velamag.com, an online magazine of travel writing by women.
