There’s Power in Male Bonding. Must There Be Menace?

The Passenger Seat
Vijay Khurana
Biblioasis (2025)

Owning Up
George Pelecanos
Mulholland Books (2024)

Growing up in the United States mid-century, I was exposed to a lot of bad lessons about what it meant to be a real man. A man, I learned from my alcoholic father, drank heavily, disrespected women and took what he wanted, mainly, in his case, by manipulation and duplicitous charm. From the culture I learned that a woman who had a lot of sexual partners was a slut, but a man with many sexual adventures was a stud, a player.

I learned the lessons well enough to subject women in my life to far too much pain. I have tried over the years to apologize to those women and to make amends, but I have no illusions that gestures erased all the damage.

I had the benefit of coming of age during the heyday of second-wave feminism, and I learned a lot while being confronted by my feminist friends about my own sexist behaviours. In seeking to change myself, I believed I might be participating in broader social progress.

And so, I met with other men in groups that focused on recognizing and changing our sexism while raising money for feminist projects. We learned in these groups that males could bond with each other in ways that were healthy and open-hearted, not based on oppressing women. We learned to welcome and enjoy vulnerability and honesty as key themes in male friendships. The best elements of my current life were profoundly shaped by these women and men.

After a time, it was easy to assume my own journey reflected a gradual but inevitable shift in male culture. Then came Donald Trump and the misogynist political backlash he represents.

Male bonding in the MAGA world suppresses shared, deep insecurities through the performative denigration of women. Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape set the tone.

Prominent nominees for the Trump cabinet have been credibly accused of sex trafficking, assault and drunken mauling of women in public.

Recently, the professionally misogynist Tate brothers received seals of approval by the Trump administration, which granted them passage to Florida in their escape from charges of sex trafficking and rape in Europe.

If “the cruelty is the point,” as Adam Serwer wrote seven years ago in the Atlantic, as “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear,” then, for MAGA male bonders, public affirmation of misogyny is also the point.

The alt-right offers young men spaces in the recesses of the internet where they can openly express hatred for women (and trans or gay people) while celebrating a hard-bodied and hard-hearted version of masculinity. The rallying cries of “your body, my choice” and “bros before hos” resonate with brutal menace rather than any desire for self-examination that might put one’s fantasy of patriarchal omnipotence at risk.

All this was on my mind as I read a remarkable new novel from Berlin-based author Vijay Khurana, The Passenger Seat. Khurana employs classic tropes of the buddy road trip and crime novel/true crime genres while giving them a critical 21st-century twist — think In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky and inputs from third-wave feminists.

Khurana’s protagonists are a pair of boy/men growing up in a small North American town. (The fiction is based loosely on the case involving an apparent suicide pact by two teens after they killed three travellers and fled authorities across northern British Columbia and Manitoba in 2019.)

In The Passenger Seat, the boys run away from their small-town home and head north, following vague dreams of high-paying labour — real “men’s work.” They meet and kill a tourist couple in an act of almost abstract violence reminiscent of Camus’s The Stranger.

Khurana takes us into the squalid inner lives of Teddy and Adam as they hang out, jump from a local bridge into water, play video games, drink and brood. The tone is ominous from the first scene onward. “As the friends fall, rocks and shallows rise to meet them, except in the darker place they have aimed for.”

Khurana uses an apocryphal quote attributed to Norman Mailer as one of his book’s epigraphs: “When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses.” This signals the competitiveness and potentially lethal homophobia that will play out when these two friends take to the road. The boys are acutely aware of each other physically, and at the same time willfully blind to any flashes of desire that might illuminate that awareness.

The novel reads like a horror story conveyed in a deadened voice, even more horrific for its quiet tone. Only one of the acts of violence is shown directly, while the others occur “offstage.”

In another artful move, Khurana provides a coda to his main narrative that shows two older men, in the town where the boys grew up, sharing moments of collusive sexism. Ron, who was having an affair with Teddy’s mother before the boys’ lethal road trip two years before, celebrates his birthday with a friend ironically named Freeman. During a drunken evening and hung-over morning after, Ron thinks guiltily about an earlier incident when he became aware of his friend’s violence against his wife and did nothing about it.

Is such complicity the assumed price of entry for male friendship? Ron’s ruminations provide an indirect comment on the silence and anguish the reader has witnessed as Adam and Teddy conduct their doomed road trip.

