I just read a piece by Gint Aras, in The Good Men Project, April 16, 2014, entitled, "When's a guy good enough?" An English professor in a community college that serves a relatively poor neighbourhood in Chicago, Aras recounts in eloquent detail the narrative he heard from a Latino cab driver punctuated with the rhetorical question, "When's a guy good enough?"
The cab driver had enrolled in college, received an initial liberal arts associate degree and then, after enrolling in a four-year college, encountered many hurdles that blocked the completion of his program. Returning to Mexico to an ailing mother, where he was ostracized as the "rich" American, the subject of too many requests to proceed with his education, only to learn that his wife back in Chicago had left him for a tire salesman, the cabbie had also, after his mother's death made another attempt to finish a teaching degree only to be blocked by an arrogant "gate-keeper" of a professor whose course he seemed unable to pass. Here is how Aras describes the instructor:
the instructor with a strong sense of (completely arbitrary) ethics, values that must be present in the student before he is “released into the world”. -
See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/when-is-a-guy-good-enough-gint-aras/?utm_source=Thursday+April+17%2C+2014&utm_campaign=Constant+Contact+Apr+17+2014&utm_medium=email#sthash.F5ldGkWn.dpuf
It was, as the story was told, almost inevitable that, on one level the cabbie would consider his "incompleteness" a disadvantage compared with the tire salesman's "career" and the capture of his estranged wife. Here is another quote from the Aras retelling of Juan's (the Cabbie's) story:
He wished someone would respect him, but he knew no one would until he was truly wealthy and stable. “That’s what a guy’s good for. A man is a source, but he’s never good enough, and he’s never got enough, or whatever he has is the wrong thing.” A guy who sells tires today, Juan said, is more stable and wealthier than a guy who might be a teacher in the future. “That’s the danger of education for a guy,” said Juan. “People need you to give them something right now. They don’t care if you say, ‘I’ll get it to you when I’m done with my degree.’ That degree might never come. You’re stupid if you think it takes four years. They plug the thing up with hoops, or they steal classes from you, make you take the same thing twice.”
And then the blockbuster:
“How about this one?”
We were now approaching the college.
“If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete. You know who that is, right?” “I don’t.” “Ha! It’s Charles Bukowski.* You don’t know Charles Bukowski?”
“Not by heart, no.”
“Well, he writes a lot of truth.”
Juan pulled up to the front of the college, right before the entrance to the theater. He said, “You can’t wish for it to go both ways. If you want everything your way, you end up lonely. And if you don’t want to be lonely, you must give up your way. No matter what, something’s got to suck. That’s just the way it is, I guess.”
Juan's attitude might sound like a "pity-party" to some, and perhaps it is. However, the question has hung over the foreheads of millions of men for centuries, without being addressed in nearly as articulate and compelling a manner as Juan, through Gint Aras, puts it.
Every time I left my home, as a young boy, I heard the words, "Be a good boy!" as if somehow my plan was to be something else. Most times when my mother talked about her husband, my father, the words "your father's no good" were included in the diatribe, although they stayed together in an uncomfortable truce for sixty-two years.
I have a theory, based on some seven decades of watching men "attempt to prove themselves" as if their identity had been replaced by their capacity to earn, or to provide, or to perform a skill, or to win friends, or to essentially turn themselves into a function, as if bring a human doing had replaced a human being, in their consciousness.
And despite his perception of himself as an incomplete man, "never good enough," Juan hits the nail on the head about my theory.
Most of the activities in which men are engaged start out as attempts to prove that these men are "acceptable" to someone...first their parents, then their teachers, then their employers, and then and most importantly their female partners, and then their children and grandchildren. Men (perhaps women too, but here we are talking about men) are "other-directed" to the point that the notion of "self-direction" seems almost meaningless. I once asked a high school principal what he would do if he could do whatever he wanted. He shrugged and replied, "I have no idea!" He was engaged, by his own words, in managing widgets on a board, providing coverage for absent teachers, scheduling meetings and the agendas for those meetings, writing reports for head office, listening to complaints from parents and teachers, and attempting to keep the lid on the school, so his reputation would pave the path toward a superintendent's job, with more of the same, including both more salary and more pension.
And the culture supports this concept of "proving oneself"...and if and when one decides, really decides, that one is more than or different from "a function for others" then one is, from my experience, completely ostracised as evil, dangerous, irresponsible, uncontrollable, deviant, and the target of slurs that say more about the person firing the verbal assault's own poverty of self than they do about the target of the slur. For men, existence is highly competitive, with siblings, with classmates, with co-workers, with supervisors, and with 'friends' or perhaps 'associates' who rarely get behind the mask of "good guy" or "funny guy" or "combative guy" or "wise guy" or "serious guy"....rarely is a man, (and this includes how other men see him as well as how he sees himself) a human being, somewhat full of gaps, and somewhat competent and seriously complex yet also extremely simple, and most important "comfortable in his own skin"....as the cliché has it.
We fight to win and depending on the prize of that winning, we will do almost anything to achieve it, including sacrificing our too often unknown identity in the process. And in the process of reducing both ourselves and the prize to some form of objectification, we inflict violence on ourselves, and on many others, including our partners, our children our co-workers, our bosses and our futures.
Wars have been and will continue to be fought because "some man or men were not good enough."
Divorces have been filed because someone, either the woman or the man believed, "the man was not good enough."
Heart attacks have occurred because someone pursued a goal at the expense of balancing health and wellness, a word that really did not exist even a couple of decades ago. Firings and dismissals have occurred too often because someone was found "not good enough" for the post.
And, to turn this around, first we have to tell our stories about how this "meme" has impacted our lives, who those people were who projected their own inadequacy onto us unconsciously and then remind both ourselves and others when appropriate, that projections are just that, projections and not reality. Just because my mother was neurotic and projected her need for perfection onto both my father and me (as well as onto my sister) does not, and need not define my identity. And just because the Christian church takes the position that we have all sinned and are all sinners falling short of the glory of God (I think the quote is from Paul's letter to the Philippians) does not mean that we are "no good" as creatures, although the imago dei portion of that Christian faith seems to have got lost in too many pulpits and pews on Sundays, and then carried home for the "leavening" of the home culture for the rest of the week.
Whenever and wherever one finds abuse, one can immediately look for the abuser who is invariably acting out of "scarcity" of some essential ingredient in his life. "Being no good" is at the heart of the worst crimes in human history, including the brutal murder of 6 million Jews in the Second World War. The pursuit of superiority, as a substitute for inadequacy, inflicts so much brokenness, pain, misery and death, not to mention the angst infesting the spirit of our cabbie Juan. And, of course, on the other side of this canvas are the "winners" who callously and contemptuously patronize those of us who are "not good enough" in their eyes, and we let that perception dominate our culture.
And feminism, at least in its most virulent form, simply adopts the 'meme' of masculine competitiveness, proving, once again, that women are as competent, if not more so, than men, (as if there were any question about that in the first place!). And the cycle grows even more insidious, and encircling of both genders.
On Good Friday, 2014, one of the questions poking its head above the frozen ground remains, as always, "Will Death imprison us all, in one of its many forms, or will we be able to find our own path to a new and fully alive and fully authentic existence?
So long as the "extrinsic" dominates and obliterates the "intrinsic" in our culture, and in our faith, then we will all forever be "never good enough"....and there is no deity supporting that reduction.
*A quote from the writer Charles Bukowski:
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski
Friday, April 18, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
More research into young males' depression seems promising
Warning sign for depression in teen boys found The Times of India, February 19, 2014
LONDON: The world's first biological marker to single out teenagers suffering from acute depression has been found - a discovery scientists hope will enable better diagnosis and treatment. Teenage boys who show a combination of depressive symptoms and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found to be 14 times more likely to develop major depression than those who show neither trait. This has helped scientists from the University of Cambridge identify the first biomarker - a biological signpost - for major, or clinical, depression. They argue this could help identify those boys in particular at greatest risk of developing the illness and provide treatment at an earlier stage.
Until now there have been no biomarkers for major depression. ; this is believed to be, in part, because both the causes and the symptoms can be so varied.
The researchers now hope that having an easily measurable biomarker - in this case, elevated cortisol plus depressive symptoms - will enable primary care services to identify boys at high risk and consider new public mental health strategies for them in the community. Cambridge University professor Ian Goodyer, who led the study, said depression is a terrible illness that will affect as many as 10 million people in the UK at some point in their lives. "Through our research, we now have a very real way of identifying those teenage boys most likely to develop clinical depression," said Goodyer. "This will help us strategically target preventions and interventions at these individuals and hopefully help reduce their risk of serious episodes of depression and their consequences in adult life."The researchers measured levels of cortisol in saliva from two separate large cohorts of teenagers. The first cohort consisted of 660 teens, who provided four early-morning samples on schooldays within a week and then again twelve months later. The researchers were able to show within this cohort that cortisol levels were stable over one year in the population at large in both boys and girls in this group.
A second cohort, consisting of 1,198 teenagers, provided early-morning samples over three school days. Using self-reports about depression current symptoms collected longitudinally over the 12 months and combining these with the cortisol findings, the researchers were able to divide the teens in the first cohort into four distinct sub-groups, ranging from those with normal levels of morning cortisol and low symptoms of depression over time (Group 1) through to those teenagers with elevated levels of morning cortisol and high symptoms of depression over time (Group 4) - this latter group made up one in six (17%) of all subjects.
The subjects in Group 4 were on average seven times more likely than those in Group 1, and two to three times more likely than in the other two groups, to develop clinical depression.
LONDON: The world's first biological marker to single out teenagers suffering from acute depression has been found - a discovery scientists hope will enable better diagnosis and treatment. Teenage boys who show a combination of depressive symptoms and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found to be 14 times more likely to develop major depression than those who show neither trait. This has helped scientists from the University of Cambridge identify the first biomarker - a biological signpost - for major, or clinical, depression. They argue this could help identify those boys in particular at greatest risk of developing the illness and provide treatment at an earlier stage.
Until now there have been no biomarkers for major depression. ; this is believed to be, in part, because both the causes and the symptoms can be so varied.
