Another wake-up call to men...desist from all forms of violence and abuse of women!

 Did you know there will be approximately 9000 threats/acts of violence mostly against women in the U.S. Congress this year? These threats include threats of death and rape.

That's nearly twice the number from 2020.

According to Statistics Canada(2019), approximately every six days a woman is murdered by an intimate partner in Canada.

In 2021 StatsCan reports that 4 in 10 women have experienced some form of intimate partner violence.

From the Canadian Women Foundation website
canadianwomen.org:
30% of all women age 15 or older report experiencing sexual assaults at least once.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reports in 2014:
In our society, gender inequality is present in many areas, including politics, religion, media, cultural norms and the workplace. ....
Hyper- masculinity- the idea that masculinity is determined by hostility and aggression- is damaging for everyone. It promotes violence and entitlement.
Reading about domestic violence, however, seems somewhat clinical and detached from the real lives that are impacted...directly and indirectly.

Also, for a male even to presume to write about family violence begs some scepticism and contempt.

My personal life experience is not congruent with the overwhelming data.
Violence in our home originated with the matriarch. However, it did not take place in a vacuum. The failure of the adult male to "show up" as confident, assertive, courageous and “emotionally literate and intelligent” (in today’s terms) and proactively seeking to negotiate with his partner contributed significantly to the power imbalance.
Impatience and a belief that her partner lacked basic qualities expected of men contributed to the frustration and the violence.

Although statistically insignificant as a pattern, perhaps the dynamic of power needs a counter-balance of equal and authentic power, as perceived and applied between "consenting adults".

Men who fail to "own" both an awareness and a precise consciousness of our needs, including our emotions, our sexuality, our fears and insecurities, as well as our authentic hopes and aspirations leave a predictable and tragic vacuum in relationships.
Women cannot and must not be expected to "fill" that black hole. Similarly, for women, stereotypically to believe and disdain male inadequacies and insufficiencies contributes significantly to the emasculation of those men.

A recent letter to an "advice" column asked the columnist for advice on how to tell a potential male partner their relationship was over
"because he is poorly endowed". Why was that man even considering a relationship with that woman letter writer?

Powerlessness, in any of its innumerable faces, is a scourge...similarly, the over-compensating for any neurosis also undermines the potential for healthy relationships.

One of the more egregious aspects of the abuse of power, especially between men and women is commonly known as "micro-aggressions".
A woman about to introduce a guest speaker is mistaken for a female waiter at a banquet.

A male municipal politician tells a female executive, assigned head-table seating at a hosting club, to sit "down there" so I can sit at the head table to introduce my guest.

A male committee member dictates the terms of an incubator  committee's process, precluding the expression of views by female members.

A female expressing a nuanced opinion is cut off by a male who presumes to be an expert on the topic.

A male touches a female's face after a first conversation over coffee, without considering how she feels about and how she  interprets the event which was not arranged as a date.

A male is asked to help a female only to resist in order to continuing watching a sporting event.....

This list of examples is endless; yet, the insensitivity of the subject males renders them "tone deaf" to their own behaviour and attitude.

Of course, such emotional and attitudinal blindness, while hardly headline worthy, underlies the far more serious, dangerous and deeply offensive violence by men against women.

Fear of women "taking over" parallels the racist fear that immigrants will steal jobs from "white men". Similarly, the demand for respect and equality by the LGBTQ community threatens the established status quo of traditional masculine power and entitlement.

Violence itself must not be reduced to bruises, black eyes, broken bones and lethal physical injuries. Betrayal by men of women, through any of many deceptive patterns, including drugs, alcohol, career addiction, affairs, gambling and "hiding" in man caves and/or computer games are all potentially abusive behaviours which emerge when partners cannot and do not "communicate" openly and frankly.
Given the obvious female advantage in both language and emotional intelligence over most men, it is extremely important for women to first recognize that "upper hand" without deploying it abusively and insensitively in their demeaning put-downs of their male partners.

Men need not sacrifice our inherent masculinity by opening ourselves to the more complex and subtle and authentic emotional selves. And it is mostly other men who block such a development, fearful that hard masculinity will erode and eviscerate them in the process.

One of the more telling questions I heard came from a senior male focused on the recently envisaged prospect of attracting women to his traditionally male service club. It was sad that he was inquiring of another male and not a female, even his partner. It was also sad that the question had not been raised effectively inside the club much earlier.

Listening to stories of women leaving such male bastions after a ‘bad’ experience only serves as markers of how far we all have yet to go for our daughters and grand-daughters to experience genuine respect and dignity from the men in their generations.

Advocating for a place at the table for misandry

A while back, this space waded slowly into the “beach” of the notion of misandry. A little tenuous, a little awkward and a more than a little risky in a time when misogyny is being trumpeted on all media, seemingly at all hours of the day and night, this “test-drive” needs to be updated.

For too long, the field of gender politics has been dominated by the feminist voice, too often as victim of the misdeeds, and the debasing attitudes of too many red neck men. In that vortex, men rarely venture into openly expressing disdain, disgust and contempt for the actions and the attitudes of those men who continue to tarnish the public reputation of masculinity. Men also, in their silence, permit the heavy hitters among angry and abused women to hold sway in the public consciousness about gender relations.

Simultaneously, trump, the most heinous example of masculinity on the planet, continues to debase especially women of colour, while simultaneously giving encouragement and license for white supremacists. Boris Johnston, newly elected prime minister of the United Kingdom, for his part, does not offer much hope to that narrow bank of the demographic occupied by enlightened, evolved and androgynous men.

Even those who have courageously established agencies in support of men’s rights, focussing on fathers’ rights to children following divorce, and to other legal male rights contests inside contemporary families, have failed, likely by design, to venture into the question of the detection of, the ferreting out of, and the exposing of and the implications of the other side of the gender debate, misandry. There are also reasonable and probable reasons for this posture: trying to thread a very small hole in a cultural needle to avoid any perception of, or worse charge of, seeming to be misogynistic, or even worse “being” misogynistic. In order to undertake the monumental task of seeding a public agency to advocate for the rights of men, and bringing the voices of all members of all families into the “room” CAFÉ, for example, has studiously restrained all public utterances from even the bare hint of misogyny. This piece not only respects that posture; it seeks to emulate it.

