Gender Healing BLOG
Men’s Authenticity Network
by David Shackleton on 03/18/21
Years ago, I had a friend. I won’t name her, but if she reads this she
will recognize herself. I was a middle
aged man who had discovered the reality of men’s issues. And by reality, I mean that I had discovered
that men’s disadvantages and problems are the functional equivalents of women’s
disadvantages and problems – and sometimes the precise equivalents. Historically men have been as disadvantaged
by gendered roles and expectations as women have.
This is not a common insight. I remember reading in a feminist book that
women’s issues are life and death, while men’s issues are like a bad hair
day. That pretty much sums up the
current cultural belief about men and women.
Almost everyone knows that we need feminism, the advocacy for women’s
equality. Few realize, however that we
need advocacy for men as well as women.
That claim is not a joke. Nor is
it due to some conspiracy of angry white guys who resent an alleged loss of
privilege. Rather, it is an insight of
profound importance, not only to men but to women and society as a whole.
But my friend was different. She genuinely empathized with men. She felt our pain when we talked about false
allegations against fathers as a tactic in custody battles, about men being 77%
of the homicide victims,[i]
75% of the suicides,[ii]
70% of the homeless,[iii]
65% of the addicted,[iv]
and 95% of the incarcerated.[v]
About the fact that the typical female survivor of childhood sexual abuse,
working to recover from her trauma in therapy or a support group, is in her
twenties or thirties – while the typical male survivor of childhood sexual
abuse only enters therapy, if he does at all, in his fifties or sixties. He has spent a lifetime trying to avoid his
pain by succumbing to sex or drug or other addiction, through distracting
himself with work, sports, food, alcohol and so on. Only when all of these strategies fail does
he ask for help in coping with his distress.
The tragedy of those thirty wasted years is
a characteristically male tragedy, and like many male tragedies it is largely
invisible. Society, which means almost
all of us, just doesn’t notice, because we don’t empathize with men as we do
with women and children. Empathy for
women and children, care and concern for their welfare, is completely natural.
Empathy for the men is best described as unnatural. This severe imbalance in empathy naturally
leads to a distorted perception that women’s needs and problems are central and
important, while those of men are peripheral and therefore trivial. We project an internal, subjective bias out
into the world and wrongly perceive an external, objective inequality.
But as I say, my friend was different. She came to a conference on men that I had
organized and told me that she had wept
after returning home, feeling the pain of the men who had told their
stories. She was a feminist who strongly
believed in women’s rights – but that was fine with me, because I agree with
her. What’s not ok with me is the belief
that women deserve concentrated and focused attention, but men do not. I wondered if my friend’s empathy would lead
her to realize the functional equivalence of men’s issues to those of women,
their equivalent value, scope, importance, seriousness. That would be a positive insight, I thought, solidly
based on the sexual equality that feminists say they want. What if men and women are already equal, in
terms of the damage they have suffered from historical gender roles?
She was resistant for years, holding that
women’s issues are bigger, that women are more deeply victims, that men have
the power that matters. But I remained
hopeful. No other feminist that I knew
empathized with men, felt their pain, at all.
Surely that would end up making the difference.
A few years ago, my friend completed a PhD
in sociology. Her thesis was actually
about feminist distortion of an aspect of men’s issues. I went to the university event celebrating
her achievement, where she presented a summary of her work. In her presentation, she talked first about
the reality of women’s victimhood, citing an example of a woman who was beaten
by her husband for burning his dinner.
When the woman complained to the authorities, in this example, she was
told, “Well, don’t burn the dinner.”
This is, of course, outrageous. As an anecdote, it has some historical
legitimacy, but it is clearly designed to present women’s issues as an
emergency and to denounce society’s traditional attitudes toward women as
utterly contemptible. Clearly, something
had to be done about such horrific attitudes.
I looked around the roomful of sociology academics, and everyone was
nodding in agreement. I agreed too, of
course; women’s issues do indeed have deep legitimacy.
