Wild At Heart, Part Dos

Madame M,

Well, the salsa dog was an extremely rare indulgence, if you were readying the nutritional flail. :)

This culture is indeed increasingly hostile to men’s manhood, and Eldredge does deserve credit for laying out his struggles in plain sight.

It is welcome to hear/read a female freely admit a feminine tendency to control, manage, and manipulate, for too many men think that, yet such is their apprehension (and maybe fear) of the females in their lives, that they rarely say it themselves (and certainly not where females can hear). And Eldredge probably gets (or would get, if they knew) a shout out from a lot of men for his attempt to unleash chained and often belittled manhood.

American males particularly, in our individualistic culture (and one socially dominated in large part by females), can often feel isolated and true friendless all too easily. What both Eldredge and the book The Friendless American Male describe is a feeling all too common: “I do not belong, I am wanted by no one, I am alone.” I understand that there are nowhere near enough men around with time to show other men, especially younger men, how to be men. We really are a nation of Unfinished Men. Little masculine initiation. Little father instruction. I think he’s spot-right in that regard.

Eldredge does do a nice summary of the Return to Masculinity movement. Quoting Robert Bly is particularly instructive. And no doubt about it: Although I wouldn’t say it is absolutely universal across the board (as he does), the father wound is cross-cultural. Ever read The Kite Runner?

In trying to evaluate my own situation, I don’t think I’ve ever doubted my masculinity or my gender orientation. I’ve never been afraid of embracing the yin in me either, however. So maybe I’m not a good appraiser of the battles many males fight. If my father wounded me, which he did a bit I suppose, I forgave him. For some reason (perhaps it was gift from Providence), I always had an innate sense of transcending my father’s limitations and failings. Sure, I got mad when I was younger, but by my twenties, I felt sorry for the hard life he had and what it made him, and I held no grudges and only a few disappointments about him. He did the best he could with the half-crappy hand he found himself dealt.

Now, some of me is my father, I certainly agree, and for the most part I am glad about those parts. But other parts of me have no seeming source. I have learned in this life that there are exceptions to many rules of thumb, including the rule of thumb that you learn all of what it is to be male from the males around you. I have always felt different enough from those around me to know I would in more than small measure be charting my own way (or maybe I have been assisted by unseen or unfelt guides). When my dad and I disagreed intensely, or I saw his hurtful failings, I did not hate him for it; I instead saw his own humanity, his own hard childhood and adulthood, the things that shaped him to be that way. It would be falsely modest to deny I was fortunate to have received a gift of discernment at an early age. (Or maybe I only thought I did, and have been living in self-delusion ever since, lol).

I understand Eldredge’s writings about anger. That we men are not valiant and dangerous like we want to be, but often only filled with anger, lust, and fear. I have some issues with his interpretations about lust that I will maybe discuss later, but as for the anger, for a part of my life I was angry like that much of the time and didn’t know why. Yes, like “hurt by someone we loved or lost something very dear,” but there was more too. Some missing piece, something deeply unfulfilled. Like when I would walk out of a James Bond movie and feel like I should be doing something adventurous too, should be BEING more, but then just head back to a “normal” life, and it would feel not quite right to do that, to live just that way. It would unleash a lot of feelings about how maybe the world was jamming me painfully into a box, or I was living a page from some book that wasn’t mine, or something like that, and it would make me so angry. It was an anger I couldn’t really articulate either, and that only made me angrier because I couldn’t fully make sense of it. The females around me only made it worse by saying, “You aren’t being realistic, you are a father, what’s wrong with you, maybe you need anger management counseling,” and on and on. The few times I tried to talk to males about it, I got only silence, or a repeat of the same things the females said. I tried to tell myself that my discomfort was maybe only wistfulness at not fully self-actualizing, but I knew that wasn’t the full story. It was a lot like Eldredge describes.

I also agree with him about the excessive fear of risk. The constant “what if? what if?,” with all of the hyperventilating and sweating, doesn’t serve us well. But the fear of it all falling apart, of the world piercing our constructed semi-illusion? That applies to far too many of us males.