The researchers now hope that having an easily measurable biomarker - in this case, elevated cortisol plus depressive symptoms - will enable primary care services to identify boys at high risk and consider new public mental health strategies for them in the community. Cambridge University professor Ian Goodyer, who led the study, said depression is a terrible illness that will affect as many as 10 million people in the UK at some point in their lives. "Through our research, we now have a very real way of identifying those teenage boys most likely to develop clinical depression," said Goodyer. "This will help us strategically target preventions and interventions at these individuals and hopefully help reduce their risk of serious episodes of depression and their consequences in adult life."The researchers measured levels of cortisol in saliva from two separate large cohorts of teenagers. The first cohort consisted of 660 teens, who provided four early-morning samples on schooldays within a week and then again twelve months later. The researchers were able to show within this cohort that cortisol levels were stable over one year in the population at large in both boys and girls in this group.
A second cohort, consisting of 1,198 teenagers, provided early-morning samples over three school days. Using self-reports about depression current symptoms collected longitudinally over the 12 months and combining these with the cortisol findings, the researchers were able to divide the teens in the first cohort into four distinct sub-groups, ranging from those with normal levels of morning cortisol and low symptoms of depression over time (Group 1) through to those teenagers with elevated levels of morning cortisol and high symptoms of depression over time (Group 4) - this latter group made up one in six (17%) of all subjects.
The subjects in Group 4 were on average seven times more likely than those in Group 1, and two to three times more likely than in the other two groups, to develop clinical depression.
The Good Men Project: The Disposability of Boys by Cameron Conaway
The Disposability of boys
By Cameron Conaway, The Good Men Project, February 17, 2014
Some posit that this acceptance is a direct result of how cultures have been socially conditioned to see gender roles due to the way religious attitudes and/or patriarchal cultures have demarcated them. While this influence certainly can carry over into secular societies, it seems there’s a more pervasive form of social conditioning at work; one that views boys, regardless of age, as young men; one that views their more physical behavior as the seed of manhood—a time when, at least conceptually, they’ll no longer be seen as vulnerable and will instead be capable of preying on those who are truly vulnerable. The result? Boys who will be men are judged as though they are men. This is harmful both for boys and for the men who then live under the socially conditioned false narrative that believes they are invulnerable.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Security guards dressed in blue leaf camouflage pointed their semi-automatic machine guns directly at me (after making sure I didn’t have a camera, notebook or phone), and I watched in horror as one tiny boy after another dragged their feet through toxic shoreline sludge in order to lift with their bare hands the rusted anchor chains. The black plumed skies lit up red as other boys took turns using the blowtorch. I have no idea if there’s hell in the afterlife but that scene showed me for damn sure that there’s hell in this life.
By Cameron Conaway, The Good Men Project, February 17, 2014
The UN’s recent reports on the treatment of children in Syria and in the Roman Catholic Church revealed some of the despicable acts committed against boys that are part of a disturbing and hidden global trend.
They are the forgotten many. The afterthought. The tacked-on obligatory mention at the end of a sentence, if that. Some university classes on human trafficking fail to mention them alongside “girls and women” in their syllabi. But there they are being used as soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and as slaves in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh, the farmlands of Florida and the fishing villages of Ghana. And there they are, as detailed in recent reports from the UN, being used as human shields in Syria and as sex slaves in the Roman Catholic Church. Can we talk about this now? Is it okay to talk about this?
Preface: Addressing the disposability of boys is not ignoring or in any way minimizing the appalling situations many of our world’s girls and women are enduring right now. Addressing the disposability of boys is addressing the disposability of boys. There is often hostility when this topic is brought up because there’s the assumption that the speaker is choosing sides. This isn’t a game and there are no sides.
***
On February 4, 2014 the UN released its first detailed findings on the treatment of children in Syria. The “Report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic” contained text perhaps even more damning due to its comprehensive details than the alleged torture photographs that were released weeks ago and that a team of war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts deemed “direct evidence” of the “systematic torture and killing” by the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. One excerpt on page 4 stated:“Boys aged 12 to 17 years were trained, armed and used as combatants or to man checkpoints.”This falls perfectly in line with why boys are often selected around the world for use as slave laborers. Comparatively, boys tend to be more physical, stronger, and more physically aggressive than girls and are therefore more preferred when it comes to the often backbreaking work of slave labor. While some communities have tried to eradicate this notion that boys are more physical and physically aggressive than girls, Dr. Michael Thompson, co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, believes the difference is clear but admitted to PBS Parents that he isn’t precisely sure why:
“Why are some young boys more aggressive than girls? We don’t know for sure. We think that boys are predisposed to higher activity levels as a result of androgens (male hormones) inutero. However, it is not, as many people believe, a result of testosterone in the blood, because before puberty, boys and girls have the same level. What we know is that boys in all cultures around the world wrestle more, mock fight more, and are drawn to themes of power and domination, but that’s not the same as hurting someone, so it’s not necessarily a cause for worry.”Dr. Thompson’s statement about “boys in all cultures of the world” aligns with what I learned about human trafficking during my two and a half years living in and traveling throughout Asia. Whether it was Nepal or the Philippines, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, it was simply more acceptable for boys to perform the most grueling forms of physical labor, especially when it was the kind of labor that may lead to disease or permanent disfigurement.
Some posit that this acceptance is a direct result of how cultures have been socially conditioned to see gender roles due to the way religious attitudes and/or patriarchal cultures have demarcated them. While this influence certainly can carry over into secular societies, it seems there’s a more pervasive form of social conditioning at work; one that views boys, regardless of age, as young men; one that views their more physical behavior as the seed of manhood—a time when, at least conceptually, they’ll no longer be seen as vulnerable and will instead be capable of preying on those who are truly vulnerable. The result? Boys who will be men are judged as though they are men. This is harmful both for boys and for the men who then live under the socially conditioned false narrative that believes they are invulnerable.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Security guards dressed in blue leaf camouflage pointed their semi-automatic machine guns directly at me (after making sure I didn’t have a camera, notebook or phone), and I watched in horror as one tiny boy after another dragged their feet through toxic shoreline sludge in order to lift with their bare hands the rusted anchor chains. The black plumed skies lit up red as other boys took turns using the blowtorch. I have no idea if there’s hell in the afterlife but that scene showed me for damn sure that there’s hell in this life.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
From the UK....1/3 more girls seek university admission than boys this year!
Boys being left behind as university gender gap widens
The number of girls seeking a university place this year is more than a third larger than that of boys, who university chiefs say are becoming “a disadvantaged group”
By James Kirkup, The Telegraph, January 31, 2014
Young men are becoming “a disadvantaged group” as far more young women go to university, higher education chiefs have warned.
The number of girls seeking a university place this year is more than a third larger than that of boys.
The growing divide is becoming a more pressing issue than the number of applicants from poorer homes, said the chief executive of Ucas, the universities admissions service. “There remains a stubborn gap between male and female applicants which, on current trends, could eclipse the gap between rich and poor within a decade,” Mary Curnock Cook said.
“Young men are becoming a disadvantaged group in terms of going to university and this underperformance needs urgent focus across the education sector.”
Ucas said that 580,000 people have applied for places at British institutions this year. Around 333,700 of them were women, almost 58 per cent. Only 246,300 men applied, a difference of 87,000, which was up 7,000 on last year. In the 2010-11 academic year, women made up 55 per cent of applicants.
Politicians seem to be happy with policy approaches that focus on economics, poverty, some kind of numbers that have currency in the public discourse. We have, indeed, become collectively fixated on the money barometer as our window on political issues. And then, it seems too often we think that throwing money at the problem absolves the political class of responsibility.
This issue of female university applications outstripping male applications in Great Britain by one third trumps the issue of the numbers of applications from poorer homes. Perhaps, finally, some of the more complex reasons for this gap will finally merit some serious public, political and academic attention.
We have needed research on the question of what is happening to boys in most of the countries in the west for some time. It is not sexism to point out these trend lines and there is or must be no aspersions cast in the direction of female applicants. In fact, any public discussion of these numbers and their meaning must focus instead on the reasons behind the drop in male applications and not on blaming the female segment of the university-applicant population for the rise in their numbers.
And, while it is not a competition between males and females in a direct sense, the culture needs to sustain a healthy proportion of male university graduates in order to sustain healthy employment rates, and all that accompanies that gradient for families, and for social services and for balance and good health culturally.
Men must be present with articulate voices at all the "tables" where decisions are taken in all fields including education, economics, technology, science, health and in private corporations. And in order to accomplish that legitimate and long-term objective, we need to pay attention when deficits, like the one being reported in the Telegraph today, appear.
It is, of course, much more glib and simplistic to focus on some benchmarks like a country's GDP, for too long the measure of the economic success of a nation. The value of good produced is both easily calculated and easily translated into a simple version of "good government" in order to provide fodder for politicians seeking re-election. It is the public, in the widest meaning of that word, who needs to be more focused on the many issues that comprise any legitimate yard stick for how healthy a society is, and will be in the foreseeable future.
And one of those benchmarks has to become the ratio of male to female university applications.
Men must not be either encouraged or permitted to withdraw simply because women are "appearing" to outstrip them in some kind of faux competition. And men must not be encouraged or permitted to perceive these numbers as a competition. In fact, removing competition from the equation may be one of the best ways to address the issue.
Schools, from a very early age, need to become sensitized to the issues facing male learners and to address those issues, as legitimate, and not as "deviant" simply because they are different from the issues facing female learners. And that begins in the faculties of education where the archetype of the good student profiles all the natural attributes of female students: compliant, disciplined, polite, enthusiastic, responsible and coachable.
Male students, on the other hand, fail to measure up to the female "standards" on all of these attributes, in many cases, and the approaches to their learning needs have to take those needs into consideration. Perhaps it is time to segregate male and female students in the classroom, in order to achieve a learning environment that generates a better balance of interested, talented and ambitious male and female applications to universities, so that we do not face a society and culture in which men revert to a secondary role, while women dominate. We need both genders playing their full part for the sake of their children and grandchildren and we will not see that balance if these trends continue without being both formally and informally addressed.
Politicians seem to be happy with policy approaches that focus on economics, poverty, some kind of numbers that have currency in the public discourse. We have, indeed, become collectively fixated on the money barometer as our window on political issues. And then, it seems too often we think that throwing money at the problem absolves the political class of responsibility.
