Menletter

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August 2004 Number 29

In this issue:

· Not an Elevator Speech

· Men at the Movies (New Feature)

· Bits and Pieces

Not an Elevator Speech

"Elevator speech" - a short speech, usually lasting from fifteen seconds to a couple of minutes (long enough for an elevator ride), in which you tell the essential points about a topic. The topic is usually about yourself, a product you're selling, or a cause you are espousing. Elevator speeches are typically used in sales, business networking, and the like.

Sing for your supper?

My wife and I were out to dinner with an old friend of my wife, and her companion. It was a soft midsummer evening, the food was superb, and we were eating outside on a tiny patio at the back of the restaurant. It was a perfect setting for relaxation and lively conversation.

One of the areas our wide-ranging conversation wandered into was the benefits I had gotten out of attending men's gatherings and retreats, and doing other kinds of men-oriented work, including this newsletter. My wife's friend listened intently, asking questions. Then she dropped the big one:

"How exactly would you define 'men's work'?"

There was a long, long pause. I feel like I've been doing some kind of men's work for over a dozen years and very actively for the last six years. I'm also aware that the term "men's work" can encompass many different kinds of activity, not all of which I take part in. But I was having trouble even coming up with a suitable elevator speech describing my own work.

How would you do with such an elevator speech, on men's work or on any other topic you're deeply involved in? Have you thought about it enough to have a ready answer, or would you be stammering and hemming and hawing as I was?

We chatted for a while as I answered questions and talked about the kind of men's work I do and some other kinds of men's work I'm familiar with. But it occurred to me that the question deserved a more thoroughly thought-out answer - maybe too long for an elevator ride, but at least one based on more than off-the-cuff dinner table conversation.

Here's what I've come up with, based on personal experience and observation. I've identified four categories of men's work: Inner work, Ritual work, Outer or outreach work, and Social advocacy. Some men may do all their men's work in just one or two categories. But I think it's more typical for the areas to overlap and intertwine.

Inner work

Many men do much of their work as interior explorations into inner spaces - their souls if they believe in a soul, or just their essential being. They may undertake a meditation practice, keep a journal, write poetry, or engage in some other kind of solitary spiritual or artistic work. They may be part of a group or have a teacher, but the bulk of the work is done alone.

Although the work can be generally spiritual or "inner," there's often an element of exploration specifically into what it means to be a man: What is my essential nature as a man? How do I relate to the world as a man? What is masculinity? Do I have a "feminine" side?

Ritual work

Inner work often leads to life changes, some of them dramatic. Ritual work is also about change, but within a community of men.

When the mythopoetic movement got underway a quarter century ago (or so), one emphasis was on ritual. Ritual work continues today, often in the form of men's gatherings or retreats. Men gather for a weekend or a week and share such activities as drumming, story-telling, sweat lodges, breathwork, and so on. Individual changes, often accompanied by strong emotions, take place, but usually in the context of a sacred ritual space.

Ritual space is a psychic container carefully built, often by experienced leaders, as both a physical location and a community of sharing. This space is necessary for men to feel that their emotions are being shared in a safe community beyond the reach of ridicule and shame.

Other forms of men-focused ritual work, both mythopoetic and otherwise, include men's groups, drumming circles, church-based groups, poetry groups, and so on. One very important gateway into ritual work is Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. Many men seem to have come into mythopoetic ritual work along this avenue.

Outer or outreach work

Some men are committed to reaching out to other men, to encourage them to engage in the inner or ritual work that has benefited them and their friends. This kind of work is quite varied and includes prison visiting, leading retreats, writing newsletters and maintaining Web sites, authoring books, hosting radio shows, and so on. The work may be strictly non-commercial (such as this newsletter, the superb men's Web site at www.themenscenter.com, or the Web sites maintained by volunteers for various men's groups and men's gatherings). The work may be supported by advertising, such as Glenn Sacks's radio show and many other men's Web sites. Many books on men's issues are authored by psychologists working with men (Allan Chinen, Aaron Kipnis, Michael Gurian), leaders of the men's movement (Robert Bly, Michael Meade), or men's advocates (Warren Farrell, Jack Kammer).

See the Resources links for Web sites about men's gatherings, psychologists, and men's movement leaders.

Social advocacy

Advocates of men's issues work in particular areas in which men's lives are challenged simply because they are men. These areas include divorce, custody and visitation rights, false accusations of abuse, prison rape, domestic violence against men and boys, men's health, educational discrimination against boys, circumcision, depiction of men in the media, and so on.

Interactions

As I mentioned earlier, these areas often overlap and intertwine. A man may begin attending ritual men's groups or retreats and be motivated to work on his inner life. A man may reach a personal crisis, begin to work on his inner life, and then join a men's group. A man may undergo a nasty divorce and join an advocacy group. If I haven't described your situation, it's because there are more possible combinations than I have time or space for.

A downside of all this variety may be the frustration or guilt that we can't be involved in all of the areas of men's work. This may be especially true of a man who has the time, energy, or inclination only for inner work; he may feel he's letting other men down. But even the inner work creates outer benefits. A man who lives more consciously and compassionately will benefit everyone around him.

Past essays on this site touch on some of the themes here: Men's Work and How To Start a Men's Group.

