The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (10 page)

Just as feminist gains in this nation primarily had a positive impact on women with class privilege, the “working” men who have been given permission within the contours of patriarchal culture to reconfigure the nature of work in their lives tend to have class power. In the late eighties and early nineties a number of popular movies portrayed powerful men either through illness or crisis evaluating their lives and choosing to make profound changes in the nature of work. In the recent film
Life as a House
a white male architect whose work is being devalued quits, finds out that he has cancer and only a short time to live, then engages in a process of rethinking patriarchy, though of course that term is not used. Evaluating his life, he chooses to use his remaining months to make emotional connections with family, especially his teenage son, and with friends. He spends his time learning how to give and receive love. His ex-wife’s wealthy businessman husband, inspired by the example of the dying man, and rethinks the nature of his life and resolves to give less time to work and more time to emotional connections. This film, like its predecessors, makes clear that working men must make time to get in touch with their emotional selves if they are to become men of feeling.

The immensely popular Academy Award–winning movie
American Beauty
showed the primary character, Lester Burnham, depressed about his life, his work, his marriage, and his family; he has lost his capacity to feel. He stops taking work seriously and by the end is getting in touch with his feelings, yet he cannot redeem his life. He also dies, like the protagonist in
Life as a House.
These movies seduce audiences with images of men in the process of growing up, but then they betray their characters and us by never letting these men live. They echo the patriarchal message that if a man stops work, he loses his reason for living. In
Rediscovering Masculinity
Victor Seidler states that the male who defines his self through work seeks to do so because “this is the only identity that can traditionally belong to us…believing we can still prove our masculinity by showing we do not need anything from others.” In
American Beauty
Lester suffers alone. His critical investigation of his feelings takes place in his head. And he cannot survive being so utterly vulnerable and isolated. Ultimately, movies send the message to male audiences that men will not be meaningfully empowered if they learn to love.
American Beauty
finally tells audiences that there is no hope for depressed men who are willing to critically reflect on their lives. It tells us that even when men are willing to change, there is no place for them in patriarchal culture. The opening lines of the film say it all: “My name is Lester Burnham. I am forty-two. In less than a year I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. And anyway, I’m dead already.” Popular culture offers us few or no redemptive images of men who start out emotionally dead. Unlike Sleeping Beauty, they cannot be brought back to life. In actuality, individual men are engaged in the work of emotional recovery every day, but the work is not easy because they have no support systems within patriarchal culture, especially if they are poor and working-class. And it is no accident that
Life as a House,
which shows a man rejecting patriarchy and finding his way, is not as successful as
American Beauty.

Poor and working-class men suffering job depression, despair about the quality of their intimate lives, a feeling of alienation, or a sense of being lost often turn to substance abuse to ease their pain. When they begin to seek recovery, AA is one of the few places they can go to do the work of getting well. In healing groups they learn first and foremost that it is important to be in touch with their feelings, that they have a right to name those feelings. The success of AA is tied to the fact that the practice of recovery takes place in the context of community, one in which shame about failure can be expressed and male longing for healing validated. Visionary male healers, such as John Bradshaw, found the way to healing in these settings. Working-class men I have interviewed who found in recovery the way back to emotional connection share that it is profoundly difficult to engage in this work, which is fundamentally antipatriarchal, and then leave these settings to reenter patriarchal culture. One man talked about how his female partner was turned off by his willingness to express feelings, to tell his story; in her eyes this was weakness. She insisted that now that he was sober he did not need to “express these feelings” anymore.

Despite changes in the nature of gender roles, ours is still a patriarchal culture where sexism rules the day. If it were not so men could see periods of unemployment as timeouts where they could do the work of self-actualization, where they could do the work of healing. Many working men in our culture can barely read or write. Imagine if time away from work could be spent in exciting literacy programs for poor and working-class men. Imagine a wage offered for this work of self-development. When patriarchy no longer rules the day, it will be possible for men to view themselves holistically, to see work as part of life, not their whole existence. In
Love and Survival
Dean Ornish, sharing his personal struggle to work less, to make time for self-actualization, offers this insight:

When he began to choose to live holistically, Ornish was able to change this thinking about work.