This issue of female university applications outstripping male applications in Great Britain by one third trumps the issue of the numbers of applications from poorer homes. Perhaps, finally, some of the more complex reasons for this gap will finally merit some serious public, political and academic attention.
We have needed research on the question of what is happening to boys in most of the countries in the west for some time. It is not sexism to point out these trend lines and there is or must be no aspersions cast in the direction of female applicants. In fact, any public discussion of these numbers and their meaning must focus instead on the reasons behind the drop in male applications and not on blaming the female segment of the university-applicant population for the rise in their numbers.
And, while it is not a competition between males and females in a direct sense, the culture needs to sustain a healthy proportion of male university graduates in order to sustain healthy employment rates, and all that accompanies that gradient for families, and for social services and for balance and good health culturally.
Men must be present with articulate voices at all the "tables" where decisions are taken in all fields including education, economics, technology, science, health and in private corporations. And in order to accomplish that legitimate and long-term objective, we need to pay attention when deficits, like the one being reported in the Telegraph today, appear.
It is, of course, much more glib and simplistic to focus on some benchmarks like a country's GDP, for too long the measure of the economic success of a nation. The value of good produced is both easily calculated and easily translated into a simple version of "good government" in order to provide fodder for politicians seeking re-election. It is the public, in the widest meaning of that word, who needs to be more focused on the many issues that comprise any legitimate yard stick for how healthy a society is, and will be in the foreseeable future.
And one of those benchmarks has to become the ratio of male to female university applications.
Men must not be either encouraged or permitted to withdraw simply because women are "appearing" to outstrip them in some kind of faux competition. And men must not be encouraged or permitted to perceive these numbers as a competition. In fact, removing competition from the equation may be one of the best ways to address the issue.
Schools, from a very early age, need to become sensitized to the issues facing male learners and to address those issues, as legitimate, and not as "deviant" simply because they are different from the issues facing female learners. And that begins in the faculties of education where the archetype of the good student profiles all the natural attributes of female students: compliant, disciplined, polite, enthusiastic, responsible and coachable.
Male students, on the other hand, fail to measure up to the female "standards" on all of these attributes, in many cases, and the approaches to their learning needs have to take those needs into consideration. Perhaps it is time to segregate male and female students in the classroom, in order to achieve a learning environment that generates a better balance of interested, talented and ambitious male and female applications to universities, so that we do not face a society and culture in which men revert to a secondary role, while women dominate. We need both genders playing their full part for the sake of their children and grandchildren and we will not see that balance if these trends continue without being both formally and informally addressed.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Dichotomies and their reductions...can we re-mythologize?
Jay Parini, in his recent book, Jesus, the Face of God, seeks to re-mythologize Jesus, following decades of scholarship that has sought to de-mythologize Jesus, through history, through anthropology and linguistics and a rather profound process of deconstruction.
It was Graeme Green who responded to a question from a grade twelve student in a Canadian Writer's Day forum who asked, "What do you think about the process of taking a poem apart as a way to study it?..."Well, you have to murder something in order to dissect it?"
It was a diminutive nun, speaking extemporaneously in a Family Violence workshop who uttered these words, "The greatest violence we do to each other is contained in the reductions we impose on each other."
Women have for nearly a half century been wailing about how men "objectify" them, by acting as if they cannot see past their physical persons. Recently, the inevitable echo has been creeping out of the men's corner, also complaining about objectification by women, primarily into the role of cheque-writer, provider, without the accompanying "full recognition" of the complexities of our masculinities.
I once asked a bishop to describe the spirituality of a serving warden in a church to which I was about to be assigned, as a student intern, and was going to a breakfast to meet the warden. His reply, in one word, was "Red Book"...and in the Anglican tradition that is code for "traditional, and supportive of a theology that emphasizes the sin and depravity of humans through both prayer and liturgy, as compared with a different emphasis in the "Green Book," the more modern edition of prayers and liturgies, over which hours if not days, weeks, even months and years of time have been wasted in the Anglican tradition in Canada, over how to worship God. Not only were Anglicans skilled in dividing themselves and their fellow pew-sitters into 'high church' and 'low church' (more code for more and less "bells and whistles" respectively in the liturgies) but also into "liberal and evangelical", but into Red and Green Book Anglicans....
The problem with dichotomies, "either-or's," is that individual people do not fit entirely into the categories to which others assign them, and that by over-simplifying for the purposes of making sense and of managing differences, we "pigeon-hole" people, and institutions, as well as neighbourhoods, schools, towns, cities and even nations and ethnicities into such cardboard stereotypes that we suck the life-blood, their complexity and their eccentricity and their uniqueness and even their 'right' to be who they are, especially if we do not see 'eye-to-eye' with them.
Our public discourse, commonly referred to as political punditry, and commonly gathered from sources like television, newspapers, magazines and social media, is broken down into some easily grasped dichotomies, right versus left, corporate versus socialist, worker versus employer, Canadian versus American, American versus Chinese, radical versus moderate, Sunni versus Shia, Russian versus Ukrainian, Afghan versus NATO. Our political parties, and the economic world view of our parties is another of the dichotomies into which we "de-mythologize" their positions, into such phrases as higher taxes (NDP) and more jobs (Conservatives) and balanced approach (Liberal) as if to make such distinctions is to provide the electorate with signals for identification, for the purpose of casting a ballot, and for the political class to be armed with "conventional" talking points that, once again reduce all issues to debating points, for the purpose of ultimately gaining power, and implementing that cardboard agenda, once again a reduction of what might be required, given the dynamic of changing circumstances.
One of the really dangerous dichotomies of discernment is that between mentally ill and not mentally ill, and given the multiple applications of dichotomies to all other aspects of modern life, in our adolescent and frighteningly lazy and immature pencil drawings, and lists of duties, chores and responsibilities we are dangerous vulnerable to adopting the vocabulary of the psychiatric profession and applying that vocabulary to individuals as if we were capable of discerning the full meaning and complexity of those "diagnoses" that might be found in the DSM-5. Furthermore, we reduce all psychiatric illness to a form of demonology, rendering a public fear unleashed with impunity, and thereby either hospitalize or medicate our illnesses, in order to manage our fears, more than to treat the person who suffers from whatever illness.
Aristotle was insightful in finding and naming family, phylum and species...of plants and animals, for the purpose of what has become centuries of scientific study. Similarly, Freud and Jung were brilliant in their pursuit of the unconscious, as a primary motivating force in the lives of individuals, and even of communities. However, Freud and Jung did not agree on the role of sexuality in the human psyche, and ultimately neither could prove the other wrong.
Nevertheless, in spite of the libraries filled with definitions that attempt to discern nuances of difference between species, and ethnicities and cultures and anthropologies and theologies, and ideologies, we are in danger of worshipping at an altar that can and will only divide and not unite in common purpose. Intellectually nuanced and highly articulate debates over how many angels one can place on the head of a pin were perhaps somewhat useful when we were sophomores. "Is God dead?", another simplistic dichotomy, makes a good cover story for Time, perhaps starts some people thinking about their relationship to a deity, and for such a limited purpose, perhaps has some limited value.
However, applying hard and distinct definitions to abstractions, in a compulsive attempt to gain control over those abstractions, is a fool's game of self-delusion. And when it becomes a mass-movement, mostly unconscious and mostly unchallenged, the participants run the serious risk of substituting delusion for reality. Some of us used to joke that, as Anglicans, we were very conscious that "in heaven, there was neither a red nor a green book"! For those who needed the protection of a label, our joke was quite uncomfortable.
However, it is not a joke to tell someone, anyone, "You are not spiritual enough!" when such a judgement is code for "not charismatic enough" or not "high church" enough, or "not evangelical enough" or not "obedient enough".....
Nor is it a joke to label another person "evil" or another nation or religion, "evil" simply because they do not subscribe to a similar set of tenets and dogma as the one subscribed to by the speaker.
Abortion is a case in point. There are good people on both sides of this festering debate, especially in the United States, given that most other countries have settled the issue, in so far as legislation and public debate are concerned. The Roman Catholic position is absolutely opposed, and those who frame the issue as a "woman's right to self-determination" are considered 'evil' in the light of the Roman Catholic position. The argument will not be put in that language. Those who campaign for the right to life will argue that it is not their opponent they wish to demonize, but their position which they oppose. They do not hate the sinner, but they hate the sin.
Is not "sin" another attempt to impose a hard, finite and thereby presumably enforceable definition on an abstraction? Is that not at the core of our criminal codes, that some behaviours are defined as wrong, in the hope that we will be able, as a society, to eliminate, or at least to control such behaviour in our attempt to provide peace, order and good government (words from the Canadian constitution) or the right to pursue prosperity, liberty and happiness (words from the U.S. Constitution)
What if those definitions of "crime" are nothing more than a limited attempt to define, from a limited and frightened perspective, the root causes of those behaviours, using almost exclusively observable data, without actually taking into account a full disclosure and study of the human being? What if our laws, including our attitudes to mental illness, are nothing more than an overt expression of our fears of the unknown, and are so incomplete and so dangerous that they are counter-intuitive to our common goal of reducing their impact on our society?
What if, in our pursuit of perfection, as our misguided way to please God, we have over-reached in our generation of a civil society, and produced more repression and regression and more criminals and more criminal behaviour, as our way of sustaining the nobility who first wrote those laws and those conventions?
"Go and sin no more!" were the words ascribed to Jesus in his encounter with the prostitute.
How many gallons of ink, and eons of public debate have we held in our compulsive-obsessive pursuit of a society free of sexual misconduct, including 'the oldest profession'? Who do we think we are, that we would impose more embarrassment and more contempt and more judgement on the prostitute than was imposed by Jesus? And what God is it who demands such an attitude? And what heaven are we aspiring to enter by subscribing to such contempt of the other, whose behaviour and whose attitude may not agree with our personal code, but whose choices we know so little about, and are so resistant to actually listening to, that we might preserve our little comfortable bubble, outside the reality of that prostitute?
It was the Pharisees who questioned Jesus about the picking and eating corn on the "Sabbath" and were rebutted with, "Was the Sabbath not made for man, and not man for the Sabbath?"
In our narrow, frightened and judgemental pursuit of our own perfection, are we not in serious danger of over-subscribing and over-defining what and who God is and what a deity means to a human being?