My friend moved on to discuss men. There are, of course, examples of men’s
issues that are equally outrageous, such as men who are falsely accused by
their wives of a crime in a child custody battle, a tactic that often works to
deprive those fathers of custody of their own children. But such examples align with our prevalent
lack empathy for men, so they don’t feel outrageous. However, my friend didn’t try for
outrage. Her comment about how we might
respond to men’s issues was different.
Sociologists, she advised, should study such issues, but not as advocates
for change. Again I looked around the
room, and again everyone was nodding in agreement. My heart sank. I was alone in seeing the illegitimacy of
this difference in attitude, the lack of equivalent outrage on behalf of men
and the resulting lack of interest in advocating for men.
The presentation ended and it was time for
refreshments and congratulations at my friend’s success. I couldn’t do it. I left the room, locked myself in a washroom
stall and wept. My hope that my friend’s
empathy for men would lead her to see the functional equivalence of men’s and
women’s issues had finally died. Like
almost everyone I knew, she put women’s issues at the centre. Equalism, the bipartisan model, the
equivalence of men’s and women’s issues, was beyond her reach as it was for
virtually everyone else.
I tell this story because it was key to my
own journey of grieving, that is, of coming to terms with the fact that
equality and balance between men and women is almost impossible for most people
to recognize. It is so simple a concept,
so obvious, the idea that it all balances out between men and women – and so
useful in that it eliminates victimhood and resentment and replaces those with
balance, with equality, with reason for collaboration. That’s what everyone says they want! But it seems that the attraction to
innocence, to projecting guilt onto men, to being the victim, is just too strong for most people.
My grief over that event played out in my
life for some time. I had to integrate
the injustice that society continues to perpetuate, the compassion without
accountability for women and the accountability without compassion for
men. I had to let go of my fantasy that
my friend would come to balanced sexual equality, that she would be the first that
I had a hand in converting. It took time because I had hung my hopes on
her. It wasn’t really about her, of
course, but about men, my need to grieve the fact that society just doesn’t
care about men the way it does about women and children. That difference in empathy is a fact, and I
even understand the biological, evolutionary reasons for it. But I hadn’t really accepted it. It was just too painful to be the sex that is
hardly cared about.
I have accepted it now, and my vision of
social change takes that fact into account.
There was a time when we didn’t empathize with black people, when we saw
them as subhuman, fit only to be slaves.
That has changed. Perhaps it will
for men, too.
I see the grieving process that I have
outlined here as the key to authenticity and constructive advocacy. By grieving, we come to peace with an
undesired reality rather than remaining angry at it. From that place of peace, we can craft an inspiring
vision of what we want to achieve in the world and work towards it in a way
that is collaborative and invitational rather than divisive and judgmental.
[ii] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications/healthy-living/suicide-canada-infographic.html
[iii] https://endhomelessness.org/demographic-data-project-gender-and-individual-homelessness/
[iv] https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/differences-men-women/
[v] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00010-eng.htm
Unconditional Love and Truth
by David Shackleton on 11/15/16
I have suggested
that love is the highest or deepest value of the feminine archetype, and that
truth is the corresponding foundational value of the masculine. If wisdom is indeed built on a dualistic
balance of opposites, then these fundamental qualities, in their fully
developed, wise form, must also be dualistic.
And of course, this means that their definitions will be dualistic,
since a good definition must capture all significant dimensions of a
phenomenon.
What is the common
conception of love today? It is that
love is unconditional care and acceptance.
We call it unconditional love. I
suggest to you that this is indeed a part of love, but only the feminine pole,
the feminine side of the duality. We
have explored the idea that following a great upsurge in feminine energy in the
1960s, our conception of ideal human behavior moved towards the feminine, and
remains there today. We now prefer
cooperation over competition, consensus over hierarchy, empowerment over authority,
peace over conflict, etc. No, that isn’t
strong enough; we don’t just prefer the feminine modalities, we judge them as
superior, the right way to be. Under the
influence of the feminine archetype, unconditional love feels like what love should
be, and all it should be.
But something is
missing. If only unconditional care and
acceptance is loving, how do we do masculine things like setting boundaries,
maintaining standards and judging behavior?
