No Easy Manswers: At the Masculinity in Literature Panel

If you’re worried about young straight men’s place in literary production, or young white men’s, or young straight white American men’s; or if the question bedeviling you is why men don’t read, or read less than women but more than sometimes reported, or read performatively; or if, say, you want to know about the unspoken presupposition of cissexuality in discussions of dick-swaggering texts and the anxieties about measuring up that those texts express: there are essays and articles for you. There are enough of them, in fact, that some spend a paragraph or two commenting on the superabundance of pieces about men. Many are intellectually puny; a few are excellent. Leah Abrams’s “Into the Manosphere—in Manuscripts” is perhaps the definitive (and funniest) recent work on Men in Literature. In her essay, Abrams provides an overview of notable contributions to the bloated (or tumescent?!) corpus — Federico Perelmuter’s discourse-galvanizing “Against High Brodernism” and Charlie Markbreiter’s “Cis Male Literature” are, in my opinion, highlights — and then posits that the cancellation plot, body anxieties, and daddy issues are central to the output of several contemporary male authors. But if you’re curious who cares enough about the crisis (or crises, poly) supposedly plaguing literary manhood to go to a panel on the subject, you couldn’t do better than attending “The Trouble with Men” at the 92nd Street Y on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on a frigid night late last month. Roughly thirty percent of the seats were occupied by men, twenty percent by women, and fifty percent by the silent majority: no one.

“This seemed like such a good idea when we first thought of it,” the novelist and moderator Andrew Lipstein said moments after taking the stage. The problem, Lipstein had realized, is that “there’s really no one definition of” masculinity, the implication being, perhaps, that the conversation risked becoming diffuse and unenlightening. Of course, many author panels are diffuse and unenlightening. They’re often better for selling a few books and burnishing personal brands than theorizing about a broad, exhausted topic like “the state of masculinity in literature,” as the event’s webpage put it. To that point, none of the writing I mentioned above was discussed; there was no recapitulation of everything everyone has ever said about men and books. Instead of looking The Discourse in the eye, the four panelists, all male, seemed to be staring somewhere over its shoulder for much of the hourlong event. They spent a lot of time talking about war and vulnerability. If I didn’t learn much, I was at least intermittently entertained.