Meditations of a Simple Man

I’ve just spent a week leading 17 high school young people on a retreat.  It was a great time for them, full of getting real..  Generally I’ll spare you the details, but I will say at least this: more than one young man was articulate enough to express discontent with how they’re taught to be men.  I came home exhausted, and full of a desire to address the topic.

I suppose this post has been percolating since I was in high school myself, and I listened to the music my Father was raised on.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were my favorite quartet.  Particularly I liked Neil Young's “A Man needs a Maid.”  Eventually the song struck me as emblematic of the masculine crisis.  The first verse says “I was thinking that maybe I’d get a maid, find a place nearby for her to stay: Someone to keep my house clean, cook my meals and go away.”  Women, says this verse, just exist to satisfy our desires.

And indeed, at the center of masculinity itself is a crisis in feeling and desire.  Men aren’t taught the worth of unsatisfied desires.  We’re taught to fulfill them so that they’ll go away.    That’s a lost opportunity.  A bit of further preface is needed, however, so allow me not to get ahead of myself.

The culturally prevalent masculinity is exclusive, and negative.  By that I mean: men don’t know who they are, they simply know who they’re not.  They’re everything that isn’t feminine.  Femininity, by extension, is bad and weak.

Emotional literacy isn’t a skill men transmit to one another. In a striking similarity to the “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel” messages passed down in dysfunctional families, culturally prevalent masculinity eschews emotions, and the vulnerability to which they point. When we men experience an emotion, they act on it to purge the obsession.  We are taught to throw sex and drugs and violence at our emotions until we no longer feel them.  When no amount of those things is sufficient to get the job done, we resort to repression.    

The culturally prevalent masculinity values sex, power and money.  In this unhealthy masculinity, the value of sex can manifest as anything from promiscuity to sexual manipulation to sexual violence.  The value of power can manifest in the Board room, on the athletic field, in the gym and in the family structure.  The value of money can apply to cash, possessions, but also non monetary commodities: even desirable qualities like six pack abs, social aplomb, and stoicism.

In this system, strength is anything that defends a desire’s fulfillment. Femininity, similarly, is simply a thing that suffices these needs.  Women are only worth it if they’re beautiful.  Women working as meteorologists hit youtube because they’re gorgeous, not because they were right about last week’s downpours. Ani Difranco’s lyrics are apropos here: “God help you if you are an ugly girl, ‘cause too pretty is also your doom. ‘Cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”  Pretty or ugly, competent or failure: women are judged by how they fit in to mens’ system of needs.

Women then turn around and enforce that with each other.  Unhealthy femininity has helped popular teenaged girls persecute their awkward classmates since time immemorial.  Beautiful women have been attracted to men who reproduce their fathers’ dysfunction since before there were words to describe it.  

The “fault” here lies unhealthy patriarchy, but the old saying about “inherited negative messages” applies.  Unhealthy femininity is not women’s fault, but it is their problem.  For certain, even well-meaning men take advantage of masculine privilege.  And Unhealthy Masculinity isn’t their fault, but it is their problem.

The real crown of laurels goes to those groups whose members don’t fit neatly into the masculine paradigm.  As a disabled man who passes as “normal” I know only a little about how disabled men threaten the importance of Sex and Power.  Gay men similarly threaten the norm.  While they’re maligned in the mainstream, they create masculine self-identities based on the conscious choice to be, to be loving, to be mentally healthy.  This is more than we can say for their counterparts subscribing to the prevailing sense of manliness.  

Crowned with glory, too, are men of color who see too clearly how “white” the prevailing masculinity is.  They are confined in boxes: portrayed as violent or ignorant or poor.  Meanwhile the business world balks at dreadlocks.  Meanwhile young latinos are placed in positions of incredibly high responsibility in their families because they can function in English speaking worlds.