Finally, this

At the risk of this sounding like I'm putting forth a condescending "last but not least" acknowledgment, I want to recognize that much of what we call men's work is the dangerous, dirty, work performed mostly by men: firefighting, police patrol work, soldiering, construction, fishing, farming, lumberjacking, mining, roofing, and the like.

This is all work in what Warren Farrell has called the Glass Cellar (http://www.warrenfarrell.com/articles/editorial2.htm). If we men in safer jobs have the luxury of doing inner work, ritual work, outreach, and advocacy, it is at least in part because other men are working down in the cellar keeping us safe and our society's infrastructure going. We forget this at our peril.

New: Men at the Movies

Solaris (2002)

This is an occasional column about movies. Outside submissions are welcome. Focus is on movies that address such men's interests as mentoring, fatherhood, careers, psychology, spirituality, yearnings for connection, etc.

In the 2002 remake of Solaris, George Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a recently widowed psychiatrist who is sent to investigate some weird goings-on on a space station orbiting the far-away planet Solaris. He goes there to help and possibly rescue a close friend, Gibarian, who is on the space station and has sent an urgent S.O.S.

Solaris is being assayed as a potential source of minerals. It has, apparently, no life forms on it.

Once on the space station, Kelvin discovers that several of the occupants of the station have died, apparent suicides (including Gibarian). Only three people survive: Snow, a twitchy young man who can't seem to speak in complete sentences; Gordon, a woman who at first refuses to leave her room; and a little boy, apparently Gibarian's son. Snow seems on the verge of madness. Gordon is scared out of her wits, and the little boy wanders the space station and stays just out of reach.

Snow acknowledges that something bizarre is happening and admonishes Kelvin not to sleep.

Kelvin, in his own quarters, succumbs to exhaustion and has vivid dreams about his dead wife, Rheya. When he awakens, Rheya is in the room, completely alive. Confused and scared, convinced she is some kind of apparition, Kelvin lures her into a shuttle pod and sends her off into space.

She rematerializes the next day.

The rest of the movies is taken up with a few big questions: who and what is real; how to get off the space station; what is the exact nature of Rheya.

It turns out that Solaris is not a planet but a living being capable of reading the minds of the earthlings circling it in the space station. Solaris has manufactured Rheya, Gibarian's little boy, and some unspecified monster in Gordon's room out of their own thoughts and memories. And here's where the philosophical underpinnings of the movie get really interesting.

Rheya is an amalgam of every experience, memory, emotion, and thought Kelvin has ever had about her. Her looks, manner of speaking, movements, even her emotions are projections from his own imagination. But there's more. This creature also seems to have a mind of her own. She is distressed that her memories seem to be incomplete. She is even more distressed by his guilt surrounding the original Rheya's suicide. And she is falling in love with Kelvin, apparently independent of the fact that she's a manifestation of his imagination.

But fundamentally, this flesh-and-blood (?), nearly very real creature is Kelvin's projection.

What of his original wife? Was she not also a kind of projection? Yes, she was a distinct human being, but Kelvin's experience of her had been a product of his own perceptions, memories, emotions, and thoughts. The wife he knew was, in some important way, every bit as much a manufactured artifact as the Solaris-generated Rheya.

And that's the point. All of our realities are projections from within. Yes, there is a physical world that exists outside of us. But we never, or almost never, experience it directly. But our minds have a way of convincing us that our projections are identical to some ultimate, physical reality.

It's easy enough to talk about and write about our experiencing life as a series of projections removed from some ultimate reality. Mystics and shamans have probably been doing it ever since humans have been able to express their thoughts. We have Plato's cave; St. Paul's dark mirror; the teachings of the Buddha about self and non-self, existence and emptiness; and many others. Most of us get only glimpses and hints that our realities are of our own manufacture - and then we tend to intellectualize them into a "that's interesting" kind of triviality.

Stories such as Solaris are useful in helping us experience the ambivalence and uneasiness of seeing both worlds at once, or at least being face to face with some aspect of our projections. Kelvin and Rheya ("real"? Solarian?) end up together (on Earth? on Solaris?), knowing they will never part.

What is real? What is projection? Does it matter?

Yes. And no.

Bits and Pieces

National Men's Rights Congress

The National Men's Rights Congress took place in Washington, D.C., on June 18 - 19 of this year. A full report, called "Men and Boys Deserve Better," is posted at

http://www.mensrights2004.com/booklet/ - Men's%20Health. The report is short and pithy, but it covers many issues - health, circumcision, education of boys, Selective Service, paternity fraud, and so on.

Testosterone Poisoning

We know the stereotype - any man acting aggressively or even assertively is supposed to somehow be suffering from testosterone poisoning. Unless there's truly been an overdose of testosterone from a medicinal or illicit source, it's hard to imagine our bodies poisoning themselves. But many people, especially women, seem to accept the "poisoning" idea as gospel.

A few years ago an Indian Web site posted this story on testosterone poisoning from a more realistic standpoint: http://www.mansworldindia.com/mantoman/testos.htm. Well worth reading. In fact, the whole site provides another view of men and men's issues - some very familiar to men in the US and some perhaps unique to India (or at least the Indian upper class).