Are these things now all to be seen as unloving? Consider what M. Scott Peck says on the
matter. “The path of love is a
dynamic balance of opposites, a painful creative tension of uncertainties, a
difficult tightrope between extreme but easier courses of action. Consider the raising of a child. To reject all its misbehavior is unloving. To tolerate all its misbehavior is
unloving. We must somehow be both
tolerant and intolerant, accepting and demanding, strict and flexible. An almost godlike compassion is required.” [i]
Clearly, a full and complete definition of love must somehow
include both of these contradictory aspects.
Here is my definition of love.
First, the feminine part: I affirm
and accept you totally, exactly the way you are. Then the masculine part: I challenge you to become all that you can be. As always in duality, these two poles seem to
be in tension, to contradict each other.
Love, I suggest, is that monistic quality that represents the seamless
integration of these dualistic opposite poles.
In practice, of course, one must choose one or the other
pole at any one moment, since behavior
is confined to form. Suppose your
daughter comes home from school one day with a "C" on her report
card. How do you respond? If you are able to come from a space of love,
you consider what this means for her. Is
a C in this subject a great accomplishment, a stretch for her? In that case, praise her for her
accomplishment. Does it represent a
failure of effort on her part? Then
challenging her to do better is the loving thing to do. Is she feeling like a failure because of the
mark? Reassure her of her unconditional
worth to you, that the failure doesn't change how you love her. And so on.
We always have to walk the line between opposites, and no
formula can help us much. Staying in
either pole, either extreme, is bound to be wrong. The evidence
of love is in the effort made to sustain this tension, in the work done on the
other's behalf to discern what is right action in the moment. This work is always required, since the right
decision cannot be reduced to a formula.
The capacity for love is in
the ability you have (or don't have) to remove yourself (e.g., your ego need to
have an intelligent child, or a hardworking child, or to be seen as a good parent, etc.) from the
picture, and make your action entirely about her or his needs, support or
development. This capacity and ability
is, of course, partly the result of being truly loved by others in the first
place. However, we are not victims of
our destiny, but can choose to love ourselves and thus grow our own capacity to
love.
Love, as the highest value of the feminine archetype, is
relational because that is the focus of that archetype. And so the definition takes the form of “I
accept you,” “I challenge you,” etc.
Truth, on the other hand, as the highest value of the masculine
archetype, is not relational but absolute.
And yet, it is dualistic in that there are two distinct and independent
fields of truth – the inner or subjective world where the goal is authenticity,
and the outer or objective world where the goal is accuracy. As with love, we can approach and discover
genuine truth in either field only to the extent that we can remove ourselves,
our ego needs, our biases and prejudices from the picture and surrender to what
is.
As we discussed in chapters one and three, this is difficult; our
feelings, especially, tend to overwhelm our ability to perceive either our own
motivations or events in the outer world.
Because we fear, usually without conscious awareness, that the truth will
convict us, we reinterpret what we experience internally and what we perceive
externally in ways that reassure us, usually by making them confirm whatever we
already believe. This is known as
confirmation bias, and numerous studies have affirmed its power and presence in
the human psyche.
We see that both the expression of real love and the search
for real truth are difficult; they involve the application of disciplined
effort or courage, or both – which is why they are both still quite rare in the
world. A story from feudal Japan will
illustrate what I mean. A Zen monk is
working in a field when he is approached by a warrior. The warrior asks, “Explain to me what is
heaven and what is hell.” The monk
regards him for a moment, then says, “Get away from me, you barbarian, and stop
wasting my time.” The warrior is
furious. He has humbled himself and
asked a real question, seeking knowledge, and the monk has rejected him and insulted
him as well. He draws his sword and
raises it high to kill the monk, and the monk says quietly, “That is
hell!” The warrior pauses, and realizes
that the monk, a stranger, has actually risked his life in order to give a real
answer, a true and full answer to his question.
Instantly his emotion changes and he feels deep respect and love for the
monk. And the monk says, “And that’s
heaven.”
In the story, the monk chooses to take a major personal risk
for the sake of giving a deeply true answer to the warrior. He accepts and respects the warrior in his
question, the feminine pole, and also challenges him to rise above his
momentary anger and see truth, the masculine pole. Note that the initial form of the response
from the monk is highly disrespectful of the warrior – but that is just surface
form. The underlying strategy is deeply
respectful, as becomes apparent to the warrior after a moment of
reflection. This non-alignment of
surface form with deeper essence, with truth, is very common in the world,
although it more usually takes the opposite form of outward respect covering
over a lack of love in truth, in essence.
