Stein - Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity

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This is not how a man feels.

I should be lighting a cigar, high-fiving the doctor, and grabbing my genitals to celebrate that my sperm are manly, even for sperm. But when I look at the tiny splotch of Doppler weather pattern on the screen and Cassandras obstetrician says it means were probably having a boy, I do not do any of these things. Instead, I have my first panic attackmy hearing and vision receding, my heart pumping as if I were doing something manly that makes your heart pump. Which I am not. I am merely picturing having to go camping and fix a car and use a hammer and throw a football and watch professionals throw footballs and figure out whether to be sad or happy about the results of said football throwing.

So I hope the doctor is wrong. No man has ever stared so hard at a screen and hoped a blur was a vagina since they eliminated those 1980s cable boxes where you could press two buttons at once and get scrambled porn.

A boy. Thats great, I say.

You wanted a girl, didnt you? Cassandra says.

Until now, I thought I didnt care. Apparently I care so much that I said thats great in a deflated tone that people never use when they are told a childs gender, despite the fact that theres nowhere to take that conversation. Yet somehow everyone else can manufacture excitement, as if theyre thinking: A boy! Thats great! Its one of the two major genders! Its not as if we live in China, where they can continue, A boy! Thats great! Now we dont have to abandon it on the top of a mountain!

On some level I suspected you didnt want a boy, Cassandra says. But youre not one of those touchy-feely yoga guys who really get women. So in that sense, I thought you would love a boy. Its not like youre sensitive to the needs of women.

Ive had one minute to deal with my insecurities about my masculinity when I find out Im also inadequate in bed. I hope that, within the seven months before the baby is due, Cassandra is able to generate more sensitive, maternal feelings. Towards me.

At home Cassandra mocks my freak-out. She argues that while I may not be tough enough to hang out with men, I can probably gin up enough testosterone to keep up with a small boy. Especially the boy well have. If he turned out to be a jock, Id say, What genes are those? She said. The only thing worse than having your masculinity questioned by your pregnant wife is having your paternity questioned by your pregnant wife.

Shes not wrong, though. I dont think of myself as a man so much as a person who happens to have a penis. If I got dropped on an island inhabited by a less technologically advanced society, Id be killed immediately for being useless. Though the one time I actually was dropped on an island inhabited by a less technologically advanced society I was greeted with chilled scented towels and grilled lobster tails. This was on my honeymoon. An hour later, I called the front desk because there was a lizard in our room.

But Ive never suffered for my lack of manliness. Ive always had girlfriends. I have plenty of guy friends. Ive had great jobs. My wife, Cassandra, has never complained about my wimpiness. In fact, shes so disgusted by sports and fraternities that she slept with at least one guy who turned out to be gay. I am unable to get a firm count on gay ex-boyfriends because Cassandra had a much more sexually active college social life than I did. And post-college. Basically everyone I slept with is probably gay according to somebody, Cassandra says. Not the cocaine dealer guy, though. He was definitely not gay. The army guy, he wasnt gay. I end this conversation before she starts telling me about Apollo 13 astronauts and rodeo clowns.

I get along great with my dad, even though hes not at all girlie. He grew up in the Bronx, has scars on his hands from childhood fights, played high school basketball, boxed, fixed his own cars, and was in the army. He has read even more books about World War II than your dad. But it didnt bother him that I didnt want him to teach me any man skills.

I never minded being unmanly. Until right now. Because Cassandra is wrong: I cant hold my own with even a small, non-jock boy. Because I have no experience. I was even worse at being a boy than I am at being a man. Almost all of my friends in elementary school were girls. I owned no Matchbox cars, no dirt bikes, no nunchucks. I never climbed a tree, built a fort, or broke a bone. I had an Easy-Bake Oven, a glass animal collection, sticker albums, a stack of LPs of nothing but show tunes, and a love for making stained-glass window ornaments. Im not equipped to raise a boy. Im equipped to raise a disappointed contestant on Antiques Roadshow.

Im still pretty freaked out two weeks later, when Cassandra and I go to a specialist with an impressive, 3-D sonogram that is so detailed, I cannot believe anti-abortion activists havent purchased every one of these machines. This doctor, who mentored our obstetrician, says hes pretty sure our fetus is a girl fetus. I feel an incredible relief. But when we walk out of the building and I turn to Cassandra to talk about buying girl clothes and picking out a girl name, she hugs me tight and cries.

If I put on makeup in front of her, Ill worry that will make her think looks matter too much. Everything is loaded. I dont have a career, so Im a poor role model. Im a mess, my life is a mess, women are a mess. Shes going to be an anorexic, slutty emotional basket case. Thats what all women are, she says. I hold Cassandra while she sobs. Then she adds: The other reason I didnt want it to be a girl is that we both have big noses. For eleven years Cassandra has been lying and telling me how nice she thinks my nose is. We now have only six months for those sensitive, maternal feelings to emerge.

But that 3-D sonogram is wrong, as the genetics results from the amniocentesis prove. The blur from the first ultrasound was indeed a penis. And, as Cassandras obstetrician keeps uncomfortably pointing out at every sonogram, a large penis. She indicates this with a crude drawing of a penis and testicles and the word WOW in the white spaces on the photo-booth strip of black-and-whites of a second-trimester, spread-eagled fetus. This Princeton-educated doctor tells us that our sons prenatal penis is so huge, if he does poorly in school he can always work in the Valley, by which she means perform in hard-core pornography. I believe this is her way of telling me that this kid is already doing better as a man than I am. Or maybe it is her way of telling me that we should find another doctor.

That night I put on Free to Be You and Me, the soundtrack from my feminist-era youth, to reassure me that, in our progressive, nerd-dominated culture, gender isnt so important. But now, almost four decades later, the songs sound like lies. There are no straight Williams out there who want dolls. Ladies do go first. You and me are not free to be you and me. You and me are going to be a mother and a father, and there are differences between those roles. And if I stay the kind of man I am right now, we are going to have a son who forgets to mention that dads were invited on the camping trip.

So Im going to learn how to be a man. If I can just make it through some man stuffgo camping, play a sport, hunt an animal, fix stuff around the houseIll gain some credibility with my son. If this goes really well, hell never even know the wussy me. But if I cant, Im afraid that instead of looking to me as his role model, hell turn to his coach, his best friends dad, or, worse yet, a professional athlete who eventually disappoints him, fueling a depression that leads my son to write a better book than mine.