Physics reminds us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. David Brinkley, the late NBC news anchor reminds us, “A successful person is one who builds a firm foundation on the bricks that have been thrown at him/her.” As a young boy, being “raised” by a woman who hated her father, and who declared her recently deceased husband of sixty-two years “no good” and who regularly meted out both physical and emotional abuse to an innocent and unsuspecting son, I have what might be considered an inside track on the misandry that enters too many rooms, in too many towns and cities, churches, schools, and corporations in North America and has been slinking under the doorways of public consciousness like an early morning fog, barely visible and certainly free of both scent and expected detection. Perhaps a better analogy would be the recently publicly disclosed “radon” gas.*

In the current cultural ethos, bombarded as it is with evidence of inappropriate sexual behaviour and attitudes by men directed toward too many women, including pending court cases and already documented convictions in such cases, even to raise the specter of misandry seems highly self-sabotaging, dangerous, and quixotic. Men, generally, are not bonded in a manner similar to the “sisterhood” to which all women implicitly belong. In fact, the reverse, exemplified by the historic encyclopaedic physical, military, pugilistic and even legal/courtroom conflicts between men, more typically exemplifies how men communicate: through direct confrontation, competition, and fighting even to the death, if deemed necessary to assert and to defend male honour.

Nevertheless, risking obliteration from both men and women, like a canary in a coalmine, this piece seeks to bring forward repeated evidence, too often denied or avoided or merely dismissed by men in positions of authority, the contempt of men by women not only exists in each of our contemporary social constructs, and contributes, without acknowledgement to many of the conflicts that we have come to cluster under the rubric, “gender politics.”

Reasons for women’s contempt, distaste, discomfort, in all of its many forms and faces vary in both fact and intensity. They include but are not restricted to:

·        a broken relationship with the fathers of your girls,

·        a series of unmet expectations in the face of high bars imposed or suggested by highly ambitious and insensitive fathers on their daughters

·        a lengthy exposure to their mother’s contempt for their fathers, or other men in their mother’s lives

·        exposure to and experience of a male figure who is especially officious when solving an issue in which young girls are involved, including teachers, principals, doctors, law enforcement officials, social workers, and clergy

·        an unresolved competitive/conflicted relationship between mothers and fathers of young girls

·        exposure to and experience of young men in their dating lives who fail to exhibit a level of respect, decency and honour for their female partners

·        exposure to and experience of men, conversely, who failed to confront injustice whether imposed by other men or women, incarnating a “eunuch” kind of failure

It all started, for me, with my father, although the pattern was invisible to me in the first several decades of my life. The physical and emotional abuse I experienced from my mother was never experienced/inflicted in the presence of my father, nor was it ever exposed in conversations I witnessed between them. In essence, this abuse was and remained closeted, secret, except through direct communication from me to my father’s two sisters. The kind of exaggerated and conflicted relations that originated from my mother with public officials such as school authorities, was never disclosed by my mother to my father, demonstrating further attempts to prevent disclosure of such acts. These, however, also occurred almost exclusively between my mother and male persons.

The obvious conflict about whether or not I could continue to participate in minor hockey between my mother and father provided evidence, on reflection decades later, that their conflict was neither resolved nor resolvable. My father’s silence, for example, when my mother refused permission to participate in a hockey tournament in Collingwood, exhibits a level of insecurity, perhaps even fear in my father of my mother. This potential fear also reared its head in his speech stammer, worse at home than at his workplace, where he consistently dialogued freely and easily with customers in the hardware store he managed.

Similar default on my father’s part appears around and over family decisions on re-decorating, travel, family purchases, and even family activities that seemed to be generated and directed by my mother. Passive-aggression, however, was a repeated response from my father. Interjected on top of a history, known to my father, that my mother literally detested her father for his “premature” marriage to another women, shortly after the death of her mother, and perhaps his own family history where his own mother clearly dominated and controlled his father, this river of psychic sludge, inhabited as it is by unstated voices, resentments, contempts, and disparagements and unconscious projections necessarily contaminated the future of many, beyond the expectations of most participants. In his upper eighties, my father acknowledged, directly to me, “You were raised by Hitler and Chamberlain! And I was the Chamberlain in the family!”

Contempt, however, is one of many faces of fear. Others include, but are not restricted to: deceit, gossip, revenge, silence, withdrawal, poison, undermining, deafness (both literal and metaphoric), denigration, stereotyping, malicious humour/satire, dissociation and sexual denial by women of their male partners. And in a complex vortex of female emotional expressions (regardless of their intensity or appropriateness) most men are both literally and metaphorically “speechless”. Not having fully engaged in a process of exploring the emotional responses of characters in plays, novels, poems and films in their humanities classes in both elementary and secondary school, young men very often emerge into post-secondary institutions and workplaces devoid of both the vocabulary to express and the habit and comfort even to detect and disclose their personal emotional experience. Conventional social culture and perception, however, is currently flooded with disparagement of this male “inferiority” in the light of female vocabulary and familiarity with sharing their personal emotions. The public “convention” then falls into the trap of disdain of masculinity, both through the overt efforts of many women and the silence of most men, who, in the words of my physician, when nudged by my statement, “Men can learn to name and acknowledged their emotions,” replies, “Oh John, but women do it so much better!”
“And who is making this exercise a competition but you; women certainly are not on the personal level!” was my rebuttal.

Emotions, those unbridled, unbroken, unbreakable, and irrepressible forces that continual rumble in the human psyche, as they have from the beginning, nevertheless signal, warn, hint and even provide reconnaissance for and  in each situation regarding humans everywhere. In history, emotions have conventionally been regarded as unreliable, untrustworthy, dangerous and indicative of “mental instability” and even of religious “intemperance” or perhaps even insanity. Clearly, both the medical and religious communities have historically trusted human “reason,” science, experimentation, empirical evidence, and the legal community has struggled for centuries with the notion of human “motive”. In this detective search, they have sought to connect the dots between empirical evidence and a possible motive in most criminal activities, knowing that any approximation of what someone might be “thinking” or “feeling” would be, at best, speculation.

A link between the medical, religious and legal communities seems to lie in the human experience that is classified as “extreme”….usually described by actions (words, beliefs, attitudes) of emotional extremes. Medical conditions, legal cases, and religious conversions and missions are frequently associated with and complicated by human “emotions”….and history is replete with attempts by various scholars to disregard, eliminate, avoid, disparage or generally to disregard the implicit force in those various situations. Extreme emotions, for example, have fallen into one of two historical “problems”…sickness in the eyes of the medical fraternity and evil in the eyes of the religious fraternity.