What does it mean I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly, if we are imposing our meagre and poverty-based, scarcity-engendered definitions of that life, as our way of making ourselves 'holy and pure'? What would happen, for example, if we were to re-write our psychiatric manuals and our criminal codes with a full recognition of, not merely the social need for moderation and propriety, but also for the fullest development of each individual in the most tolerant and supportive culture we can both imagine and create together? What would such a project do to those who attempt ultimate control? What would such a project do to those governments that reduce their responsibilities to the latest GDP numbers? What would such a project do to those churches who, by infantilizing their adherents, reduce the relationship of a human being to God to that of mere obedience to a code of conduct?
It might well be worth the serious consideration of those who reflect on such things, to consider such a proposition in the next century or five.
It was Graeme Green who responded to a question from a grade twelve student in a Canadian Writer's Day forum who asked, "What do you think about the process of taking a poem apart as a way to study it?..."Well, you have to murder something in order to dissect it?"
It was a diminutive nun, speaking extemporaneously in a Family Violence workshop who uttered these words, "The greatest violence we do to each other is contained in the reductions we impose on each other."
Women have for nearly a half century been wailing about how men "objectify" them, by acting as if they cannot see past their physical persons. Recently, the inevitable echo has been creeping out of the men's corner, also complaining about objectification by women, primarily into the role of cheque-writer, provider, without the accompanying "full recognition" of the complexities of our masculinities.
I once asked a bishop to describe the spirituality of a serving warden in a church to which I was about to be assigned, as a student intern, and was going to a breakfast to meet the warden. His reply, in one word, was "Red Book"...and in the Anglican tradition that is code for "traditional, and supportive of a theology that emphasizes the sin and depravity of humans through both prayer and liturgy, as compared with a different emphasis in the "Green Book," the more modern edition of prayers and liturgies, over which hours if not days, weeks, even months and years of time have been wasted in the Anglican tradition in Canada, over how to worship God. Not only were Anglicans skilled in dividing themselves and their fellow pew-sitters into 'high church' and 'low church' (more code for more and less "bells and whistles" respectively in the liturgies) but also into "liberal and evangelical", but into Red and Green Book Anglicans....
The problem with dichotomies, "either-or's," is that individual people do not fit entirely into the categories to which others assign them, and that by over-simplifying for the purposes of making sense and of managing differences, we "pigeon-hole" people, and institutions, as well as neighbourhoods, schools, towns, cities and even nations and ethnicities into such cardboard stereotypes that we suck the life-blood, their complexity and their eccentricity and their uniqueness and even their 'right' to be who they are, especially if we do not see 'eye-to-eye' with them.
Our public discourse, commonly referred to as political punditry, and commonly gathered from sources like television, newspapers, magazines and social media, is broken down into some easily grasped dichotomies, right versus left, corporate versus socialist, worker versus employer, Canadian versus American, American versus Chinese, radical versus moderate, Sunni versus Shia, Russian versus Ukrainian, Afghan versus NATO. Our political parties, and the economic world view of our parties is another of the dichotomies into which we "de-mythologize" their positions, into such phrases as higher taxes (NDP) and more jobs (Conservatives) and balanced approach (Liberal) as if to make such distinctions is to provide the electorate with signals for identification, for the purpose of casting a ballot, and for the political class to be armed with "conventional" talking points that, once again reduce all issues to debating points, for the purpose of ultimately gaining power, and implementing that cardboard agenda, once again a reduction of what might be required, given the dynamic of changing circumstances.
One of the really dangerous dichotomies of discernment is that between mentally ill and not mentally ill, and given the multiple applications of dichotomies to all other aspects of modern life, in our adolescent and frighteningly lazy and immature pencil drawings, and lists of duties, chores and responsibilities we are dangerous vulnerable to adopting the vocabulary of the psychiatric profession and applying that vocabulary to individuals as if we were capable of discerning the full meaning and complexity of those "diagnoses" that might be found in the DSM-5. Furthermore, we reduce all psychiatric illness to a form of demonology, rendering a public fear unleashed with impunity, and thereby either hospitalize or medicate our illnesses, in order to manage our fears, more than to treat the person who suffers from whatever illness.
Aristotle was insightful in finding and naming family, phylum and species...of plants and animals, for the purpose of what has become centuries of scientific study. Similarly, Freud and Jung were brilliant in their pursuit of the unconscious, as a primary motivating force in the lives of individuals, and even of communities. However, Freud and Jung did not agree on the role of sexuality in the human psyche, and ultimately neither could prove the other wrong.
Nevertheless, in spite of the libraries filled with definitions that attempt to discern nuances of difference between species, and ethnicities and cultures and anthropologies and theologies, and ideologies, we are in danger of worshipping at an altar that can and will only divide and not unite in common purpose. Intellectually nuanced and highly articulate debates over how many angels one can place on the head of a pin were perhaps somewhat useful when we were sophomores. "Is God dead?", another simplistic dichotomy, makes a good cover story for Time, perhaps starts some people thinking about their relationship to a deity, and for such a limited purpose, perhaps has some limited value.
However, applying hard and distinct definitions to abstractions, in a compulsive attempt to gain control over those abstractions, is a fool's game of self-delusion. And when it becomes a mass-movement, mostly unconscious and mostly unchallenged, the participants run the serious risk of substituting delusion for reality. Some of us used to joke that, as Anglicans, we were very conscious that "in heaven, there was neither a red nor a green book"! For those who needed the protection of a label, our joke was quite uncomfortable.
However, it is not a joke to tell someone, anyone, "You are not spiritual enough!" when such a judgement is code for "not charismatic enough" or not "high church" enough, or "not evangelical enough" or not "obedient enough".....
Nor is it a joke to label another person "evil" or another nation or religion, "evil" simply because they do not subscribe to a similar set of tenets and dogma as the one subscribed to by the speaker.
Abortion is a case in point. There are good people on both sides of this festering debate, especially in the United States, given that most other countries have settled the issue, in so far as legislation and public debate are concerned. The Roman Catholic position is absolutely opposed, and those who frame the issue as a "woman's right to self-determination" are considered 'evil' in the light of the Roman Catholic position. The argument will not be put in that language. Those who campaign for the right to life will argue that it is not their opponent they wish to demonize, but their position which they oppose. They do not hate the sinner, but they hate the sin.
Is not "sin" another attempt to impose a hard, finite and thereby presumably enforceable definition on an abstraction? Is that not at the core of our criminal codes, that some behaviours are defined as wrong, in the hope that we will be able, as a society, to eliminate, or at least to control such behaviour in our attempt to provide peace, order and good government (words from the Canadian constitution) or the right to pursue prosperity, liberty and happiness (words from the U.S. Constitution)
What if those definitions of "crime" are nothing more than a limited attempt to define, from a limited and frightened perspective, the root causes of those behaviours, using almost exclusively observable data, without actually taking into account a full disclosure and study of the human being? What if our laws, including our attitudes to mental illness, are nothing more than an overt expression of our fears of the unknown, and are so incomplete and so dangerous that they are counter-intuitive to our common goal of reducing their impact on our society?
What if, in our pursuit of perfection, as our misguided way to please God, we have over-reached in our generation of a civil society, and produced more repression and regression and more criminals and more criminal behaviour, as our way of sustaining the nobility who first wrote those laws and those conventions?
"Go and sin no more!" were the words ascribed to Jesus in his encounter with the prostitute.
How many gallons of ink, and eons of public debate have we held in our compulsive-obsessive pursuit of a society free of sexual misconduct, including 'the oldest profession'? Who do we think we are, that we would impose more embarrassment and more contempt and more judgement on the prostitute than was imposed by Jesus? And what God is it who demands such an attitude? And what heaven are we aspiring to enter by subscribing to such contempt of the other, whose behaviour and whose attitude may not agree with our personal code, but whose choices we know so little about, and are so resistant to actually listening to, that we might preserve our little comfortable bubble, outside the reality of that prostitute?
It was the Pharisees who questioned Jesus about the picking and eating corn on the "Sabbath" and were rebutted with, "Was the Sabbath not made for man, and not man for the Sabbath?"
In our narrow, frightened and judgemental pursuit of our own perfection, are we not in serious danger of over-subscribing and over-defining what and who God is and what a deity means to a human being?
What does it mean I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly, if we are imposing our meagre and poverty-based, scarcity-engendered definitions of that life, as our way of making ourselves 'holy and pure'? What would happen, for example, if we were to re-write our psychiatric manuals and our criminal codes with a full recognition of, not merely the social need for moderation and propriety, but also for the fullest development of each individual in the most tolerant and supportive culture we can both imagine and create together? What would such a project do to those who attempt ultimate control? What would such a project do to those governments that reduce their responsibilities to the latest GDP numbers? What would such a project do to those churches who, by infantilizing their adherents, reduce the relationship of a human being to God to that of mere obedience to a code of conduct?
It might well be worth the serious consideration of those who reflect on such things, to consider such a proposition in the next century or five.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Reflections on re-visiting "Rebel without a Cause," the 1955 movie starring James Dean and Natalie Wood
My wife and I had the opportunity to 're-watch' the classic movie, starring James Dean and Natalie Wood, Rebel without a Cause, from 1955, last evening on PBS. Not only was the movie a devastating criticism of the parenting of the 1950's, with fathers and mothers fawning over their idol of public perfection in their children, but the men, especially the men/fathers were as Jim Stark (Dean's character) put it "mush" when confronting their wives.
I was raised in the "Stark" household, metaphorically speaking. Watching that father feverishly clean the mess he had made when he let the tray with his ill wife's food fall, so that his wife would not see what he had done, while his son Jim laughed at his foolishness and urged him to "let her see it," I was ashamed to think that that could have been my father. And, as for the pivotal question Jim asked his father early in the movie, while he contemplated his risk in showing up for the "duel" of stolen cars racing to the cliff overlooking the sea, "What should I do?" his father could summon only luke-warm and ineffectual words: "Let's get a paper, and list our options, and then find someone to give us advice."
I recall a conversation, on the back steps on our family home, in the summer of 1956, with my father about the terrible actions, words and attitudes that we were experiencing from my mother, including disdain for him, and physical and emotional abuse directed to me.
