[Author’s Introduction]
On Monday I published Part I of this series. It looked at the case of Jian Ghomeshi and the media response to it. In that piece I argued there was a missing element of the pain of men. From there I laid out a vision I hold for a discourse of and (largely) by men that work with in solidarity with many movements, most notably feminism.
The piece generated a firestorm of controversy on my FB page. I’m not interested in re-hasing that entire debate as it was multi-layered. There were a number of criticism of my piece; I thought some of those criticisms were valid and others definitely not. At the bottom of Part I there’s an updated section where I acknowledge the criticisms.
The primary takeaway for me was that I wanted to talk about what I see as a great degree of male pain (that is what this article is focused on) and that the Ghomeshi overlay brought in a very volatile mix of debate around feminism, patriarchy, gender profiling, true solidarity and justice work, men’s rights activism, and so on. I stand by what I wrote in that piece but I also don’t want to needlessly reignite that controversy.
So in light of the response I’ve decided to take out the Ghomeshi backdrop for this piece. What I say here are things I’ve been thinking of for awhile now. The Ghomeshi case and in particular the response to it online helped coalesce some of those thoughts and gave me an impulse with which to explore them (for better and for worse it might be said). But my argument here is in no way dependent upon that case (or more the very complex question of abuse and violence).
Hopefully this will allow the discussion concerning this piece to be simply what it is. I don’t claim that this approach is a magical cure all for a whole series of interrelated (entangled?) topics and issues. I simply want to put forward one element I see missing. I think it’s an important one but by no means the only or final one.
So here in Part II what I want to explore is what I see needing to be understood and later communicated by men about their experience. This introduction I’ve written this evening (Wed). The main body of the piece below was written before the response to Part I (in fact before publication of Part I). I’ve mostly left it as is but have made some adjustments.
I’ll be using the term men fairly broadly and by nature stereotypically in this account but please note the specifications given in Part I. I’m also not speaking from a scientific survey or report frame of reference so it will be more anecdotal and general in nature. I’m not claiming to be a social science research authority on the subject.
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I see a twin void in the heart of most men in our culture. These twin wounds are deep and pervasive. I call them twin because they are technically separable, especially conceptually, though in practice they tend to overlap and flow into one another.
The first major wounding is shame. Men in our society carry enormous unspoken, unacknowledged, unloved, unreceived, and unappreciated shame. My sense is that many men will not admit this to themselves, much less to anyone else. Part of the reason for this closeted shame is that some men are honest about their shame and share it with others–both to men and to women. They often find their shame cruelly denounced. From there they only go to push the shame down further into some dark corner of their being, there to fester and express itself later in unhealthy (and potentially destructive) ways.
I’ve written before on the existence of healthy shame–a voice of wisdom within us that acknowledges that we are radically free and empowered beings while simultaneously (all of us) being incredibly ill-equipped for life. Forever and profoundly incomplete. Healthy shame is being fundamentally at ease with our inherent weaknesses as human beings.
This is hard enough for anyone. It’s especially hard and especially not allowable for men in our society.
The shame residing in men however is not the healthy kind. It’s the profoundly debilitating variety. Toxic shame as it’s often called. Unacknowledged (or worse suppressed) shame goes rogue in our being. It becomes perverted and leaks out in all manner of harmful ways.
This male shame runs so deeply that even well-meaning attempts to respond to it can often end up unintentionally reinforcing it. I’m thinking of a piece like this one by Thomas Fiffer entitled 6 Things Men Don’t Need to Be Ashamed Of. The intent of the piece of is clear enough–for men to take pride in aspects of their being. Except I would argue this doesn’t work and only drives the shame further down by being told we shouldn’t feel the shame. The shame is there. Telling someone not to feel that way is not going to deal with the feeling. It will only drive it further down.
Healthy shame is the feeling of being exposed, having all aspects of one’s being be seen. More men are going to have to take the courageous stance of saying they are ashamed and hurting not as a plea for someone else to fix their pain or their brokenness or as a legitimation of problematic behavior but as a radical act of strength by revealing the deep wounds.
Shame often is accompanied by grief. Basically no one in our society knows how to grieve and this is most especially true for men.
When I hear people (usually but not always women) in the circles I tend to run in wonder or even complain about men not having access to their emotions I typically respond by saying men’s emotional lives are not safe. The first emotions most men will encounter if they dare dive into their souls are grief and shame. Those are two of the toughest emotions to learn to navigate consciously. These men have been given essentially no tools for acknowledging and working with their emotions generally much less shame and grief particularly. As far as I can tell the only emotion that is generally socially accepted for men is anger which is a beautiful emotion but one with a clearly defined (and limited!) role. Constructive anger is the capacity to (re)establish healthy emotional boundaries when lines have been crossed by another person.
