Male bonding doesn’t have to be about bravado and bros. Dancing on stage naked taught me a better way

In my early 20s, I worked as a naked dancing ghost. I was a late stand-in for a production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. A couple of evenings a week I strolled in the dark to Malmö Opera’s functionalist home, with its marble-clad columns and huge, warmly lit window surfaces.
Backstage in the dressing rooms, it was almost like the atmosphere before a lower-division football game, the guys shooting the breeze, talking rubbish, except that when they returned one by one from the cubicle where the makeup was being applied, they were naked and corpse-pale, their bodies dotted with splashes of black. Lips were chalky-white and eyes were adorned with dark rings that gave faces a startled expression.
The makeup artist had received offensive comments from one of the ghosts, who had been fired. That’s how I got the job – at short notice. I started the same night as the dress rehearsal, in front of an audience of close to 1,000 people.
Despite the cultural stereotype of Swedes being entirely comfortable with nakedness and always stripping off in public, I was embarrassed and ashamed of my body. In fact that is why I applied for the job. I hoped it would be a form of therapy. If I’m naked a couple of nights a week, the shame should disappear, I reasoned. The exterior would heal the interior with the help of the audience’s burning gaze.
The physical shame wasn’t really the biggest problem, however. Deep down, I was ashamed that I couldn’t control myself, that I drank, lied and behaved like an asshole. I was convinced that if people found out what I really thought, felt and did, I would be abandoned. As soon as I was drunk, which I constantly was, my body craved validation from women, regardless of whether I had a girlfriend or not.
Wagner’s opera is about a man who endures unspeakable inner torment: a sea captain condemned to sail his ship on the seas for all eternity. Every seven years he must go ashore to look for the woman who will love him faithfully until his death. This can be his only salvation. Essentially, The Flying Dutchman is about the possibility of forgiveness.
In a strange way, I was perhaps hoping that a similar redemption would rub off on me: I would at least achieve clarity, and reclaim boundaries for my body and myself.
On stage, the spray paint made our pubic hair hard, and the voices of the opera singers made our hair stand on end as we danced around with them in the illuminated darkness, our facial expressions frozen. A captivating experience of sound, light and movement.
We were fragile, powerful, ridiculous and funny at the same time. Our cocks dangled in unison to the music. Male togetherness, so often difficult to combine with presence, vulnerability and meaning, seemed in this context easy and self-evident.
Previously, relating to men in groups had scared me; it was simply not possible to for me to hang out with a group of men without freezing up. But this was different.
I have been thinking about this experience since the return of war to Europe. Sweden has abandoned its neutrality and we are told we must be prepared for the threat of Russian aggression, for war. The military has long been one of the most glorified forms of male association in our culture, in movies and in books. A powerful, noble male bond is forged via a shared will to compete against another group of men, to the death if need be.
The military may now be an outdated picture of ideal male companionship, but large groups of men doing anything together other than playing sports, performing, drinking or fighting can still be hard to imagine. Intimacy between men in groups, when it occurs, is traditionally created by an external threat, imagined or real. If that pressure is missing, we still often become incapable, lacking common points of support.
Group settings in which men are allowed to be sensitive beings can be difficult to find beyond the high-pressure arenas of professional sports. Within the limited confines of these ritualistic forms all the emotional and relationship issues that men have to grapple with must be confronted.
But the oppression is palpable. You only have to scroll through the Swedish sport newspaper Sportbladet to read, under a thin veneer of competitive events, headlines about what really hurts: infidelity, violence in close relationships, illness, friendship, love and gossip. “The mother’s anger: my son was weak and sick”, screams one headline.
Others include: “I’m not going to hide any more – the football star comes out as gay” and “The handball player’s strange shoe addiction”.
The male community I experienced during The Flying Dutchman was almost utopian; we were masculine in our nudity but shared a situation where the usual strategies for connecting fell flat.
Although, as nude men, we made a good spectacle and received the most boos and cheers nightly before the curtain came down, we were kept apart from the leads between acts.
A motley collection, we sat in dressing gowns in the smoking room and waited for our next call. We felt free to sit there and chat about everything and anything. After a few months of stripped-down waltzing, the arias and the community had etched themselves so deeply into my body that, 20 years later, I still struggle with the impulse to throw off my clothes and dance when I hear the notes of Wagner.
Expressions of male friendship have changed since then. I now go to the gym two days a week with my gym bros, and while we work out we can talk about almost anything. A friend and I recently started a podcast about culture and masculinity. I have learned that modern male friendship can be intimate and candid – a recipe for better health and more fulfilling relationships and careers.
But it’s complicated. While there is no shortage of male influencers signposting the way to a more modern masculinity, they are often controversial. The recent backlash against the US podcaster, male influencer and wellbeing bro Andrew Huberman prompted Swedish columnist Catia Hultquist to wonder if this was a sign that the demands of male friendships had increased, and the start of a movement of male disappointment – not so much #metoo as #brotoo.
The big problem we still have with masculinity and friendship is that, like art and literature for that matter, friendship involves ceding control and becoming vulnerable in the eyes of another person. Masculinity doesn’t have to be about football and pub bravado any more than it need be about war. Likewise, male mutual support can be found in the most surprising places. But my question would be: has the male community modernised enough to allow this vulnerability?
Earlier this summer, I went to Berlin with Författarlandslaget, the Swedish writers’ national football team. Over a weekend, we played in a European championship against England, Italy, Germany and France, helping weld together a male European writing community.
In Författarlandslaget, I know people who have taught me something about vulnerability. Our team captain, Fredrik Ekelund, came out as a transvestite, and I have played with Martin Bengtsson who, after a suicide attempt, quit elite football and became a writer and musician. The yoke of having to act big and strong, which we men constantly carry with us, is temporarily removed when I get to wear the yellow and blue jersey of the national team.
The everyday rage and belligerence that surround us require us to erect defences, but when we peel off the superficial layers of our culture, masculinity can really change. Men in a group can open up to each other about their hidden fears and insecurities, talk about what makes us tremble with shame, about the emotional and actual violence we are capable of doing to each other, to women and ourselves. The paradox about stripping away our defensive, buttoned-up outer layers – as I found out, naked and ghostly in front of an audience of operagoers – is that it gives us back control.
Exposing our true selves can release us from the trap of received ideas about masculinity; it lets us take ownership of our essential fragility and, even at the risk of disappointment, makes us more human.