"What are we going to do about this woman?" I pleaded.
"I really don't know; I have tried everything I can think of and nothing has worked so far; so I really don't know what to do," came his honest, if once again ineffectual response.
Were we to have that conversation today, I would be demanding that either he and I leave, unless and until the kind of "zoo" we were living in changed, or that I would be leaving alone. In the words of both Jim Stark echoed by his girlfriend, Judy, in the movie, " I am not going back into that zoo, ever!" (each referring to their family homes).
Trying in vain to "fit in" applied not only to the Jim Stark's of the movie; it applied to all of us, in our mid-teens in the fifties. And although our parents may not have moved from town to town, as part of their campaign to escape the embarrassment of their young son, they were nevertheless just as addicted to being seen as perfect parents with perfect kids.
"Be a good boy!" was the line that spurted out of my mother's mouth whenever I ventured into any social encounter. Dressed inappropriately in a sports jacket as Jim was for his first day at Dawson High, I was sent out to my first "teen-town dance" wearing a similar dress jacket only to find all the other males wearing t-shirts and/or light sweaters. The formality of my attire spoke volumes about the snobbery and the vacuity of my (and Jim's) parents and I could imagine his discomfort at wearing the weight of those expectations in the clothes he was "assigned." I recall having not enough courage, or spine to ask anyone to dance, but most likely told my mother that I had enjoyed myself on that hot August night with those clothes soaked in my perspiration.
"Be a good boy" now echoes in my head as the grating sound of a military commander, barked as if her reputation were intimately tied to my behaviour, my words and my attitudes, while her own responsibility for those features of her life were being drowned in her projections of her own perfect persona onto her only offspring.
Link "be a good boy" to "don't read, do something!" and "if you get the strap at school you will get it twice as hard at home" and "you're no good and you never will be any good" and you have a chorus for a daily, hourly chant from the female tyrant whose strode like a colossus over the micro-culture of our family home. To be sure, to counter her "dark side," she was literally in perpetual motion in her pursuit of work and potentially "redemption"(in the puritan perspective of idleness leading to temptation and evil)...cooking, cleaning, sewing, decorating and redecorating, gardening, preserving, delivering food to grieving families, nursing, and talking to her one or two friends....in excess were all of these activities.
The excess of her criticisms, even emotional floggings of the two men in her life, were, of course, never permitted to escape into the public domain; they were our family secret, and we knew unconsciously that if we were ever to break the code of silence that surrounded and enveloped our house and her reputation, they "all hell would break loose" even though we did not even speculate on what that would look like.
Feeling unworthy and unloved, like Jim Stark and to a lesser extent Judy, I too rebelled, only my turn came immediately following my first year in university, when I was eighteen, a little later than Stark's. My rebellion took the vocal formation, when I uttered the word to myself, "I am not doing this FOR HER (meaning going to university, and achieving grades that would make her proud) but rather I am no longer afraid of her and need to do things for myself and on my own."
It was that year(1960-61) that I became involved in student government, fraternity life and dating while enrolled in an honours program that required even more study time and concentration than my busy, over-consuming ambition-let-loose could and did accommodate. The year came crashing in on me at the corner of Richmond and Central Avenues near midnight one snowy Sunday night in March of 1961, when the recently purchased Volkswagen I had purchased for a summer job selling nursery stock collided in the island-intersection with a northbound car coming up Richmond. I did not see his headlights if there were any, and the right front fender was crushed. Neither my friend nor I were injured, but my ability to concentrate in the final weeks prior to final exams was shattered.
Ambition to become a man and all that that entailed, and the need to be loved and accepted and even liked by a female partner have been two strands that have weaved a somewhat enmeshed tapestry of intersecting timelines for the last half century of my life.
Haunting both strands, however, was the "foundational" understanding and even belief that I was alone in those pursuits, without mentor, without anyone from whom to seek counsel, and without even the option of such a choice. And guarding that foundational belief, were models of "woman" and "man" of femininity and masculinity, both of which were caricatures of themselves and of each other. Her offense drowned or possibly trumped his, because he knew that by becoming assertive he would be overruled and thereby would "lose" again, something the male ego finds troublesome. Similarly his responsibility did not compete on a level playing field with hers, since she held her Registered Nursing "degree" over his head, as her accomplishment that would always trump his refusal to attend Dental School when she offered to work as a nurse in Toronto and "put him through" in effect pay the freight.
Competition between man and woman, in our house, produced a consistent, predictable and tragic outcome: she won, he lost and he retreated from further engagement into passive aggressive patterns that presumably drove her mad.
And like Jim Stark looking for role models of masculinity, Stark finding one in officer Ray at the local police department, I also found one in the lawyer who "took me in" as a student summer employee and became my mentor, providing adult male support, counsel and advice that could not come from inside my home.
However, the thrashing and the self-doubt, and the self-loathing that was "seeded" in the garden of my youth lasted decades longer than the tonnes of raspberries that were picked from my mother's garden. And only through a persistent determination to say "No!" to various and deeply hurtful public admonishments, "targeting" and "bringing down" episodes, designed and delivered by individuals and groups who were well aware they were unable to penetrate my armour, I have, after half a dozen decades, relented somewhat to those attacks, without ever letting my guard completely down.
I still determine to locate and to envisage all the escape routes from whatever situation I might find myself in. I still listen as carefully as one who cannot read and overcompensates with listening, to all the signals that could and would impale me on their sharp tentacles and flag those signals as potentially destructive. I still, on the other side, admire and fantasize about the risks others take, in the spirit and the hope that they might achieve their accomplishment without bringing themselves down, as did Silken Laumen, the Canadian Olympic rower, who, when she was 500 meters from her first "gold medal" and leading her closest opponent, told herself that she was not worthy of winning, and finished second. She too suffered the ignominy of a troubled mother, hers throwing plates and threatening to "gas" the family any day, while mine assaulted both my father and me with her invectives and me with her dowel of a discarded rolling pin, on the shoulders, the arms the legs, if and when I provoked her anger and her disappointment and her embarrassment, adding more fuel to an already burning layer of embers that has still not been fully extinguished inside my being.
I need to watch "Rebel without a cause" a few more times, for the mining of relevant nuggets of insight...do you too?
I was raised in the "Stark" household, metaphorically speaking. Watching that father feverishly clean the mess he had made when he let the tray with his ill wife's food fall, so that his wife would not see what he had done, while his son Jim laughed at his foolishness and urged him to "let her see it," I was ashamed to think that that could have been my father. And, as for the pivotal question Jim asked his father early in the movie, while he contemplated his risk in showing up for the "duel" of stolen cars racing to the cliff overlooking the sea, "What should I do?" his father could summon only luke-warm and ineffectual words: "Let's get a paper, and list our options, and then find someone to give us advice."
I recall a conversation, on the back steps on our family home, in the summer of 1956, with my father about the terrible actions, words and attitudes that we were experiencing from my mother, including disdain for him, and physical and emotional abuse directed to me.
"What are we going to do about this woman?" I pleaded.
"I really don't know; I have tried everything I can think of and nothing has worked so far; so I really don't know what to do," came his honest, if once again ineffectual response.
Were we to have that conversation today, I would be demanding that either he and I leave, unless and until the kind of "zoo" we were living in changed, or that I would be leaving alone. In the words of both Jim Stark echoed by his girlfriend, Judy, in the movie, " I am not going back into that zoo, ever!" (each referring to their family homes).
Trying in vain to "fit in" applied not only to the Jim Stark's of the movie; it applied to all of us, in our mid-teens in the fifties. And although our parents may not have moved from town to town, as part of their campaign to escape the embarrassment of their young son, they were nevertheless just as addicted to being seen as perfect parents with perfect kids.
"Be a good boy!" was the line that spurted out of my mother's mouth whenever I ventured into any social encounter. Dressed inappropriately in a sports jacket as Jim was for his first day at Dawson High, I was sent out to my first "teen-town dance" wearing a similar dress jacket only to find all the other males wearing t-shirts and/or light sweaters. The formality of my attire spoke volumes about the snobbery and the vacuity of my (and Jim's) parents and I could imagine his discomfort at wearing the weight of those expectations in the clothes he was "assigned." I recall having not enough courage, or spine to ask anyone to dance, but most likely told my mother that I had enjoyed myself on that hot August night with those clothes soaked in my perspiration.
"Be a good boy" now echoes in my head as the grating sound of a military commander, barked as if her reputation were intimately tied to my behaviour, my words and my attitudes, while her own responsibility for those features of her life were being drowned in her projections of her own perfect persona onto her only offspring.
Link "be a good boy" to "don't read, do something!" and "if you get the strap at school you will get it twice as hard at home" and "you're no good and you never will be any good" and you have a chorus for a daily, hourly chant from the female tyrant whose strode like a colossus over the micro-culture of our family home. To be sure, to counter her "dark side," she was literally in perpetual motion in her pursuit of work and potentially "redemption"(in the puritan perspective of idleness leading to temptation and evil)...cooking, cleaning, sewing, decorating and redecorating, gardening, preserving, delivering food to grieving families, nursing, and talking to her one or two friends....in excess were all of these activities.
The excess of her criticisms, even emotional floggings of the two men in her life, were, of course, never permitted to escape into the public domain; they were our family secret, and we knew unconsciously that if we were ever to break the code of silence that surrounded and enveloped our house and her reputation, they "all hell would break loose" even though we did not even speculate on what that would look like.
Feeling unworthy and unloved, like Jim Stark and to a lesser extent Judy, I too rebelled, only my turn came immediately following my first year in university, when I was eighteen, a little later than Stark's. My rebellion took the vocal formation, when I uttered the word to myself, "I am not doing this FOR HER (meaning going to university, and achieving grades that would make her proud) but rather I am no longer afraid of her and need to do things for myself and on my own."
It was that year(1960-61) that I became involved in student government, fraternity life and dating while enrolled in an honours program that required even more study time and concentration than my busy, over-consuming ambition-let-loose could and did accommodate. The year came crashing in on me at the corner of Richmond and Central Avenues near midnight one snowy Sunday night in March of 1961, when the recently purchased Volkswagen I had purchased for a summer job selling nursery stock collided in the island-intersection with a northbound car coming up Richmond. I did not see his headlights if there were any, and the right front fender was crushed. Neither my friend nor I were injured, but my ability to concentrate in the final weeks prior to final exams was shattered.
