The Androgynous Man

Noel Perrin

The summer I was 16, I took a train from New York to Steamboat Springs, Colo., where I was going to be assistant horse wrangler at a camp. The trip took three days, and since I was much too shy to talk to strangers, I had quite a lot of time for reading. I read all of “Gone With the Wind”. I read all the interesting articles in a couple of magazines were even fuller then than now.


The one that held my undivided attention was called “How Masculine/Feminine Are You?” it consisted of a large number of inkblots. The reader was supposed to decide which of four objects each blot most resembled. The choices might be a cloud, a stream engine, a caterpillar and a sofa.


When I finished the test, I was shocked to find that I was barely masculine at all. On a scale of 1to 10, I was about 1.2. Me, the horse wrangler? (And not just wrangler, either. That summer, I had to skin a couple of horses that died—the camp owner wanted the hides.)
The results of that test were so terrifying to me that for the first time in my life I did a piece of original analysis. Having unlimited time on the train, I looked at the “masculine” answers over and over, trying to find what it was that distinguished real men from people like me—and eventually I discovered two very simple patterns. It was “masculine” to think the blots looked like manmade objects, and “feminine” to think they looked like natural objects. It was “masculine to think they looked like things capable of causing harm, and feminine to think of innocent things.


Even at 16, I had the sense to see that the compliers of the test were using rather limited criteria—maleness and femaleness are both more complicated than that—and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I wasn’t necessarily a wimp, after all.


That the test did reveal something other than the superficiality of its makers I realized only many years later. What it revealed was that there is a large class of men and women both, to which I belong, who are essentially androgynous. That doesn’t mean we’re gay, or low in the appropriate hormones, or uncomfortable performing the jobs traditionally assigned our sexes. (A few years after that summer, I was leading troops in combat and, unfashionable as it now is to admit this, having a very good time. War is exciting. What a pity the 20th century went and spoiled it with high-tech weapons.)


What it does mean to be spiritually androgynous is a kind of freedom. Men who are all-male, or he-man, or 100 percent redblooded Americans, have a little biological set that causes them to be attracted to physical power, and probably also to dominance. Maybe even to watching football. I don’t say this to criticize them. Completely masculine men are quite often wonderful people: good husbands, good members of society. Furthermore, they are often so unself-consciously at ease in the world that other men seek to imitate them. They just aren’t as free as us androgynous. They pretty nearly have to be what they are; we have a range of choices open.


The sad part is that many of us never discover that. Men who are not 100 percent red-blooded Americans—say, those who are only 75 percent red-blooded—often fail to notice their freedom. They are too busy trying to copy the he-men ever to realize that men, like women, come in a variety of acceptable types. Why this frantic imitation? My answer is mere speculation, but not casual. I have speculated on this for a long time.


Partly they’re just envious of the he-man’s unconscious ease. Mostly they’re terrified of finding that there may be something wrong with them deep down, some weakness at the heart. To avoid discovering that, they spend their lives acting out the role that the he-man naturally lives. Sad.


One thing that men owe to the women’s movement is that this kind of failure is less common than it used to be. In releasing themselves from the single ideal of the dependent woman, women have more or less incidentally released a lot of men from the single ideal of the dominant male. The one mistake the feminists have made, I think, is in supposing that all men need this release, or that the world would be a better place if all men achieved it. It wouldn’t. It would just be duller.


So far I have been pretty vague about just what the freedom of the androgynous man is. Obviously it varies with the case. In the case I know best, my own, I can be quite specific. It has freed me most as a parent. I am, among other things, a fairly good natural mother. I like the nurturing role. It makes me feel good to see a child eat—and it turns me to mush to see a 4-year-old holding a glass with both small hands, in order to drink. I even enjoyed sewing patches on the knees of my daughter Amy’s Dr. Dentons when she was at the crawling stage. All that pleasure I would have lost if I had made myself stick to the notion of the paternal role that I started with.


Or take a similar and rather ridiculous example. I feel free to kiss cats. Until recently it never occurred to me that I would want to, though my daughters have been doing it all their lives. But my elder daughter is now 22, and in London. Of course, I get to look after her cat while she is gone. He’s a big, handsome farm cat named Petrushka, very unsentimental, though used from kittenhood to being kissed on the top of the head by Elizabeth. I’ve gotten very fond of him (he’s the adventurous kind of cat who likes to climb hills with you), and one night I simply felt like kissing him on the top of the head, and did. Why did no one tell me sooner how silky cat fur is?


Or take public emotion. All my life I have easily been moved by certain kinds of voices. The actress Siobhan McKenna’s, to take a notable case. Give her an emotional scene in a play and within 10 words my eyes are full of tears. In boyhood, my great dread was that someone might notice. I struggled manfully, you might say, to suppress this weakness. Now, of course, I don’t see it as a weakness at all, but as a kind of fulfillment. I even suspect that the true he-men feel the same way, or one kind of them does, at least, and it’s only the poor imitators who have to struggle to repress themselves.


Let me come back to the inkblots, with their assumption that masculine equates with machinery and science, and feminine with art and nature. I have no idea whether the right pronoun for God is He, She or It. But this I’m pretty sure of. If God could somehow be induced to take that test, God would not come out macho, and not feminismo, either, but right in the middle. Fellow androgynous, it’s a nice thought.

