The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (14 page)

Being “vulnerable” is an emotional state many men seek to avoid. Some men spend a lifetime in a state of avoidance and therefore never experience intimacy. Sadly, we have all colluded with the patriarchy by faking it with men, pretending levels of intimacy and closeness we do not feel. We tell men we love them when we feel we have absolutely no clue as to who they really are. We tell fathers we love them when we are terrified to share our perceptions of them, our fear that if we disagree, we will be cast out, excommunicated. In this way we all collude with patriarchal culture to make men feel they can have it all, that they can embrace patriarchal manhood and still hold their loved ones dear. In reality, the more patriarchal a man is, the more disconnected he must be from feeling. If he cannot feel, he cannot connect. If he cannot connect, he cannot be intimate.

Significantly, Terrence Real suggests that most men do not know what intimacy is, that the “one-up, one-down world of masculinity leaves little space for tenderness…one is either controlled or controlling, dominator or dominated.” He shares the powerful insight that “when they speak of fearing intimacy, what they really mean is that they fear subjugation.” This fear of subjugation is often triggered by the reality that boys parented by patriarchal women are controlled via their longing for maternal closeness. In maternal sadism, the manipulative woman exploits the boy’s emotional vulnerability to bind him to her will, to subjugate him. This early experience resides at the heart of many a man’s fear of being intimate with a grown woman. And it may explain why so many men in patriarchal culture seek intimacy with girls or women young enough to be their daughters.

There is little feminist discussion of maternal sadism in relation to boys because it has been difficult for feminist thinkers to find a language to name the power mothers wield over children in a patriarchal culture, where in the larger social context mothers are so powerless. Yet it may be that very powerlessness in relation to grown men in patriarchy that leads so many women to exert emotional power over boys in a damaging manner. For this reason single-parent homes where mothers are dysfunctional and maternal sadism abounds are as unhealthy a place to raise boys as dysfunctional two-parent homes, where maternal sadism is the norm. In the two-parent home, the boy child may be fortunate to have an adult male who serves to intervene against maternal sadism, who acts as an enlightened witness. Such intervention is absent in the single female-headed household.

Women are not inherently more loving than men; women may give care and still be emotionally abusive. There has been such a strong tendency in patriarchal culture to simply assume that women are loving and capable of being intimate, that female failure to acquire the relational skills that would make intimacy possible, often goes unnoticed. Most females are encouraged to learn relational skills, yet damaged self-esteem may prevent us from applying those skills in a healthy manner. If we are to begin to create a culture in which feminist masculinity can thrive, then women who mother will need to educate themselves for critical consciousness. In the near future we may hope to have more data to show us the ways boys fare better when they have loving parents, whether together or apart, who teach them how to be intimate. Meanwhile let us create the space where males who lack relational skills can learn them.

As Zukav and Francis boldly state in
The Heart of the Soul,
“Intimacy and the pursuit of external power—the ability to manipulate and control—are incompatible.” Before most men can be intimate with others, they have to be intimate with themselves. They have to learn to feel and to be aware of their feelings. Men who mask feelings or suppress them simply do not want to feel the pain. Since emotional pain is the feeling that most males have covered up, numbed out, or closed off, the journey back to feeling is frequently through the portal of suffering. Much male rage covers up this place of suffering: this is the well-kept secret. Often when a female gets close to male pain, penetrating the male mask to see the emotional vulnerability beneath, she becomes a target for the rage.

Shame at emotional vulnerability is often what men who are closed down emotionally seek to hide. Since shaming is often used to socialize boys away from their feeling selves toward the patriarchal male mask, many grown men have an internal shaming voice. Studies indicate that patriarchal fathers are rarely killed by their children; mothers are murdered more, for the rage many males feel from father shaming is usually transferred to female authority figures. With females, especially, the wounded boy inside the man can rage with no fear of reprisals. The more intimate the relationship, the more likely she is to be both the target of the rage and the secret keeper, telling no one that he is addicted to rage. This is especially the case where the acting-out male is a son who is physically hitting a mother or weaker siblings. The violence of sons, especially adolescent boys, toward mothers is rarely talked about in our culture. Now that so many adult single men return home to live with female parents or never even leave, there is a growing problem of domestic discord, both emotional and physical, that is covered up.

