DRAMA 4 MEN: THE POWER OF THE MALE ADMISSION

Lance Armstrong, AA boyfriends and how easy it is to endorse a questionable man.

As a nation, we are hardwired to believe men, especially when they can point to having been through something.

One of the first pop culture heroes ever, Jesus Christ, was a hot guy in his thirties who died and came back to life. We love that shit! Yes, Mary had to give epidural-free birth in a barn without even getting to experience sex, but no one cares. She’s not the hero. The baby is. The boy baby. Who grew up to be a hot boy man with magic tricks and a six pack and lots of doubters whom he proved wrong. We love that! We don’t ask questions. We say yes, endorse, put a replica of his six pack in every church, thank you.

I get it. I am not religious but I myself have been known to blindly endorse questionable men by, say, dating them.

I promise this is related—

When I was 20 years old I went to a rehab center in Union Square on a Tuesday night to attend my third or fourth AA meeting ever. I was still at the age/level of social anxiety where being in new places alone terrified me. I presumed everyone in the vicinity was waiting for me to do something embarrassing like walk into the closet instead of the bathroom or “admit I was an alcoholic”.

So I trembled a little as I whispered “meeting?” to the people at the rehab center’s reception desk, who directed me to a small room with green carpeting and a circle of black folding chairs inside. I was absolutely floored when the speaker arrived - a conventionally attractive young woman. She had long shiny hair and perfect bone structure. I didn’t hear anything she said but it sounded like “I used to drink then I came to AA and now I’m beautiful and it’s SOOOOO fucking easy for me to get a boyfriend.”

I was pretty much sold on sobriety based off that so I let my gaze wonder and started reading the 12 steps on the wall. I read (interpreted) that I needed to be restored to sanity, take a moral inventory of my defective character, list all the people I’d harmed and make amends to them in order to become a new person and all of that pretty much checked out. I hated myself and everything I had done while drinking and before drinking. I believed I was insane because that’s how it felt to be blacking out in a bedazzled Wet Seal bra top on a liberal arts campus where everyone else was reading Lacan and interrogating their relationship to the male gaze. My character was surely defective because I couldn’t stop blacking out but didn’t know how to enjoy a moment of sober consciousness or how to connect with people in an authentic way. Hating yourself and acting accordingly invariably leaves you with a long list of people you’ve harmed, and I actually couldn’t wait to make amends to those people because my ego wanted them to know I’m NO LONGER the deranged whore who hurt them, I’m in fact a completely different person, I PROMISE, so don’t be mad at me!

When I stopped drinking in my youth, my goal was just to become acceptable. To be one with the rest of the world. To transcend from wreckage reaping mess to someone who goes home when tired and can maintain a friendship for longer than a summer. Everything I’ve done since for my mental health has been motivated by a similar desire to become more normal and stable. But during my time in AA, I noticed that many of the men there were having a different experience.

This specific type of man may have joined AA to stop drinking, but they stayed to be treated like a hero. By getting sober, they were giving a gift to the world around them. By residing in a luxury rehab on their parents’ dime, moving into a luxury “sober living” and taking all the time they needed off work to attend AA meetings every day and stay away from triggers, these men were doing something miraculous and groundbreaking. The world doesn’t treat messy women well, but it would have been very easy for these men in their specific positions of privilege to stay drunken assholes their whole lives and marry out of their league and get promoted and add to their generational wealth. But some of them decided not too. Some of them, were heroes.

I ended up dating a man with this attitude about sobriety, like he was “crushing it”, saving and changing lives by telling his story, and that was part of what drew me in. It is so rare to see men anywhere under any circumstances being vulnerable, that watching this jock-type guy, who looked like he would have hurt my feelings in high school, openly admit to having humiliated himself on a bender felt groundbreaking to me. He really was different than all the financial analysts on Hinge with whom he’d shared a pretty similar upbringing. I believed it. He was a miracle!

He made his sobriety his career. He gave motivational speeches on a professional level. I flew Orlando to watch him speak at a corporate event and everyone there received him exactly the way he presented himself, as a hero. Proof of God. Proof that everything can work out (with the right financial resources which were not mentioned in the speech)! The corporate event, like all other spaces in America, was hugely receptive to that narrative. Young, attractive white guy went through unexpected adversity and now is on the other side of it. Cue applause.

Just a few days after I broke up with this same guy, we were in an AA meeting together because when I told my sponsor I didn’t want to go, she said I was letting fear dictate my actions and I would probably drink if I didn’t go to the meeting and sit mere feet away from my ex as he shared about how he was facing something difficult. He said that sobriety is like going to the gym, you have to do it even when you don’t feel like it. The room echoed with nods and “mmhmms” of approval and “thank you for sharing!”’s. They ate it up. Of course they did! I can relate, I had just recently stopped eating it up!

I promise this is related—

My family watches a lot of movies together. It’s kind of the main thing we do. Our tastes often align and when the movie ends, there’s a great sense of catharsis in knowing we all felt similarly about the plot, heroes, and villains. 

Unfortunately, no such catharsis was found when we all sat through the documentary THE ARMSTRONG LIE in 2013. I was left completely alone when the movie ended and I expressed my feelings of sympathy for Lance Armstrong. I watched shock, horror and, worst of all, disappointment growing in the eyes of my family members as I repeated Lance’s arguments - It wasn’t just him - everyone in the sport was blood doping! The italians made him do it!

I believed Lance had earned his seven yellow jerseys. I fell for it. Fooled once again. To be fair, before the scandal, Lance’s story was so motivational to the world that his mom started a career as a professional motivational speaker just based on being his mom. Here’s a direct quote from her speaker bio: “From high school dropout to mother of Lance Armstrong, seven-time Tour De France champion and cancer survivor, Linda's story motivates people to achieve their own dreams.”

no Mary treatment for Linda

In the same way that watching my ex talk about making drunken mistakes in front of a room full of people made me believe he was capable of more emotional range than a shoe, watching Lance admit in a press interview that there was something wrong with his body and that he might not survive it made me believe he was trustworthy. I mean, he was admitting something! Men don’t ever admit things!!!! Well, it seems that having testicular cancer is the only thing he’s ever admitted to with honest intentions.

There’s a new documentary called LANCE on Netflix and I must say, a lot has changed in my psyche over the past eleven years. It was immediately apparent to me this time around that Lance Armstrong suffers from narcissism and might be a pathological liar. Yes, most cyclists who competed against him in the Tour de France were also blood doping or using performance enhancing drugs, but most of them were also like “no comment!” when asked about it and Lance DOUBLED DOWN at every turn. He called his friends liars, called one of his female team members a whore for sharing concerns about doping in the press, and constantly used his cancer as ammo - why would he fuck up his system with drugs when he nearly died from stage 4 cancer?! He spewed this stuff everywhere, to any interviewer who would listen. 

There are also claims that Lance tattled on other cyclists for doping in order to avoid blame himself and that he had total control over the organization that runs the Tour de France. Oh, and according to my DMs (journalism), Lance left Sheryl Crow while she had cancer and probably cheated on her. So, overall, I admit… Lance Armstrong is not a great hero to stand behind. 

It is progress that I can see this now! In fact, it’s incredible that I have gone from believing Lance Armstrong’s lies to no longer believing them. Yes, it took three different types of therapy, and the resources to be able to afford that, but I did the therapy and asked my parents to pay for it when I couldn’t! I watched two different documentaries about Lance without ever once considering reading an article! I vulnerably admitted I was wrong, and it only took me a decade plus to do so! I am a miracle and if you don’t think so you might be a mysogynist.

To hire me as a motivational speaker for your next corporate event, contact 4thedramasubstack@gmail.com