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Is There a Cure for Masculinity?

Free Association Books

Introduction – Clinical Case Studies

Some everyday stories. There are quite a lot of these and that is partly because I enjoyed writing them.

A president begins an illicit affair with an intern at the White House. He is 25 years her senior. The affair is discovered and he bends and distorts the truth to the whole nation and eventually the fuss dies down with only minor damage to his reputation. He is married to a beautiful and clever woman who has given up a great deal to support him in fulfilling his ambitions.

A cabinet minister is discovered to be having an affair with an actress 20 years his junior. It emerges that apart from enjoying sucking her toes he insists on wearing the shirt of the football team he supports whilst they are making love. His wife and the mother of his three children forgives him although the disclosure of the affair by the actress costs him his career.

A male MP is found dead from asphyxiation after indulging in a perverse and dangerous form of sexual activity which involves bondage and the deprivation of air during orgasm.

The editor of an influential political magazine, an extremely intelligent man in other respects, is discovered to be having an affair with a much younger woman. The disclosure costs him advancement and maybe his career.

A very senior cabinet minister has an ongoing affair with his secretary and informs his wife in a very cruel way. He divorces her and marries the secretary without damage to his career but much shame and humiliation when his wife discloses information about his private behaviour.

A pop star is discovered to have thousands of illegal and disturbing pictures of children on his computer. He is sentenced to jail and his career is ruined. He emigrates to the far east and a year or so later is arrested for having sex with underage girls. He is sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

An eminent psychoanalyst is accused by another psychoanalyst, who was his former training patient, of inappropriate sexual behaviour with her. It emerges that during her training he was having sex with her during the sessions. He is ejected from his institute and struck off the medical register.

A consultant gynaecologist is found guilty of sexual assault on a patient. After the allegation is made by her, many other patients come forward and report that he had done the same to them. He is struck off the medical register.

A senior MP, married with three children, is seriously assaulted by two men after he approaches them for sex in a park late at night. The subsequent revelations about his long standing and secret homosexual behaviour cost him his career.

A senior US senator denies allegations, made by a rent boy, that he has been paying for sex regularly with him. His denials are fruitless and his career is ruined. He is married and has consistently voted against any legislation which may further the rights of homosexuals.

The editor of a national newspaper is outed by a prostitute who he has been seeing regularly for some years. He is married with children. His career is not harmed by the disclosure.

A senior manager with an international IT company is discovered to have thousands of pornographic pictures of children on his company computer. He is discovered when his computer becomes so slow because of the amount of pictures stored that he has to call in the company's experts to find the problem with it. They discover the pictures and he is dismissed; the police are called and he is charged and sentenced to three years imprisonment. His career is ruined.

A senior manager with an international food company is found to have been taking large bribes from suppliers to place contracts with them. He is dismissed and his career is destroyed. His wife eventually divorces him and gets custody of the children. He becomes a drug addict and alcoholic and it takes him many years to get his life back into order.

An immigration judge is involved as a witness in a court case brought by his cleaner, an illegal immigrant. It emerges that he has been having sex with his cleaner for many years and that he knew she was illegal. His career is damaged by the disclosure.

A prime minister who is renowned for preaching about family values has an affair with a minister and it is kept secret until she is sacked and she discloses it. He is wounded but not below the water line. Her reputation is advanced, but not as a politician.

A deputy prime minister has an affair with a junior adviser, often having sex in his office with the door open as if inviting discovery. No doubt the risk of it increased the illicit thrill. He is damaged but manages to hang on to his job. She is effectively dismissed by being sent to do a job in an outlying office which is much less demanding than her previous role. He speaks against her in public. In revenge she discloses details of their affair which are deeply embarrassing to him.

A very popular television presenter, a 'happily married' father of three, winner of all manner of awards, is discovered to enjoy taking cocaine and wearing women's underwear at sex parties which do not involve his wife. His career is ruined.

Another popular and intelligent television presenter, who enjoyed lampooning the above presenter for his proclivities, was discovered, ten years later, to enjoy taking cocaine whilst having sex with prostitutes. His career was badly damaged and may not recover.

A children's programme presenter was discovered to enjoy taking cocaine and indulging in sex parties. His career is ruined.

A famous author and politician is accused of having sex with a prostitute. He denies it in court during a libel action at which his wife also appears as a witness. He wins the case but is later discovered to have committed perjury. He is sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. His political career is ruined.

A famous, iconic footballer is disclosed to enjoy wearing his wife's underwear when he is not at home – that is, ordinarily, not during sex. His wife makes this known in a jokey interview. Many jokes are made but he seems undamaged by the revelation.

