Men's Work - Not for Wimps?

From Menletter July 2004

By Tim Baehr

Finding Emo

I've noted in the past that a lot of male initiation seems to take place in mid-life, when we get fed up enough with the way life isn't working out, when we're tired of the numb spots covering the wounds in our psyches and begin to poke at them. If we can re-open the wounds in ritual space, they can be come the wounds that mark our initiation into manhood.

I got a communication recently from a younger man, Jason, who has attended the Men's Wisdom Council for the first time. The Council is an annual week-long retreat for men, held in June in Rowe, Massachusetts. It allows men to explore, as deeply as they want to or need to, what it means to be a man, where they need to go on their journeys, and so on. The age range is from twenty to eighty, but the great majority of men seem to be in their middle years - say, 35 to 55 or so.

How does a younger man do men's work? Here's some of what Jason had to say:

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I had a blast as a first-timer [at Wisdom Council]. No doubt about it. But I'm still procrastinating going over my notes and really dealing with old habits. Nonetheless, change is afoot. When I got home to my girlfriend, Karen, she'd just gotten her quarterly issue of "Bust" magazine (a hip rag for twenty-something ladies). On the cover were the words, "Is your man a Wimpster?"

Oh shit, she's on to me! I snatched up the zine and read the article, and surprisingly, it was about a very particular trend among guys from the dawn of the slacker to the present. If you met me at Rowe and wished there were more young guys doing men's work, you're likely inviting a "wimpster" or two into the fold. Others in my age-range would describe wimpsters as emo-kids and Robert Bly fans would call them modern day self-hating "soft-men." They abhor machismo, but bear hostility toward women. I'll link the article below because you should know how many young men are dealing with (or not dealing with) their masculinity and how these two fed-up ladies are

responding with this article. In my opinion, this article is significant and provocative and could inspire young women everywhere to demand that their arrested development boys become men. For the record, this may apply to same-sex couples, but the wimpster boy generally preys on women.

Although I ended up identifying with a couple traits of the wimpster and hope to keep working on myself in those areas, I generally don't appreciate this kind of guy. They're too cool, aloof and smug. I asked Karen for her thoughts. She's had frustrating dating experiences with wimpsters and says I'm nearly the opposite of them. Reverse psychology, no doubt, from my very crafty lady. But anyhow, I wanted to share this article with you all to keep the dialog going about the feminine and the masculine. The article is both accurate, insightful, and challenging, while being cartoonish, simplistic and insensitive. So learn what is worth learning and holla back with your thoughts. For the record, . . . I think [the Wisdom Council] challenge[s] each of us to achieve a healthier balance than this wimpster breed of young men who're coming up (and often persist for decades).

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Here's the link Jason mentioned: Meet the Whimpster: Manipulative Asshole in Sensitive Guy's Clothing: http://www.blacktable.com/elder040212.htm.

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Jason (and Rachel Elder, who wrote the original Whimpster piece) provide a window into a world I wasn't familiar with. Oh, wait. If I take away the twenty-something jargon and gloss over cultural references I don't get (who is Conor Oberst?), I can see a piece of the world I used to inhabit (and perhaps still do in some - I hope - minor ways).

Side comments from my 18-year-old son: Elder's just another goddamn feminist with an ax to grind. Real emos are just guys heavy into teenage angst, sitting in a corner crying into their sweaters, with no malicious intent. In three words: emo kids suck. Some girls need emos because they're nurturers who get off on bottom-feeders. Problem is girls who are pitiers.

Further communications from Jason, and my informal research (how did we ever survive without the Internet?) indicate that emo kids had their origin in punk rock. There's a particular style of dressing (I'd call it nouveau geek), a certain androgyny, and a definite anti-macho bias. Non-emo kids who are their contemporaries find them irritating at best.

Jason's warnings about encountering emo-kids (or over-age emo-kids) in men's work may be prophetic. Actually, I'm looking forward to it. We older (or more experienced) men will be able to model for these young men what the deeper masculine is about. Machismo may be out; but assertiveness, raunchiness, humor, and deep loyalty are in. Women are never the victims of men who truly claim their masculinity.