The Passenger Seat marks a point on the arc of male bonding literature that traces back to the 4,000-year-old bloody Epic of Gilgamesh and on through Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon to pretty much every action movie and hard-boiled detective story up to the present. Mortal dread and violence are bound together like a garrotte.

George Pelecanos, a modern master of the noir form, makes a good companion to Khurana. He has produced a series of pitch-perfect, semi-autobiographical novels set in Washington D.C.’s ethnic and Black communities outside the Beltway, and he’s written for shows like The Wire, Treme and The Deuce. In the title story of his new collection Owning Up, he turns the noir genre against its usual commitment to misogyny and violence.

His protagonist Nikos is a kid torn between his loyalties to a pair of older men in the shadow of a now little-remembered event, the Hanafi Muslim occupation of a D.C. building in 1977. Nikos, like the protagonists of The Passenger Seat, is baffled by his own emerging sexuality and the vexing question of what it means to be a man.

One of the older men who influences him is a seedy white hipster, Ray, who entangles him in daytime burglary. Ray encourages Nikos to view Mindy, a girl he is dating, as “trim,” there to be pressured, used and abandoned.

The other influence on Nikos as he muddles toward manhood is Ed, a Black man who despises Ray. Ed is instrumental in protecting Nikos from the worst of Ray’s influence, telling the teen: “You need to treat that young lady with respect. I heard you talking to Ray about her one day, how you got with her in the back seat of your car… Yeah, that’s right. Bragging on what you did. Why you telling on her like that?”

All of this is viewed retrospectively, as Nikos, now an aging but successful writer, looks back on that formative moment in the ‘70s and tries to “own up” to his own sexist exploitation of Mindy and other women. It is an altogether plausible, non-polemic exploration of male bonding in all its ethical complexity.

Another artist who has recently fused noir tropes with a critique of toxic masculinity is the American spoken-word poet and performer Steve Connell, whose “We Are the Lions” was commissioned by the YWCA for an anti-violence program called AMEND, designed to promote healthy male bonding against, not for violence against women. It speaks directly and eloquently to the question of what healthy male bonding looks like among equals.

In “We Are the Lions,” the performer is seen alone in an empty loft space, wearing a tough-guy jacket and seriously cropped tough-guy hair. His opening lines establish his continuity with the bog-standard toxic masculinity most of us grew up with. He begins:

“I don’t have a problem with pornography.

I mean, I don’t get upset when I see sexually exploitative commercials.

In fact, those are usually my favorite ones.

I mean I don’t know what her ass has to do with my hamburger, but I’m going to drive through the very next day.

I don’t have a problem with violent movies or images or the word bitch.

I don’t have a problem with jokes about women.

In fact, I freely admit there are times where I sit back with my fellas and kick back, talk about some bitch and how I wish I could hit that, talk openly in public places, unconcerned if your kids laugh.

I mean, it’s just words, just jokes, just dudes talking shit that you never expect is going to get back.”

But then the performance takes a surprising turn, as he says:

However, I do have a problem with violence and cruelty and rape and abuse and even if we know it’s just me, it’s just you, it’s just a few harmless jokes between me and my dudes, that still perpetuates a culture where it’s easy to confuse the link between the jokes and the bruise.

Between her getting choked and what’s just jokes between dudes.

And if there’s a connection between the things I don’t have a problem with and the things that I do then perhaps I need to rethink my views on the way we view women and how many views sexually exploited images get on YouTube.”

He goes on to tell a story about a village attacked in the night again and again by lions, lions who kill only women and children. The men of the village stay up to “protect” the innocent, but the next morning there are more victims. Slowly, the men come to realize that they are the lions, the monsters they fear are alive within them, alive to emerge in the dark and ravage.

“And we are the lions time and again.

And if we aren’t the lions, we’re on their side too often standing proudly in defense of the pride.

Perhaps afraid that if we stand with women against the lion we will, ourselves, be devoured.

And so ironically to prove we aren’t cowards we become cowards.

To prove we aren’t weak we become weak.”

As today’s autocratic “strongman” politics excuse and promote male moral meltdown, in Khurana, Pelecanos and Connell we have voices of nuance and resistance.

They encourage men to interrogate — with trepidation but also hope — their urge to bond with other men. The pull is so powerful, so primal, that it is subject to manipulation by hate-mongers armed with algorithms.

The pull therefore demands conscious mentoring by wiser, older voices. Men who know the true enemy is the lion who fails to know, and therefore tame, the sources of his destructive hunger.