Masculinity in Glengarry Glen Ross

Each character in this play is living through strife and frustration in their own lives, with themselves and in their own efforts to get by in society. Everything in this play appears to be a competition. It is a competition of manly hood. Whoever sells the most, gets the most respect, drives the fanciest car, and gets better sales in the future. Blake (Alec Baldwin’s character) even goes so far as to hold up a set of brass balls in the meeting so as to emphasize the amount of testosterone it takes to be a good salesman. He compares his annual earnings to the other men in the room in order to emasculate them. He belittles them, puts them down, and basically tells them that he could do their job better than any of them any day. The constant profanity throughout the movie is the male expression of frustration and attempted intimidation. Characters in the play are constantly putting one another down in order to build themselves up. Insults such as fairy are thrown around to question other’s manly hoods. Levine tells Williamson that a man is his job. If this is the case, then all of the men working at this sales organization are in a constant struggle not only with their positions of work but with their positions as men. The ability to provide also seems to be a major component of manly hood. Levine ultimately resorts to criminal activity to be able to support his daughter. When Lingk is unable to provide Roma with his compliance with the final sale, he admits that he has let him down. As the saying goes “money is power” and in this play that idea is fully illustrated. Each of these men are struggling with the lack of authority they have over their own lives. They blame their inability to sell on their placement on the board. As a former sales associate, I have heard the saying “there are no bad sales, only bad salespeople”. The characters in this play have a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that their poor placement on the board is a result of any fault of their own. They are in such denial, it seems, because their placement on the board is symbolic of their placement as a man.