Simultaneously, however, those human emotions have continued to rumble, vibrate, shake, sooth, dance and even embrace the experiences of the people they “
inhabit. Also, those emotions have been given, and have taken on the personalities of various “gods,” demons, angels, snakes, dogs, birds, dragons, and the like. In effect, humans have invariably given a personifying “face” and identity to these emotions. Recognizing the persistence and ubiquity of our emotions, humans have variously constructed mental hospitals, for example, “outside” population centres, and have tended to apply clinical diagnose what has been considered “dangerous” and aberrant behaviour and attitudes, all of them emitted from human emotions. Churches, too, have regarded emotions as dangerous to the spiritual pilgrimage of all humans.

At the core of each human encounter, whether between same or opposite genders, the matter of human emotions is always in play. And our various attempts to contain, repress, deny, avoid, or even ameliorate the influence and power of human emotions, as well as the positive contribution to building loving and supportive relationships, have always yielded to some kind of imaginative analysis. Our human imagination holds our existence ‘together’ is what is a much more random and unpredictable and irrepressible, yet life-giving force and power that defines the human being. Far from succumbing to any religious doctrine, legal prescription, educational process or factum, or even literary convention, our imagination and our emotions are and can be integrated into a “world view” that does not presuppose the need for control, order, or external authority.

However, our human fear of the extremes to which we are vulnerable, whether expressed through medical diagnosis, or through sin, or criminal activity, has contributed excessively and neurotically, perhaps even psychotically, to our collective and individual self-sabotage. Rather than restricting our “world view” to the dictates, diagnoses, sanctions and expectations linked to the “experts” in all traditional professional fields, originally charged with ‘establishing and sustaining order” in civilization(s), as a requisite for human survival.

It is this premise with which we wish to contend. And no straw-man is the premise.

Masculinity, for its resistance to its own vulnerability in both acknowledging and identifying our emotional truths and realities, and femininity, for its indulgence in the pleasures and the warning signals emerging from their emotions have together brought us to this place. And the continuing fractious contentions between the genders relegates this public debate to the “either-or” “he said-she-said” dichotomy. Neither women nor men will ultimately emerge from the conflict transformed into any approximation of androgyny. Women will suit-up in their warrior armour to “protect” themselves from the ravages of masculinity gone amuck; men will continue to hide from their emotions, believing those emotions to betray their very masculinity.

My mother and father, unfortunately, were unable, unwilling(?), untrained, un-open(?) or predisposed to refuse to have a conversation that would (could?) have freed them both from their respective psychic cells. Similar “cells” of emotional imprisonment, however, have bloomed in the public organizations in which we have all participated.

Example:

·        the woman whose misandry goes unrecognized and unacknowledged in her leadership of her organization, while disdaining men, masculinity, including even their spouse, (secretly)

·        the advertising writers, actors and producers who generate television advertising that blatantly demeans masculinity as stupid, physically and emotionally immature and awkward

·        films and dramas that blatantly depict masculinity as debasing all women

·        university curricular offerings and departments entitled “gender studies” that focus primarily, or worse exclusively on “womens’ studies” (on the premise that all of history has been created, written and documented by men)

·        enrollment patterns and inducements that favour a female cohort over the male cohort, “to bring into balance” the inequities of male dominance

·        then writing of laws, regulations and processes that openly and publicly favour the stories of female ‘victims’ while minimizing the contextual evidence that paints a more complex and more “fair”* picture

·        the surreptitious and often un-perceived, or mis-acknowledged in its importance, the misandry of women, by both men and women supervisors

·        the refusal/failure/omission of negotiating “fair” employment wages, safety standards and opportunities of advancement of women by male executives, as an implicit gender bias, too often unaddressed by their male peers.
     
     Undoubtedly, there are a plethora of other perhaps even more relevant examples of how men and women both fail their children, their grandchildren and their communities in their respective ‘cracked’ visions of human emotions. And, while misogyny is  openly discussed and acknowledged, misandry needs to take its legitimate place at the public table.
*  
      * Radon is a chemical element with the symbol Rn and atomic number 86. It is a radioactive, colourless, odorless, tasteless noble gas….radon itself is the immediate decay product of radium. Its most stable isotope 222Rn, has a half-life of only 3.8 days, making radon one of the rarest elements since it decays away so quickly. (Wikipedia)

Reflections on gender issues

In a period of history so fixated on misogyny, it seems more than a little appropriate to mention its opposite, misandry. Nobody seems to want to discuss the ways by which mostly women, but certainly too many men, defame, degrade, disdain, trivialize and trash males and all forms of masculinity.

The most obvious example of males demonstrating contempt for males is highly visible and even more audible in the Oval Office. Obama is, persistently and contemptuously portrayed by the current occupant as effete, weak, spineless, and even effeminate by a president so paranoid in his masculinity that he has set a course to undue everything that Obama accomplished on behalf of the American (and world’s) people. Hawks, like John Bolton, are also engaged in a dangerous display of neurotic masculinity, on behalf of America, through their overt and aggressive push for war with Iran including regime change, and potentially also with North Korea. Life-long military generals who actually know something about the ravages of war take a much more balanced and moderate and mature perspective.

Does trump think of what he is doing as misandry? Of course not! Yet, does trump think beyond the superficial impact on his personal ratings of anything he says or does? No!

Pervasive among red-neck males is another aspect of misandry: contempt, hatred and bigotry of the LGBTQ community, and especially of gay men. Red-necks really don’t give much thought to how they feel and think about whether females are lesbians, or which gender is claimed by transgenders. About homosexual men, however, red-necks consider them an affront to all forms and expressions of masculinity. (And before we go any further, let’s not confuse pedophilia with homosexuality. Pedophilia is dangerous and criminal! Last time I checked, being gay is not a crime in western countries, as it is in some African nations.)

There are other less obvious and less overt examples of misandry among red-neck sports talking heads. The preference for fighting in athletic competitions like hockey, football, baseball, basketball, as an incentive to crowd arousal, as opposed to skillful, balletic, choreographed, and disciplined play, is just another indication of the rub against the skilled players, who, by the way, as a group, do not suffer from a fragile masculinity, as perhaps the red-necks so.

There is a much more subtle and less obvious form of pandering to the violent among the news media, believing, (somewhat supported by the cultural evidence that conflict sells while compromise, collaboration and resolution does not generate high ratings), that real leaders have to be engaged in hard language and the growth of hard power if they are to be embraced a legitimate leaders. This stereotyping of hard power, elevating it, through such budget lines as the Pentagon that gobbles as much cash as all other departments combined, supported by the fixation with conflict, especially violent conflict, is another of the many distortions of healthy masculinity.

