#hal gill

Seeing hockey yaoi joke posts about this excerpt (from Four Pretty Good Hockey Stories by Hal Gill for The Players’ Tribune) serves I believe as a good example of how the general public can sense the psychosexual undercurrents of the expression of masculinity—which are particularly exarcerbated in hypermasculine spaces like men’s sports (my personal thesis is that men’s hockey is a microcosm of the primarily North American societal ideal of masculinity and a useful way to apprehend its trends on a wider scale)—without grasping that those neither necessarily stem from desire nor reveal anything about one’s sexuality. The ideal of masculinity as an identity lies on sexual subjugation: that of the female archetype (the wife, who the man must keep obedient and sexually exclusive lest he be emasculated; the daughter, who the man must dictate and enforce who she can or cannot date lest he be emasculated—and to the husband of whom he ultimately consents to transferring the right of sexual subjugation to; the sexually appealing non-subjugated women, ie. friends, acquaintances, strangers, who the man must pursue lest he be emasculated; etc). It also lies on the rejection of what threatens it: typically, the archetype of the faggot* (the non-masculine male, the subject of masculinity who doesn’t conform to its dogma by refusing to sexually subjugate women or sexually submitting to women, by sexually submitting to other men, by displaying characteristics contradictory to the ideal of masculinity, ie. emotionality, defeatism, lack of strength or “grit”, “effeminacy”, etc.; the male who readily invites, accepts or doesn’t combat emasculation). Hierarchically speaking and as masculinity prescribes it (and as is put in motion within societies organized in patriarchies, where masculinity reigns supreme) both the female and the faggot are bellow the man; the man is the better of the female and the faggot, physically, politically, and morally.

Those dynamics are, in my opinion, at the core of the situation Gill describes. Most people are familiar with the fact that Sidney Crosby, as Kristi Allain describes it in Kid Crosby or Golden Boy: Sidney Crosby, Canadian national identity, and the policing of hockey masculinity, “has been ambivalently positioned [by the public and by the media] as the rough, tough, Canadian hockey superstar who can save professional hockey (…) [and] also as a whiney, emasculated character who is dependant on his paternalistic relationship with Mario Lemieux (…) accompanied by the moniker ‘Cindi Crysby’ or ‘Golden Boy’.” (As an aside, Kristi Allain is a remarkable researcher and sociologist and the author of my favorite papers on masculinity & Canadian hockey; I think her works are invaluable to understand the dynamics at play between nationalism and masculine identity as they relate to Canadian hockey.) At the start of his career, he incarnates an archetype that is neither fully man, nor fully faggot, nor fully female; he a prodigy within hockey, meaning the better of other men—yet he fails to show the avidity to embrace stolidness particularly expected of players in the dying motions of the “old school hockey” era in the 2000s.

Masculinity corrects deviation through enforcement between peers: think of injunctions to “man up,” of the disappointment expressed by patriarchs at a son’s effeminacy, of one being questioned if he’s not “man enough” to perform so-and-so. This later devolves into punishment—being disinherited or cut off, being physically or sexually assaulted, being othered and ostracized from the masculine social group (junior hockey teams come to mind, but this is a topic for another post), etc. A more recent example of punishment for the failure to conform to ideals of masculinity within hockey is what happened to Jack Hughes in his rookie year: him saying he was described as a “pretty boy hockey player who couldn’t play” is, along with players routinely laying hits on him, in my opinion extremely telling. Note the language “pretty boy” (echoing the ‘Golden Boy’ nickname Don Cherry used to call Sidney Crosby, as Kristi Allain also describes): he’s not a man but a boy; he’s not tough but pretty; he’s the lesser of real men.

It is far from insignificant that Gill employs the terms “dominate and overpower” either: here the theme of sexual subjugation emerges once more. Subconsciously, Gill understands that Crosby is an atypical agent under masculinity: he understands himself as the real man and Crosby as the amorphous lesser who doesn’t respect his place within the hierarchy and who needs, in some way or another, to be corrected. What he intends to express through physicality is: you are not my better. “He’s too strong” comes as a perplexing realization: Crosby can not only match “every ounce of [Gill’s] strength” but also outdo it. The opposition of their “want(s)” isn’t without meaning either, and easily takes on an erotic tone because it is of the register of sexual subjugation: Crosby meets Gill’s desire for physicality and integrates it within his own desire to “slip off [him]”. Whether Sidney Crosby really “wanted” Gill to behave this way doesn’t matter: Gill suddenly understands Crosby not as a lesser with an incidental talent for hockey, but as a fully-realized man with desires who met his attempt at sexual subjugation by sexually subjugating him in a subtler way. He cannot be made to fullfil Gill’s desire; Gill is disturbed because he accidentally fullfils his desire instead.

