Where Have All The Craft Men Gone?

Last night, Suzanne and I attended a night of open crafting at our local library.  I taught her some nifty paper-crafting techniques, we met some lovely people, and between the two of us, we produced three very lovely cards.  The event was held on the main level of the library, and it was very informal: simply bring in your supplies, find a cozy place with some table-space, and “do your thing”.  This is a new thing at our local library: previously, it was “Coloring Night”.  Anyone interested in the adult coloring craze was welcome to show up, grab some free coloring page print-outs and use the library-supplied colored pencils, and color away, feeling free to quietly socialize (or not) with other folks who had likewise come to color.  Clearly, the elderly gentleman seated across from me was a longtime attendee of the previous “Coloring Night”, but that wasn’t the only thing that set him apart from the rest of the folks gathered around those tables last night:

He was the only “apparent” man there.

Apart from him, the event was, as “crafting things” so often are, a “hen-party”: a room full of women creating socially. (Please do not take that term disparagingly; I do not mean it as such.)  He was, to the uninitiated eye, the only “rooster” in the room.  And then there was me….

I resisted the call of paper-crafting for twenty years (as previously discussed).  I’m not willing to say that my resistance to it was completely gender-biased, because quite simply, it wasn’t, but I do think that many men’s resistance to paper-crafting, artist journaling, and even scrapbooking (possibly even to the “coloring craze”) is. Let me explain….

Unless you live on a rainbow-colored cloud somewhere in the stratosphere, it’s really not a secret that we are conditioned, as a race, that certain gender stereotypes exist: some things are “manly” or “womanly”, or not; girls should wear pink and have pink things; boys should wear blue and have blue things, yada yada. Gender stereotyping starts early in our culture, often with things as seemingly simple as pink Lego’s, or Barbie dolls, or the marketing of race cars and action figures.  And those stereotypes have reached right out and grabbed the crafting world by the throat!  All you have to do is take a trip to your local Michael’s Craft Store if you don’t believe me:

Wood-burning and leather-crafting are considered “manly” crafts by many.  Perhaps it’s because they are associated with a sort of “you decorate in early modern dead animal, don’t you?” stereotype?  Perhaps it is because these are typically more “tribal” crafts.  Care to guess how many aisles are relegated to these crafts at most Michael’s Craft Stores? One. Supplies for both are usually relegated to one small area, directly beside each other.

Meanwhile, candle-making, quilting, sewing, baking, jewelry-making, and paper-crafting are marketed as “womanly”–complete with all the “bling”, bows, and feminine imagery one would expect to go along with such marketing. And that’s basically the rest of the store….

And then there is the area for paints, sketchbooks, drawing tools, and canvases, which is its own area, and basically “un-gender biased”: seriously, it’s like a few walls of antiseptic whitespace in almost every craft store you go into.  This communicates one very simple message: we all have it in us to draw/paint/sketch. Everyone can be an artist if they want to be. 

But it doesn’t stop there: name me, if you can, three men who have made a name for themselves in the quilting industry? As bakers? As paper-crafters?  I can name one in the first: Tim Holtz. Not accidentally, he’s one of two in the last: Tim Holtz and Gentleman Jim Hankins. Of course, when it comes to bakers, you have Duff and Buddy Valastro.  Now name me three women….the list goes on and on and on, right?  

You don’t have to be an anthropologist or sociologist to realize that gender stereotypes arise basically out of a “monkey see, monkey do” mentality, which is inherent in pretty much everybody, whether we like it or not.  For example, little girls see other little girls playing with Barbie dolls instead of Matchbox cars and arrive at the pretty obvious conclusion that this is “what little girls do”, while on the flip side, little boys see other little boys playing with Matchbox cars instead of Barbie dolls, and arrive at the same conclusion in reverse: this is “what little boys do”.  That “monkey see, monkey do” mentality doesn’t go away when we reach adulthood: as guys, if we see other guys not scrapbooking, paper-crafting, baking, etc., but see only women doing it, we ultimately arrive at a similar childlike conclusion: “dudes don’t do that”; “that’s a chick thing”, and, heaven forbid: “that’s girly”!

Which brings me specifically to the topic of art journaling.  Courtesy of modern marketing, artist journaling has been lumped together with scrapbooking and paper-crafting as “a chick thing”: it’s “something women do”.  Yet, you might be surprised to discover, the first true artist journalers were, in fact, men!

Perhaps the most famous art journals in history were created by Leonardo da Vinci, Henry David Thoreau, and Carl Jung.  Charles Darwin could also be included in that list.  All of these men were what we might today call renaissance men: 

a present-day man who has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency in more than one field; a man of any period who has a broad range of intellectual interests; an outstandingly versatile, well-rounded person.

The ideal of the renaissance man originated in Italy (not surprising, given that the perfect model of the concept is historical art journaler Leonardo da Vinci himself), and is based on the belief that every man’s ultimate goal should basically be to be good at everything, and not only gain but exhibit as much knowledge as humanly possible, and not only the knowledge of academic things, but also knowledge of human experience, inclusive of (such oft-“female assigned” things as) emotions.  Somewhere along the way, that paradigm of the extremely well-rounded individual gave way to a preference for “cookie cutter gentlemen”: men who are the pinnacle of their specific chosen field; men who are heroes in their specific chosen sport, etc. I don’t think it at all coincidental that this paradigm shift coincided with the subsequent assignment of the understanding and expression (in art journals or otherwise) of emotions as “something women do”.   History (and literature and art) tell us that this paradigm shift happened somewhere around 1920 AD.