Gail Sheehy’s
Understanding Men’s Passages
contains autobiographical accounts by men wrestling with the knowledge that the work they do is promoting severe depression and unhappiness. These men grapple with choosing their emotional well-being over the paycheck, over the image of themselves as a provider. Lee May recalls, “I was faced with two hard choices. One, stay in the job I was doing and choke, strangle, die psychologically, or quit and face the possibility that we would crumble financially.” He admits that his unhappiness with work had undermined the spirit of well-being in his home: “Our household was an unhappy place. But had I stayed at the old jobs, my unhappiness would have pervaded our relationship.” May was able to make the choice to leave his unhappy job, and the work he went on to do—writing a book about his life as a globe-trotting journalist, writing a popular column on gardening—was all work that enhanced his self-awareness, his self-actualization. His honest portrayal of his fears in breaking through denial is a model for many men who would learn to honor their inner selves rightly in a world that tells them every day that their inner selves do not matter.

Courageously writing about how hard it was to break with the patriarchal values that had governed his thinking for years, Ornish shares that the practice of intimacy is healing: “I am learning that the key to our survival is love. When we love someone and feel loved by them, somehow along the way our suffering subsides, our deepest wounds begin healing, our hearts start to feel safe enough to be vulnerable and to open a little wider. We begin experiencing our own emotions and the feelings of those around us.” Imagine a nonpatriarchal culture where counseling was available to all men to help them find the work that they are best suited to, that they can do with joy. Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable. Imagine a world where men who are unemployed for any reason could learn the way to self-actualization. Women workers find that leaving the isolation of the home and working in a communal setting enhances their emotional well-being, even when wages are low and in no way liberating (as some feminist thinkers naïvely suggested they might be). If men followed this example and used the workplace as a setting to practice relational skills, building community, the male crisis around work could be addressed more effectively.

Many men who have retired from jobs, particularly men over sixty in our culture, often feel that aging allows them to break free of the patriarchy. With time on their hands, they are often compelled by extreme loneliness, alienation, a crisis of meaning, or other circumstances, to develop emotional selves. They are the elders who can speak to younger generations of men, debunking the patriarchal myth of work; those voices need to be heard. They are the voices that tell younger men, “Don’t wait until your life is near it’s end to find your feeling, to follow your heart. Don’t wait until it’s too late.” Work can and should be life-enhancing for all men. When daring men come to work loved and loving, the nature of work will be transformed and the workplace will no longer demand that the hearts of men be broken to get the job done.

S
ay that you are feminist to most men, and automatically you are seen as the enemy. You risk being seen as a man-hating woman. Most young women fear that if they call themselves feminist, they will lose male favor, they will not be loved by men. Popular opinion about the impact of feminist movement on men’s lives is that feminism hurt men. Conservative antifeminist women and men insist that feminism is destroying family life. They argue that working women leave households bereft of homemakers and children without a mother’s care. Yet they consistently ignore the degree to which consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.

When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating.

Even though not all men are misogynists, feminist thinkers were accurate when we stated that patriarchy in its most basic, unmediated form promotes fear and hatred of females. A man who is unabashedly and unequivocally committed to patriarchal masculinity will both fear and hate all that the culture deems feminine and womanly. However, most men have not consciously chosen patriarchy as the ideology they want to govern their lives, their beliefs, and actions. Patriarchal culture is the system they were born within and socialized to accept, yet in all areas of their lives most men have rebelled in small ways against the patriarchy, have resisted absolute allegiance to patriarchal thinking and practice. Most men have clearly been willing to resist patriarchy when it interferes with individual desire, but they have not been willing to embrace feminism as a movement that would challenge, change, and ultimately end patriarchy.

Feminist movement was from the outset presented to most males via mass media as antimale. Truthfully, there was a serious antimale faction in contemporary feminist movement. And even though the man-hating women were a small minority of women’s libbers, they received the most attention. Failing to care for women rightly, men through continual acts of domination had actually created the cultural context for feminist rebellion. In the chapter on “Feminist Masculinity” in my recent book
Feminism Is for Everybody,
I write: “Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts. Individual women came from these relationships angry. They used that anger as a catalyst for women’s liberation. As the movement progressed, as feminist thinking advanced, enlightened feminist activists saw that men were not the problem, that the problem was patriarchy, sexism, and male domination.”

It was difficult for women committed to feminist change to face the reality that the problem did not lie just with men. Facing that reality required more complex theorizing; it required acknowledging the role women play in maintaining and perpetuating patriarchy and sexism. As more women moved away from destructive relationships with men, it was easier to see the whole picture. It was easier to see that even if individual men divested themselves of patriarchal privilege, the system of patriarchy, sexism, and male domination would still remain intact, and women would still be exploited and oppressed. Despite this change in feminist agendas, visionary feminist thinkers who had never been antimale did not and do not receive mass media attention. As a consequence the popular notion that feminists hate men continues to prevail.

