I could stand about 10 minutes of Africa’s Major — the recent Sun City million dollar golf challenge — before changing channels. Golf interests me about as much as your second cousin’s appendectomy. It doesn’t.
In that brief span I noticed stalwart commentator Dale Hayes’s voice is exactly how white masculinity sounded when I was growing up. Every Port Elizabeth teacher I had talked like him — a sort of boozy male idiom of anecdotes and self-righteousness, common sense and sentimentality. His is the perfect vocal accompaniment to golf.
The game invites similar homo-social comparisons with Jackass 3D — men watching other men at play. But whereas Jackass gets men together to stage cartoonish feats of gonzo excess, golf sets exceptional males against each other, rewarding skill with the privileges of corporate sponsorship, earnings and rankings.
Golf is about rationally managing the self and maximising skill in a competitive environment — it is business by other means. But Jackass imagines men as amateur superheroes doing dumb shit in an era that offers them nothing better to do.
Homosociality
These are two forms of homosociality then — one regressive, the other potentially liberating. But what is homosociality?
It is essentially about preferring the company of your own sex and, with men, a sort of ‘solidarity between males”. It needn’t be gay — in fact it strenuously polices gayness, though it tends to hold sway in male domains. Bros before hos — that kind of thing.
We can trot through the standard sociological backdrop to all this — the rise of feminism and the nominal peeling back of the cultural dominance of masculinity. Men are expected to display a sensitivity to women’s needs and claims that our fathers would have dismissed outright.
The hard shell of male identity circles — Humpty Dumpty — is cracked. It is an open-ended field of multiple claims of definitiveness. From Justin Timberlake’s slinky venality in The Social Network to rugby player Bees Roux’s appalling bare-fisted assault, masculinity is confused and confusing.
Hence the deeply affirming appeal of golf, which is so reassuring to dudes with its fetishised technicality and passion for detail — an idealised all-male utopian community of reckless fun, like Jackass.
The show has long since graduated from late-night MTV cult to fully fledged global touchstone — young men doing visually arresting things (trolley cart jumps, being shot from cannons, zooming along on bicycle rockets and scale-model poo volcanoes) that immediately lend themselves to YouTube hits and ‘forward it to everyone you know” notoriety.
‘Notion of abjection’
The highlight of the latest 3D Jackass instalment, which quickly grossed much more than $100-million in the United States alone, is man-child Steve-O being catapulted hundreds of feet into the air inside a mobile toilet. Shit flies everywhere.
It is very funny and the perfect example of ace feminist theorist Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection”. It applies to whatever lies beyond the pale — stuff edited out of everyday life (corpses, human waste) to maintain the shared illusion of normality.
For Steve-O to be covered in shit is to put himself in an abject position. Part of the pleasure is that Steve-O is a white guy. His debasement rehearses a wider sense of abjection — the perceived cultural loss of white male privilege in the wake of affirmative action and multiculturalism. Put a black woman in the shitbox and it’s a very different movie!
Again and again, the Jackass collective inflicts pain on each other. They punch and push and set up the guy terrified of snakes to plunge into a snake pit. They shoot at each other, taunt and peer pressure each other into ever more dangerous situations and feats. What’s going on?
It’s as if, with the advent of globalisation, the offshore relocation of manufacture and industry to the Third World — mainly India and China — men in developed countries have lost a traditional source of self-worth — that space for bonding and identity formation, the fraternal workplace.
Men’s working lives have changed. Jobs don’t last. It’s part-time work with no real future. The workplace is far from a setting of male esteem any more.
The emotional beginnings of that loss is brilliantly detailed in the series Mad Men, showing the phallic authority of 20th century fellows (in advertising) slowly losing ground in a sea of booze, market shifts and bewildering corporate dynamics.
The joy of Jackass masochism lies in its heedless return to the body. While ideas reign in the economy and an ‘honest job” is hard to come by, these guys are all about physically testing themselves, fearlessly exploring what the male body can take and do.
The only work ethic they share is setting each other up for ever more outrageous dares. They stage the supposed abjection of white masculinity by punishing its body — for laughs. And they do it together. They do it to each other, for each other, in front of each other. They are a homosocial collective at play. And I want to join them.