The New Jag Offs

In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man by Tom Junod.  Doubleday.  ****

When I was young in Pittsburgh, it was an insult to be called a jag off, but it could have been worse (at least they weren’t saying something about your mother).  Until the age of eleven or twelve, I didn’t know what the expression meant.  By the time I found out, I was guilty as charged, but I’ve often wondered what makes it an insult, when it describes behavior that is nearly universal (as we used to say, 95% of young men masturbate, and the other 5% are liars).  I think the reason it’s insulting is that it implies you can’t get laid.  That was the thing that felt bad about masturbation when I was young.  I couldn’t have real sex.  All I could do is jerk off.[1]

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was reading Helen Lewis’ excellent article in the Atlantic, “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” to find out that Nick Fuentes, the hugely important influencer of young men, describes himself as a “Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin.”  Virgin?  Back in my day (as the old farts say) that would have disqualified him from being an expert on anything, much less manhood.  How can he be an expert on manhood if he’s never fucked?[2]

Lewis’ article concerns masculinism, a term I’d never heard before but which, I must say, is a mouthful.  Fuentes is one kind of masculinist but not the only kind.  Even men who get laid regularly can be masculinist, though I can’t understand why any woman would want them.  Masculinists resent women’s standing in the world, their rise in the workforce at the expense of men, their influence in politics; they also resent the fact that they can’t get a date with these people whom they resent so much, though that seems to be a real chicken and egg question.[3]

Lewis’ article was overwhelming to the point of being almost farcical.  Is there anything men don’t resent women for?  They blame all their problems on women.

I have a complicated—though deep-seated and sincere—feeling about why men resent women.  They’re afraid of them.  They’re afraid of their emotional/sexual/spiritual hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhpower (also of their superior intellects, though that’s not the most important thing).[4]  That is my explanation of the rise of the patriarchy in every field, but especially in religion, where it has been disastrous, dumbing down religious truth and codifying it, essentially falsifying it.  To take just one example, Mary Magdallen—even in the standard Gospels, to say nothing of the apocryphal one with her name on it—got Jesus in a way that the disciples never did.  The disciples come across as a bunch of doofuses.  But it is the men who established the official religion (which we’re stuck with today), while Mary, the legends tell us, went off to meditate in caves in France.

The only hope for change in this situation is for men to face their fear.  I’m not holding my breath.

All of this comes up because of Tom Junod’s excellent memoir, in whose title he states a fact of men’s lives: we form our opinion of what a man is by the examples men set for us, especially our fathers.  And while we’re not wedded to that opinion forever, it’s hugely formative.

Junod’s father was most emphatically not a jag off.  He knew how to dress, comport himself, run a business, order at a restaurant, the works, and he most definitely knew how to get laid.  The problem wasn’t knowing all that.  The problem was turning it off.

Junod’s memoir is fascinating in that we keep seeing his father through different lenses, and our opinion keeps changing.  He starts off as a male role model anyone would admire.  He runs a successful business—selling women’s purses, of all things—dresses beautifully and elaborately[5], and is actually very close to his son, and treats him well.  There’s an implication that he wants the boy to be like him, but he doesn’t push that on him.

This is a man who said—and other people said this about him—that when he walked down Fifth Avenue in New York, women stared at him, and some came on to him.  (A problem I’ve never had.)  He spent so much time in New York that he had a regular room in a hotel, and knew people at restaurants all over the city.  He also travelled to San Francisco and other cities taking orders for handbags for department stores, and he believed, no doubt rightly, that his appearance helped him with sales.  His buyers were usually women.

Does this sound like a man who had affairs?  A stupid question; the real question is: when, and how, will his son find out?  He did so at first by snooping among his father’s things, much later by seeking out people—sometimes the women themselves—and asking about it.  I’ve never heard of anyone going to this much trouble to discover things about his father.  And discover things he does, sometimes things he’d rather not know.  But the women all say the man was a wonderful lover.  He sincerely and deeply loved women.

That meant, of course, that he didn’t treat his wife well.  She was as much of a beauty as the rest of them, at least when things started, but she could never rein him in and didn’t really try, especially as time went on.  She had a fierce love-hate relationship with the man, which affected their whole lives.  They were still together at the end, which wasn’t especially pretty (but it often isn’t).

This was a man who was most emphatically not afraid of women, who loved women and was loved back, but who, in another way, treated them badly.  (The great writer Peter Matthiessen, about whom I recently read a massive biography, was similar.  He was attractive to women, and that was a major way to burnish his ego.  He could never give it up.)  The whole question this raises—how do you fully live out your sex life while being faithful to one person—is one that human beings have been struggling with forever, and Lou Jounod—and his son—didn’t solve it.  Apparently modern women have the same problem, if we can take All Fours as an example.

Junod became obsessed with his whole family, and made some astonishing discoveries along the way.  (I won’t go into them; I’ll just say I thought of titling this piece Grandma Was a Slut).  I got a little tired of all that, and while I can see that it was interesting to him, it went on too long for me.  I nevertheless found his father fascinating.  A shorter book that focused just on that man would have worked better for me.  Junod, it seemed, wanted to put his whole life between covers.

In the end, you want to say, why were you so obsessed with this man, who was admirable in his own way but was also a serial adulterer who came close to leaving his wife for another woman (whom he then would have betrayed).  Why aren’t you angry at him?  Junod gives a good answer.

“I took so much from him, I owe so much to him, and when I respond to the world I am often responding through him, for better and for worse.  He taught me how to live, man—and he gave me permission to enjoy life.  He might not have been a good man but he was an elemental one, and I feel his presence when I eat, when I drink, when I make love, when I breathe.  Anger never had a chance.”

[1] When I wrote my book The Red Thread of Passion, about sex and spirituality, someone asked me what my most surprising discovery was.  I said that the great sex experts in the world—I was thinking of Joseph Kramer and Annie Sprinkle—did not consider masturbation an inferior practice.  They considered it to be as real as any other kind of sex.  Just one more option.

[2] He claims he wants to relegate women to breeding farms.  If he went to such a place, would he know what to do?

[3] I was startled to read that the two young men who did the recent shooting at the mosque in San Diego didn’t just hate Muslims, they also hated Jews, blacks, and were misogynistic, resenting the fact that they hadn’t had more success with women, a fact which they attributed—before they took their own lives—to their short stature.  Talk to Mel Brooks about that.  Or Martin Short.

[4] My first career was as a seventh grade English teacher, and I spent a lot of my time working with 12-year-old boys who didn’t think they were as good in English as the girls.  They weren’t.  But they had also spent their entire school careers in situations where the girls were quicker, neater, smarter, had better penmanship.  So I spent all my time telling them they were better than they thought they were.  Eventually, I convinced them.  They just lacked confidence.

[5] I’ve never heard of a man taking this kind of care in dressing.  The lotions and scents with which he treated himself would (and did) fill a bathroom, so that no one else could use it.  The most stunning example came when young Tom was going on a date, and his father told him to clean out his navel using witch hazel and a Q-tip.  He recommended that he spend five minutes doing that.