Ongoing Process

It has recently come to my attention that I have a significant need to mend my relationship with men, with maleness itself.

But what is it to be male?  What makes a man other than having the interesting bits on the outside rather than the inside?

It seems there’s remarkably little consensus on this.  The gender studies people say it’s all socially constructed.  The scientists say that it’s biological.  The men’s movements say it’s pretty much whatever they feel like saying (though it usually seems to involve running around in the woods with other men, presumably being all manly).  The mythopoetic folks say that it’s [insert vague folklore reference here].

I took a class called "Mens’ Lives" that did its best to teach that there was no one definition of man, but it failed miserably.  It gave a wide variety of very different men in very different contexts doing the exact same thing: defining their identity by their capacity to hold power over others.  It was really quite sickening.  Of course, there is power.  Life is power.  And in any given situation featuring multiple humans, one is going to have more power than the other in some regard.  But is that really the core of what it means to be male?

I’ve just made very brief attempts to read Iron John by Robert Bly and Fire in the Belly by Sam Keen, which seem to be two of the leading books on the modern examination of masculinity.  I didn’t make it past the introduction in either of them.  Bizarrely, the very first thing they both did was declare that the first step in really understanding maleness was to remove it entirely from the context of femaleness.  As if the idea of "male" could even possess meaning without the idea of "female", much less that men could physically exist without women.  These guys seriously need some 101 in the co-creation of opposites.  They both also managed to make a number of comments that lead me to believe they had no real understanding of the social relationship between men and women; feminists these men are not.

I think about the principle of Yang, which is heavily associated with maleness: light, ascending, expressive, active, warm, dry, external, etc.  But none of these things feel meaningful to me in regard to gender.

I find I am completely baffled by maleness, yet I feel a dire need to create a connection to male energy.  I am assured by my female friends that real manliness is completely unrelated to beer, football, crude jokes, aggression, violence, and an emotional vacuum.  But they can’t seem to tell me what it’s actually about.  The ones I know who are into men generally list "feminine" qualities when they talk about the men they love: gentleness, kindness, passion, sensitivity, etc.

Yet somehow men are fundamentally different than women (the gender studies people may now leave the room, thanks).  They think different, they experience different, they express different, they process different, they value different.  I feel like I kind of understand women.  Their mode is totally outside of my own experience, but I kind of get them.  But men are a complete mystery to me.

The trouble is, I’m a man.  And I get me.  But what I see in me seems to bear no resemblance whatsoever to what I see in the typical male.  Of course, what I see in my female friends bears little resemblance to what I see in the typical female.  Maybe I just need to meet non-typical men.  But then, what I’m trying to get at is maleness.  Will I find it by looking to the "least manly" men I can find?

I guess I’ll have to let this one percolate a while longer.