Although men’s bonds with other men are incredibly trustworthy and powerful, the masculine notion of success idealizes a man who succeeds all by himself. In a society, all people must rely on each other completely and intimately. The myth of the self-made man is false because every successful person must have employees, aids, confidants, business partners, subcontractors, customers, stockholders and numerous other people complicit in that success, including that self-made man’s domestic partner and children. However, men have much to gain from associations with masculinity in capitalist America. Our notion of masculinity includes wealth. Without wealth, we are unable to provide safety and security for those that we love most dearly. Society tells us that the people who men love are safer if men spend their days securing capital wealth and success, but at what cost?
In a capitalist society, one man’s success is often another’s failure. One man is promoted, while another is not. One man’s business succeeds, while another’s filling the same niche must fail. Because security in any society is tenuous, and more so in a capitalist society, the notion of being a self-made man is directly tied to safety. If a man feels like he is relying on anybody else, he is unsafe and less of a man. This lack of safety is not unlike the lack of safety felt in the schoolyard in our boyhoods. However, this fear is entirely false. Time and again, it has been proven that reliance on others makes us safer, not less so. The very basis of America is that all men are better equipped to rule a nation than any one individually, and after 1920, all people are better equipped than all men. Tragically, while men feel threatened by reliance on strong social groups, it is in fact self-made-ness that threatens us the most because if we attempt to provide for our families alone, then our own failure will utterly collapse our family.
Sometime in the last several centuries, people agreed upon the man’s role as the breadwinner who brings home the bacon. Men feel satisfied with the role because it is important and significant. But while one person brings home the bacon, another must cook it, and still others must enjoy it. When we put so much importance on earning money and food, we automatically undermine the traditionally feminine role of using those resources to make a healthy and stable family, and in doing so we risk the healthy and stable family by alienating the father.
Unlike the trivial and short term suffering of children in the schoolyard, the fear of a father attempting to secure the safety of his family is long term and profound. Having tied masculinity with providing for the family, such a failure becomes feminization. In such a way does femininity come to equate with joblessness, homelessness and even starvation and death. A common, and false belief, is that homeless persons just aren't willing to work hard enough. Poverty comes to equate with feminization and conversely wealth with masculinization (a myth not aided by the fact that most poverty is caused by divorce, meaning that most people thrown into poverty are women). Gangsters and mobsters can easily become the ideals of masculization because they combine physical violence with the ruthless pursuit of wealth.
Similarly, some have become so focused on the pursuit of wealth that they never seem to have enough. If these men are made masculine by making more money, working harder, and being promoted before other men, than not being promoted, making less money, and spending more time at home feminizes those who do not succeed.
The greatest success of the women’s liberation movement has been to undermine the femininized corollary to the self-made man that women are useless and only survive as the recipients of the benevolence of the man who made himself without her help. Unfortunately, some women have countered with a self-made woman myth. However, business women and women politicians are resigned to the fact that sexism pervades the self-made woman myth. That is so because the notion of being self-made cannot be separated from the worst aspects of masculinity, fear, oppression, and suffering. Sexism cannot be ended until the self-made person myth is exposed as the ridiculous fraud that it is.
