MATING WITH A WOMAN is one thing; partnering with a woman is quite
another. One steady refrain from the men's chorus reminds us that our
balls will fall off if we come under the control of a woman. The choir
keeps singing music from Samson and Delilah, warning us that a woman can
shear us from our masculine glory and thus rob us of our strength. We
approach each woman as if she is our mother come to punish us for our
independence by taking away our puberty.
The average man feels fully masculine only if he can attract women,
thus granting women terrifying power. And not only must he win her, he
must also satisfy her. A woman can utterly deflate a man by refusing to
be aroused, or, if things get to that point, by refusing to be satisfied.
And a woman's anger terrifies men. It returns us to our childhood with
Mom.
I don't think it off the wall to speculate that most of the
problems between men and women are related to a man's panic in the face
of a woman's anger. A woman who misunderstands the male display of power
may assume the man is trying to dominate her because he does not respect
her enough. But a display of female anger, however justified, will only
frighten the man into a more garish hormonal display. In men whose male
chorus permits it, this might erupt as violence--the failing man's
last-ditch effort to show enough masculinity to drown out her
anger.
When we do marry, we play a new role, discovering the female
perspective and the limitations of being male. Are we able to partner
with someone whose views are different from our own and ultimately
achieve binocular vision-seeing life from both his and her perspectives?
Or do we choose to protect our maleness from her femaleness, playing our
male role to her female role, going through life obeying our militant
chorus?
Our macho chorus might not let us hear her wishes and desires: We
may ask our father, our clergyman, or all our friends how to deal with
marriage, but completely refuse to talk with the woman, our ostensible
partner. Protecting ourselves from her anger comes before learning how to
make her happy.
We've been taught that masculinity has little to do with being
married. Being a husband means more than the act of being macho. To be a
husband means "to take thrifty care of domestic affairs." Much of what
we've learned about being male involves escape from female control and
the civilizing influence of women so we could join the company of other
men out there in the wild.
Some of us, mostly those whose dads fathered well, can adapt to
marriage despite previous conditioning. Others, less fortunately
fathered, must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into marriage--and in
due time, into counseling. These guys have devoted their lives to
becoming men, despite their lack' of domestic models; now they are asked
to unlearn, and they're 4 scared. They have yet to learn that masculinity
and marriage are compatible.
WHAT WENT WRONG: A GENERATION WITHOUT FATHERSS How sad that men
should base an entire civilization on
the principle of paternity, upon the legal ownership and
presumed responsibility for children, and then never really
get to know their sons and daughters very well.
-- PHYLLIS CHESLER
WHEN LOOKING FOR ANSWERS as to how men got so messed up in regard
to their masculinity, it is easiest (and probably most logical) to cite
our society's bizarre attempt to raise our sons without fathers--or at
least without someone to serve as grown-up models for growing boys. After
three decades of working with men who can't live in comfort with women,
I'm increasingly convinced that the problem is not in the relationship
with the woman, or with the man's mother, or with society, but in the
boy's relationship with his father--or rather, its absense.
Boys know they' re supposed to grow up to be like their fathers,
and if Dad is there and the boy is malleable, he will become a man just
like his father. If the boy finds something in the father that doesn't
appeal to him, he may be able to correct it in himself. But most boys
nowadays are growing up with fathers who spend little, if any, time with
them. Ironically, when the boy most needs to practice being a man, his
father is off somewhere playing at being a boy.
Theories of human development keep assuming that fathers are there,
actually living in the same house with the rest of the family, performing
some useful functions, interacting emotionally with wife and children,
playing a role in a son's life, being a model for the boy. Such blissful
days, if they ever existed, have now passed, and fathers wield their
influence not by their presence, but by their absence. Instead of
real-life fathers, boys grow up with myths of fathers, while mothers,
whatever their relative significance out there in the world, reign
supreme at home and in the life of the boy.
If fathers have run out on mothers, in any of the many ways men use
to escape women, then boys can't imagine that their masculinity is
sufficient until they too run away from women and join the world of men.
The fathers may have used work, sports, war, other women, alcohol or
drugs, or whatever they could come up with to escape home; and their sons
would then equate masculinity with whatever they imagined their fathers
to be doing that was more important then being at home with their sons.
Boys who don't have fathers they know and love don't know how much
masculinity is enough.
Tags:
alarming numbers,
armed robbery,
boys team,
chants,
corporate takeovers,
exaggeration,
father,
girls team,
heavy doses,
jungles,
male chorus,
masculine mystique,
masculinity,
mating,
meaningless work,
men,
men masculinity,
mortal struggle,
primitive society,
Puberty,
saber toothed tigers,
testicles,
time and place,
trudge,
veneration