这就是我——双面男人
诺埃尔.佩兰

16岁那年的夏天，我从纽约出发乘火车到科罗拉多州的斯廷博特斯普林斯，准备去一个牧马人的营里做事。这一趟花了三天，可是由于我羞于与陌生人聊天， 大部分时候我都在看书。 我把（乱世佳人）读了个遍， 而且看了几本杂志里的有趣的文章，发现它们比现在要好看得多。

其中有个测试深深地吸引了我——(你有多像男人-女人)， 里面印着许多墨点，由读者选出这些墨点最像哪四样东西——云朵、蒸汽机、毛毛虫还是沙发。

当我完成这个测试时， 我惊讶地发现我差一点点就不算是男性的了。 因为在1-10的分数段内，我只得了1.2分。我，还算是牧羊人吗？（其实也不仅仅牧羊，那年夏天，，我还给好多死去的马剥皮。）
这次测试的结果使我感到很震惊，于是我做了有生以来的第一次分析。由于在火车上有空闲的时间，我反复地看着属于“男子汉”的答案，想要知道真正的男人和那些像我一样的人到底有什么样的区别, 最后我发现了两种基本的类型。男人们会认为那些墨迹像人造之物，而女人们则认为它们像自然之物。男人们会认为它们像有害之物，而女人们则认为它们是无害的。

尽管只有16岁，我就能判断出那些依从于测试的人衡量男女性的标准极其有限，而事实上男性与女性都要复杂得多。于是我深深地松了一口气，毕竟我未必是懦弱的人。

没过几年我就意识到，那个测试揭示的不仅仅是出题者所显示的表面现象。它揭示了世上有无数的男人和女人，包括我，本质上是双面的。双面并不是说我们是同性恋，或是激素不足，抑或是传统上的性事表现不佳。（在那个夏天的几年之后，我在战争中领兵，而现在在战争中享受快乐已经是过时的了。战争是刺激的，可惜的是，20世纪过后，高技术武器破坏了战争中的快乐。

精神上的双面是一种自由。那些“男子汉”，“魅力男性”，还有100%血气方刚的美国男人，并没有明显的生理上的趋向使得他们在体力上突出，可能还是处于优势地位的呢。就说观看足球比赛吧，我提这事并不是批评他们。总的来说，通常男性确实是值得骄傲的：好丈夫，社会良民。此外，他们还善于为人处世，超凡脱俗，安逸自由，因此其他的男人纷纷效仿。他们不如我们这些双面人自由。他们总是必须成为他们理应成为的人，而我们却有无数的选择。

可悲的是我们当中很多人从未发现这个事实。那些非100%血气方刚的美国男人——比如说，那些只是75%血气方刚的男人经常无法察觉到他们的自由。他们忙于效仿“魅力男性”，以致于没有意识到男人也跟女人一样风情万种。为什么男人们（增词）要疯狂地模仿呢？我的回答只是我的思考，而不是草率的。在这个问题上我已经思考良久。

在一定程度上，他们钦羡“魅力男人”的那种不知不觉的安逸。通常他们担心发现他们有根深的不足，内心的懦弱。为了避免发现这样的不足，他们毕生扮演“魅力男人”与生俱来的角色。真是可悲啊！

男人归功于女性运动的一件事即男人的失败（担心自身的不足而效仿“魅力男人”）不如从前那样普遍。在从依靠男性的男性社会中解放出来的过程中，女性同时或多或少地解放了男性主导社会中的很多男性。我想女权主义者犯的一个错误是他们认为全世界的男性都需要解放，而且如果所有的男人都解放了，世界将会更美好。事实不然。世界将会更单调。

至今我还不清楚双面男人的自由是什么。显然自由依情况而变。我所知晓的我自身的例子，我还很清楚。身为人父，令我深感自由。在众多事情看来，我是个相当优秀，相当自然的母亲。我喜欢养育孩子，看着小孩吃东西我感到很开心，看到4岁小毛孩用她的小手握着瓶子，努力想要喝水的样子，我变得多愁善感。当我女儿艾米还在爬行阶段时，我甚至喜欢在她的丹顿斯博士（玩具）的膝盖上缝缝补补。如果我坚持了起初的家长观念的话，我将会失去所有的快乐。

举一个简单而又有点荒诞的例子吧。我觉得亲吻猫咪也很自由。尽管我的女儿们毕生都在做这样的事，但直到最近我才发现我会想做这样的事。我的大女儿22岁了，现在在伦敦。因此，在她不在的这段时间，我要照顾她的猫。它是一只肥肥的、敏捷的农场猫，叫皮楚什卡，但是对人很冷淡，尽管当它还是小猫时，伊丽莎白就经常吻它的头。我喜欢上它了（它很爱冒险，喜欢和你一起爬山），有一天晚上，我只想吻吻它的头，于是我就吻了它。为什么没有人告诉我原来猫的皮毛是如此的毛茸茸呢？

再举个在公共场合释放感情的例子。在我的一生中，我很容易被某种声音所感动。比如希尔伯翰麦肯纳的声音，举个特别的例子。让她在剧中表演感动的情景，她还没说上10个字，我就热泪盈眶了。当我还是小男孩时，我很怕别人看到。我努力使自己有男子气概，就如你说的，压制自己的弱点。现在，我不再把它当成是弱点，而是一种成就。我甚至认为那些真正的“魅力男人”也是这么想的，至少他们当中有一种人会的。只有那些愚笨的效仿者才会挣扎着去压制自己。

让我再说说那些墨迹吧，它们所做的假想——男性总是和机器与科学相提并论，而女性总与艺术和自然紧密相连。我不知道要用他，她还是它来称呼上帝，但是我能肯定，如果上帝受到诱使而做这个测试的话，上帝将不会是男性的，或是女性的，而是刚刚好处于中间。双面的伙伴们，这是一个值得思考的问题。
05英语 陈美云译