So I am gearing up to write a book proposal for work that is connected to my Persian translations (about which more in subsequent posts). I’m using as my reference the same book that I used when I wrote the proposal for the book I was tentatively calling Evolving Manhood in the 1990s, Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write (Second Edition), by Elizabeth Lyon; and since that first proposal was successful, in that it landed me an agent, I decided to go back and reread it, just to get myself back into the proposal-writing frame of mind. I was surprised at how much of the argument I made in that proposal for why my book should have been published feels still current to me today (or perhaps “relevant” is a more accurate word). There are, of course, things I would write differently today, and there is much that is dated, but I was pleased to find that I can still stand by the core of what I wrote. Here, for example, is the section Lyon  labels “About the Book.”

What kind of a man are you, anyway? The question that is the challenge that defines manhood: a call to arms, a goading to dig deep into the recesses of your masculine self and find what it will take to prove that the question need never have been asked. It is a gauntlet thrown down, the white glove across your face of the proper gentleman’s challenge. Empires have been built to answer this question, technology invented, championships won, fortunes made. Wars have been fought; genocides committed. People have been condemned to poverty, tortured and killed, raped and sodomized. Parts of this planet have been irrevocably polluted by men’s search for the answer that will eviscerate this question. Yet while men keep trying to prove that the question is pointless, the point of the question keeps prodding us ever further into the all-too-often violent quagmire of trying to find an answer. Evolving Manhood: An Autobiographical Meditation, however, takes the question not as a challenge to be met, but as an invitation to explore.

Scan a list of titles about manhood and masculinity currently on the bookshelves—from Robert Bly’s Iron John to Michael Segell’s Standup Guy—and you’ll find that, depending upon the author’s perspective, manhood needs to healed, renewed, eliminated, recovered, reconstructed, or transformed in some other way that will ostensibly help men be the kind of people we’re really supposed to be. Conflicting and contradictory, these prescriptions call for us to be either closer to, or more distant from, our mothers or our fathers, to learn or unlearn the skills of aggression, give up or hold on to traditional fatherhood, establish or eliminate rituals of male initiation, or support or fight the political agenda of the women’s movement. Add that movement’s critique of masculinity to these clashing and often mutually exclusive theories, and a man might be excused for feeling he is supposed to be all things to all people: a sensitive, aggressive, vulnerable, tough, tender, supportive, disciplined, courageous, wise, nurturing, provider-protector who can also cook, do the dishes, clean house, change diapers, be a good father, and manage as well to be great in bed.

For me, the question of the kind of man I am first came into focus when I found the courage to name myself a survivor of child sexual abuse. Two different men at two different times in my pre-adult life saw fit to use me sexually, and the only reason I came to understand that I had been their victim was that I began in my late teens and early twenties to read feminist theory. I learned there that the predatory sexuality of my abusers was a logical consequence of a culture that defined masculinity in terms of power and aggression. This first lesson in feminism is the nucleus around which Evolving Manhood is written. Yet Evolving Manhood is not primarily a book about how men have oppressed women. Rather, it is—as I have named it in the subtitle—an autobiographical meditation, a journey of self-discovery that moves beyond the rhetoric of equal rights and tit-for-tat ideology into what has been, for me, the possibility of real transformation. In writing this book, I have stepped off the comfortable edge of what I know about myself as a man and entered the ambiguity and ambivalence of what I have yet to learn. I invite you, by publishing my book, to take that step with me.

Cross-posted.