I’m a farm boy- I had my first work when I was less than ten, I grew and sold my first crop around that same time, I’ve never had a job that wasn’t in agriculture or forestry, and I’ll be damned if I’m anything but a farm boy. So much so, that while the dreams of so many rural kids is to get to the cities, I’m majoring in environmental studies and biology the university not two or three mile as the crow flies from my house, aiming for graduate school in agronomy at the U of M.
Yessir, I’m a country man, and like every man in America, I’m beset by the expectations of my gender role- in the case of masculinity, it’s almost more of a race/class/gender role. What is a rural, white, man? I don’t know if the image of rural masculinity comes from an honest cultural tradition, or if it’s just something pushed by media, or both, but can tell you this: the image, the role, of the rural white man is a hyper-masculine, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, pseudo-populist construct. A rural man, if popular image is to be believed, is responsible (a word that here means ‘willing to blame the poor for their lot while ignoring corporate subsidies’), hard working (‘won’t unionize’), ‘independent’ ( ‘willing to blame Mexicans for his lot while ignoring corporate outsourcing’), and humble (‘not an uppity intellectual’). He loves America (and doesn’t question the necessity of war), loves Jesus (and doesn’t question the agenda of his church), and doesn’t trust those big-city ‘latte liberals’, college students, and ‘radical environmentalists and feminists’ pushing their socialist agenda through big government and the Fed and liberal media and big business. No, a rural man is no soy-swilling, long-haired, effete snob. He’s a man’s man. And, let us not forget, a rural man is a carnivore; he takes his cornbread and coffee with short ribs, and he chows sweet beastflesh- never shall tofu touch his lips.
Recently, I became a vegetarian. Not for animal rights purposes, mind you, though I’m not big on agribusiness practices. No, I did it for social and environmental reasons. I just don’t see the sense in using so much land to grow so much grain for so many cows, when there are so many hungry people in the world. Now, that right there ought to fulfill multiple expectations of the rural man- I’m trying to act pragmatically, responsibly, with personal integrity, and thriftily; I’m doing this against waste and against agro-industrial practices that screw up our common home and the lives we live in it. Yet, the fact that I just ate a lentil stew with a side of curried tofu ensures that my penis is now a nonfunctional organ hanging in front of my rapidly developing ovaries, and my flannel shirts have all just become ‘ironic’.
Now, this article isn’t about being a vegetarian. No, that’s just what got me thinking enough to write it. This article’s about what I already covered- a ridiculous standard of rural masculinity. How can one be a man? If I fail to follow the prescribed notions of manhood, I will have failed to assert myself, and I am not a man. If I assert myself and stand against this nonsense and for ecological and social responsibility and an active critique of the institutions of our society, I’ll have failed to follow the prescribed notions of manhood, and I am not a man. With such a standard, the only way to be a man is to be an irresponsible, callous, prejudiced, willfully ignorant person working for a goal contrary to your own self-interest. The Catch-22, of course, being that a person like that is not a tolerable man.
There’s only one solution I can think of, and it’s a continuation of what I’ve been doing since the day my sister showed me ‘Killing Us Softly’ and I stopped thinking that feminists were the man-hating hypocrites that I’d always seen and heard them portrayed as. The only solution is to break free of this whole damn stereotype of rural masculinity. Why should I follow a code of conduct based in asinine, sexist assumptions, a code of conduct that contradicts itself by demanding responsibility while demonizing responsible actions, that is anti-intellectual, that serves only to set rural folk against city folk and the petit bourgeois while demonizing those that fight the system of power, that discourages compassion, that fetishizes violence, that is pushed on us relentlessly by urban professionals working for massive corporations (the big six media companies and their entertainment subsidiaries)? Why the hell should I be a lapdog for a culture war waged by some bourgeois thinktank in New York against other bourgeois think tanks in New York? Why should I spend my days complaining about ‘latte liberals’ and the ‘Hollywood elite’ while corporate stooges and the Wall Street elite tell me how to live my life? Why should I teach my sons that an education and a vocabulary are things to be ashamed of?
Don’t misunderstand me here- I’m not attacking rural men. I AM a rural man. I’m not saying rural men are uneducated, racist, sexist, homophobic apologists for a system of exploitation and domination- I’m not saying that because it’s not true, unless you let it be. I’m saying we’re persistently portrayed as such and pressured to be such to the point where some of us have foolishly taken it as part of our identity. I’m not here to bash rural men, I’m here to tell you to stop letting conservative culture war pundits and the entertainment media shape your idea of what a rural man is. It’s time to take gender back, and then kick it’s ass. You want responsibility? Quit demonizing the poor and start thinking about who’s warming our planet. You want to fight the elite? Stop worrying about urban hipsters and start worrying about CEOs. You want the government to get out of your life? Let’s start with curtailing the runaway military-industrial complex, stopping theocratic blue laws, bringing accountability to the cops, and ending corporate welfare. You want honesty? Stop mindscrewing yourself into thinking capitalist-dominated financial institutions want to force socialism on you, and take a look at what those capitalist-dominated financial institutions ARE forcing on you.
The reactionaries think that because I’m a straight, rural white guy, they can count on me as some automatic recruit for the most troglodytic, regressive part of their agenda; a culture war that marginalizes and casts scorn on women, on femininity, working folk, people of color, immigrants, the at least 10% of our friends and neighbors who are gay, and others. They think they can make me into a sexist, homophobic, theocratic, nationalistic stooge who’ll turn a blind eye to their embezzling, warring, repression, civil rights abuses, union-busting, torture-funding, and river-poisoning just so I can feel like I’m holding on to the white, male privilege which, in the wake of the rape of rural communities by agribuiness, corporate-written government policy, and neocolonialist globalization, is all a lot of rural white guys have left.
No, sir; I ain’t gonna be that sort of ‘man’. I’m my own man, and this bowl of alu mattar? Consider it my resignation from your identity racket. My delicious resignation.
