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Women workers find that leaving the isolation of the home and working in a communal setting enhances their emotional well-being, even when wages are low and in no way liberating (as some feminist thinkers naïvely suggested they might be).
they consistently ignore the degree to which consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.
Feminist movement was from the outset presented to most males via mass media as antimale. Truthfully, there was a serious antimale faction in contemporary feminist movement. And even though the man-hating women were a small minority of women’s libbers, they received the most attention.
enlightened feminist activists saw that men were not the problem, that the problem was patriarchy, sexism, and male domination.”
feminist vision that embraces feminist masculinity, that loves boys and men and demands on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and women, can renew men in our society.
Teachers of children see gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls—for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.
To offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings.
Feminist masculinity presupposes that it is enough for males to be to have value, that they do not have to “do,” to “perform,” to be affirmed and loved. Rather than defining strength as “power over,” feminist masculinity defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self and others. This strength is a trait males and females need to possess.
A Masai wise man, when asked by Terrence Real to name the traits of a good warrior, replied, “I refuse to tell you what makes a good morani [warrior]. But I will tell you what makes a great morani. When the moment calls for fierceness, a good morani is very ferocious. And when the moment calls for kindness, a good morani is utterly tender. Now, what makes a great morani is knowing which moment is which.”
“As anybody who works with the elderly will tell you, when octogenarians utter their dying words, it’s ‘Mama’ the men call for, never ‘Daddy.’ These men may not even be calling out for an actual mother but for the symbolic mama who stands for nurturance, care, connectedness, whose loving presence lets us know we are not alone.”
Men’s continued allegiance to a notion of masculinity that could no longer be fully realized on the old terms led them to place greater emphasis on their ability to dominate and control by physical force and abusive psychological terrorism.
No other contemporary film exposes the evil of patriarchy as masterfully as Monster’s Ball.
Poet and farmer Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture suggests that “if we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as ‘manly,’ men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is the deepest connection with the communion of all creatures.” Many men in our society have no status, no privilege; they receive no freely given compensation, no perks with capitalist patriarchy. For these men domination of women
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I have been stunned when individual males would confess to sharing intense feelings with a male buddy, only to have that buddy either interrupt to silence the sharing, offer no response, or distance himself.
Sadly, we have all colluded with the patriarchy by faking it with men, pretending levels of intimacy and closeness we do not feel. We tell men we love them when we feel we have absolutely no clue as to who they really are. We tell fathers we love them when we are terrified to share our perceptions of them, our fear that if we disagree, we will be cast out, excommunicated.
This early experience resides at the heart of many a man’s fear of being intimate with a grown woman. And it may explain why so many men in patriarchal culture seek intimacy with girls or women young enough to be their daughters.
Women are not inherently more loving than men; women may give care and still be emotionally abusive.
When the hearts of men are full of compassion and open to love, then, as the Dalai Lama states, “there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma, for our own heart, our own mind, is the temple and the doctrine is compassion.”
He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male.
According to Bradshaw they learn that “relationships are based on power, control, secrecy, fear, shame, isolation, and distance.” These are the traits often admired in the patriarchal adult man.
Rabbi Harold Kushner offers this clear definition: “Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so that there is no longer a split in the soul.”
M. Scott Peck discusses the root meaning of the term “integrity,” which is the verb “to integrate,” emphasizing that this is the opposite of compartmentalization. “Individuals without integrity naturally compartmentalize.
To practice integrity, then, is difficult; it hurts. Peck makes the crucial point: “Integrity is painful. But without it there can be no wholeness.” To be whole men must practice integrity.
Integrity is needed for healthy self-esteem. Most males have low self-esteem because they are constantly lying and dissimulating (taking on false appearances) in order to perform the sexist male role.
Workaholism is the most common addiction in men because it is usually rewarded and not taken seriously as detrimental to their emotional well-being.
Workaholism is a deep sleep. It is a self-induced trance that temporarily keeps painful emotions away from your awareness.”
One dimension of feminist movement that did have a profound impact on men was its insistence that women had the right to critique men both collectively and individually.
Unlike happiness, joy is a lasting state that can be sustained even when everything is not the way we want it to be.
It is a resistance against all kinds of things that are like war. Because living in modern society, one feels that he cannot easily retain integrity, wholeness. One is robbed permanently of humanness, the capacity of being oneself…. So perhaps, first of all, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted, and destroyed by the system. The
if rigid gender roles are not imposed on boys, they will make their decisions about selfhood in relation to their passions, their longings, their gifts.
real love—not the emotional exchange of I will give you what you want if you give me what I want, but genuine care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust—it
naturally are wisely cautious about the energy that they can expend in the service of helping men heal.