Intimate terrorism in male-female couple relationships is identified as a problem, particularly emotional abuse. Yet very little is said about the intimate terrorism between adult children and parents. The recent film
The Piano Teacher
graphically showed the sadomasochistic violence that can exist between an adult child and a parent, assuming the form of both emotional and physical abuse. In this film the adults shown are female, and audiences are allowed to interpret what they see according to traditional sexist notions of female competition. Yet in real life there is tremendous emotional abuse happening in single mother/adult son relationships that is not named. Women in patriarchal culture are trained to cover up and hide male abuse, all the more so when the culprit is a son and the victim his mother. These situations of unhealthy intimacy exist because of our cultural failure to teach women and men what intimacy is. And as long as women remain the primary parental caregivers, we will have the lion’s share of the responsibility for learning how to be intimate ourselves and sharing that knowledge with male and female children.

Learning how to be intimate is a relational skill that teaches us the value of self-knowledge. Offering a broader, more meaningful definition of intimacy than the old notion of simply being close and vulnerable to someone, Gary Zukav and Linda Francis state that you “create intimacy when you shift from the pursuit of external power—the ability to manipulate and control—to the pursuit of authentic power—the alignment of your personality with your soul.” In recent years there have been a number of self-help books published that urge readers to care for their souls. Such books by James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and Gary Zukav have been national bestsellers. Ironically, these men speak of the necessity of caring for our souls as though the path to that care is the same for women and men. In the introduction to Thomas Moore’s
Care of the Soul
he tells readers, “Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul. They are particularly elusive in our time because we don’t believe in the soul and therefore give it no place in our hierarchy of values…. We live in a time of deep division, in which mind is separated from body and spirituality is at odds with materialism. But how do we get out of this split?” Visionary thinkers believe that by exposing the way the logic of domination has created the split and choosing the model of interbeing and interdependency, we can begin the work of restoring integrity, and with integrity comes care of the soul.

Men caught up in the logic of patriarchal masculinity have difficulty believing that their souls matter. It is perhaps a patriarchal bias that leads Thomas Moore to suggest at the conclusion of his clarion call for all of us to cultivate soulfulness that “care of the soul is not a project of self-improvement…. It is not at all concerned with living properly or with emotional health.” This need to deny the relationship of care of the soul to self-nurturance is itself indicative of the very binary splits in consciousness Moore critiques. There is no one who cares for her or his soul rightly who does not experience an enhancement of emotional well-being.

Men need to hear that their souls matter and that the care of their souls is the primary task of their being. Were all men seeking to uncover greater soulfulness in their lives rather than seeking power through a dominator model, then the world as we know it would be transformed for the better.

It cannot be a mere accident of fate that the visionary male teachers who are offering us messages about ways to care for the soul that will enhance life on the planet are men of color from poor countries, men who live in exile, men who have been victimized by imperialist male violence. Two men who come to mind are His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In
Ethics for the New Millennium
the Dalai Lama calls for a spiritual revolution. He shares his belief that all humans desire happiness and that a principal characteristic of genuine happiness is inner peace, which he links to developing concern for others. His soulful message echoes that of feminist thinkers who are telling the world that men can heal their spirits by developing relational skills—the ability to experience empathy, to care for others.

The existence of visionary male teachers who offer males and females spiritual guidance is a constant reminder to us that the hearts of men are transformed by love and compassion. Consistently, the Dalai Lama teaches us about the need to cultivate the practice of compassion. Whether males ever see themselves as working to end patriarchy, the fact remains that any man who chooses the way of compassion heals the spirit and moves away from domination. The Dalai Lama offers this wisdom:

This is the care of the soul that males and females must attend to if we are to sustain life on the planet, if we are to live fully and well.

Most men in our society believe in higher powers, and yet they have learned to devalue spiritual life, to violate their own sense of the sacred. Hence the work of spiritual restoration—of seeing the souls of men as sacred—is essential if we are to create a culture in which men can love. When the hearts of men are full of compassion and open to love, then, as the Dalai Lama states, “there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma, for our own heart, our own mind, is the temple and the doctrine is compassion.”

When contemporary feminist movement was at its most militant, those of us who worshipped male deities were often made to feel as though we were traitors. Yet many of us found it especially useful in maintaining our love for males and appreciation for the sacredness of the male soul to separate patriarchal ideology from the powerful images of nurturing and loving kindness embodied in male religious figures. Many of us who were wounded daughters from Christian backgrounds found it useful to meditate daily on the twenty-third psalm because it evoked for us the image of a father caring for our souls, affirming and assuring us that we would survive, that goodness and mercy would be accorded us and that the father would keep us forever in his care.

