During my senior year of high school, my after-school job was to sweep up the floors and empty the trash cans at an auto repair shop.

I was theoretically destined to have a different and more privileged life than these auto mechanics I saw everyday. I was going to attend college, getting an ROTC scholarship to defray the tuition and dorm costs, then go on to graduate school and get an advanced degree and live my life as a professional or as an academic.

But as the end of high school approached, I found myself envying the auto mechanics and not feeling so good about the path I was to follow. I would continue to be dependent on my parents financially for a long time to come, bringing in no reagular income of my own any time in the foreseeable future. I would be spending many more years of my life trying to earn the good grades and approval of people in a hierarchy above me into which I would be seeking to rise. Those Air Force instructors would be superior to me in a military arrangement, the university would be my landlord, I'd have professors to please and impress, and I might have dormitory RAs and such folks to deal with as well.

Day after day I saw the auto mechanics in the space where they worked, as they wrapped up their day. They all worked for Dave, the shop owner (except for Dave himself, of course), but to a man they behaved as if they could effortlessly secure a similar job turning wrenches in some other shop, and his behavior towards them was easy and friendly and non-bossy. (He was that way towards me too, for that matter, and I appreciated it. My previous after-school job had been at a pharmacy where I'd been yelled at and belittled constantly in a boss-to-peon-employee way, and I'd hated it).

I had the feeling the guys were well-founded in their confidence: they seemed good at what they did, and every adult in town had a car and had to take it somewhere to get maintained and fixed. All of them, Dave and his crew, had a discernable pride in their skills and they projected a strong sense of "Nobody tells me what to do". They didn't take shit from anyone, didn't need to suck it up. After an honest day's work fixing folks' cars, they popped open beers and lit up a joint or two and sprawled on comfortable sofas, turned on some tunes, and we all hung out for another half hour or more relaxing and chatting before heading home.

The homes they headed to weren't luxurious palaces but they had comfortable friendly pads to which they could bring women if single, or which they shared with their wives if they were married. Theirs was a masculinity composed of self-determination and the comfortable sense of being people who contributed a skill that other folks needed and would pay for. Women apparently found them sexy for who they were and how they were.

When I looked down my own road, I was doing so with virginal eyes; I had not had a very successful dating life thus far. What people kept telling me was that I would acquire social status and hence desirability by eventually getting those advanced credentials from the university environment, and then obtaining one of the high-status positions that would be available to me as a consequence — that would make me an attractive prospect for women. My mind sourly translated: I spend years getting a professional education so I can get money and status and then maybe I can meet a security-seeking woman who will let me do it to her.

If you see what I mean, it was not an image of masculinity that had much inherent appeal. The auto mechanics seemed able to present as sexy on the basis of who and how they were in the world, including their confidence and their attitude of doing as they wanted to do and not letting anyone push them around. I was being offered a competing model in which any sexiness I ever obtained had nothing to do with who and how I was as a person, as I saw it, but more like a perk for doing as I was told, the chance to be with women who would admire my social status and my wealth, but that had nothing to do with me as a person, see?



I was counterculturally-minded and didn't care about wealth and social status, and I really liked the idea of having a skill, like a craftsman of old, able to ply my trade in virtually any town I chose to plop down in. And it looked like I could get there a whole lot faster than the 8+ years of college education on the path I was expected to walk. I jumped ship, I bailed on the college path and went to Vo-Tech school to learn to be an auto mechanic. I received the training and then held jobs in auto shops for a couple of years before reluctantly deciding that without better skills and further training I wasn't going to reach the point of being self-supporting.

So the auto mechanics thing didn't exactly pan out as hoped for, but neither did my subsequent attempt at being a college student in 1979-1980, so in the early 1980s, with only a high school diploma to my name, I put in some time as a manual laborer in a variety of settings in the western US where a temporary oil-boom economy made jobs readily available.

So I had a few years of being, and being among, the guys of the social and economic class I'd aspired to, as well as the one a notch or two below. I didn't fit in. I found things not to like about them and their culture and attitudes, and they likewise found things they didn't like about me and mine. Many people would attribute that to class cultural differences, and there's probably some truth to that, but it's not how I experienced it.


I worked as a roughneck on an oil rig for a couple of days and was remonstrated, "You don't slam the coupling closed with a bang like you're supposed to. Don't just close it to where it latches, do it like this!" At first I thought there was something mechanical that happened if you slam it, or that the sound was an important cue to the other workers or something — nope, they just got something out of things banging and from the crew enthusiastically slamming things around.

Working with the hardbander — the welder who joined the lengths of drilling pipe — was easier at first but then he became unfriendly because I didn't reciprocate with the bragging about the chicks in town and what he would do to them.

I liked working on the tree cutting team, working the chain saw and feeding the chipper, cutting the new road to the drilling site. That time it was me who was resenting the attitude of my coworkers. Foreman asked us to unload a truckful of scrap metal parts and then come back for a new assignment, and the other guys wanted to go at it slow and lazy, picking up one metal piece at a time and walking to the edge of the truck bed and pausing and then tossing it onto the pile, then making some joking remark, eating up the time. I figured the foreman would be seriously pissed at us all when he saw how little we'd gotten done, and I was right, but they wouldn't listen or didn't care at the time, and they were affronted that I'd stand against what the rest of them wanted to do.

The surveying crew seemed nice enough until the lead surveyor began scowling at me and saying dismissive things. Finally told me I had an attitude problem. The rest of the crew was always grinning and joking, and because I was all serious and stood around like I had a stick up my butt, he felt I thought I was better than him and he didn't care for it.

Intertwined with other issues, a lot of it had to do with maleness and masculinity. It was sometimes overt and sometimes subtle but it was always there. I had gotten myself into an all-male environment. There was no reason women could not have done these jobs, and been hired to do these jobs, but there weren't any there. If I'd been a college student, or a professional in one of the fields dependent on an advanced degree, it would not have been an all-male environment, but this was. For the first prolonged period in my life I was pretty much exclusively in the company of guys.

I'd craved the freedom and the proud sense of "No one bosses me around and tells me what to do", the self-determination of economic independence, but now I found myself immersed in a hostility towards anything reeking of "sissy". I was now in a noisy crude and coarse performance for which I wasn't very well cast.


I'd also craved what I perceived to be their model of sexiness and desirability, but among these guys I ran into the attitude that guys always pay for it: "You can get a whore, or you can be single and take girls out and you pay for the date, or you can get married and you bring home a paycheck, but if you want that pussy, you gotta pay for it somehow". That didn't sound any better than the white-collar educated-track version. I wanted an equal relationship, starting with being equally desirable.


Gender does map onto class in interesting ways. It's a trope, a cliché: Bogart and Hepburn on The African Queen, her with her tart crispness and him with his coarser working-class modalities. Men have maleness in a patriarchal world, and can embrace the sloppy informality of the working class, but women are expected to hold themselves up to a standard lest any sloppiness be associated with sluttiness. There's a gender dichotomy around good and bad: for males, good is passive, the absence of assertively and rebelliously doing bad things, whereas bad is active. For girls it's constructed the other way around, where bad is passive, a weak failure to impose discipline upon yourself, a state of being carried along to perdition, while good is that active state of straightening one's backbone and displaying the starch of one's character.

The guys' complaint about me was the same as their complaint about women: that I acted like I thought I was too good for them. They recognized the overlap and directly said so: I needed to act like a man, I was acting like I was pussywhipped, I seemed faggy, I wasn't a regular guy. I'd been targeted for similar comments while I was growing up, but in opting for a blue-collar environment it seemed like I'd made the proverbial jump from frying pan to fire.

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