A cabinet minister is accused of taking bribes. He issues a fervent denial and sues the newspaper editor who made the allegation. He is later discovered to have perjured himself during the case and is sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. His political career is ruined.

A famous cricketer is accused by a lover of having violently attacked her. He denies the allegations which are carried in most newspapers. However, other women come forward and attest to the same thing. His reputation is in tatters and his career is badly damaged.

The former lover of a famous footballer, herself a well known television presenter, discloses that he has regularly been violent to her. His reputation is badly damaged but his career is unaffected. However, after his retirement he is not offered opportunities to be a pundit on football programmes.

A famous footballer is revealed to have been paying for sex with a prostitute who is old enough to be his grandmother. Although he becomes the butt of many jokes, and there is talk of his fiancée being very upset, his career is not damaged by the revelations.

A leading evangelical and fundamentalist Christian who campaigned against homosexual marriage and against homosexuality was discovered to have been paying for sex for many years with a male prostitute. The evangelist is married and has five children. He has close ties with the republican party and the White House. He resigns his post and his career is ruined.

A Chinese-American mathematician published an article about how a particular theory could be applied to the development of financial derivates. In the article he is particular to warn of the axioms he has used and how understanding these and taking appropriate care is essential to the adequate assessment of risk associated with any derivates developed from this model. His work is used to develop Collateralized Debt Obligations but his caveats are ignored. The world is brought to financial meltdown by the men who developed the CDO and ignored the risks he outlined as they pursued short term profit without thought of long term consequences.

A middle aged factory worker (X), who is married and has two daughters, creates an online identity as an 18 year old soldier. He begins a passionate online relationship with an 18 year old college student. They never meet but the relationship progresses to telephone contact and explicit sexual communications. The man's wife discovers the relationship and contacts the young girl by phone and discloses her husband's real identity. The young girl does not believe her so the wife gives the contact details of a friend and work colleague of X who confirms what the wife has said to her. Amazingly the young girl then begins a passionate online relationship with X's colleague. The young girl, Jessy, contacts X and discloses everything that has happened. A short while later X's friend is found shot dead. The police suspect X and, worried for the safety of the young girl, attempt to contact her. They discover that she is, in fact, a married, middle aged housewife and the mother of the 18 year old daughter whose photographs and possessions she had been sending to X. X is eventually arrested and charged with his friend's murder. His life is in complete ruins as he faces life imprisonment if found guilty. His wife comments that she had been living with a stranger since he began using the internet and that there had been no traces of the man she had known.

An oft repeated 'fact' is that as many as 40% of men are at some time violent to a female partner. Although more men are now prosecuted for this, it remains true that most are not and that 'domestic violence' (battering) is still largely denied and ignored by policy makers.

Pornography, produced by men for men is one of the world's largest and most profitable businesses. According to some research over 90% of internet traffic is pornographic. It is surely not feasible to suggest that it is viewed and used only by lonely or sexually disturbed men. In fact the available evidence suggests otherwise. It is used by 'ordinary' men for the purposes of masturbation on a regular basis. In recent years, 'Lads Mags' have taken to publicizing and rating pornographic websites for the benefit of their readers. Some of this traffic is beyond simple gynaecology, it involves women in truly grotesque situations involving animals or objects or substances, the perversity of which would make one question the sanity of any man who found such images arousing. No doubt many of these men are really disturbed. Equally, I am sure that most are not.

A very famous sport star is caught in a series of infidelities that lead to the breakdown of his marriage and the termination of some lucrative sponsorship contracts. After a while he announces that he is to return to his sport but that he will not be terminating his 'treatment'. I wondered what he was having treatment for. After all, he had spent his life perfecting his skills so that he could gain as much money, power and status as was possible and one of the main reasons for that was so that beautiful women would want to have sex with him. After finally achieving his lifelong goal he was told that he was 'ill'. What, precisely, was he being cured of? Well, of course, it was of 'being himself – a man whom millions of other men wanted to be and whom millions of women want to have sex with. This is not to deny that his behaviour might benefit from some deconstruction but, ill? I think not. Sexual addiction is an interesting new 'illness', a condition which seemingly afflicts only men. No doubt it provides some therapists with a good income and is a subject of much brain beating in major drug companies as they attempt to find a 'pill' for this new medical condition. Therapeutic treatment for sex addicts is 'big business' in the USA and some people are attempting to similarly establish it in Europe – 'big business' is the operative expression here.

And the point is?

