How do I write about the experience of having been a boy, a man and now an elder?
Seriously? Flippantly? With what intention of what outcome? Be gentle? Be harsh? Be honest? Any and /or all of these things maybe?
Or, with an aim for a perspective that is based around the understanding that the patriarchal cultural background leaves us few options as men to fully live who we are, what we are or how we might make choices based on meeting our own needs while recognising how these choices impact on others around us and the planet as a whole.
Hash tag, I get the privilege and ease with which my gender and colour and access to the comforts of rich world gives me.
My response ability may be warped by external influence, meanwhile my responsibility for making an effort to challenge and change systems and my own behaviours still exists and needs my attention.
It feels really important to me that we as a species move towards an understanding of how we might better manage the struggles we so obviously have now with this gender inequality, this mess, damage and limiting social, emotional, physical, intimate and financial, political… grittyness… and all that extractive and dominance nonsense these inequalities produce.
The discomfort I feel as whatever I write about being a man, manliness, masculinity… that aims to open up discussion and understanding… and that openness lands in me surrounded by the imagined critical voices that offer only more of the weight I carry around with me in the confusion that is ancestrally embedded via generations of hurt and pain and privilege and greed and fear and loathing… while along side me in this land mine peppered dangerous field… I also carry the warmth and ease and love with which I have formed many valuable life affirming relationships with so many people who do not necessarily identify as boys or men and some who do.
This is what landed this morning that set me off to jump into the troubled world of gender politics again today. It’s not a clarity thing, more like something glimpsed in a woods that is immersed in a spring mist… and the word that was dancing about there, vague but visible… was normal… as in a normal boy, normal man, normal girl, normal woman, normal old person.
I had picked up the book Normal People by Sally Rooney from my book shelf the other day and it has been sitting on a small table next to my writing chair in my front room for a few days. It looks old now and I remember reading it a few years ago, it still offers me thoughts and feelings that swim within me around being a boy and working my way through those early school adventures with liking someone without understanding why and wanting to get naked with them.
The boy, young adult, Connell, always brings me to thinking about how important it was to be a boy ( a normal one ) in school and my need to be part of the boy group, the gang, the crew, a boy who both needed to be part of that and at the same time recognised how this limited me in terms of what my heart and body and soul was nudging me towards acknowledging, owning and being with.
I needed something, someone, I wanted that connection, that comfort and that excitement that I could not find on the football pitch or in the company of only my boy gang friends. I needed to be soft and honest and open with someone and wanted to offer them what they needed too.
That marked me as needy, and needy was a slur thrown at girls and women by boys and men, according to them, us, being needy, having a need for closeness and mutual understanding… and sharing that, as a boy, to a boy, was seen as a weakness, and weakness was not for us, that was for others, less important than us others.
That is what I saw Connell dealing with in that novel. There was much more alongside this, and this is whats there for me today though.
That paradox around I need to be loved and cannot show or share that, despite the rainforest bird style strutting and simian chest thumping that we seemed unable to resist… drove me towards insanity… drugs and drink and generous women helped sooth that cliff edge… and I am well aware that drugs and drink are never there as long term medicine… and to treat those women as my rehab was not a fair expectation.
Wow, I am now picking up this voice;
” Just say that it is not easy to be a boy in school; and navigate the tricky and ridiculous and seemingly essential balancing act of fitting in, getting what you need from fitting in and opening to an emotional intensity that draws you away from fitting in, and marks you as not fucking normal.”
And that voice met with this one;
” Are you fucking kidding mate, just dive in and shoot yourself in the balls why don’t you, if you want to own up to being an over sensitive, self obsessed, up yourself… and needy prick, just ponce about in a frock, purse your lips and pout and get on with it mate, we don’t give a fuck and always knew you were weird anyways…”
There is something of the confusion that Connell holds when he has got intimately and emotionally involved with Marianne and stays quiet, saying nothing when his boy group publicly make fun of Marianne in front of him, dismissing her as a not proper girl and putting her down.
Something of the pull between maintaining credibility with his boy gang while being almost overwhelmed by the deep feelings of love and care and connection to Marianne… that brings me to this core struggle that we have in the identity of being a normal boy/man.
What am I asking for here? A get out of jail card for having made all those noises and postures around claiming my rightful position as a proper boy/man while some of that meant I let down and disrespected others who were important to me, ending up in them feeling hurt and diminished and losing trust in my capacity for the honesty they might rightfully expect.
Yeah, maybe not the get out of jail bit, rather the acknowledgement that growing up as a boy and becoming a young adult in the cultural conditioning that we go through daily… leaves so many of us damaged to the extent that we struggle to recognise, own and be comfortable with our confusion and from there never dare to reach out for better ways of being while taking whatever flack and shit this might bring us from those who are way too scared to even consider letting go of the chains that seem to restrict them while also offering them a certainty that although it doesn’t exist, feels for the moment, like security.
I started by asking the question how do I write about the experience of being a boy, a man, an elder. And from this… what feels a bit too ranty to me and a bit too begging for forgiveness and understanding… I have arrived somewhere, loosely described as a way forwards that relies upon being able to sit with each other and share what we get from clinging onto this current cruel and no-one wins male dominated system and what we lose from letting go of that… then describing how we may gain from a future for ourselves and our children and our communities if there were no limits upon our belief in the possibility of a less difficult, more caring, life for all on this giving planet.
Or, can we find ways to dare to share how we might plan for the coming millennia positively and thereby not to be immersed in the same violence and injustice of this last thousand years. Because although I see that being done in lots of small groups and communities allover the planet, I don’t see it being actioned among most of those who purport to lead us all.
And in terms of being an impressive man, and from wanting to say that I hope some of this might be useful for you and spark you with energy and hope and boost your determination to call for a better world, the truth may lie more in this writing experiment this morning leaves me feeling less unsettled than I was a few hours ago when I woke to the morning news… and that is enough.
Not asking for forgiveness… just trusting myself to be as honest as possible today, and trusting you to know you could have stopped reading after the first couple of lines… ooh does that feel like a classic man thing passive aggressive dumping off of responsibility?
Genuine love and respect to you and yours regardless, Mark T.