This image of loving fatherhood embodies feminist masculinity in its most divine form. Healing the spirit, caring for the souls of boys and men, we must dare to proclaim our adoration, to bow down not to the male as dominator, but to the male as embodied divine spirit with whom we can unite in love, with no threat of separation, knowing a perfect love that is without fear.

H
ealing the crisis in the hearts of men requires of us all a willingness to face the fact that patriarchal culture has required of men that they be divided souls. We know that there are men who have not succumbed to this demand but that most men have surrendered their capacity to be whole. The quest for integrity is the heroic journey that can heal the masculinity crisis and prepare the hearts of men to give and receive love.

Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder. Therapist John Bradshaw explains the splitting that takes place when a child learns that the way he organically feels is not acceptable. In response to this lesson that his true self is inappropriate and wrong, the boy learns to don a false self. Bradshaw explains, “The feeling that I have done something wrong, that I really don’t know what it is, that there’s something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone’s love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else—someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.” Sexist roles restrict the identity formation of male and female children, but the process is far more damaging to boys because not only are the roles required of them more rigid and confining, but they are much more likely to receive severe punishment when they deviate from these roles.

Contemporary feminist movement created a socially sanctioned space where girls can create a sense of self that is distinct from sexist definitions; the same freedom has not been extended to boys. No wonder then that boys in patriarchal culture continue the tradition of creating a false self, of being split. That split in boys and men is often characterized by the capacity to compartmentalize. It is this division in the psyches and souls of males, fundamentally wounding, that is the breeding ground for mental illness. When males are required to wear the mask of a false self, their capacity to live fully and freely is severely diminished. They cannot experience joy and they can never truly love.

Anyone who has a false self must be dishonest. People who learn to lie to themselves and others cannot love because they are crippled in their capacity to tell the truth and therefore unable to trust. This is the heart of the psychological damage done to men in patriarchy. It is a form of abuse that this culture continues to deny. Boys socialized to become patriarchs are being abused. As victims of child abuse via socialization in the direction of the patriarchal ideal, boys learn that they are unlovable. According to Bradshaw they learn that “relationships are based on power, control, secrecy, fear, shame, isolation, and distance.” These are the traits often admired in the patriarchal adult man.

Emotionally wounding boys is socially acceptable and even demanded in patriarchal culture. Denying them their right to be whole, to have integrity, is not only encouraged, it is seen as the right way to do things. Terrence Real says that “we force our children out of the wholeness and connectedness in which they begin their lives” and then encourage them “to bury their deepest selves, to stop speaking, or attending to the truth, to hold in mistrust, or even in disdain, the state of closeness we all, by our natures, most crave.” Exposing the harsh reality of the psychological impact of patriarchy, Real has the courage to speak this truth: “We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them.” Teaching boys to despise their vulnerability is one way to socialize them to engage in self-inflicted soul murder. This wound in the male spirit, caused by learned acts of splitting, of disassociation and disconnection, can only be healed by the practice of integrity. Wounded males must recover all the parts of the self they abandoned in serving the needs of patriarchal maleness. Such recovery is the necessary groundwork for restoring integrity to male being.

Speaking about the meaning of integrity in his most recent book,
Living a Life That Matters,
Rabbi Harold Kushner offers this clear definition: “Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so that there is no longer a split in the soul.” Patriarchy encourages men to surrender their integrity and to live lives of denial. By learning the arts of compartmentalization, dissimulation, and disassociation, men are able to see themselves as acting with integrity in cases where they are not. Their learned state of psychological denial is severe. Adding to the definition of integrity in
Further along the Road Less Traveled,
M. Scott Peck discusses the root meaning of the term “integrity,” which is the verb “to integrate,” emphasizing that this is the opposite of compartmentalization. “Individuals without integrity naturally compartmentalize. And patriarchal masculinity normalizes male compartmentalization.”

Peck argues that compartmentalization is a way to avoid feeling pain: “We’re all familiar with the man who goes to church on Sunday morning, believing that he loves God and God’s creation and his fellow human beings, but who, on Monday morning, has no trouble with his company’s policy of dumping toxic wastes in the local stream. He can do this because he has religion in one compartment and his business in another.” Since most men have been socialized to believe that compartmentalization is a positive practice, it feels right, it feels comfortable. To practice integrity, then, is difficult; it hurts. Peck makes the crucial point: “Integrity is painful. But without it there can be no wholeness.” To be whole men must practice integrity.

