Masculinity and the Blue Collar Everyday-Joe Thing

In My Humble Opinion
1

(This is a repurposed blog post) *

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.

  • AHunter3 blogs weekly on the subject of being genderqueer, gender politics issues in general, and his ongoing attempts to get his book published. These blog posts tend to be anywhere from 500 to 2500 words in length and are written in the style of a regular column in a periodical.
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Interesting essay. All I can contribute is my own experience, which oddly parallels yours but in a reverse way. I also worked a variety of blue collar summer jobs in high school. I didn’t really do it for the money, I came from an upper middle class family, but my parents required me to work during the summer. All the guys were what might be colloquially termed “rednecks”, and all the talk usually centered around beer, pussy, pussy, beer, hunting, fishing, pussy, and pussy. And weed. And pussy. I did have one hipster/nerd co-worker one summer that I worked for the city utilities department, who I loved driving around in the truck with and talking about more intellectual topics, except for when he rambled on about comic books (something I knew absolutely nothing about but which he could expound on for hours.)

Overall I ENJOYED the blue collar element. Even though I was a little out of my element at first, I gradually came to enjoy the redneck guys and their raconteurism. Despite having perhaps a limited palette of topics to draw from, I have to say they were good at telling stories in an expressive and entertaining way. I was more of a “bro” in high school, I guess, so maybe I fit in a little better than you did, despite being far more intellectually inclined and from a higher social and economic stratus.

Ironically, the one and only time that I had a co-worker who made me feel bullied and miserable, was the time I briefly worked as a server in a very small restaurant/cafe. This guy, who was maybe 5 years older than me, was a far-left leaning type, he constantly listened to NPR on the stereo, was clearly very well-educated but had an extremely pretentious and snobbish personality, and was sullen and very terse whenever he spoke to me. I was constantly wondering in my mind, “what did I do to piss this guy off so much?” He never reciprocated any of my attempts to be friendly. I remember one time I had such a miserable day with him that I literally went directly to a liquor store right after work and bought a 6 pack of beer and drank it all.

Years later, during the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, I saw in the news that a local guy was arrested at a protest, and it was that same guy. I was thrilled!

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I work in a blue-collar facility as one of the only salaried professionals. I really like it. The people are interesting, tell great stories, lead interesting lives and the ones that last work their tails off. They also know a whole lot of complex things and make surprisingly good money and benefits especially with overtime. I would rather work here than in any office environment. There is nothing wrong with skilled manual labor. I would much rather be a plumber or an electrician than sit around filling out TPS reports all day.

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I still remember my auto-mechanic’ing days fondly. Yes, the additional emphasis on the gender stuff accelerated my awarness of it as a personal issue, but it’s not like that was my sole experience. I became fairly good with my tools (although still slow) and I was proud of it.

Years later, in grad school, a professor scribbled in the margins of a paper I was submitting, “You need Bordo to connect this paragraph to your argument”. I misread that / interpreted that as “You need Bondo to connect this paragraph to your argument” — that my assertion was so full of holes that I needed metaphorical body filler to make the paper look whole!

:smiley:

I have the good fortune to draw my income as a database developer (FileMaker), an occupation that wasn’t on anyone’s event horizon in the late 1970s. It’s a skill, I’m good at it and get paid quite well for it, I’m a contracted consultant and therefore ply my trade all over, I don’t have to be physically present in an office and therefore please a bunch of overseers and office manager types, and all in all it’s a lot like being an auto mechanic except with electronic tools and skills instead of the kind you use on engines and brakes and distributor caps and whatnot.

5

Yeah, I can sort of see that. Prior to getting into IT / corporate bullshit consulting management shit, I was a structural engineer for a short time (technically an EIT). During college I also worked as a CAD draftsman for a company that refurbished injection molding machines or something like that. Most of the staff were machinists and other specialized labor. A very low-stressed summer job, but still kind of sucked because I sat by myself in the “engineering” section while the rest of the office staff sat somewhere else.

But I also worked a number of light industrial temp jobs in factories and warehouses and most of the people working there were dumb as shit.
Anyhow, to the OPs point. There is certainly something more satisfying in working on something that produces tangible results. Most office work is tedious meetings and spreadsheets and PowerPoint bullshit. More often than not, “success” is defined by how well you “fit in” with the other useless carbon blobs and kowtow to your bosses whims. Lots of backstabbing and jockeying for position. Skilled blue collar work is often dependent on highly trained specialists who “know their shit”. Your value is defined not on how much you suck up but on how well you do your job.

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There is something really appealing about doing simple work along with company. I don’t think this effect is limited to blue collar work. Basically any job where you are doing something and have a freed mental capacity to socialize (I had this effect grading exams with company) at the same time will over time cause people to bond over the most common denominator, not to be bored.

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Can relate to what you’re saying, was never happier than when I worked moving furniture in the summers during high school and college. Nothing like the camaraderie you develop doing manual labor with other people, and the days seem to go by quick when you’re on the road alot, at least I found. I often think if I could make a decent living doing that I’d be very happy, but at the same time gotta wonder if the romance kinda wears off if you HAVE to do it for your whole life, not to mention the physical toll on your body as we get older in some of those jobs.

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There’s another aspect of blue collar work that I envy sometimes: the fact that so many of these guys have known all their life what they wanted to do.
The follow their father’s example; start working alongside him when they are 16, and get very good at what they do.
By age 22, they’re very comfortable with who they are and what they want from their future.
I’ve know a plumber/handyman guy, who always comes to work at my house with one or both of his sons. The pride they feel in a job well done just shows on their faces.

Unlike the typical college student, trying to live up to his (and his family’s) expectations, and build a career.
No need to get neurotic over which university to try to get into, go networking like crazy, desperately hanging onto every lead and personal connection they can find, doing anything to pad the resume. And risk losing your all self-esteem if it doesn’t work out.