What Kind of Man Are You?

From Menletter June 2008

By Tim Baehr

The question in the title is more than a Ray Charles classic, a superficial quiz in a magazine, or a bad line spoken by an overbearing wife in a 1940s B movie. It's a serious, man-to-man (or self-to-self) question.

We love to categorize things, sometimes making the categories more important and real than the members of the categories. That's a danger. But categories are also a useful way of thinking about things.

Here are some ways of thinking about men, about ourselves. As you might expect, the categories overlap to a greater or lesser extent.

Victims

I'm going to start here partly just to get it out of the way. It may be one of the smaller categories, but one about which a lot has already been said and written. You're probably aware of most types of male victims, even if you don't quite fit into the group.

Men can be victims simply because we're men. A few examples:

● Rape in prison

● Unfair divorce and custody laws, or applications of them by clueless judges

● Unfounded accusations of ex-spouses (abuse, child abuse)

● Membership in the "death professions" - soldiering, police work, firefighting, lumbering, farming, and so on - with high rates of accidental injury or death

● Shorter lifespan in general than women

● Prostate cancer, which hits almost 17 percent of us, kills 3 percent of us. Publicity and research dollars lag far behind those for breast cancer, with similar statistics.

● General ridicule and disregard in media and advertising

● Oh - and if you're black it's even worse.

The women's movement also identified a lot of victims, but it had an easily identified enemy: males in power, and eventually (for some women) any human with one or more testicles. We don't have things that simple. Male victims can blame individual women, or women in general, for just a few of our ills. The rest of the perpetrators are other men (males in power, again), general societal expectations we've bought into, or ourselves (making bad choices about our safety or health). Maybe that's why there was no successful men's movement.

Grievance Carriers

Some male victims, along with people sympathetic to them, have carried men's grievances into public awareness. Warren Farrell may be one of the more recognizable examples, along with Rich Zubaty, Sam Keen, Jack Kammer, William Pollack, and many others. Some women have also become advocates of men (and victims in their own right of their angry sisters): Susan Faludi, Cathy Young, Norah Vincent, and Christina Hoff-Sommers, to name a few.

These people's writings are full of statistics and anecdotes, and sometimes proposals and potential remedies. I'm not sure their collective effect has been much more than to increase our overall sense of grievance, even among those of us who are not "victims," although some individual men may have been motivated into making changes in the conditions of their lives.

Victims and grievance carriers are reactive, having experienced or seen inequities and sometimes having set about to remedy them. I have to confess that the tone of Menletter has at times been one of grievance - a reactive position I'm less and less comfortable with.

A more proactive approach has been taken by men stumbling along the path to masculinity. But first I need to address the largest group.

Silent Majority

The silent majority of us men is the largest and most varied group. It consists of a portion of the male oligarchy that profits from exploitation of both men and women; a huge bunch of men who don't see or don't care to see ourselves as disadvantaged; and some men who are jaded or have given up the fight. This group must be a huge challenge and frustration for the grievance carriers trying to raise male consciousness. (I imagine the leaders of the early women's movement felt the same frustration trying to move millions of housewives out of their [male-induced?] numbness and complacency.)

We can deride some of the silent majority as Joe Sixpacks, sleepwalking through their lives with no concern for a larger picture. Or we can recognize that many of us men simply feel lucky to get from paycheck to paycheck, provide for ourselves and our families, and worry more about gas prices, war, rent, food costs, and heating oil than about whether we're fulfilled as men. We're silent not because we have nothing to say, but because we're too busy coping.

Men Stumbling Along the Path

Some of us, perhaps in quiet reflective moments, or perhaps from reading or hearing about other men doing "inner work," have wondered if coping is enough, if carrying grievances is enough, if recognizing our shared victimhood is enough. We begin to suspect that there's a larger man inside us, a man connected with places deeper and broader than work, home, and the commute in between.

Two decades or so ago, some men had these same suspicions and began to dig around. The discovered poetry, mythology, and something they called the deep masculine. And they began to organize men's retreats and write books. Most of these men are still active in promoting the discoveries they made: the poet Robert Bly, the mythologist and story-teller Michael Meade, and the psychologist James Hillman. Those days carried the promise, at least, of a new movement, a men's movement, based on mythopoetic studies and notions of the "wild man" within us all. For a while, we were led to see the damage done to us by women and by our absent or abusive fathers. I remember being among the angry and confused men, seeing our fathers as ogres or irrelevant ciphers, wondering (as soft, suburban white men with desk jobs) what the hell a wild man really was, and trying to find out by playing Native American in the woods and devouring poetry and folk tales. I think some of us suffered a little spiritual whiplash as we found something positive to aspire to while we were still being reactive grievance carriers.

We may have been stumbling along a path with no clear destination, but at least we were moving, and we were on a path. As the path became more experiential - with participatory men's retreats, more life experience, and less sitting around listening to gurus - some of us discovered for ourselves what we had been told: The real demons in our lives came from within. By going deep into our pain and wounds and using our physical or emotional scars as marks of initiation, we healed our relationships with our fathers, enhanced our marriages, and found a wellspring of compassion. The inner work began to bear fruit in the outer aspects of our lives.

Complete Men

I know of a few men who have the feel, for me, of complete men. They are not immensely successful materially, or even spiritually. But they have a certain natural wildness about them. It's as if they've lived the myths that the rest of us have only read about. These men still fall into pits, like any wild animal or mythological hero, pits of failed relationships, pits of temporary failures, pits of despair. But they keep on working, keep looking for allies, keep on keeping on. They are complete in their incompleteness. And I love being around them.

And another thing about being complete: These men have been all of us - victim, grievance carrier, silent majority, stumbler, man. They've been through the tough stuff, and their stories make them the elders in the community of men.

We're All Together

In any of the multiple facets of our lives, we can be all or any of the categorical types: victim, grievance carrier, silent majority, stumbler, or complete man. It would be folly to look down on a man showing qualities of any category. We can't know what time and life will do for a man, or what may be going on inside him that nobody - not even the man himself - is aware of. Maybe it's best to see all men as stumbling along a path toward complete manhood. We may need to follow some of them, lead some of them, or just go shoulder to shoulder with each other.