The universal disdain for anything emotional among many men, too, illustrates both a profound irony, and a tragic blindness. Naturally, in the execution of public debate and the strategizing around public policy, the factual evidence must hold a significantly higher priority than a person’s or a group’s emotional responses to the issue at hand. However, to deny the presence and impact of those emotions is to risk having them play an even more significant role than they would if they were acknowledged. None of us goes into any activity, including all professional activities like the court room, the operating room, the emergency room, the board room, the classroom, the sanctuary, the laboratory, and even the delivery truck, or the garbage truck, or the factory, without taking our emotional DNA, (linked to an agenda, whether conscious or not) with us.*

The masculine proclivity for public disdain of anything resembling human emotions in literature, film, television and, while a denial of our fragility in dealing effectively with those very emotions (especially as compared with our female partners, sisters, mothers, aunts and grandmothers), also renders us less open to learning both about their respective identities and their power, and about their subtlety and sophistication. Such a masculine umbrella over-riding the culture is a shameful indication of our deep and relenting inferiority, as passed on from our male ancestors, and effectively cripples, if not actually destroys, many relationships with our female partners. It says here that for men to learn to identify our emotions is neither feminizing nor weakening us; rather it is to enter into a world so complex and so turbulent and so awakening that our perception of ourselves, and our place in the universe can and will change dramatically, for the better.

Emotions do not have to be relegated to a functional factor in marketing (something men seem to want to do and to do rather well). And to participate inside our own emotions, and to regard them as just another facet of our identities that can be developed, grown, enriched and celebrated (in a positive manner), rather than waiting until they explode and sabotage our very lives, is a potential gift that many men will never accept, appreciate or engage.

We do not have to “work” at being different from our female partners; that is not something the universe (and especially women) have no trouble identifying. In fact working at it only demonstrates our unique and sad mis-perception and neurosis. Neither gender is “better” than the other; you will not find women today considering that they are, by definition, “less than” any man, and yet the world is replete with evidence that men consider ourselves much “less” and “less acceptable” than our female colleagues.

It is our very own responsibility to acknowledge that men and women, while different, are complimentary to each other, and not in some competition with the other gender. And while the emotional aspect of that responsibility might come more readily and easily to some women, there is the glaringly obvious that women collectively seem to be in an obsessive competition for wages, positions of responsibility and corporate and political power. So, it might be very difficult, if not impossible to parse the emotional from the political/corporate/pecuniary.

And, when we come to the off-hand, almost comedic, yet highly pejorative comments from women, the culture is flooded with them.

“All men are jerks!” comes quickly to mind, especially from women who have been painfully hurt by men.

“All men want is one thing,” is another of the proliferating stereotypes.

“No man listens to anything I say,” slides off the lips of women, especially among a group of women where there are no men to raise an eyebrow. And even if there were men present, it is unlikely that a single eyebrow would be raised, fearing the prospect of being labelled, misogynist.

“That dog has to be male; just look at the way he jumps around uncontrollably!” is another of the now-expected “jokes” that attempt to ridicule masculinity, however such ridicule might flow, both consciously and unconsciously from women.

And then there is the “no raised voices” mandate in the new workplace, since, it is believed, and universally accepted that “raised voices” are a form of bullying, verging on assault. We are to comport in a many fitting to the most anal fourth-grade class, commanded by an insecure, neurotic and repressive female pedagogue. It was a great surprise, and an unforgettable moment in my young life, when, as a friend and neighbour passed by desk, in such a grade four class, I reached out and gave Roger a gentle, and eminently friendly poke in the shoulder, saying “Hi” only to be commanded to the front of the room, where two lashes of the strap were administered on each hand, along with a lifetime of ridiculous, unmerited and unjust embarrassment.

 This was only exacerbated when, returning the joke, Roger appeared in our yard, and asked, in front of my mother, “What did your mother say when she heard you got the strap?” Naturally, hearing of this for the first time, she dished out an unforgettable unjust bar-soap mouth-washing over the kitchen sink.

And yet, upon reflection, after decades of voluntary and involuntary review, counselling, therapy and journaling on my part, it was that mother’s contempt for her father, transferred to her husband and her children that so shaped my early perceptions. Dangerous, malicious, vindictive and passionately inflamed women, ranging from the sneaky and deceitful to the blatant and proud have found all attempts to listen, to empathize, to “enter the shoes” and to support women, both in minor and in major turbulence that have backfired.

Some women have found their need for absolute control, especially in public, and openly collaborative situations, so gripping that when words like “I feel parented”  at their imposed, enforced agenda on the group, shot through their bodies like a electric shock. They picked up their papers, exited, and then sought blind revenge through manipulation of other compliant females.

Some have even gone so far as to send cards reading, “You destroy my image of men!” as if to say that my “masculinity” is so upsetting because it does not conform with the stereotype. Others, after opening up and disclosing some important and personal feelings, and then realizing what they had done, were so anxious that they turned on me, as if I were the problem. They had never before been so ‘open’ with a male, found the experience simultaneously supportive and scary, and preferred the latter as their ultimate interpretation. It was not, I believe, that they feared public disclosure of their emotions through a breach of confidence, but that they had been put under a light with a male. And yet, that may well have been part of their discomfort.

Others have openly sought relationships, who, when those attempts went unreciprocated, then turned on me in a vindictive revengeful manner, as if to punish me for what I considered my honest and professional “No”. Other women whose desperation and fear and aloneness became evident only after months of a very different “presentation” of their personality, became so viscious that they even openly declared, “I want to destroy men, and have become very good at it!”

We all must refuse to be content with the headline stories of men abusing women, without also wondering about what has become known as the “back story”. My father endured decades of abuse silently for the most part, and also passive aggressively, given that he either feared his spouse, or considered himself “less” than the other, a position from which too many men begin their private understanding of their relationship with women.

Only if and when men drop their need to be heroic, and need to rescue, and begin to assert our legitimate needs and desires, in open, honest, non-manipulative ways might we expect to see some move toward levelling the playing field between the genders.  (Women too might consider their part in the patronizing rescuing dramas with “weak men” in their view, in which they become enmeshed!) Patronizing,  trashing, dominating or competing at the emotional level will only exacerbate the relations between the genders. And, acting upon belief and perceptions of stereotypes (especially ones based on the other’s neurosis, thereby ironically and paradoxically exhibiting our own), by both genders will render each mere stick-persons, or cardboard cut-outs of their humanity.