Integrity is needed for healthy self-esteem. Most males have low self-esteem because they are constantly lying and dissimulating (taking on false appearances) in order to perform the sexist male role. Identifying the practice of integrity as a core pillar of self-esteem in his groundbreaking work on the subject,
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem,
Nathaniel Branden talks about the way in which lying wounds self-esteem. He confesses that, like many men, he once convinced himself that it was important to tell lies to protect other people, but eventually he had to face the truth that “lies do not work.” To honor his self-esteem, to practice integrity, he learned that the truth had to be told, that “by procrastinating and delaying I merely made the consequences for everyone more terrible.” Furthermore, he writes, “I succeeded in protecting no one, least of all myself. If part of my motive was to spare people I cared about, I inflicted a worse pain than they would otherwise have experienced. If part of my motive was to protect my self-esteem by avoiding a conflict among my values and loyalties, it was my self-esteem that I damaged.” This faulty logic he describes is the same that many patriarchal men use to avoid telling the truth and practicing integrity.

All too often we are led to believe that men gain more power through lying and compartmentalization. It just simply is not so. The stress of guarding and protecting a false self is harmful to male emotional well-being; it erodes self-esteem. Much of the depression men suffer is directly related to their inability to be whole. Even though they have been socialized to create and maintain false selves, most men remember the true self that once existed. And it is that memory of loss—coupled with rage at the world, which encouraged the surrender of the self—that engenders depression. This suffering, the source of which often goes unidentified in adult males, is constant. It leads many men to addiction, whether to workaholism or substance abuse. Workaholism is the most common addiction in men because it is usually rewarded and not taken seriously as detrimental to their emotional well-being.

Work is often the space where men detach from feelings. Zukav and Francis describe workaholism as a flight from emotions: “It is a drug that is as effective as the most powerful anesthetic…. Workaholism is a deep sleep. It is a self-induced trance that temporarily keeps painful emotions away from your awareness.” At the moment when addictions stop keeping the pain at bay, many men sink into depression. And as with so much male pain, it is only in recent years that men have been given societal permission to confront depression. Men suffer depression frequently because of their own unfulfilled expectations or their perfectionism (which can never be satisfied since to be human is to be imperfect). Often it is suggested that feminist movement has taken away or undermined “male power,” and as a consequence, men feel bereft. Underlying this notion is the idea that women are to blame for male depression, although it is difficult to believe that men feel at all threatened by masses of women entering a workforce where they receive less pay than men and come home after long hours to do a second shift. Since a woman outside the home is no longer under the rule of the individual patriarchal head of household, this movement outside may threaten male power more than what women do on the outside.

One dimension of feminist movement that did have a profound impact on men was its insistence that women had the right to critique men both collectively and individually. In the patriarchal home I was raised in, a significant aspect of Dad’s power was that he was beyond critique. Even though Mom never became a feminist, after forty years of submission she did begin to critique Dad in ways that echoed feminist challenges to male power and privilege. Like many women, she challenged her husband’s lack of emotional engagement. Like many women, she has wanted him to be interested in personal growth. For years patriarchal culture has taught men that their selfhood, their manhood, is affirmed by a lack of interest in personal growth; all of a sudden in the wake of feminist movement, women were bombarding men with new emotional expectations. Collectively men responded with a feeling of depression.

Popular psychotherapist M. Scott Peck reminds us that anytime any of us takes significant steps to grow, we go through a process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (the same stages Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified as those we go through when we confront dying). He gives the example of his being criticized for character flaws by loved ones and resisting the critique:

Often, however, men find themselves stuck in the place of rage.

No wonder then that many men seeking to be whole must first name the intensity of their rage and the pain it masks. Writing in the face of the knowledge that he is dying, Joseph Beam confesses in “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart”:

Anger often hides depression and profound sorrow.

Depression often masks the inability to grieve. Males are not given the emotional space to grieve. Girls and women can cry, can express sorrow throughout our lives. We can just let it out. Males are still being taught to keep it in and, worse, to deny that they feel like crying. Donald Dutton in his chapter “Love and Rage” says that male refusal to acknowledge loss is a key component of male rage:

Many adolescent girls go through a grieving process as they make the transition from being a small child to mature girlhood. Girls are allowed to mourn changes. Males have no rituals of mourning, as boys or men.

One of the reasons the church has been so important in the lives of black men is that it is one of the locations where they are allowed to express emotions, where they can grieve. James Baldwin describes this release of emotions in church in
The Fire Next Time
: “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their joy to me, I surrendered mine to them.” It was in the church of my childhood that I first saw men mourn.