So it’s important that we ask ourselves: what else was happening in the world around the year 1920 that could have caused such a paradigm shift?  We really need look no further than that immortal work by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby.  Face it: in that book, Gatsby is the guy all the other guys really want to be, but don’t have the guts, or the glory, or the whatever to actually become.  Meanwhile, the teller of the story, Nick Carraway, is the “status quo”; the “everyman”, who looks up to Gatsby and “really wants to be him when he grows up”, but never quite makes that cut.  Fitzgerald’s character of Nick really is, in most ways, precisely that: he’s the “norm” for a 1920s “dude”.  He’s a veteran of The Great War (WWI; the “War to end all wars”), with a very specific college education, and a very specific college degree to go along with it, that has placed him in a very specific sort of job as a bond salesman. And he feels trapped, precisely because of that specificity.  Meanwhile, Gatsby, on the other hand, is a young and mysterious millionaire who made his money as a bootlegger (which, in the 1920s, may as well have read as romantic as the word “pirate”), who also served in WWI, but, unlike Nick Carraway, wasn’t broken by it.  He’s a symbol of the ultimate “free spirit” for men in that era, as readily as any flapper doing the Charleston might be for women of that era.  

There were lots of men like Nick Carraway in the post-WWI world (which is why he makes the perfect “everyman” to serve as narrator for Fitzgerald’s novel); there were conspicuously less men like Gatsby post WWI, and even less than that following The Great Depression of the 1930s. The question becomes: why?  The answer: WWI and the Great Depression communicated, for once and for all, that the world is not a safe place.  In fact, it is a very dangerous place,  without any guarantees, and, as “bread-winners” and “the backbones of families”, it then becomes a man’s place not to “dilly dally”; not to “waste his time on shenanigans”, for, if he does, everything will unravel, exactly the way things do for Gatsby at the end of Fitzgerald’s opus. (Spoiler alert, for anybody who didn’t have to read this in high school!) In that way, The Great Gatsby becomes sort of a modern morality tale for the would-be twentieth (or now twenty-first) century renaissance man:  don’t quit your “day job”, because bad things will ensue; stick to the status quo with all of its “guarantees”; don’t ever be ruled (or even given to artistically expressing) your emotions because that’s how wars happen.

The type of man guys are told to be in that post-Gatsby world doesn’t have time to do something as “silly” as maintain an art journal.  He’s too busy bringing home the cashola; scoring the big win for his company, his family, or his team.  Women, certainly, can do such things (as maintain an art journal, or scrapbook, or paper-craft, or other-craft), for theirs is the realm of emotions–where do you think the term hysterical comes from?–and they have certain “freedoms” that men don’t, simply because not “as much is riding on them”. Really? Really?  We also live in a world with the highest percentage of self-made women in history; women who “rule” their own businesses, families, and households, whether as CEOs, single mothers, divorcees, or simply as independent females who don’t require men in their lives to get things done!  

Which leaves us with a worldview where renaissance women are totally acceptable (even, I daresay, expected), while renaissance men are often labeled as effeminate, or weak-minded (“not determined enough” to master just one specific field), or “wishy-washy”.   You don’t have to research marketing and business long at all on the internet to find a plethora of programs run by women, which teach people how to combine career, family, and marketing to become self-made people.  These programs are not only created and taught by women, but are also aimed at a female audience. Meanwhile, on the flip side of that, most programs created, taught by, and aimed at men teach such things as how to build your career by becoming more self-focused (i.e., to the exclusion of family, friends, and such not-as-important things as one’s emotional well-being).  The consequence? Ultimately, women are empowering other women, while men are (too often busy) pigeon-holing each other into a rat race mentality which leaves most men feeling incredibly trapped, whether they’re willing to admit it, or not. And that rat race mentality, instead of “preventing wars”, or even preventing “living in dangerous times” is only serving to further all of the above.

So, what could potentially happen if we destroyed the gender wall in crafting, and men reclaimed the title of renaissance man, via artist journaling?  For me personally, it has meant, as Thoreau said, a return to living deliberately:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Living a compartmentalized life is not truly living; it’s merely surviving, and to survive something is to “just get by”; to come through “by the skin of one’s teeth”, and then just barely.  Why should anyone wish to live like that?  No, better to go all-in and have the rush of experience, even if we fall flat on our faces in the end (which hopefully I haven’t done in making this blog post so damn long!).  Artist journaling forces one, by the simple creation of art through random drawings and often (especially in the digital methods) through collage, to stop compartmentalizing, and reach outwards, towards more ephemeral symbologies of our day-to-day.  In a lot of ways, it’s as much a return to a more “tribal” mindset as the weekend football game that men are encouraged to like, while at the same time being discouraged to be artistic. Face it: we’re living in a world right now where women are empowering other women to break free from compartmentalization, while at the same time, men are being pushed further and further into their respective corners by each other.  Maybe it’s time we tore down that particular gender wall and paused to join these ladies in their cut/fold/glue and other forms of artistic expression–digital or otherwise. Maybe, just maybe, we could learn a thing or two from them….