I could go on and on, multiplying these examples of successful men whose identities and careers have been subverted by sex, money and violence although it is true to say that money and violence to women are less destructive to careers than is sexuality. And nothing subverts identity quite like sexuality. It is seemingly impossible to find as many examples of such identity-subverting behaviour involving prominent women. Why is this? Are these men normal? Does their behaviour reflect what we already know to be an obvious truth, that most crime, whether sexual or financial or violent, is committed by men? Could it be that public success is itself a 'cause' of these behaviours in that such men are subjected to intense scrutiny by the media and that what goes unnoticed in ordinary men is simply picked up because of the public interest in the private lives of celebrities? Should we be surprised by such behaviour? Why are careers ruined by this apparently normal behaviour? What constructions of maleness and masculinity do we hold that dictates that these men should be ruined by the disclosures mentioned?

Why is it that crime seems to be a masculine activity? Is perversion similarly a male pastime? Are these men different from other, 'normal', men who don't appear in newspapers or are not the subject of intense scrutiny by journalists? I am going to present many similar examples of 'deviant' behaviour as I hear of it every day in my consulting room. I am given many opportunities to speak at conferences and in the main the audiences I address are composed largely of women. As I talk about the men I work with and their peculiarities, whether sexual, violent or otherwise, I frequently see women nodding and smiling. Frequently they break out into loud laughter. More often than not, many of them approach me afterwards and tell me that they have never heard their husbands or partners so well described. It is also true to say that I meet with stern challenge from women and occasionally from men in such situations. They protest that I present all men as perverse or violent or otherwise behaviourally disturbed. When I take up the challenge, often the differences they tell me about are quantitative, not qualitative and, equally often, the men they have known are, apparently, more deviant than the men I work with. Some of my patients are celebrities or otherwise very successful, but in the main they are fairly 'ordinary' and not subjected to public scrutiny. Are they different from 'normal' men? I do not believe so but the reader must decide on the basis of her own experience and from her reading of this material.

Additionally, most of the men I know as friends or colleagues have a hidden self – but not so hidden they are unwilling to share it with me. When my first book, Why Men Hate Women, was published it was suggested by one reviewer that I was either a self-hating man or a man who hates men. I feel confident in asserting that I am neither. Joyce McDougall made a plea for a measure of abnormality in the way culture and psychoanalysts and therapists see people. I can only echo that plea and this book is, amongst other things, an attempt to do that.

I feel very privileged to have been allowed into the lives of the men you are soon to read about. I have taken great care to protect their identities and where possible have asked permission to write about what they disclosed to me. Surprisingly, none have said no.

I would like to state the obvious at the outset. The view of men presented here is undeniably idiosyncratic – some might say extreme. I freely acknowledge that I have inhabited a privileged position for over three decades insofar as I have been allowed access to many men's most secret and shameful fantasies and activities. That is what this book is about – the darker sides of masculinity. Uncomfortably close to the creative genius required to paint Guernica is the violence and destructiveness which is its subject matter. The tools required to inflict that destructiveness and suffering on its innocent victims required, for their invention and creation, levels of creativity equal to that possessed by Picasso.

This book is not only about the origins of that age-old conflict between destructiveness and creativity or love and hate but it is also about the forms in which individual men act it out in the true sense of that phrase – without insight or awareness. It is my belief that masculinity is predicated on a fissure or fault deep within the male psyche. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that masculinity is based on a structural fault in the male psyche, that at some point in development a seismic shift occurred, similar to the action of tectonic plates shifting apart. This 'basic fault' or fissure is the resting place of psychological masculinity, a construct I shall define. On one side of that fault, the underside, is a non-gendered child, mainly relating to his primary carer/the breast whether securely or otherwise. The topside of that fault is the combination of the secret and the visible that we call a man. Men's struggles with that fault in adulthood, the conflict between the desire to embrace the underside or to eradicate it (an impossible task) are the subject matter of my everyday clinical practice. The compromises, bargains, fudges, contradictions and lies in thinking and feeling and particularly behaviour are the symptoms handed to me by my patients. This book is an attempt to explain that fault and follow the paths men take on the route to developing some sense of a stable masculine identity, or at least to one which provides the illusion of stability and the possibility that it can be managed. I have tried to make this work something different from ordinary books about men and psychotherapy. What interests me about men is the apparently deviant qualities to our nature. I attempt to show that what we think of as deviant is actually rather ordinary, or connected to the rather ordinary in obvious ways and in effect to plead for tolerance for a measure of 'ordinary deviance'.

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Excerpted from Is There a Cure for Masculinity? by Adam E. Jukes. Copyright © 2010 Adam E. Jukes. Excerpted by permission of Free Association Books.
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