Ambition to become a man and all that that entailed, and the need to be loved and accepted and even liked by a female partner have been two strands that have weaved a somewhat enmeshed tapestry of intersecting timelines for the last half century of my life.
Haunting both strands, however, was the "foundational" understanding and even belief that I was alone in those pursuits, without mentor, without anyone from whom to seek counsel, and without even the option of such a choice. And guarding that foundational belief, were models of "woman" and "man" of femininity and masculinity, both of which were caricatures of themselves and of each other. Her offense drowned or possibly trumped his, because he knew that by becoming assertive he would be overruled and thereby would "lose" again, something the male ego finds troublesome. Similarly his responsibility did not compete on a level playing field with hers, since she held her Registered Nursing "degree" over his head, as her accomplishment that would always trump his refusal to attend Dental School when she offered to work as a nurse in Toronto and "put him through" in effect pay the freight.
Competition between man and woman, in our house, produced a consistent, predictable and tragic outcome: she won, he lost and he retreated from further engagement into passive aggressive patterns that presumably drove her mad.
And like Jim Stark looking for role models of masculinity, Stark finding one in officer Ray at the local police department, I also found one in the lawyer who "took me in" as a student summer employee and became my mentor, providing adult male support, counsel and advice that could not come from inside my home.
However, the thrashing and the self-doubt, and the self-loathing that was "seeded" in the garden of my youth lasted decades longer than the tonnes of raspberries that were picked from my mother's garden. And only through a persistent determination to say "No!" to various and deeply hurtful public admonishments, "targeting" and "bringing down" episodes, designed and delivered by individuals and groups who were well aware they were unable to penetrate my armour, I have, after half a dozen decades, relented somewhat to those attacks, without ever letting my guard completely down.
I still determine to locate and to envisage all the escape routes from whatever situation I might find myself in. I still listen as carefully as one who cannot read and overcompensates with listening, to all the signals that could and would impale me on their sharp tentacles and flag those signals as potentially destructive. I still, on the other side, admire and fantasize about the risks others take, in the spirit and the hope that they might achieve their accomplishment without bringing themselves down, as did Silken Laumen, the Canadian Olympic rower, who, when she was 500 meters from her first "gold medal" and leading her closest opponent, told herself that she was not worthy of winning, and finished second. She too suffered the ignominy of a troubled mother, hers throwing plates and threatening to "gas" the family any day, while mine assaulted both my father and me with her invectives and me with her dowel of a discarded rolling pin, on the shoulders, the arms the legs, if and when I provoked her anger and her disappointment and her embarrassment, adding more fuel to an already burning layer of embers that has still not been fully extinguished inside my being.
I need to watch "Rebel without a cause" a few more times, for the mining of relevant nuggets of insight...do you too?
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Men have fallen victim to the "good provider" reduction....
What Are You Doing To A Man When You Call Him A Good Provider?
By Mark Greene, the Good Men Project, January 13, 2014
The Man Box is a set of rigid expectations that define what a “real man” is, particularly in American culture. A real man is strong and stoic. He doesn’t show emotions other than anger and excitement. He is a breadwinner. He is heterosexual. He is able-bodied. He plays or watches sports. He is the dominant participant in every exchange. He is a firefighter, a lawyer, a CEO. He is a man’s man. This “real man”, as defined by the Man Box, represents what is supposedly normative and acceptable within the tightly controlled performance of American male masculinity.
One value, central to the Man Box, is the expectation that men are to earn money and support their families. While seemingly benign, this expectation is rooted in a time when only men could be employed and therefore only men wielded the economic power in the home. Accordingly, what the Man Box offered was simple. “Do what you are told on the factory floor, be the undisputed king in your home.” Men, by retaining control of their family’s economic survival, held vast amounts of authority within the family structure; authority which often resulted in the brutal oppression of their wives and children. It was the devil’s bargain of economic power for American men; a devil’s bargain that is fading away as women become increasingly economically independent. But the ghost of it remains.
First and foremost, men are expected to be good providers. Our parent’s generation expects it of us, the family courts expect it of us, women on first dates often expect it, and in the event of an early death, our life insurance policies pre-suppose it. The simple mechanics of being a good provider excludes men from a number of other spaces which, not coincidentally, are reserved for women. What more, as they aspire to switch traditional breadwinner roles with men in our evolving economy, even highly successful professional women collapse into the expectation that men are supposed to provide. And the cultural contradictions go on and on.
Reflections:
"Providing" for the family, bringing home the bacon, holding down a job and not risking trying new ventures...striving for more and more creative ways to make a living, including sending out resumes throughout a career in education...feeling like a "cheque-writer" in the household...most men of retirement age know more about this experience than they should.
I used to say often in the course of a twenty-three-year marriage, "If I had wanted a corporation, I would have formed one; I thought this was something very different, called a marriage!"
Quitting and staying, as the contemporary phrase puts its, I believed for too many years that it might change, that I might be considered more than the writer of cheques, the "good-provider" but then I came to acknowledge that it would never change, that it was baked into the cake of the stereotypical concept of marriage, and I was the victim, along with millions of other men, of that imprisonment.
And what's more, I did not have the negotiating skills perhaps or the vocabulary to find mutually acceptable paths to a different picture.
Once, back in 1981, when three daughters were eleven, eight and five, I proposed that the family make the traditional cross-country camping trip to the west coast of Canada, with a tent trailer.
I had arranged for the money for gas to come from a free-lance journalism assignment that called for weekly "reports" on the journey, called into the local radio station for which I was then working as an editorialist. The children were of an age that, within one or two years, at least the eldest would no longer be content in a car with her parents and siblings, and would probably prefer to spend one month of her summer with her friends, or perhaps in a 'summer job' as was the habit of many adolescents.
Nevertheless, "There is not enough money!" became the resistant cry of my then spouse, pushing me first into a state of frustration, then discussion about how it would be paid for, and finally, a long solitary drive to consider my options. I returned from that drive to announce, "I am taking the kids and going on the trip; you can come if you like but the trip is going to happen."
Of course, she was not going to be left behind from a trip that neither she nor I had ever experienced as part of our youth. And also of course, she enjoyed herself, so far as I know, as did the three girls.
A decade after our marriage finally dissolved ( how appropriate that word, given the process of dissolution, erosion and the many attempts to prevent the process!) my ex-spouse commented, "Well, we certainly were 'well provided' for throughout the marriage!"
Where were such observations and perceptions and attitudes throughout the marriage? They were non-existent, since to offer such observations would and could only lead to complacency on the part of the "provider"...that is me!
The Man Box is so deeply embedded in the psyche of the North American culture, at least among the 'protestant' segment of that culture, that many male lives have been literally destroyed by its ravages.
It has been especially ravaging among those whose early years were infested with negative criticisms from either or both parents that usually included the words, "You're no good and you'll never be any good!" as were the words from my mother's mouth. As an adolescent, I was unaware of the psychological concept of projection, in which one projects one's greatest fears onto another, as she was constantly doing to her only son, having already established in her mind the belief that her own spouse was a deep and profound disappointment, just as her father had been, and also her father-in-law, whom she never met in person, but only through reputation. He was deceased when she was only fourteen.
While at least in my situation, it was the overt actions of my mother, and the complicity of my father that created the archetype of the Man Box, I fell into the same "trap" in my own first marriage. And there was also a "religious" component to the box. It had to do with how women perceived men, as a role player, and not as a human being. Playing a role, becoming a function as a provider, is one of the most debilitating reductions one human being can inflict on another; it is one of the most heinous forms of contempt and men have to resist such "definitions" of their female partners, just as we must resist the trap of being caught in such "definitions" by our female partners. And the part played by religion was that each "be good" aphorism had a moral, ethical and 'sinful' overtone that carried with it the prospect of some nasty pay-back if the man failed in his responsibilities.
"Be good!" or ELSE!.....and sometimes that "or else" included physical punishment, or worse, verbal insults, or downright devaluation, as if it were a moral imperative that this (in my case) female 'sheriff' were enforcing.
Female superiority, and as a consequence, male inferiority, is a notion that men will have to contend with for the duration of their lives on this planet. And, playing into that stereotype, given that universities now see 60% of their students, including their graduate students are female, (where are the men?) will only grow the stereotype.
Women will come to the advocacy "aid" and support of their sisters.
Men, on the other hand, are very slow, if even interested, in coming to the advocacy of their male counterparts, another of the myths that men have 'ingested' and fallen victim to...that if we were to come to the advocacy of men, we would be acknowledging that men are in need of such advocacy. Let's finally say it... MEN DO NEED THE SUPPORT OF OTHER MEN!
And that is not a weakness, but a simply reality.
And we are all indebted to the Good Men Project for showing that leadership and advocacy and encouraging others to join in the dialogue that must include both reflection as well as conversation.
By Mark Greene, the Good Men Project, January 13, 2014
The Man Box is a set of rigid expectations that define what a “real man” is, particularly in American culture. A real man is strong and stoic. He doesn’t show emotions other than anger and excitement. He is a breadwinner. He is heterosexual. He is able-bodied. He plays or watches sports. He is the dominant participant in every exchange. He is a firefighter, a lawyer, a CEO. He is a man’s man. This “real man”, as defined by the Man Box, represents what is supposedly normative and acceptable within the tightly controlled performance of American male masculinity.
One value, central to the Man Box, is the expectation that men are to earn money and support their families. While seemingly benign, this expectation is rooted in a time when only men could be employed and therefore only men wielded the economic power in the home. Accordingly, what the Man Box offered was simple. “Do what you are told on the factory floor, be the undisputed king in your home.” Men, by retaining control of their family’s economic survival, held vast amounts of authority within the family structure; authority which often resulted in the brutal oppression of their wives and children. It was the devil’s bargain of economic power for American men; a devil’s bargain that is fading away as women become increasingly economically independent. But the ghost of it remains.
Reflections:
"Providing" for the family, bringing home the bacon, holding down a job and not risking trying new ventures...striving for more and more creative ways to make a living, including sending out resumes throughout a career in education...feeling like a "cheque-writer" in the household...most men of retirement age know more about this experience than they should.