But when anger is set up to be doing the work of grief, fear, sadness, shame, and remorse, as it is for many men, then we have a very serious problem–a problem of rage and self-loathing. (Self-loathing being another way to talk about unhealthy or toxic shame–the belief, the feeling that one is inherently bad, broken, and unredeemable. Rage is a very complex emotion energetically–in its healthy aspect (very hard to access for the record) rage is a primordial
When I work with healthy rage and when I am able to access it (not always possible in my case) I feel as if I’m the eye of a hurricane. I become utterly, almost preternaturally, still. I burn blue or white hot. The fire is so intense it’s almost as if it is no longer a fire.
The paradoxical gift of healthy shame is pure liberation. The paradoxical gift of healthy rage is a sense of total (almost newborn) innocence.
But these emotions are very challenging to deal with and probably are best dealt with after learning to deal with sadness, grief, anger, fear, remorse, etc.
Perhaps now we can see why it’s safer to distract oneself with video games, porn, alcohol, loveless sexual encounters, or workoholism rather than try to navigate all that emotionally dicey terrain. Diving into those emotional waters without proper guidance and training is actually not safe at all. Grief and shame are very powerful characters in our psyche (as are shame and rage) and if they are not dealt with wisely then can cause significant damage–though dealt with properly they are sources of incredible insight.
So contrary to how these things are often viewed, I see these stereotypical distractions and addictions as imbued with a certain intelligence (if ultimately limited and self-defeating).
As an example of what I mean, take the rise of the so-called man cave phenomenon. I find it a fascinating social expression, full of all kinds of hidden meaning. The first thing I think it tells us is that the home does not feel a safe place for many men (the men have to create a separate space in the garage or basement for their maleness). They do not see themselves as actually in a sense being partners in the home.
Second thing that’s interesting is that caves are traditionally where men and boys (and sometimes women and girls) were sent to go through cultural and spiritual initiation rituals. One went into the cave and partook in the initial and then returned to the tribe changed in some fundamental way. Importantly that change was recognized and honored by the tribe at large.
Since our society has almost wholesale given up such wisdom, the faintest thread of memory remains and we reinvent the thing we long for but in a very unconscious way (the man cave). The cave is a safe entryway in this world to the underworld, i.e. the descent of the soul into it’s pain. Our man caves exist to numb out the pain rather than to face into it. They will remain such until we acknowledge the underlying pain and learn to deal with it in healthy ways.
My experience though is that in order to get a hearing as a man with this kind of pain (and in my case as a white, heterosexual, middle class man) a man needs first to listen and to grow in relationship. If a men’s movement wanted to gain actual legitimacy and truth in life, I believe it would start first with acknowledging the pain of others, i.e. those hurt by the modern era. Children, women, people of color, the poor, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered. Start there. Let their experience break your heart. And then from having listened, speak to one’s own pain.
I’ve spent a great deal of the last 15 years of my life connecting and interacting with people with a different biological sex, as well as gender, cultural, sexual orientation identities different from my own. I would never claim I understand what it’s like from the inside of those worlds. I’m not after all a woman. I’m not after all gay, lesbian, or bisexual. I’m not after a person of East Asian or African or aboriginal ancestry. I have however tried to be as humble as I can and listen. I’ve genuinely try to imagine myself in the experience of these other people and the times when I honestly can’t, I simply acknowledge I can’t really understand what that’s like.
Of course I’m still heavily shaped by my experience and lenses and biases, but those experiences have taught me to try (as best as I can) to imagine the world from a different perspective. To try to honestly take into account the experiences I’ve heard from others, their stories, perspectives, and values, whenever I speak.
There is a lot of male pain and it isn’t being heard widely in society. Still rather than immediately jumping into it–however understandable that is–it’s going to require deeper listening. It’s going to require waiting to speak and in that speaking acknowledging the profound sufferings of others.
When held rightly, pain and suffering, grief and shame are what bring solidarity. We are very different in our different manifestations. We are the same in that we are all hurting, vulnerable, beautiful beings. Including yes men of privilege. Constant fights and divisions over whose suffered more don’t serve us here. Everyone suffers, not all necessarily equally in either intensity or magnitude. But hurt deeply everyone does. Especially in this crazed, insane world we inhabit.
That male pain is going unacknowledged society-wide and its causing enormous damage, internal and external.
Men’s pain does not need to be in competition with the pain of others (especially women’s pain). It should honestly be brought forward as one more valid voice within the litany, the lamentation of our collective sorrow. It’s real. Its not the only form of pain. Yet it’s still real and the fact that it isn’t spoken about or listened to is a cause of even more suffering.
But men’s pain is real. The ultimate shame is that men’s inner lives are not valued in our culture. As a society we don’t care about the inner lives of men–this is the message men receive as boys. They receive that message both from adult men and women. They will hear that message repeated throughout their lives and eventually they will pass it on to the next generation.
