Dear men of all kinds and ages,
This letter began after feeling provoked by a discussion about social justice and masculinity, and whether men and masculinity have been exiled by progressive culture. For much of my life I’ve been in some way troubled by the question of what is a man, what is masculinity, and whether I was either.
A long time ago I encountered the metaphor that the mind is like a blade, and one way to ensure its sharpness is to engage in debate and take on the challenge of constructing your argument for why you believe what you do, including the evidence supporting your position, and your answer to challenges and critiques. While the grating feels unpleasant, the friction is necessary to keep the mind sharp and clear. This kind of argument focuses on the quality of the ideas and the efficacy of their presentation, whether they seem to elicit truth. It’s not the deeply personal and accusatory tone that often joins what we think of as arguments these days.
A sword is not our only quality, and there are times when the blade needs to be tempered with the cup of understanding. This cup seeks to understand why the other person says, believes, feels, and acts the way they do. What’s become clear to me is every person’s actions make complete sense once you fully understand their context, and when we are able to achieve and demonstrate that understanding, we make possible real dialogue, change, and collaboration.
So both the cup and the blade are needed for being in relationship with others, but folks tend to favor one over the other, and need to make efforts to develop both.
At some point in my young life I really got a sense of the harm men and boys did to other people. Men in this culture tend to be most likely to perpetrate violence, and most likely to be victims of it.
I was bullied myself, and I saw my older sister being treated very poorly by the men she was dating, and I was too small to stand up for her but I internalized this injustice and was drawn toward the teachings of Feminism, which I thought could be freeing to all of us. I wanted a world without coercion or dominance in which we could each support each other in being the person we wanted to become.
This seed continued to grow as I became more conscious of the history of the United States and the harms done to the people who were here before we settled, the people we enslaved, and the people we used for cheap labor. So I felt a deepening and broadening of that call to throw off dominance and coercion. What’s become a dearly held belief is that each person, given both support and autonomy, will move toward their best.
So when we look at communities that are rife with poverty, violence, illness, and addiction, I tend to notice both a lack of support and a lack of autonomy. These communities tend to be economically deprived of opportunities and resources, and simultaneously controlled by people who do not live there and have little relationship with the people within them.
When I was younger and looking at these patterns, I with other white middle class people had a savior mentality, like these struggling communities were foundering in ignorance and needed help working through their problems. Now I see this as flawed thinking and a kind of oppressive behavior that offers support at the expense of autonomy.
So instead of imagining myself a savior of the poor and oppressed, I feel called to find the balance point between advocating for the support all communities need to let our innate capacities of autonomy and self-determination flourish. And I pay attention to those with power who seem to undermine that autonomy and self-determination.
I’ve been accused of hating men and that is simply not true. If I thought men and white people were evil and irredeemable then I would not be doing the work I do. What I am seeking is liberation. I often focus my attention on men and white people because I am both, not because I believe we are uniquely evil or toxic. My training has shown me that there are oppressors, collaborators, and resistors in every system and culture, and dominance and abusive violence is not unique or exclusive to any particular gender or race. If we have power but we are protected from the consequences of how we use power, we tend to become more sociopathic.
Carl Jung’s work showed me that owning both, my power and my capacity for cruelty and violence, is the path of becoming a whole person. Because we can be both caring, loving, powerful men and can cause harm. We can think of ourselves as nonviolent and non-confrontational, good caring people—men of the cup—but instead what we’ve done is outsourced our violence to men with guns who police our streets and fight in distant countries so we can have cheap oil.
Before we are willing to see our own wholeness, we imagine there is a division between innocence and guilt, that some people are innocent no matter what they do, and others are guilty before they’ve drawn their first breath. But healing that lie, seeing both my innocence and guilt, is power.
To be honest, the more I study gender in general, and men and masculinity in particular, the less certain I am of what “it” is. Gender is both profoundly real, personal, and viscerally felt—I recognize that now. Gender is also profoundly shaped by the political, economic, and social conflicts of our age. It’s both what I feel and think about myself and it’s the ways others treat me and what expectations they have of me simply by virtue of being male.
In recent years, having come more into my body and athletics, I’ve been spending more time with men and remembering the joys of it. There’s a playfulness in teasing that feels like a martial arts practice, learning how to hit each other hard enough to get attention but not hard enough to harm, while the teased person in turn practices how to deflect the attack and respond. This is when the work of the sword is joyful and connecting rather than separating.
This practice and exploration has cultivated a thought that still feels difficult to articulate, almost dangerous, because it’s incomplete. Much of my work is supporting accountability when appropriate, when we’ve caused harm. Yet I also see that we need to work on not participating in being harmed.
The last sentence is tricky and needs context. I know from experience that to hear such a sentiment can cause one to think, “Oh that means if I was hurt, I deserved it.” But what I mean is quite the opposite. None of us deserve to be hurt and harmed, or to stay in situations that demean and degrade us.
And yet often we do—for so many reasons. First, we may not recognize that we are being hurt or harmed. When we do, we may think we deserve it. Then when we learn we don’t, we may not know how to protect ourselves or trust that we can be okay if we get away. Part of our work in life is moving through each of those steps, learning the lessons we need to learn: how to recognize I’m being hurt, how to honor that I do not deserve it, and what skills and resources I need to be able to protect myself or leave the situation and be okay.
We might have all these skills and get hurt anyway. All strategies have a vulnerability that causes them to fail. But there’s something about knowing we did what we could to avoid or stop it that’s important. It tells ourselves that we matter. Even if it’s saying, “That hurts, stop it.” Even if it’s walking away from an impossible situation.
That is what I want to say today.