I used to say often in the course of a twenty-three-year marriage, "If I had wanted a corporation, I would have formed one; I thought this was something very different, called a marriage!"
Quitting and staying, as the contemporary phrase puts its, I believed for too many years that it might change, that I might be considered more than the writer of cheques, the "good-provider" but then I came to acknowledge that it would never change, that it was baked into the cake of the stereotypical concept of marriage, and I was the victim, along with millions of other men, of that imprisonment.
And what's more, I did not have the negotiating skills perhaps or the vocabulary to find mutually acceptable paths to a different picture.
Once, back in 1981, when three daughters were eleven, eight and five, I proposed that the family make the traditional cross-country camping trip to the west coast of Canada, with a tent trailer.
I had arranged for the money for gas to come from a free-lance journalism assignment that called for weekly "reports" on the journey, called into the local radio station for which I was then working as an editorialist. The children were of an age that, within one or two years, at least the eldest would no longer be content in a car with her parents and siblings, and would probably prefer to spend one month of her summer with her friends, or perhaps in a 'summer job' as was the habit of many adolescents.
Nevertheless, "There is not enough money!" became the resistant cry of my then spouse, pushing me first into a state of frustration, then discussion about how it would be paid for, and finally, a long solitary drive to consider my options. I returned from that drive to announce, "I am taking the kids and going on the trip; you can come if you like but the trip is going to happen."
Of course, she was not going to be left behind from a trip that neither she nor I had ever experienced as part of our youth. And also of course, she enjoyed herself, so far as I know, as did the three girls.
A decade after our marriage finally dissolved ( how appropriate that word, given the process of dissolution, erosion and the many attempts to prevent the process!) my ex-spouse commented, "Well, we certainly were 'well provided' for throughout the marriage!"
Where were such observations and perceptions and attitudes throughout the marriage? They were non-existent, since to offer such observations would and could only lead to complacency on the part of the "provider"...that is me!
The Man Box is so deeply embedded in the psyche of the North American culture, at least among the 'protestant' segment of that culture, that many male lives have been literally destroyed by its ravages.
It has been especially ravaging among those whose early years were infested with negative criticisms from either or both parents that usually included the words, "You're no good and you'll never be any good!" as were the words from my mother's mouth. As an adolescent, I was unaware of the psychological concept of projection, in which one projects one's greatest fears onto another, as she was constantly doing to her only son, having already established in her mind the belief that her own spouse was a deep and profound disappointment, just as her father had been, and also her father-in-law, whom she never met in person, but only through reputation. He was deceased when she was only fourteen.
While at least in my situation, it was the overt actions of my mother, and the complicity of my father that created the archetype of the Man Box, I fell into the same "trap" in my own first marriage. And there was also a "religious" component to the box. It had to do with how women perceived men, as a role player, and not as a human being. Playing a role, becoming a function as a provider, is one of the most debilitating reductions one human being can inflict on another; it is one of the most heinous forms of contempt and men have to resist such "definitions" of their female partners, just as we must resist the trap of being caught in such "definitions" by our female partners. And the part played by religion was that each "be good" aphorism had a moral, ethical and 'sinful' overtone that carried with it the prospect of some nasty pay-back if the man failed in his responsibilities.
"Be good!" or ELSE!.....and sometimes that "or else" included physical punishment, or worse, verbal insults, or downright devaluation, as if it were a moral imperative that this (in my case) female 'sheriff' were enforcing.
Female superiority, and as a consequence, male inferiority, is a notion that men will have to contend with for the duration of their lives on this planet. And, playing into that stereotype, given that universities now see 60% of their students, including their graduate students are female, (where are the men?) will only grow the stereotype.
Women will come to the advocacy "aid" and support of their sisters.
Men, on the other hand, are very slow, if even interested, in coming to the advocacy of their male counterparts, another of the myths that men have 'ingested' and fallen victim to...that if we were to come to the advocacy of men, we would be acknowledging that men are in need of such advocacy. Let's finally say it... MEN DO NEED THE SUPPORT OF OTHER MEN!
And that is not a weakness, but a simply reality.
And we are all indebted to the Good Men Project for showing that leadership and advocacy and encouraging others to join in the dialogue that must include both reflection as well as conversation.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Rosin champions the "end of men" AGAIN....or is it STILL?
Men Are Obsolete
Five reasons we are definitely witnessing the end of men
By Hannah Rosin, Time, January 2, 2014How do I know men are finished? I’ll read you a quote that says it all: “Yes. There have been times when I’ve been in a drunken stupor.” Toronto’s mayor, a shining example of modern manhood is what I would call the canary in the coal mine, only he’s not quite as delicate as the canary. Because, you know, He’s got “more than enough to eat at home.”Are men literally obsolete? Of course not, and if we had to prove that we could never win. For one thing, we haven’t figured out a way to harvest sperm without them being, you know, alive. But in order to win this debate we have to prove that men, quote unquote, as we’ve historically come to define them — entitled to power, destined for leadership, arrogant, confused by anything that isn’t them. As in: “I don’t understand. Is it a guy dressed up like a girl? Or a girl dressed up like a guy?” They are obsolete.
Once upon a time, the men ventured out to hunt bison while the women stayed behind to dust the cave, gather berries and raise the very hairy children. This is the story we have told ourselves for tens of thousands of years to explain why men rule the world while women are relegated to being the second sex, (“physiologically unsuited for leadership” is how the current Australian prime minister put it). Now after more than a century of global economic revolutions and a few decades of recession it’s become obvious that this story is no longer true, if it ever was. Here are the reasons:
ONE: It’s the end of men because men are failing in the workplace.
Over the last few decades men’s incomes have been slowly declining and women’s have been rising. Last year one in five men were not working, something economists call the biggest social crisis we will face. Party this is because the economy is changing quickly, but men aren’t. As the manufacturing economy gets replaced by a service and information economy, men are failing to adjust or get the skill they need to succeed.
Meanwhile, women are moving in the opposite direction: In 2009 they became the majority of the American workforce for the first time ever. Now in every part of America young single women under 30 have a higher median income than young men, which is really important because that’s the phase of life when people imagine what their future will look like. As one sorority girl put it to me — remember, I said sorority, not someone from the women’s study center — “Men are the new ball and chain.”
It’s the end of men because men are failing in schools and women are succeeding. In nearly every country, on all but one continent, women are getting 60 percent of college degrees, which is what you need to succeed these days. Many boys start falling behind as early as first grade, and they fail to catch up. Many men, meanwhile, still see school as a waste of time, a girl thing.
TWO: It’s the end of men because the traditional household, propped up by the male breadwinner, is vanishing.
For the first time in history women all over the world are marrying down, meaning marrying men with worse prospects than they have. We have a new global type, for example, called the alpha wife, a woman who makes more money than her husband or boyfriend. Not that long ago she was exceedingly rare. Now she’s part of about 40 percent of couples in the US. And that does not count the growing number of single moms who head their own families.
Women are occupying positions of power that were once totally closed off to them. The premiers of the Canada’s four biggest provinces, the head of Harvard, the COO of Facebook, the newly appointed chairwoman of the Fed, ruler of the global economy, Janet Yellen, who got the job basically because Larry Summers said women weren’t that good at math. And lets not forget Christine Lagarde, who took over the job at the IMF from another shining example of modern manhood.
And why aren’t there more female CEO’s or heads of state, one of you will ask? To that I have to remind you that women’s ascendance is only about 40 years old, while men have been in power for 40,000 years. So by that standard we are rising at dizzying speeds.
THREE: It’s the end of men because we can see it in the working and middle class.
When I speak at public universities with commuter populations about the disappearance of men, the women find what I am saying to be totally obvious, like the sky is blue and Miley Cyrus is whacked. The working class feels the end of men the most, as men lose their jobs and lose their will to be fathers, and women do everything alone, creating a virtual matriarchy in the parts of the country that used to be bastions of good old macho country music style values. Why don’t these women marry or live with the fathers of their children? As many a woman told me, “He’d be just another mouth to feed.”
FOUR: It’s the end of men because men have lost their monopoly on violence and aggression.
Women are becoming more sexually confident, and something Camille Paglia has been waiting for, more aggressive and violent in both good ways and bad — that is, going to war, going to jail, and in the case of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, beating up anyone who knocks a drink out of their hand.
FIVE: It’s the end of men because men, too, are now obsessed with their body hair.
In her truly endlessly hilarious book Caitlin Moran catalogs the travails of being a woman, one of them being the unacceptability of hair, anywhere on the body. If that is a sign of patriarchal oppression then I counter it with Exhibit A.
This is of course Anthony Weiner’s chest, and as you can see, the landscape is meticulously tended. I mean, he has called the exterminator and made sure the weeds are dead and gone. And if you asked him, “Why are you so shorn, Mr. Weiner?” do you think he would say the matriarchy made me do it? No he would not, and neither should we.
Obsolete does not mean worthless. It means outmoded. The twin combustion engine made the bicycle obsolete but that doesn’t mean we hate the bicycle. We just use it the way we want to, while recognizing the necessity of efficiency and change. We don’t have to turn men into eunuchs. We can keep whatever we like about manhood but adjust the parts of the definition that are keeping men back.
I dedicated my book to my son because he is one of those boys who gets in trouble a lot, who thinks the institutions are rigged against him. I see my job as accepting him as he is, and teaching him how to adapt to the world as it is.
When I think of the world after the end of men, I think of the world my son will inherit, where, if he chooses to take his kids to a playground at 3 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, no one will look at him funny, no one will wonder if he’s out of work, no one will think, “What a loser,” and no one will think he’s from Portland or Toronto, they will just walk on by and not think anything of it at all. He can be his own lovely obnoxious self and also be at home in a new world.
Hanna Rosin is the author of the book The End of Men. Adapted from her opening statement at the Munk Debate, “Resolved: Men Are Obsolete,” held in Toronto.
Read more: Men Are Obsolete | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2014/01/02/men-are-obsolete/#ixzz2plw3sgvQ
Friday, January 3, 2014
Is there a double standard for strong women and weak men?
This is a piece attempting to penetrate the conundrum facing contemporary boys, especially sensitive, creative and "equal" to the female counterparts, especially their life partners.