Men’s value is in terms of their external productivity (just as women’s values is typically judged by their external looks). Many (though by no means all) women in our society are granted permission, even encouraged to have inner lives–the terrible cost of which is the pervasive belief that therefore others should have a right to judge the inner world of those women (again whether the judger is a woman or man).
Men don’t have so much in the way of judgment of their inner lives. Rather their inner lives are simply of no consequence. And whether a man will admit this or not, he knows it. Deep down he knows who he is as a human being, as a person, doesn’t much count or matter. Not in terms of his emotions, his consciousness, his sentience.
That’s where his shame comes from.
It’s a secret so terrible and dark he dare never speak its name.
A man who is able to face this truth, to accept his being (warts, glories, and everything in between) becomes a source of grounding. He is one who holds a gentle and persuasive but not dominating form of power. His being is nurturing not because he’s embraced his “inner feminine” but because he’s embraced the inherently nurturing aspect of his male being. He’s not a “sensitive guy” but rather an empathetic man.
That’s one side of the void.
The other side is harder to speak of. It’s more elusive, harder to pinpoint, more challenging to name.
Christiane Pelmas calls this other energy re-wilding; for men she calls it stallion energy.
This energy is a raw male energy put to the good of life. It is male participation in Eros, the warm radiant pulse of creative existence itself.
This side is can be acknowledged (unlike men’s pain) though often only in a negative fashion. Namely it’s criticized as inherently evil*. Or in the rare cases when this energy is acknowledged in a positive sense it’s a very immature, unconscious form of this energy: namely machismo, patriarchal tough guy imagery.
As a result, Pelmas describes this energy as caged and one that lashes out in turn when caged.
If we hold the view that this more primal male energy is not to be trusted, not of life, not to be honored, then it’s clear that (many? all?) men need to be re-educated. They need to be shamed into seeing not simply how terrible certain actions are but also how their desires are inherently disordered. This is the only way you can discipline such men–to use Foucault’s term.
A more honest, a more conscious approach would be to say that he (and by extension men more broadly) have two tasks ahead of them.
- To acknowledge their grief, their loss, their incompleteness.
- To learn to work wisely and compassionately with this other aspect of their maleness (call it stallion energy perhaps).
Of the two paths mentioned above–the twin male voids–I’ve largely come to be at peace with the first. I’ve grieved my losses. I’m at ease with the incomplete elements of my makeup. This aspect of me creates trust and a sense of safety for others.
But the second, the so-called stallion energy, is a major struggle for me.
Raised Roman Catholic, a good altar boy with a sincere spiritual impulse, these genuine aspects of myself were at odds with my adolescent and later young adult male energy, particularly in its darker aspects. Darker here not meaning evil, darker simply meaning darker. Of the night. Blackness.
We shouldn’t reduce Eros to sexual energy but there’s no fullness of Eros without it either. This combination of innocence, boyishness, raw primal vitality, spiritualized insight, sexual energy, and even lust is a subtle, confusing, and complex interweaving. it’s generative energy which can either be used for creation or demolition. It’s a clarion call to cleaning up this energy and incorporating it in a healthy conscious way in our lives. Turning it off numbs men down. Turning it on without subtle intelligence is a recipe for potential violence.
I can’t claim to have great facility with what Pelmas calls the stallion energy, or at least significant parts of it anyway. It does show up in my relentless push to work on myself so that I can be as clear and clean as possible in my interactions. It shows up in strong desire to be of service. It shows up in my choice to enter into conflicted territory and often say controversial (but hopefully loving) things.
But there are definitely other aspects of the stallion energy that I’m not skilled in. I suppose energy is the best word for it. It’s not really an emotion. Or at least my own experience, if that’s any guide to go by, tells me that it’s possible to have capacity with a whole range of human emotion (as a man) and still struggle to access this stallion energy. It’s also not really an instinct (at least not totally).
But it is something. It’s an energy if we understand energy in its original root meaning (from the Greek): an activity, action, or operation. It’s something active, a working or work.
So we can see then that these two woundings include a more emotional component and a more energetic component. They intertwine and overlap in myriad ways but I do think (at least conceptually as well as in practice) they are distinguishable from each other. It’s important to distinguish them I believe because when they are all wrapped up in each other and one (or both) are in unconscious or unhealthy form then we are back to some potentially twisted, messed up stuff (yes, those are precise technical terms).
In the spiritual teaching world (where I spend most of my time and activity) this stallion energy would be called the masculine (aka The Divine Masculine). By the masculine is meant a transpersonal essence in interplay with the feminine (aka The Divine Feminine). In Part III I want to explore that particular framework around this energy–how I think the framework of the masculine isn’t the most helpful one to be able to relate to this stallion energy.
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* And just for a moment to touch back into the controversy surrounding Part I yes there are some forms of feminism that do precisely this (i.e. equate the stallion energy with intrinsic violence). Not all forms of feminism, not even most in my experience. But some.