The prevailing masculinity’s white, heteronormative privilege is toxic.  Men who are addicted to sex and rage and violence raise sons who can’t feel.  They raise daughters who are only attracted to men who reproduce paternal dysfunction, only to have children and become raging mothers.  Those mothers raise men who hate themselves, and cycle compounds.  

And I’m wary of any voice that, under the guise of “empowerment” carries a message of “my way or the highway” and turns legitimate pain into the tyranny of entitlement.  Anger is legitimate: rage and entitlement are not.  Raging mothers run households in which men can fit only if they make themselves small.  Phrases such as “men are pigs” or “down with the patriarchy” seem often too general, too undergirded with rage represent end-stage healthy femininity, or effectively address the problems with masculinity.  If the women of the world want men to be different, it would be worth asking us “how can we help you have the conversations y’all need to have?”  It’s similarly unhelpful to claim, too loudly, than male privilege is a reason to discount what men say about themselves in the name of giving women a voice. 

If women manipulate men into conforming to an unhealthy standard, not only will nothing change, it will breed resentment that will derail recovery in the long term.  Very often, this comes with the implicit and explicit threat that sex will become the subject of a transaction, and its withholding a tool of manipulation.  Men advise each other to admit they’re “wrong and sorry” as a routine way of handling conflict with women.  Phrases such as “If Mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy” and “happy wife, happy life” point to the routine abdication of self required of the healthiest of men.  Additionally, dependence is much more socially acceptable in unhealthy femininity than in the culturally prevalent, unhealthy masculinity.  I know women who grew to 28 years old before ever doing so much as move a single piece of furniture.  The masculine equivalent is unheard of. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, feminine choosiness rules reproductive interactions. (And here I’m borrowing from Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 rules for Living.)  What every man knows is anthropologically confirmed: women reject twice as many men as they accept, and the “not tonight dears” outweigh the “come hithers.”  Masculine overwork shoots through not just “getting laid” but the best of romantic intentions.  A single red rose, kept on the table constantly, is as apt to be ignored as the absence of a dozen of them on February 14th is apt to be noted.  At first, it may appear romantic or loving that a man shoulder more than two thirds of a couple’s bills.  Eventually the same gesture registers as normal.  Keeping things spontaneous requires an energy that humdrum existence is constantly rendering mundane.  A healthy woman, conscious of this, will make as much effort to avoid ruts as she asks of her man, even as the mindfulness prevailing between them begets mutual exoneration. 

Meanwhile, men have too few conversations about what healthy masculinity would look like.  Their healthiest impulses are given only scant air time.  Boys everywhere are justified in being consistently, constructively angry at what masculine culture, and its dysfunctional feminine counterpart, routinely deny them.    

A healthy masculinity would be positive.   That is to say, it would spend more time clarifying what masculinity is, rather than defining masculinity by everything femininity isn’t.  There are a few truths around which such a masculinity would have to center.

For one thing, it would have to admit that neither real pain nor legitimate needs justify coercion.  So for instance, men who have been abused don’t get to become abusers.  For another, it would have to admit that true desires are different than egotistical needs.  Sexualized needs are a primary example of this: they’re not helpful  Additionally, we’ve been taught that being sated is the only valid expression for our needs  That’s a tyranny.   

In short, healthy masculinity is necessarily contemplative.  To be clear: I use contemplative here to mean “a mode of desiring, (grounded in eschewing the ego) in which desire is actively and consciously accepted and fulfilled, instead of reactively purged through immediate satiation.” This is (and should be seen more consistently as) real strength.  In the end, men need to be taught that unfulfilled desire can clarify thoughts and emotions.  Being vulnerable and having needs, without running from them or using the world to conceal them, is part of a healthy spiritual journey and a healthy masculinity. It is the only way to encounter the differences between male longings and feminine choosiness that avoids resentment, entitlement, and blame.