All in all, this tells nothing of Gill’s actual sexual affect for Crosby (chiefly if he, at that moment, would have liked to find a way into his pants), but it tells of how sexual affects between men are in a constant relationship with the intrinsinct psychosexual dynamicism of masculinity. Domination and subjugation, the statuses of better and lesser, are artefacts of the hierarchy between man and female**. A self-avowed man (one that wants to be neither female nor faggot) must at least be an equal to another man, sexually speaking: he must be able to compel the other to fulfill his desires while being in a state of mutual fulfillment*** (ie. a “real man” shows up when a friend needs help, but must detach when he is excessively used by said friend with no compensation lest he be deemed as “weak-willed”, one’s “lapdog”, or submissive). Eroticism imbues that psychosexuality when one man’s desire exceeds the normative bounds of man-to-man mutual fullfilment: when there exists a desire to be sexually subjugated or, in Gill’s case, to sexually subjugate another.

*My use of the slur is deliberate: this archetype is, to the man, highly derogatory and undesirable; it is the antithesis of man’s masculinity. It doesn’t indicate the sexuality of the subject, but that he fails to conform to man’s masculinity in some critical way or other.

**The use of “female” here indicates the archetype, not a personal tendency to call women “females”. If I even have to say that

***Some man-to-man relationships are naturally imbalanced (coach & player, employer & employee, father & son, … the list goes on) but are still dictated by “normal” amounts of power one has over the other and what one brings to the other: it is normal for a coach to order a player to perform specific tasks; it is not normal, however, for a coach to demand of a player that he repair the coach’s car, for example. The player fulfills the coach’s desire by doing the required exercise or playing a certain way; the coach fulfills the player’s desire by leading him and giving him instructions to follow.

Addendum on my use of “male”, “female”, and “man”: I do not, in my sociological or psychological analysis, use male and female as biological markers. As discussed above, I relate female to its archetype under the construction of masculinity. It englobes any and all people, particularly women, who are non-male and therefore the primary target and primarily targets (under man’s conceptualization of normative fullfilment between individuals ie. “what’s right”) of sexual subjugation by man with a limited capacity for true reciprocality under the rule of man (patriarchy). “Female”, here, exists as a category in relationship to man; it is the “other” of man, who man therefore grants himself dominion over. This is also a reflection of how society views man as default, and everything that exists outside of the ideal of masculinity as other, superfluous, or denoting a secondary construction. My use of the “biological” term is deliberate: through science and by narrativizing its findings, man constructs a reality in which the female (the non-male) is to be sexually subjugated—to be bred, to be kept away from physical labor (due to its supposed weakness), to be herded and protected and therefore decided for, etc. Man makes up and defines the female archetype by ascribing to it anything that he identifies as non-male. Male is the larger category under which man falls; is male any and all people subject to some kind of masculinity, ie. one who identifies with a certain construct of masculinity and is therefore driven to abide by its values, which necessarily opposes the female archetype. Not all males are compelled by the identity of man. Indeed: man is the specific type of male who identifies with and obeys to the ideal of masculinity (the most popular and widely enforced type of masculinity) within a particular society, most often a patriarch (provider, tough, non-effeminate, dominating, etc.) type of masculinity. Following this thought, the archetype of the faggot is that of a male non-man: one who can be likened to the female (derogatorily, of course) but who recognizes himself and is recognized by man as some form of masculine. This analysis is, of course, male- & man-centric: it observes how man shapes the world and his relationship to individuals through his understanding of masculinity. It is a profoundly binary world in which any deviation from manness is perceived as other-ness; and because man only recognizes the other as the female, it is thus perceived as femaleness. (I theorize that there actually exists a third category in man’s understanding of the world, the sexless other, but this isn’t particularly relevant here).

The first thing that struck me about Sidney Crosby was his size. He was … small. I wanted to dominate and overpower him. When we matched up, I wanted him to feel every ounce of my strength. I was still with the Bruins in 2005 when I played him for the first time. He was tearing up the league and I thought, All right, kid, you haven’t played me yet. First shift, I get him in the corner and I lean on him, and he doesn’t move. It’s like I’m pushing against a brick wall. And then he slips right off me, and he’s gone. I tried it again and again and again. Then sometime in the second period I realized: I’m doing exactly what he wants. He wants me to lean on him, so he can slip off me. He wants me to try to bully him, because he can’t be bullied. He’s too strong. So the next shift I get out there, and I think, O.K., I’m going to force him to his backhand every time. That’s what I would do to guys I couldn’t handle, because everyone is weaker on their back hand; it makes it harder for them to pass. But Sid would fire pinpoint backhand passes 30 or 40 feet across the ice. It was like he was playing a different sport. How?! This guy is only 19. I don’t get it. Then I became teammates with him in 2007, and it all made sense. I saw his work ethic, his leadership and his passion for the game — nobody loves hockey more than Sid. And I saw his skill up close. His vision, his speed and — yeah, he’s got thighs like tree trunks — I saw why I couldn’t move him on the ice.

From Hal Gill's "Four Pretty Good Hockey Stories" [via The Player's Tribune]

Boston Bruins // Favorite off-season moments

Click each gif for a description.