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A review by miaheartsbooks
Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man by Thomas Page McBee
4.0
Despite not being very interested in boxing, I really enjoyed Thomas Page McBee's Amateur: A True Story About What Makes A Man. Amateur follows McBee as he trains for a charity boxing match from scratch while exploring his fears about masculinity and violence from his position as a trans man and a child sexual abuse survivor.
The boxing training allows McBee to relate to men in a homosocial environment that combines intense violence with affection, caring touch and emotional support, as he tries to understand his own relationship with violence and other men's. He also speaks to academics who study masculinity, and I was really intrigued by a piece of research that showed that Danish men understand 'man' to mean 'not a boy', while American men understood 'man' to mean 'not a woman' so were compelled to be actively opposed to anything they see as feminine (although apparently Denmark is also a very misogynist country, so maybe this isn't the easy answer it seems).
Amateur is an honest and vulnerable account of one man's attempts to figure out what it means to be a man, and while I'd like to have read more about how race, class and sexuality intersect with masculinity, the book's memoir form doesn't really allow for that. Having studied masculinity academically and worked with its worst effects therapeutically I'm not sure Amateur taught be anything new but I was glad to read it nonetheless and plan to read McBee's previous book Man Alive.
The boxing training allows McBee to relate to men in a homosocial environment that combines intense violence with affection, caring touch and emotional support, as he tries to understand his own relationship with violence and other men's. He also speaks to academics who study masculinity, and I was really intrigued by a piece of research that showed that Danish men understand 'man' to mean 'not a boy', while American men understood 'man' to mean 'not a woman' so were compelled to be actively opposed to anything they see as feminine (although apparently Denmark is also a very misogynist country, so maybe this isn't the easy answer it seems).
Amateur is an honest and vulnerable account of one man's attempts to figure out what it means to be a man, and while I'd like to have read more about how race, class and sexuality intersect with masculinity, the book's memoir form doesn't really allow for that. Having studied masculinity academically and worked with its worst effects therapeutically I'm not sure Amateur taught be anything new but I was glad to read it nonetheless and plan to read McBee's previous book Man Alive.