“The mature Masculine must be reclaimed by the modern world. Its virtual absence from technologically advanced societies has resulted in one of the more serious moral crises ever to face Western civilization… In our world, genocide is barely noticed. Rape is used as an instrument of both pathological male self-expression and ethnic war…Violence is becoming the preferred solution to interpersonal disputes. In all this, we see evidence that mature Masculinity, in its fullness, has all but been forgotten, and that ‘Boy Psychology’ is prevalent.”
–Robert Moore & Doug Gillette in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
In 2008, I was asked to give a presentation to about a thousand US Army Non- Commissioned Officers in Washington. They had flown in from around the world to attend a weekend workshop on ending sexual harassment and abuse. The Army’s stated goal was to end it within ten years. They failed. Miserably.
But I don’t fault them for trying. I was scheduled as the first speaker. After all the welcoming speeches by officials and politicians, we were running a half hour late. By the time I came to the podium, I was told to reduce my presentation from 30 minutes to ten.
I wanted to show clips from my film – Boys to Men? – that clearly illustrate ways in which masculinity formation takes place in teen boys. I wanted to explore how those issues play out in adult men and can impact them in relation to sexual harassment and abuse.
I couldn’t do any of that in ten minutes. Instead, I said I wanted to address the men in the room directly. (Though the conference organizers were women, the audience looked to me to be about 98 percent men.) I basically told them that until they could feel their own feelings the likelihood was extremely small that they’d ever relate to or understand the feelings of sex abuse victims. I walked off to a smattering of polite applause and was not invited back to a similar gathering the following year.
I might as well have told the men that until you live on Mars you’ll never understand Earth. Suppression of feelings is one of the key lessons every soldier is taught in boot camp. During battle time deployment, it is certainly true that feeling feelings can get you killed. Circumstances of life and death demand that soldiers make the best, most rational decisions they can in the moment. Though intuition can be extremely valuable at those times, accompanying emotions of fear, anger, sadness, and shame can be life-threatening. Training takes over, and normal mental processes are overridden by programmed autonomic patterns. But what’s an invaluable modus operandi in wartime can itself become a killer in peacetime.
The problem is that human emotions are not faucets that can be turned on and off at will. Once we’re trained by our parents, schools, workplaces, or the military to hide, repress, and deny our emotions, they don’t come back with ease and facility when we need them. With them off, we will remain unconscious of that which makes us most human. Which doesn’t mean they no longer exist. They’re just driven underground where the danger of the truths they represent can be repressed. Then, when feelings arise in others, just like in ourselves, we can insist they be choked down, often with insults and judgments: Don’t be a pussy. Suck it up. Stop acting like a baby. Be a man!
The latter judgment points toward part of the military problem. Women aren’t ‘man enough’ to suck it up when they come forward with their stories of sexual harassment and abuse. That’s their ‘problem’. If they were ‘man enough’, their pain would be treated like all pains in the military—something to be ignored and dealt with privately. The military is not institutionally or culturally equipped to deal with the pains that the victims of sex abuse and harassment experience. The documentary entitled The Invisible War makes this painfully clear.
Still, my presentation didn’t fall entirely on deaf ears. Women responded. During the evening reception, one woman told me privately she’d been waiting her entire life to hear a man say what I said. Other women also came up and thanked me. I don’t recall speaking to a single man.
My own journey on the path of the mature masculine began when I was nine. My father died suddenly of a heart attack—he was 41 years old. I was in shock. On our way to the funeral, my uncle put his hand on my bony shoulder and said, “Well, Freddy, you’re the man of the house now.”
Nowadays we might laugh at the inappropriateness of such statements. But his words didn’t seem inappropriate to me. I wanted to be that man, to care for my mother, older sister, and younger brother. I wanted to live up to that responsibility. I thought my father’s death and my uncle’s recognition somehow combined to anoint me a man. It would be many years before I understood the childish conceit of that idea. I was no more a man than my sister or brother or mother. But that moment planted a seed in me, one that would continue germinating throughout my lifetime. How to become a man of integrity and honor I yearned to be? How to hold responsibility for the wellbeing of those I love? What, in fact, is it to become a man?
There followed many years in which my dad’s name was never spoken in our house. I drove all my questions and fears inside and never once had a conversation with my siblings or mother about my dad. Silence became the norm. Though the term didn’t exist for another 15 years, I essentially grew up with post-traumatic stress. With my peers, whenever they asked about him, I simply said he was dead. That ended the conversation.
Through my teen years, I drank, did drugs, and somehow managed not to kill myself or harm others. No men materialized to show me how to become that man I wanted to be. Coaches, neighbors, relatives, certainly not my uncle… no one offered me that much-needed mentorship. Though I had good friends and a supportive social circle, I felt alone, hermetically-sealed by the silence I couldn’t articulate or name. It was only a matter of time before I acted out.
The one and only time I ever hit a woman was when I was 18. My girlfriend and I were in Jamaica. I was masking my fright at this strange, new world behind bravado. ‘The Third World’ we called it then—low-income people of color with ways foreign to me. I needed intimacy and wanted reassurance, but I wasn’t conscious of it and didn’t know how to ask for it. So when my girlfriend was her usual social self at a party one night, talking with numerous other men, my frustration and jealousy boiled over into rage, and I hit her on the shoulder. Once we got back to the States, we had the good sense to break up. The irony was we then only grew closer and became lifelong best friends.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was unconsciously drawn to the company of women and gay men. I felt my emotions were safe with them, and I could risk being vulnerable. I unconsciously steered away from strong Type A males. I projected all the worst aspects of my father onto them, thought them arrogant, full of themselves, self-appointed leaders seeking obeisance. This pattern emerged in my teens and continued through my 30s. Though therapy in my early 30s helped bring awareness to some primal wounds, it succeeded only in helping me feel safe to open my heart to my therapist. I had no facility or interest in opening my heart to the wider world, especially to men.
End of Part One
Photo Credit: Krizjohn Rosales from Canva
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