BY DAVID GLEISNER
T
he last time I cried, I was a freshman in high school. It was my first season on the track team, and I had set ambitious goals for myself. For months, I had been approaching the 5:00 mile mark. Several of my teammates had already broken the barrier, and I added extra miles to my runs on weekends or before school. This was how I could prove to myself and my team that I was tough and strong. That I had what it took to be a great runner. At a mid-April meet, I felt ready. I started fast, pushed through and finished strong. My final time: 5:03. In my post-race gloom, I approached some of the freshman sprinters who were chatting after their races. To be honest, I can’t even remember what they said – some stupid joke, I’m sure – but I told them to shut up, turned around and walked away with tears falling down my face. I was devastated. As anyone who has ever done cross country or track can tell you, running is hard. It tests your limits, exhausts you physically and forces you to ignore signals of pain to push harder. With those characteristics in mind, my teammates made it very clear that, in order to succeed, I needed to “grow a pair.” I couldn’t “be a pussy.” The aggressive, primitive, visceral act of racing required a strict adherence to masculinity. I hit 4:54 at a time trial the next month. Since then, not a single tear has left my eyes. Disregarding pain, focusing on constant improvement and emphasizing physical strength, I started “Manning up.” ••• “My coaches would always tell us to not feel sorry for ourselves and to be tough. I can’t be too mad at them because they were preparing us for the realm of life that we lived in,” SESP junior Anthony Pierce says, recounting his time playing football in the Chicago Public League. “It was a lot of, ‘You need to man up, be tough, don’t make excuses, just get through it.’” Pierce grew up in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood
MAS CULI NITY
All it takes to “be a man” is to just be a man. PHOTOS BY ALEX FURUYA, YING DAI, AND CASSIE MAJEWSKI
on the South Side of Chicago. His definition of masculinity was shaped by the need to protect himself and those around him. He had to ensure he projected an image of strength and toughness, showing others that he was not to be messed with. “I’ve always been highly emotional, highly emotional, like very sensitive actually, but nobody was gonna ever find out,” Pierce says. “I definitely had a mask, like a really, really tough crust.” Growing up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, just an hour away from Northwestern, I was also exposed to a pretty rigid idea of what it meant to be a man, albeit in a very different environment. I played with Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks, dug up worms in my backyard and played baseball
in the park with friends. The people around me, both friends and family, always encouraged me to be myself. At the same time, they worked hard to ensure that “myself” followed societal guidelines – to make sure I was a normal boy. Born and raised in Alabama, Weinberg senior Benjamin Kraft was brought up in a culture that also had a rigid definition of manhood. One of the first times he remembers breaking the mold of “masculinity” was in middle school gym. “I remember distinctly in eighth grade we were playing badminton in gym,” Kraft says. “They played Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’ and I was like, ‘You know what, fuck it, I like this song, I don’t care who knows it.’”
Kraft realized he had been repressing his enjoyment because of a societally imposed definition of masculinity, one that told him which artists he should and shouldn’t listen to. “I’ve always enjoyed Lady Gaga, Erin McCarley, Sara Bareilles, not traditionally super masculine artists, so I think for me that was kind of a big step,” Kraft says. Weinberg senior Dan Loizzo, former president of Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault (MARS), entered college with an idea of masculinity heavily shaped by whiteness and heteronormativity. From a grandfather who grew up helping out on a farm to a deeply-rooted Irish drinking culture, the men
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