Carrie Dunn of The F-Word Blog points out a boxer with a big problem…
“I feel like a woman. I can’t stop crying. All that’s missing is a pair of tits.”
Ricky Hatton doesn’t seem to be taking his loss to Floyd Mayweather with particularly good grace. He does, however, have some very interesting ideas about gender characteristics, both physical and emotional, so credit to him for that.
What a waste! Years ago I read an anecdote in Herb Goldberg’s slightly flawed but pioneering “men’s consciousness” book The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege
So there was famous Spanish matador who invited a group of men over to celebrate a particularly daring performance in the bullring. After dinner the matador got up, put on an apron, and began washing the dishes. When his friends looked askance at him and one of them worried aloud that washing dishes wasn’t exactly manly the matador roared with towering Castilian rage, “Unmanly? Everything I do is manly!“
Not to put to fine a point on it, or to over-press the manliness business, but the Greek king Alexander the Great, after conquering all the known world, cried because there were no more worlds to conquer. So it’s not exactly like men crying is exactly, well, unmanly. (While we’re at it, 200 years later the Ancient Roman general Julius Caesar so admired Alexander’s conquests that he cried himself when he saw a statue of him in Spain.)
Now it happens to be the case that everything men do is manly, and not just the limited range of things deemed “masculine.” And so it’s weird that Hatton would imagine anything he could do would be un-manly.
If he cares enough about his sport, about competition, about playing his best, about putting not just his heart but his medulla oblongata and isles of Langerhans into winning then… why wouldn’t he cry genuine, manly, salt-water tears when he loses?
And seriously, what kind of kick is Hatton on that he’s going to go insulting half of all humanity that way? As if it was even true! I mean you look at most women athletes and tell me often they cry after a big defeat. Pairs of tits and all?
The old Saturday Night Live skit character Jack Handy had an appropriate aphorism
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
I’m not laughing at Hatton but I gotta say I’m pretty disappointed. Not that he cried but that he couldn’t own it himself, and that while failing to own it he tried to put it on not just anyone else but half of everyone else.
Submitted by 1828 (not verified) on Fri, 2007-12-21 23:26.
Exactly how society got the idea that women got all the emotions and men got all the bravado I'll never know but it's really silly (and highly untrue in a real sense). I love the matador story, it's fabulous and a lesson to us all.
[I know. The matador story just totally radicalized me to gender -- it *totally* cured me of macho/insecurity, boom, just like that. It destroyed any patience I might have had with the two-sphere model of gender where if men are this then women may not and vice versa. For "femininity" or "masculinity" to have any legitimacy at all then *everything* you do must be feminine if you are female. *Everything* I do must be masculine because I'm a man. We can *drop* those distinctions altogether if we choose, and as long as we still get to choose the partners who's geometries move us then fine with me. But barring that then great mother of pearl let's not snip gender into silly-assed paper doilies of pitiful, insecure, judgmental do's and don't's. Thank you, M! --fl
Submitted by 1828 (not verified) on Sun, 2007-12-23 21:10.
That Alexander the great reference is probably not historically accurate. I've heard that, and also that someone else (I forget who) cried after his death that "Of all the worlds there are in the heavens, he has failed to conquer even one." And then most historical books and documents don't mention either one.
Just sayin'.
[What's interesting isn't what he actually did or didn't do, it's that the story's been around for an *extraordinarily* long time, nor is it alone (see the reference to Caesar or, say, to Achilles in Homer.) The bottom line being that they guy isn't just insulting all women, or even himself, but by undermining the idea that even *heros* cry he's insulting all men as well. Which kind of doesn't leave anybody left to admire... which is sort of my problem with the pretense of masculinity. Thanks, Nightfall. --fl]