Garcia deserves credit for his courage to put this case, especially the case against any form of competition with "women" as part of the dialogue to which this journal is dedicated.
We encourage other men to reflect on their dependence on a stereotype version of masculinity, on their participation in the phoney competition with women, and in their one-sided development at the expense of their discernment of the differences between "arrogance and confidence" and also between authentic masculinity and bravura.
Our educators have to be schooled in the double standard too many of their institutions incorporate, often unwittingly, into their culture. Our employers, too, have to be schooled on the implementation of both practices and attitudes that reflect both respect and equality for all of their workers, both men and women. Our churches, hospitals, social service agencies also have a responsibility to demonstrate their grasp of the inequities and disparities that have grown like barnacles onto a culture of fiscal scarcity, gender competitions and technological overdrive.
After you have read the Garcia piece, below, from the Good Men Project, you might wish to entertain a few conversations with your colleagues about its content, and the implications of that content on the lives of those around you in your circle of influence.
Is The Sensitive Boy Doomed From The Start?
By Eduardo Garcia The Good Men Project, January 2, 2014
For years we have applauded and promoted strong women Role Models. We teach our girls to stand proud, be determined, and have an independent spirit; to grow up into women who own their sexuality and have fierce convictions. They will be the ones who challenged the norm, having fought for their place in a man’s world, and forged a path for other girls to follow with every step they took. They will do this without ever losing their identity of being a Woman, wearing the label of “Bitch,” given to them by weaker men who will try to minimize these women, as a badge of Honor. They are groomed since childhood to be strong, by strong parents, or they become strong as a result of being broken by society, only to come back as better women. They are taught to be warriors and to understand they don’t need a man to take care of them. They will never settle for someone who doesn’t appreciate them, and if they are going to be with a man, at the very least he has to be their equal. After an era of emotionally distant men, followed by a generation of the “absent providers,” and culminated by a “dead beat dad” society, we have taught our girls that the only person they can truly count on is themselves.
And then we look at what we are teaching our sons, the future men who will try to woe these ladies. All I can say to you is “good luck boys.”
We are raising our boys to become better than their macho-male predecessors, a noble endeavor indeed. We teach them to be sensitive, that crying in public is nothing to be ashamed of, that they don’t need to “suck it up,” that the weight of the world is not riding on their shoulders, and no matter what others might say, they are special and should be respected for being special. We just keep forgetting to tell them that everyone else thinks they are special too. We encourage them to follow their fantasies and dreams, but no one taught them about how hard you have to fight, the price you have to pay, and the struggles you have to endure for following your dreams. We teach them to voice their opinions, but forget to teach them that words and actions have consequences. We teach boys that it’s ok to sometimes be weak, but forgot to teach them how to be strong the rest of the time. We tell them that having doubts is understandable, but forgot to teach them how to be self-confident. We are failing at preparing them for the realities of a harsh world that cares little of how sensitive they are.
Boys learn that it’s ok for an athlete to cry for losing because he is in touch with his feelings, when instead he should learn to congratulate and recognize the skill and effort of the other player who won. They will confuse arrogance for confidence, turning abuse as a tool for empowerment and as a mask for insecurities. They will be overwhelmed with self-doubt every time they have to deal with rejection and are told by society that mistakes are used as marketing opportunities instead of being a tool for learning. They will view any opinion different than theirs as a personal attack, and take everything to heart as an offense. And they will react accordingly, just look at how trolling and flame wars rage online.
Somewhere in the evolution of manhood by the last couple of generations, sensitivity and sensibility were taken out of the equation of being a man, as if artistry and creativity was exclusively a female trait. Before this happened, it was expected for a man to learn about art and culture as well as the arts of war. Warrior classes of the olden days would be taught music, art, and literature as part of their development. Trade crafts were viewed as artistic endeavors and wooing a lady was a demonstration of the sensibility the man possessed. Take a moment and think of most art, literature, and music produced in the last century. Most were produced by men, although this was because women weren’t even allowed to participate openly till recently. Then, some culturally stunted individual thought it was a good idea to “feminize” culture, and men should be little more than grunts and providers. Thank you, “Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”.
And how are we handling this loss? By starting to teach culture and art to students the same way we teach science? By placing, at the same level of importance, music as we do math? Nope, by demonizing all connotations the word “Man” has, as if the culturally underdeveloped version of Man we have today was the standard throughout history. We teach boys about gender equality, but teach our girls to be proud of “Girl Power.” Are we actually applauding a double standard that makes for strong women and weak men? Some might think it’s only fitting considering we have been doing the reverse for centuries. I think our boys should not be punished for the mistakes of their grandfathers. We have produced a society where men are trying to figure life out in their 20’s and 30’s, while we see women going for their dreams since their teens!
Caballeros, we are not in a race or a competition against women, nor should we allow women to treat us as if they are competing against us. The old generation of misogynist men failed to be proper partners to the ladies. They reduced them to mere trophies to be shown at social gatherings, relegated their house and family choices/obligations. Unfortunately, the current generation of overly sensitive men is heading down the opposite road, ending up being unfit partners for powerful women. We need to find a balance, and we need to find it quickly. We cannot talk about gender equality if we are not willing to be the Modern Women’s equals.
Garcia deserves credit for his courage to put this case, especially the case against any form of competition with "women" as part of the dialogue to which this journal is dedicated.
We encourage other men to reflect on their dependence on a stereotype version of masculinity, on their participation in the phoney competition with women, and in their one-sided development at the expense of their discernment of the differences between "arrogance and confidence" and also between authentic masculinity and bravura.
Our educators have to be schooled in the double standard too many of their institutions incorporate, often unwittingly, into their culture. Our employers, too, have to be schooled on the implementation of both practices and attitudes that reflect both respect and equality for all of their workers, both men and women. Our churches, hospitals, social service agencies also have a responsibility to demonstrate their grasp of the inequities and disparities that have grown like barnacles onto a culture of fiscal scarcity, gender competitions and technological overdrive.
After you have read the Garcia piece, below, from the Good Men Project, you might wish to entertain a few conversations with your colleagues about its content, and the implications of that content on the lives of those around you in your circle of influence.
Is The Sensitive Boy Doomed From The Start?
By Eduardo Garcia The Good Men Project, January 2, 2014
For years we have applauded and promoted strong women Role Models. We teach our girls to stand proud, be determined, and have an independent spirit; to grow up into women who own their sexuality and have fierce convictions. They will be the ones who challenged the norm, having fought for their place in a man’s world, and forged a path for other girls to follow with every step they took. They will do this without ever losing their identity of being a Woman, wearing the label of “Bitch,” given to them by weaker men who will try to minimize these women, as a badge of Honor. They are groomed since childhood to be strong, by strong parents, or they become strong as a result of being broken by society, only to come back as better women. They are taught to be warriors and to understand they don’t need a man to take care of them. They will never settle for someone who doesn’t appreciate them, and if they are going to be with a man, at the very least he has to be their equal. After an era of emotionally distant men, followed by a generation of the “absent providers,” and culminated by a “dead beat dad” society, we have taught our girls that the only person they can truly count on is themselves.
And then we look at what we are teaching our sons, the future men who will try to woe these ladies. All I can say to you is “good luck boys.”
We are raising our boys to become better than their macho-male predecessors, a noble endeavor indeed. We teach them to be sensitive, that crying in public is nothing to be ashamed of, that they don’t need to “suck it up,” that the weight of the world is not riding on their shoulders, and no matter what others might say, they are special and should be respected for being special. We just keep forgetting to tell them that everyone else thinks they are special too. We encourage them to follow their fantasies and dreams, but no one taught them about how hard you have to fight, the price you have to pay, and the struggles you have to endure for following your dreams. We teach them to voice their opinions, but forget to teach them that words and actions have consequences. We teach boys that it’s ok to sometimes be weak, but forgot to teach them how to be strong the rest of the time. We tell them that having doubts is understandable, but forgot to teach them how to be self-confident. We are failing at preparing them for the realities of a harsh world that cares little of how sensitive they are.
Boys learn that it’s ok for an athlete to cry for losing because he is in touch with his feelings, when instead he should learn to congratulate and recognize the skill and effort of the other player who won. They will confuse arrogance for confidence, turning abuse as a tool for empowerment and as a mask for insecurities. They will be overwhelmed with self-doubt every time they have to deal with rejection and are told by society that mistakes are used as marketing opportunities instead of being a tool for learning. They will view any opinion different than theirs as a personal attack, and take everything to heart as an offense. And they will react accordingly, just look at how trolling and flame wars rage online.
Somewhere in the evolution of manhood by the last couple of generations, sensitivity and sensibility were taken out of the equation of being a man, as if artistry and creativity was exclusively a female trait. Before this happened, it was expected for a man to learn about art and culture as well as the arts of war. Warrior classes of the olden days would be taught music, art, and literature as part of their development. Trade crafts were viewed as artistic endeavors and wooing a lady was a demonstration of the sensibility the man possessed. Take a moment and think of most art, literature, and music produced in the last century. Most were produced by men, although this was because women weren’t even allowed to participate openly till recently. Then, some culturally stunted individual thought it was a good idea to “feminize” culture, and men should be little more than grunts and providers. Thank you, “Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”.
And how are we handling this loss? By starting to teach culture and art to students the same way we teach science? By placing, at the same level of importance, music as we do math? Nope, by demonizing all connotations the word “Man” has, as if the culturally underdeveloped version of Man we have today was the standard throughout history. We teach boys about gender equality, but teach our girls to be proud of “Girl Power.” Are we actually applauding a double standard that makes for strong women and weak men? Some might think it’s only fitting considering we have been doing the reverse for centuries. I think our boys should not be punished for the mistakes of their grandfathers. We have produced a society where men are trying to figure life out in their 20’s and 30’s, while we see women going for their dreams since their teens!
Caballeros, we are not in a race or a competition against women, nor should we allow women to treat us as if they are competing against us. The old generation of misogynist men failed to be proper partners to the ladies. They reduced them to mere trophies to be shown at social gatherings, relegated their house and family choices/obligations. Unfortunately, the current generation of overly sensitive men is heading down the opposite road, ending up being unfit partners for powerful women. We need to find a balance, and we need to find it quickly. We cannot talk about gender equality if we are not willing to be the Modern Women’s equals.
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