“Aussie Bloke” - or The Lonely Male
“Man
Up – the old Aussie bloke”: Trent Dalton's Story -http://www.theaustralian.com.au/author/Trent%20Dalton 11th June 2016
“Those
guys had life figured out because they had to figure it out to
survive”.
Exactly what “figured out” meant for this mythical “Aussie bloke”
remains obscure since survival in my experience simply meant staying
out of trouble, making the most of whatever breaks life offered and
pretending the rest was not worth worrying about. Self-image was the
concern of essentially weak characters, the false heroes who, if
their manhood was in question, sought to prove themselves with unsociable behavior, perhaps excessive use of alcohol or deeds of daring aimed to impress. The true hero with nothing to prove,
the genuine "Aussie bloke" perhaps, was more often conspicuous by his absence.
The
“Aussie” male nowadays, it seems, is a troubled soul. He has an
identity problem too, or at least that is the gist as I understand it of
Dalton's story, or "gender narrative". Anti-social behavior,
violence and self-harm are common problems along with loss of
self-respect endemic for many. Alpha and Beta “types” are adumbrated and contrasted but a sense of alienation becomes apparent: King Lear's “who is it here who can tell me who I am?"
The
popular profiling of males nowadays as either “alpha” or “beta”
suggests not just a dichotomy of attitudes and behavior, but for
Dylan, whose anecdotal story Dalton relates here, a hoped-for dual
personae is presumed as the most desirable state. But who can
live in different, antithetical spaces? Not for mere mortals “a mind not to be
changed by place or time” (John Milton's Satan); the difficulty lies in trying to
reconcile the two along with all the inner conflicts that arise from
that attempt.
How
does the lonely Male recover himself? Where is his redemption coming
from? Not from within the mystery of the in-between spaces of
the mind, neither one thing or the other: oscillating between alpha
male, self-confident, disciplined, action man, possibly also hard as
nails; and beta male, kind, caring, deferring to others, not afraid of
his emotions, a 'softy'. Its an escape into an abstraction, a shadow, a myth.
Enter the "Lonely Male": lonely, even if not alone, like the indecisive and deeply troubled Willie
Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, with “all the
wrong dreams, all, all, wrong . . . the man did not not know who he
was” or perhaps Hamlet, facing “conflicts within himself when
his indecisiveness becomes as agonizing as the corruption surrounding
him” (Bedford Literature notes, Boston USA 199).
As
a profile of the most desirable type of male for today's world, this
gender-twisting is no more than a caricature. Characteristics
responsible for individuality are innumerable and the glory of our
humanness. Everyone is different. However modified by time and
experience, one's uniqueness is the sum of all the inherited or
acquired traits we carry through life. Choices are made, but nothing
is just black and white; one lives within one's own skin with all its
variability.
The problem with the "gender narrative" is its disconnect with
the social fabric of society; with only a fixed star to guide, a
gender-specific objective, the
individual is denied the dignity of just being himself, his own person. He is made out to be merely a "type" within the popular imagination. The Lonely Male is
born again. Self-realization is the ultimate objective of all; but to
know who I am, rather than who or what I should be, is more important
than reaching for the stars.