Images of such a vulnerability-friendly masculinity abound.  The “tank man” of Tienamen square, facing a column of tanks unarmed, is the quintessential image of a man who can face his vulnerability non-defensively.   And Bapu Gandhi, fasting well nigh to death for peace, is a similar image of willingness to desire without being sated.  The masters of Tantric Buddhism, long caricatured as purveyors of the eight hour orgasm, are actually attempting to transmute sexuality’s oppositional emotional energy, turning it entirely into grounds for connection.

Healthy men work to ensure that the Ego (on the one hand) draws proper boundaries and (on the other) ceases its spiritual obstructionism.  Healthy men know the value of unfulfilled desire in clarifying thoughts and emotions.  But the benefits don’t end there.

This actually echoes the life of God: philosophers have been working themselves into hysterics, attempting to figure out why God would permit evil.  The question is framed a bit strangely.  The answer is simple: repressing difference comes from lack of self knowledge.  God knows himself, and doesn’t have to stifle his opposite.  

Real intimacy is about mutual freedom: force has no part in it.  Men who know who they are needn’t foist their own paradigm on women, or men with differing masculinities.  

Somewhat counter-intuitively, healthy grief lies at the core of masculinity.  It is unrealistic for either partner to find ultimate fulfillment in even the best of spouses.  On the face of it, this arises out of any difference in desires, but set in the context of the Genesis myth, it has much to say about masculine spirituality.  

The fruit of Eve’s gift of self will forever be appreciation of good and evil.  Such a yield gets an unnecessarily bad rap.  In the aftermath of that gift, God tells Eve “your desire shall be for your husband.”  It only in light of the initial confusion (“your eyes will be opened, and you shall be like God”) that Eve’s gift of self can be a bid to take God’s place.  Men, too, can eclipse God in women’s emotional lives.  But there’s cause for rejoicing: Eve, on behalf of all women, accepts the title “the mother of all the living.”  Adam, on behalf of all men, will forever see his desire for God laid bare (it’s purposeful, that I don’t say ‘fulfilled’) on the Tree of Life that is the Cross.  Long experience in these roles teases out the positive effects of “knowledge of Good and Evil.”  

Let me give you a rather routine example.  When I was a monk, having it out with my own darkness in the cloister’s communal solitude, there were days when I was so depressed I couldn’t taste my food.  Numbness literally interposed itself between me and my sense of taste.  These days, in the midst of life with my Jackie, I can tell the difference between Reduced Fat Extra Sharp Cheddar and the real thing.  Here we have “knowledge of good” finding its most positive manifestation: Jackie has refined my palate.  

My increased ability to appreciate cheddar cheese is a drinking of the wine of life to its dregs—and all because I’ve grieved, because I’ve stopped giving my special lady God’s special place in my life.  All because the inevitable differences between jackie and I have served to clarify my desire.

Let’s hear Neil Young on the subject again “A while ago somewhere, I don't know when, I was watching a movie with a friend,” Neil says, “I fell in love with the actress.  She was playing a part that I could understand.”  The need for intimacy persists, whether we act on it well, or unhealthily or not at all.  It turns out, in the end, that consciousness of our own incompletion is part of being whole.

The image here, is Christ.  On the Cross, like Christ, we thirst.  That thirst isn’t quenched, we just feel it in its entirety.  Made visible, that desire is a hole in every side, even when we bear our strongest resemblance to the risen Christ.  Eventually, coming to know that deficiency for what it is is only half of the work.  The rest is a reaching out, a laughter, the epiphany that is the goofy curve of another’s smile.  “This alone” said Adam, “is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.”

Because it all comes back to folk music, the final word on healthy masculinity goes to Neil's bandmate Graham Nash.  His song "Simple Man" (written for the musician Joni Mitchell,) says "I just want to hold you, I don't want to hold you down."  That is the best that one who is "simply a man" can do.

Morning by morning, the best part of awaking sleeps next to me.  When I know who I am, she’ll be welcome as she is.  But the one who awoke me is waiting within, and as the book of Isaiah says, I’ll “listen as one who is taught.”  I don’t know how to be a man, in the end.  But every day, I’m learning.