Only through a process of becoming emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, physically and spiritually healthy, whole, well and self-respecting will both confront our respective fears, traumas, broken relationships (and we all have them!) and begin to break down the walls of both misogyny and misandry that threaten to imprison millions around the world. And only if and when we “are” fully able and willing to accept, respect and honour ourselves, will we begin to accept, respect and honour the other gender. This open war between our “shadows” cannot end well.


*In fact, the sanitizing of the emotional realities, (and there are many!) from the workplace has done much to exacerbate the tensions there. In this instance, we have willy-nilly thrown the baby out with the bathwater. While not all comedic exchanges in the past among co-workers was free of gender bias against women, much of it was simply good fun. And its removal as the result of a kind of scorched-earth cultural complicity, as if we are all supposed to imitate lawyers before judges, has rendered much workplace conversation stuffed into the box of technical competence, and safety rules and regs. This depersonalizes and eviscerates all “humanity” from the workplace, as if it were both dangerous and enmeshing by definition. What a boom we have complicitly generated for the “employee assistance barons” and their clinically certified minions!

Reflections on "strong men" (Part 2)

These “strong men” can only hold power because they have manipulated others, the facts, the agents who distribute the information and generally painted a picture in which the masses either believe or believe they are powerless to change.

The emasculation of the masses did not start with trump. Nor will it be over on his demise. The emasculation of the masses began with the notion that “father knows best”….back in the dark ages when some chief and tribe both believed that they had discovered the shortest path to “reconciled power” within the tribe. And even then, specific traditions limited the purview of those “chiefs”….And  there was also the notion of a God, the Pope, and the ignorance of the masses, enshrined in the notion that ordinary people could not be trusted to “read” the Bible correctly. Only the “educated elite” in the Vatican were so enlightened as to be able to with promulgate the real “truth” of God’s word. And since we absolutely abhor uncertainty, chaos, and the complexities of ambiguities, we prefer the “order” imposed by a single voice.

Noel Coward notes: It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

T.S. Eliot reminds us: people cannot tolerate too much truth.*

Of course, truth-telling is a reliable approach to being marginalized in any organization, family, or government, especially truth telling that exposes the abuse of power by others. Having held secrets deeply hidden in my heart and mind, forhalf a century, believing that to expose the truth would embarrass those who “parented” my sister and me. I now recognize the futility and the failed responsibility of my silence because the pattern spilled over into my own marriage. Meagre attempts to open the Pandora’s Box of the real truth of what was going on inside what was then 104 Gibson not only were fruitless, but actually back-fired with even more violence, now triggered by whispered disclosure by letter to distant family members.

Whistle-blowers, we all know, are despised by those in power. They represent if not the greatest, then certainly one of the most virulent threats to anyone in power who is abusing that power. Legislation to “protect” whistle-blowers, too, is so ineffective that it is virtually useless. Any negative public disclosure of the failings of an organization, or specifically a leader (one of those strong men) is so abhorrent, especially when one considers the fragility of the character and the ego’s of such men. Rage, unfettered rage and revenge are the immediate reactions of “strong men” to the disclosure of their longest, best-kept and most heinous secrets. Even secrets that would not impact negatively the personal reputation of a discloser, but perhaps the honour and public reputation of a family, have to be sealed from public light, in a repression of the truth that can and does compromise the secret-bearer as well as the family or organization.

Mental and emotional health, deeply and inextricably linked even enmeshed with the freedom and openness to receive and to honour the full truth, especially when it is hard to digest, is compromised through the rigorous silence that some of us impose on our family history. “Black” Uncle Tom, the drunk, who is never spoken of by family rule and tradition, is an example. The unwed teen who had to leave home to have her baby is just another of the many “secrets” that haunt the streets and the coffee shops of many towns and cities. The family, or organization, too, is compromised by the repression of its “darkest” secrets, given the notion that only the truth can and will ‘set everyone free’. To live under a cloud, without either acknowledging or opening up and confronting the secrets, is to render much of what goes on there as a form of play acting.

The church, too, has its own “secrets”…like the many kangaroo courts that have been summoned, to discipline someone who is challenging the status quo. While it is no secret that the ecclesial body has adopted both the administrative hierarchical top-down structure of organization and the deployment of power, such a structure puts the few at the top, including the top honcho on a kind of pedestal, a target really, for the critics to focus their attacks. And having declared itself the “keeper of the morality” of the culture, (either officially or unconsciously) the church has embraced the notion of defining sin, and then taken to manufacturing both inadequate processes and even more suspect decisions as ‘punishment’ or exclusion as its way of living out a theology of “forgiveness”.

So, within the structure of that culture, it has felt obliged to place a veil, or perhaps a reredos, on the vaults of its many secrets. Pursuing a culture in which it expects people to place ultimate confidence and trust, as does the military, the medical profession, the legal profession, as well as most governments and bureaucracies, only enhances the potential for accumulating secrets, which in themselves, might not be all that serious, nevertheless places those in charge in a position of having to choose between looking the other way, or taking action that is “decisive” and “strong”. Overlooking, or preferring to ignore the basic truth of nature that both change and imperfection are “baked into the cake” of everything human, we have entrapped leadership, as well as our perception of what passes for acceptable and trustworthy and integrous, in a vice so narrow and so inflexible, as to seriously impair the effective, open and honest dynamic of civility, mutual respect and the potential of readily accessible reformation.

Capital punishment, for example, is demonstrated not to provide a deterrent for others, and yet, in our unbridled and voracious appetite for revenge, some 38 American states have re-instituted it in the last decade. Similarly, “war” on opiods, or illicit street drugs, manifests a wanton disregard for the conditions in which people are living, that lead them to medicate their inordinate psychic, emotional and even physical pain. It does, however, underly, enhance and reproduce a culture so bound up by its own fear of failure that it falls victim to that very fear, (just another of the many secrets that we refuse to deal with honestly, openly and moderately).

Another secret that we refuse to discuss is our dependence on hard power, as the panacea for protecting us from potential “invasion” by a foreign power. It is a mere shibboleth that no one wins in any military conflict, and yet, the American budget for the Pentagon consumes by far the largest percentage of the national budget, while people starve, live on the streets, or have to choose between needed medications and food or rent. Keeping others in power, under such specious foundations, only exaggerates a culture of both denial and self-sabotage.

