Frank matters

Gives advice on various psychological problems. How a manic-depressive person could cope with a relationship; How a stepmother could reach out to her stepdaughter; Advice for a woman who wants sexual and romantic experiences before marrying; How to deal with one's homosexual tendencies.

By Frank Pittman, published on May 01, 1998

Once you realize that until recently men have been raised as cannon fodder, you can start experiencing your life and your emotions. Read novels (not the ones they sell at airports about conspiracies, hardware, and testosterone, and definitely not the heaving-bosom ones with Fabio on the cover). Also avoid autobiographies of great men. Read Jane Austen; Emma, Sense and Sensibility, or Pride and Prejudice will explain what women have to go through to maintain control of a man's world without showing their hand. The recent novel Cold Mountain may be almost as expansive as War and Peace in its emotional range and richly experienced men and women.

Go to movies about something other than car crashes and things exploding. See Out of Africa or The Piano, each about a woman on her own, the uses she has for a man who respects her, and her lack of respect for a man who thinks he owns her. Learn to cry at movies about women.

See movies about men's real lives, not their macho heroism. See Field of Dreams, a fantasy about the universal dilemma of men today: how to reconnect with absent fathers and how to reconcile the father's heroes and models with the son's heroes and models. Don't even try not to cry.

Our choice of books and movies is crucial since we guys need exercises in understanding and experiencing our own and others' emotional lives. We need to identify ourselves on the basis of our humanity rather than just our masculinity. And we can do it without sacrificing a single drop of testosterone. We don't give up masculinity as we feel the lives of others, we expand it and add to it in a positive, healthy way.

The changes in the expectations of men may cancel some of your expected privileges, but it gives you back your life and permits you to learn the other half of human experience that you didn't learn when you were being trained for suicidal masculinity. You've been granted a reprieve. Live!

ILLUSTRATION