The vast majority of feminist women I encounter do not hate men. They feel sorry for men because they see how patriarchy wounds them and yet men remain wedded to patriarchal culture. While visionary thinkers have called attention to the way patriarchy hurts men, there has never been an ongoing effort made to address male pain. To this day I hear individual feminist women express their concern for the plight of men within patriarchy, even as they share that they are unwilling to give their energy to help educate and change men. Feminist writer Minnie Bruce Pratt states the position clearly: “How are men going to change? The meeting between two people, where one opposes the other, is the point of change. But I don’t want the personal contact. I don’t want to do it…. When people talk about not giving men our energies, I agree with that…. They have to deliver themselves.” These attitudes, coupled with the negative attitudes of most men toward feminist thinking, meant that there was never a collective, affirming call for boys and men to join feminist movement so that they would be liberated from patriarchy.

Reformist feminist women could not make this call because they were the group of women (mostly white women with class privilege) who had pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place. These were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving equal access to power. Now that many of those women have gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism.

As interest in feminist thinking and practice has waned, there has been even less focus on the plight of men than in the heyday of feminist movement. This lack of interest does not change the fact that only a feminist vision that embraces feminist masculinity, that loves boys and men and demands on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and women, can renew men in our society. Feminist thinking teaches us all, males especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life. Clearly we need new strategies, new theories, guides that will show us how to create a world where feminist masculinity thrives.

Sadly there is no body of recent feminist writing addressing men that is accessible, clear, and concise. There is little work done from a feminist standpoint concentrating on boyhood. No significant body of feminist writing addresses boys directly, letting them know how they can construct an identity that is not rooted in sexism. There is no body of feminist children’s literature that can serve as an alternative to patriarchal perspectives, which abound in the world of children’s books. The gender equality that many of us take for granted in our adult lives, particularly those of us who have class privilege and elite education, is simply not present in the world of children’s books or in the world of public and private education. Teachers of children see gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls—for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.

Just as it was misguided for reformist feminist thinkers to see freedom as simply women having the right to be like powerful patriarchal men (feminist women with class privilege never suggested that they wanted their lot to be like that of poor and working-class men), so was it simplistic to imagine that the liberated man would simply become a woman in drag. Yet this was the model of freedom offered men by mainstream feminist thought. Men were expected to hold on to the ideas about strength and providing for others that were a part of patriarchal thought, while dropping their investment in domination and adding an investment in emotional growth. This vision of feminist masculinity was so fraught with contradictions, it was impossible to realize. No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity they found so problematic. The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift.

Once the “new man” that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest. Reacting to this inversion of gender roles, men who were sympathetic chose to stop trying to play a role in female-led feminist movement and became involved with the men’s movement. Positively, the men’s movement emphasized the need for men to get in touch with their feelings, to talk with other men. Negatively, the men’s movement continued to promote patriarchy by a tacit insistence that in order to be fully self-actualized, men needed to separate from women. The idea that men needed to separate from women to find their true selves just seemed like the old patriarchal message dressed up in a new package.

Describing the men’s movement spearheaded by Robert Bly in her essay “Feminism and Masculinity,” Christine A. James explains:

The men’s movement was often critical of women and feminism while making no sustained critique of patriarchy. Ultimately it did not consistently demand that men challenge patriarchy or envision liberating models of masculinity.

Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as though they are offering a different script for gender relations. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of a benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control. In the wake of feminist movement and the diverse men’s liberation movements that did not bring women and men closer together, the question of what the alternative to patriarchal masculinity might be must still be answered.

Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require the construction of an enemy “other,” be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against. Starting in early childhood, males need models of men with integrity, that is, men who are whole, who are not divided against themselves. While individual women acting as single mothers have shown that they can raise healthy, loving boys who become responsible, loving men, in every case where this model of parenting has been successful, women have chosen adult males—fathers, grandfathers, uncles, friends, and comrades—to exemplify for their sons the adult manhood they should strive to achieve.

Undoubtedly, one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism must be to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model. This is why the term patriarchal masculinity is so important, for it identifies male difference as being always and only about the superior rights of males to dominate, be their subordinates females or any group deemed weaker, by any means necessary. Rejecting this model for a feminist masculinity means that we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of the self, of the human body that has a penis. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.

It is a stance that seems to be more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self that has a penis. Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination. There is a creative, life-sustaining, life-enhancing place for the masculine in a nondominator culture. And those of us committed to ending patriarchy can touch the hearts of real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood or maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.

Patriarchal culture continues to control the hearts of men precisely because it socializes males to believe that without their role as patriarchs they will have no reason for being. Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.