The denial of human agency in global warming and climate change, too, is a glaring reality that threatens the survival of the planet and all of us. And while there are voices crying in the wilderness, and voices taking some steps to confront our own dependence on fossil fuel, for example, as one of the more significant contributors to CO2 emissions, we are both slow and reluctant to be honest and open in our public policy to address the danger. Of course, there are arguments, in the short term for the preservation of jobs, incomes and family stability. However, creative approaches to this and many other public issues, tend to struggle under the weight of opposition from those seeking to preserve their personal, and their temporary and fleeting grasp of the brass ring.

Leaders like trump and putin are using the public’s attraction, even obsession, with stories of trite and tawdry human sex and private money “dirt”, as distractions from the truths that such leaders are carving out the very foundations of a healthy society and political culture. They are also depending on our being overwhelmed with the sheer volume and weight of stories that our memories will be drowning in “stuff” and we will either forget or ignore their nefarious obsession with their own power.

Deceit shows itself, and we can hear this story in every coffee shop and bus stop, and waiting room, in how we have participated in and permitted a culture of refusal (denial of) to accept responsibility, linked to the demolition of the notion of shame. To hear someone acknowledge “this is on me” today is so jarring to our ears that we actually wonder if there might be a loose “screw” inside the head of such a person. Employers too cover their obsession with greed and profit in the mascara of crumbs of classical conditioning rewards, while denying they are increasing the workload of every worker, without once bringing those workers into the planning and discussion of the very changes those workers will be expected to carry out.

The notion of corporate team, and the circle organizational model, once considered a healthy way to build a workplace culture of respect has been replaced by a regression return to scientific management enabled by the proliferation of digital technology that can and does measure every piece of work by the nano-second. Obvious such measurement feeds the insatiable appetite for “data” from managers, who then seek ways to wring out more work for less cost from all of the departments in his/her responsibility.

Having secured the virtual etherizing of all labour unions, and the voices of the workers, in a seemingly compulsive and obsessive march toward “entrepreneurship” and the engine the drives the economy, the establishment has gutted pensions, benefits and worker protections and replaced all of the safety net with contract positions that have no security, no benefits and no RESPECT! Even bringing in “interns” with the promise of a glowing “line” in your resume, is another deceit, playing to the exclusive advantage of the power structure. And yet, in order to even glimpse a potential hire in the future, young grads are compelled to play this game of corporate deceit.

Affairs, by the president, are now disregarded  as to whether they are acceptable in the public arena and replaced by the details over silence payments in the public media’s coverage of current events. And even then, those stories are buried in the  obfuscations of the administration’s talking heads, simply because even they have no idea where the truth lies. Such is the drama of deceit that is playing out before our eyes, under the cloud of a mere headline “fake news” attributed to formerly legitimate news outlets.

We are enmeshed in a culture of deceit, the foundations of which are rooted in fear of disclosure, fear of rejection and fear of abandonment shared by every single person. However, it is the people in positions of responsibility who have abrogated the design and delivery of the public messages to their own specific, unique and narcissistic purposes, deceiving even themselves, because there is no way they can or will remember what lies they have previously told, when, where, to whom or with what consequences.

As for me and my own family, I deeply and profoundly regret and am sorry for my own participation in a culture of silence, repression, and fear of rejection. I enabled such a culture to ensnare others in the perception, which easily becomes belief, that the truth would be too “hard” for others to handle. A veneer of “protection” can and does only mask authentic and viable connections between people, and while I was attempting to remove the masks from public figures, I was perpetuating my own mask, at the time, probably mostly unconsciously; now, not so much!

It would do all of us well to spend some time reflecting on the “secrets” we are currently hiding, in fear of disclosure from the very people we love and who love us. And such reflection might well ask questions like, “How am I sabotaging this relationship, and my own person, by burying these often deep and painful truths under a sand hill of silence, distortion or outright denial.

Such deceit, notwithstanding the warnings from some heavyweight thinkers, can and will continue to entrap us and so clip our wings from undergirding our full potential as to deprive us individually, our families and our workplaces and nations of one of the more powerful and under-accessed and under-utilized human resources. And we do not need huge rigs or monumental environmental disasters to mine this energy.

Perhaps, if we all were to find the words, the courage and the sensitivity to express our full truth, those shibboleths about not being able to withstand too much truth would fade into the mists of myth and history. And, perhaps ‘strong men’ could climb down from their vulnerable pedestals, acknowledge their fragility, and permit and enable the free-flow of human creativity, energy and real power to take responsibility for our shared lives.

Now there’s a reformation waiting to be “birthed”!

*I have been confronted directly and personally in private by a now deceased bishop anxious that the people in the church were unable and unwilling to tolerate too much honesty and truth, in conversation about prospective entrance into active ministry. I was so shocked and appalled that decades later, the scene of the conversation remains vivid, coloured, scented and clouded with the appalling self-protective bubble in which he had encased himself and his ecclesial leadership.

Another bishop, attempting to rationalize the approach taken following a church tragedy, applauded the model, spirit and leadership of Winston Churchill, as precisely what was needed, rather than the obvious choice of grief counselling. “Strong men” have embedded their image deeply even into the culture deployed in flawed and futile pastoral care.

Can we mount a campaign to rid the world of "strong men" leaders?

Time magazine’s cover is displaying what Time calls the era of the “strong man”…a montage of photos of allegedly political leaders who have adopted the mantle of the “strong man”….putin, trump, erdogan, kim jung un, sisi, duterte, and even xi jinping (having just arranged a life appointment as Secretary of the Communist Party) and a couple of others who, taken together, along with the multiple sex offenders, terrorists, spineless ‘moderate’ leaders of the male gender demonstrate what is most objectionable, heinous and repulsive about the current menu of masculinities, grabbing the headlines.

Not satisfied with circumscribed, constitutional, historic, moderated and mediated power, determined to inflict even a violent, dictatorial and exclusionary imprint on their moment in history, these men are so tarnishing the long-term reputation of masculinity, (as if it needed more pummelling!) without a concerted, conscientious, thoughtful, and collaborative push-back from the mainstream of moderate, reasonable, respectable and even attempting to be honourable men.  Commentary on the exploits of these men, for the most part, demonstrates their abuse of power, certainly not their exemplary deployment of it. They imprison or otherwise ‘wipe-out’ dissent; they manipulate the information concerning their rule; they take for granted that their power is too restricted by norms previously considered essential to their people; they consider their career ambitions, legacies and ‘triumphs’ more significant than the welfare of their people; and they dominate their own “news outlets” as if some movie magnate(s) had taken over their domains in the production of some “heroic” super-man hero movie….

