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What follows is an improvised reaction to the essays in this issue of JAPA on the theme of masculinity. It is intended as a way both of reflecting back upon, and of continuing, the fascinating, polyphonic exchanges these essays have established.
In the Hollywood summer flick Nacho Libre, the main character, the hilariously unfit Jack Black, assumes a secret identity, affecting the costumed excesses of a caped, macho street wrestler. By day a menial in a monastery, by night he wants to win matches, money, and a woman. In the film's signature moment, Black reassures his protégé, a young boy who has spotted him surreptitiously dressing up, that “it's okay because sometimes a man just goes into his room and puts on stretchy pants and has a lot of fun.” This declaration is meant to mollify the boy's uncomprehending, and suspicious, gaze, to reassure him that his adored older friend, regardless of the stretchy pants, and what used to be the forbidden “feminine” posturing in front of a mirror, remains what he always was: the incarnation of an admirable, straightforward masculinity.
It seems to me that many of us contemporary psychoanalysts occupy a position resembling that of the astonished boy of Nacho Libre. We often can feel ourselves located slightly behind the femininity/masculinity curve, waiting to see what's next, readying ourselves for the necessary adjustments. Over the past few decades, for example, we've been bombarded with well-warranted correctives—from heterosexual feminists, from gays, from lesbians—to what, in retrospect, now seem our outmoded ways of interpreting femininity and masculinity and the bedrock on which they seemed to stand.
We are therefore likely to feel less certain of our old claim to occupy femininity/masculinity's leading theoretical edge. Our position on that edge was bequeathed us by many of Freud's still radical insights.