As I described in chapter one, the task of the truth seeker is to look
past the surface forms in order to discover the hidden truth below. When enough people are engaged in this
journey, I think that we will see a real consensus emerge about what is true in
the area of human society and culture, a genuine ‘scientific’ (meaning
submitted to critical thinking, subordinated to genuine reality testing)
understanding of the phenomena of individual and collective human behavior.
My definition of truth, like that of love, is dualistically
split – in this case between subjective and objective truth. But what is truth really about? It is, simply, conformance with reality. And so a formal definition is that truth is
conformance with subjective and objective reality. In the last fifty years, under the influence
of the feminine archetype ascendant, we have seen the feminine, subjective pole
of truth grow dominant in various ways.
Post-modernism has suggested that there is no unique, objective truth,
but only culturally privileged stories and viewpoints. The New Age has argued that objective reality
is actually an artifact of collective subjectivity, a consensual reality. Currently popular ideas like the Law of Attraction[1]
are founded in this notion of the subordination of the objective to the
subjective. Once we understand the
inherent equality of both poles of a duality and the operation of one-sided
cultural biases such as the current dominance of the feminine, we can readily
see through such cultural stories to the truth.
The highest value of the feminine is love. The highest value of the masculine is
truth. Are they in conflict, or do they
somehow support each other, do they integrate seamlessly? How do we marry them in practice? If we keep them clear, if we don’t get them
tangled together, they do indeed integrate in non-contradictory ways.
Let’s start with the love side, since feminine energy is
more prominent, more readily accessed these days. We are familiar with the phrase
“unconditional love”. What we mean by it
is that we can and should love each other no matter what. Specifically, no matter what we do. Healthy parents know that no matter what
their child might do, even if she breaks the law and ends up in prison, even if
he fails at everything he attempts, this will not undermine their love for
their children, or their acceptance as part of the family. This is what we mean by unconditional love.
Notice, however, that this isn’t unconditional forgiveness. There are, and should be, consequences for
bad behavior, for failure. A son who
spends everything he has on gambling will still be loved, but will remain
responsible for his debts and won’t be trusted with money.
The masculine side, as always, has a parallel
structure. Let’s introduce the phrase
“unconditional truth.” What does it
mean? If I make a commitment, for
instance to meet someone at a particular time, and I fail to be there at that
time, then I have failed my commitment.
People try to mitigate the feeling of failure by making excuses: I
really tried, I was sick, it wasn’t my fault.
These may all be true, but they aren’t relevant to the truth of the failure. The truth is unconditional; you failed to do
what you said you would do. Even someone
who dies trying to get to a scheduled rendezvous still fails to meet their
commitment. Lack of fault does not mean
lack of responsibility. The party to
whom I made the commitment is let down, and it remains my responsibility.
As in the feminine case, the variability, the conditionality
shows up in the consequences. Failure
after genuine best efforts can usually be simply forgiven without
consequences. Failure due to lack of
discipline, lack of effort or lack of care is more serious and should result in
a loss of credibility. This variability,
this need for discretion, is why we have law courts to consider evidence. The judgment is (or should be) about truth;
was the crime committed or not?
Unconditional. The sentence,
however, takes into account mitigating circumstances – attitudes, efforts,
stresses, intentions, etc.
This unconditional responsibility as a masculine value is
why there is a tradition that the captain goes down with the ship. The foundering of the vessel may have nothing
to do with him, it may not be his fault even in the slightest, but it is his
responsibility because he had the ultimate authority. In these times when we have shamed most
things masculine as abusive, it is well to reflect on the beauty, the
selflessness of this masculine code of honor.
[1] The Law of Attraction is the belief that
outcomes such as personal success in the outer world depend entirely and solely
on one’s attitude and state of mind, that they are direct consequences of
subjective states.
[i] Peck,
M. Scott, People of the Lie: The Hope for
Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983, p. 267.