Far removed from the days of the Lee Iacoca’s, the Jack Welsh’s, when corporate governance included as an important agenda item, the support of the community in which their companies operated, it is not only the visages on the Time cover who are abusing their power. For too long, at a much lower echelon, and much less visible to the public, corporate boards and CEO’s, supported by their government pawns, have been vacuuming into their own executive field of play, the ruthless, and unobstructed pursuit of both profit and thereby dividends for investors, at the expense of committed and contracted pensions, wages, environmental and health and safety protections not to mention the viable and effective existence of labour unions which have become virtually dead.

We are witnessing an oligarchic take-over, globally, that is clearly dedicated to its own narrow narcissistic and greedy goals, without caring a ‘fig’ for the long-term health of the planet, the long-term resolution of serious and ever-morphing conflict, the strength and viability of international institutions like the UN, the WHO, the ILO, the International Criminal Court, the IMF, and then World Bank. Rape and pillage of natural resources, for immediate profit and dividends, surgical removal of regulations that would impede the unfettered pursuit of corporate profit by their puppet legislators (of so many nations and languages and ethnicities and geographies) and the dropping of a few “crumbs” of pennies in tax breaks, for example, just to keep the “dogs” of starving, un-and-under-employed, desperate and mostly hopeless people at bay.

They build up “their” military bastion, both because they can and because they never know when they might need it to retain power. They demand “loyalty” which really means a sell-out of any principles of decency, leaving only sycophants willing to assume positions of responsibility, even if their tenures will be short-lived.

It is not just the cover story that appals. It is the ‘back-story’ that infuriates ordinary people around the world. We all know that instant global communication has permeated the borders of almost all countries, (with some blatant and dangerously controlled exceptions using Canadian technology to repress internet access to their people). We also know that global markets have unleashed the lowest common denominator of corporate greed, narcissism and the unfettered and unaccountable movement and hiding of cash under the guidance of the most costly accounting and legal firms.

Oligarchs, armed with a coterie of “loyal” protectors, body-guards, lawyers, accountants and legislative pawns, walking on mountains of secretly-stashed cash, striding the corridors of their own media slaves (dependent on the ratings their “heroes” generate and the advertising dollars that ensue), dismissing negative voices as if they were mere packaging on their latest Big Mac, (a record number of jounralists, 262, have been jailed this year!), seducing more weak and gullible sycophants to replace those already carelessly thrown under the bush, denying even the merest appearance of indecency, lawlessness, and deceit.

And the story goes even deeper: these thugs in public life, striding their respective stages like self-declared super-heroes, give cover, and even role modelling to millions of young men, most of them desperate for a moment in the limelight, barely being able to distinguish fame from infamy. In a star-drugged culture, supported, aided and abetted to the social media, we are at risk of sabotaging many of our best men, who no longer seek public office, given the sacrifices required in time, resources and reputation, and of so tainting the overall reputation of men generally, that we are all at greater risk.

And because most of the “strong men” champion free enterprise, for-profit at the expense of the planet’s rising temperatures, raging fires and floods and the displacement of millions through both military conflicts and starvation, poverty, disease and infant malnutrition and the impacts of those conditions on every  newborn in the developing world. Taken together, these men represent a plethora of political parties, all of them veering far right, nationalistic, catering to their own “sub-oligarchs,’ wanting walls to keep out the most desperate, and more and more power, money and influence for themselves.

In such a climate, we need far more Macrons, Trudeaus, Merkels and articulate moderates everywhere. And yet, will the moderates be strong enough to bring serious reflective approach to world affairs, given the obstreporous intransigence of these tyrants? It is legitimate to fear that many will not see behind the headlines or this cover on Time, to tease out the black holes of vacuity, narcissism and empty ego’s that threaten the health, sanity and well-being of millions with impunity.

Men bringing more shame on men...where is the healing and reconciliation?

The current tidal wave of news reports of inappropriate sexual behaviour of many prominent men cannot be anything but disturbing to both men and women. It clearly represents a watershed moment in the conflict between the genders, demonstrating that women will no longer be silent and complicit in their own debasement by men.

And their debasement is both a disease by itself and a symptom of a much larger and more ubiquitous abuse of power that abounds in contemporary culture. It is a cliché to note that each of us has become, wittingly or not, a “thing” in the lives of our employers, our teachers, our doctors, lawyers and especially our “suppliers”. We have morphed individual human lives to fit a model of a mini-corporation, a business apparatus or machine that seeks to function in the service of its own best interests. We have so micro-defined behaviour into observable and reportable bytes, bites, digits and sound bites that have become bullets in a scorched-earth game of war between political actors, corporations, professional practitioners, hospitals, universities, colleges, churches, families and undoubtedly individuals cannot escape.

Demographic interest groups have lobbied for decades to seek and attain the attention of the political class, in an overt and determined initiative to gain political clout, a voice for what they considered their own impotence. And that impotence, they believed was neither deserved nor of their own making; it was imposed by a built-in power structure that has been centuries in the making. And one of the most powerful and growing “interest” group is the women’s movement, feminism, radical feminism, moderate feminism.

Perceived as the victim of male dominance, the feminist movement has undergone the normal iterations, starting in the 70’s with writers like Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch. From the beginning of the feminist movement, men have been on the defensive, in a way and to a degree that was neither visible nor accountable previously.  Various faces of feminism have variously wanted to “despise” men, to “tolerate” men, to “patronize” men, and some even wanted to “work with” men as partners toward the goal of male-female equality and equilibrium.

Raising the consciousness of the establishment culture (dominated by male leaders and acolytes for centuries) was only the first goal of the movement. Changing behaviour, attitudes, and numbers of pay and positions of leadership and responsibility was also deeply embedded into the “cake” of the ideology. Equal pay for equal work, membership on corporate boards, and in the executive suites, leadership in colleges, universities, high and elementary schools, and in political and governmental offices, enrollment in graduate schools, maternity leave, parental leave, and even paternity leave, and the human right of access to an education, to quality and affordable health care, access to affordable day care and pre-school…..these are just some of the goals, and attainments of the feminist movement.

While some of these worthy goals have been at least partially attained, there remain many significant gaps, especially the equal pay for equal work, since evidencing a 25% gap, while women fall far short of filling top jobs in major corporations, and in filling politically elected positions, in many western countries.

Knowing that two already established “hot buttons” on the political radar of a prurient nation like the United States are sex and money, strategists for the feminist movement picked the more obvious “nuclear option”…the historic abuse of women’s bodies by men who neither respect themselves nor their female colleagues.

You may be surprised to read that last sentence, pointing to the lack of self-respect of male abusers. Yet, after all, the abuse of power, whether of a sexual nature, a law enforcement nature, a geopolitical or a spiritual nature is almost invariably the impetus of a neurosis, sometimes in extreme cases, of a psychosis, regardless of whether the abuse is inflicted by a man or a woman. Our culture has a difficult time, generally, differentiating between obedience and respect on the one hand and sycophancy, defiance, rebellion and violence on the other. The former comes from a relatively secure individual, conscious of his/her strengths, weaknesses and comfortable in his/her own skin. The latter, whether extremes of servility or defiance, comes from a less than secure individual, perhaps self-loathing, perhaps believing others’ put-downs of value, perhaps falling into the victim trap so prevalent in situations in which the people in power are themselves lacking in self-respect. Those people in power could be parents, teachers, principals, coaches, clergy, doctors and care-givers and how they interact with their charges goes a long way to laying the groundwork of a sense of self that develops through childhood and adolescence.

None of this background excuses any abuse of power, including the abuse of power by men over women’s bodies and wills. Womens’ too often silenced voices of protest have been a repeating pattern in this abuse for decades, perhaps even centuries. Let’s be honest! We are a long way from developing a “freeway” of easy, honest, open, equal and free conversation between men and women. And unless and until that freeway is opened, nurtured, sustained and updated by each succeeding generation, we will travel the back-roads of washboards, ditches, icy patches and outright lethal collisions.

We are currently in the midst of a cultural collision for which there are no formal and appointed detectives or lawyers or judges assigned to the case. It is the court of public opinion that is “hearing” these cases, and the presumed innocence that pertains in the legal system is no longer tolerated.

There is no reason to justify the abuse of a woman by any man, and, as some very old popular songs once intoned, men frequently asked “permission” to hold, touch, kiss and variously ‘romance’ a member of the opposite gender. Whether men lack the language or the patience, or the respect (for both themselves and the woman) to engage their female partners in any physical (or emotional or psychological) shared encounter, there is a long journey ahead, to be able to see a world on the horizon in which men and women are no longer in a competitive and conflicted tension for sexual favours.

However, the current cultural landscape idealizes and idolizes “power” and the “abuse of power”. Tabloid headlines, tabloid reporting, tabloid social media  attitudes and personal attacks supplemented by an entertainment industry on violence and sexual steroids saturate our public discourse and culture. In this moment, we have a confluence of microphones for violence, and a history of repressed resentment, anger and contempt for the millions of incidents of sexual injustice linked to a political climate in which personal character is the single defining issue of the day. Policy, legislation, foreign policy, negotiations, treaties, agreements and the ‘stuff’ of public discourse have all been swept off the public consciousness, to be replaced by the obsessive-compulsive attraction to “sex”….not only as a marketing instrument, and a titillation of the entertainment industry, and a billion-dollar industry in itself, but now as a tidal wave of political and legal import easily and relevantly comparable to a recession, a depression or even another military engagement.

It is not possible to turn on any television channel, especially the 24-7 new-channels on cable, without confronting the names of accusers and the targets of their accusations in multiple sexual “assaults”. And while attempting to “right the wrongs” of centuries of male dominance in both domestic and public affairs, and to “level the playing field of male-female relationships” with a view to the achievement of equality, equanimity and justice is a laudable goal, the current narrative of our public discourse is clearly not going to accomplish that worthy goal.

In fact, the current massive “bombing” of the airwaves, the courts and the tabloids with the names of prominent men who have wantonly and irresponsibly abused women, supported by teams of victims will invoke one of the most blunt instruments of human design, the legal system. The court of public opinion, too, is not interested in the nuances, the complexities and the details of the offences. So on both fronts, the legal court system and the court of public opinion, all of the male names are now presumed guilty, with no chance of either defending themselves or bringing clarity to one of the most complex interactions on  the human landscape.

Just as divorce settlements have come to a ‘no fault’ precipitate, after years of throwing blame from one side to the other, there will have to be a similar “precipitate” in the battle to deal with sexual offences. Such a position, of course, will be intolerable for those who consider themselves victims. And for those men currently under a cloud of contempt, embarrassment and quite literal degradation of reputation, there may not be either the public appetite for a responsible path toward redemption, reconciliation and healing. Some will argue that all men under such a cloud deserve the most nuclear punishment available. Others will argue that a different approach, in the long run, will generate a conversation, a full airing of the complexities of the many hidden and ‘private’ details that are neither worthy of public disclosure nor are they likely to generate a more equitable and healthy gender playing field.

Their women accusers, whose “public statements” generate 72-point headlines in the tabloid and mainstream media, will always find another Gloria Aldred to defend them, behind the microphones and in the court rooms. And those who have accepted the public apology from their abusers, will be grouped among all other accusers, without having the opportunity to seek dialogue and reconciliation.

This needed step is never going to be achieved in the current climate. While attempting to “right the wrongs” of centuries of male dominance in both domestic and public affairs, and to “level the playing field of male-female relationships” with a view to the achievement of equality, equanimity and justice is a laudable goal shared by a preponderance of reasonable self-respecting men and women, the current narrative of our public discourse is clearly not going to accomplish that worthy goal.

Shame is the cloud that hangs over the lives, the bodies, the minds and the hearts of millions of young boys and young men, as they wander through a labyrinth of conflicted messages exhorting them to be “strong,” “like a man,” and also vulnerable and sensitive. There are few mentors among their fathers, coaches and teachers who can or will demonstrate a discernment and practice of healthy, evolved and sensitive, self-confident masculinity. And the process of raising the curtain on the many entangling myths that have ensnared generations of men for centuries, and shedding light on a robust and confident and self-respecting masculinity (the very opposite of the kind currently occupying the Oval Office) will take decades, if not centuries. These are not noted as excuses for inappropriate behaviour and attitudes. They are merely a brief snapshot of some of the foundational stones that men will have to acknowledge and begin to shed. And they will need all the help they can get from their female family members, friends, lovers, partners and colleagues.

Meanwhile the current river of shame will engulf the lives and the careers of perhaps hundreds or thousands or perhaps even millions of men, with the potential risk of driving the prospect of reconciliation, healing, equality and equanimity further into the caves of the unconscious.