Thread by @RemakingManhood

THREAD: Men and trauma
For this generation of men, there will be no quick or easy way forward. It will take generations for us to free ourselves from what was done to us, by us, for us, and through us in the name of traditional American masculinity. /1

How American men perform manhood is killing us and those we love. Our mothers, wives, daughters, our sons, our fathers and our friends are all paying a terrible price. Which is why this conversation about manhood has to happen. /2

If we can not do this for ourselves, straddling what was and what is to come, uncertain of simple moral imperatives, angry and defensive, then we must do this for those we love. /3

We must find the courage to shift our damaging man box culture for those close to us, for our children and grandchildren, who deserve to grow up in a world free of the brutal inequality that we, by our collective indecision, are maintaining. /4

Understand, I’m uncomfortable telling other men to step up. Our culture teaches us not to have this conversation. If you’re a man, you’re likely uncomfortable reading it. I can only offer you this. My condemnation of our culture of masculinity is NOT a condemnation of men... /5

...I do however, hold us responsible for our damaging culture of masculinity if we fail to create something better. /6

The history of the world is one in which men have been taught to leverage our authority over women. For my father’s generation, men didn’t learn to negotiate as equals in their personal relationships because they controlled the economic power in the family. /7

Men didn’t learn to deal with the daily uncertainty of not knowing because they were free to declare what and how things should be. While women know uncertainty intimately because they have spent lifetimes accommodating the whims of men. /8

Whether we use it or not, this legacy of privilege has been handed down to us. Accordingly, for many of us, developing our more nuanced relational capacities faltered or failed utterly, preempted by manhood’s blunt assertions of dominance. /9

When we attempt to navigate the complexities of equality in our romantic relationships with women, always behind the carrot lurks the stick of our power as men. It takes only the slightest bit of empathy to imagine the rage we'd feel where our positions with women reversed. /10

A cursory glance at the makeup of the U.S. Congress will verify that men continue to hold the levers of power in government. According to the CDC nearly one in five women report being raped. Almost a third of women experience physical violence inflicted by an intimate partner /11

Across the US and globally, men brutalize, and murder women with shocking ferocity. Presented with these easily verifiable facts, men’s defensive anger surges up from the disconnect between the privilege many of us continue to leverage and the calamity that is modern life. /12

While men continue to hold most of the power, many among us seek to place blame elsewhere for our increasingly dystopian world. Surely, this is someone else’s fault? Immigrants. Socialists. Feminists. /13

The wave of chronic trauma we are all confronting has taken generations to form and will take generations to spend itself, if it ever does. For all of us, every action we take either adds momentum to this wave or decreases its impact on the generations that will follow us. /14

And because women’s and even children’s voices are growing louder and more insistent, men are slowly coming to a painful realization. There is nowhere to hide from the collective trauma all around us. /15

Be it video of gunfire in our schools or cries of terrified children at our borders, our trauma is universal and ubiquitous. It is the air we breathe, it is the water we swim in; so universal as to be background noise, numbing us to the grislier realities of famine and war /16

We, as men, have the power to shift all of this. We are the impediment. If ignored, the chronic trauma we are allowing to continue will be the defining legacy we leave to our children and theirs. If ignored, it may well be the end of us all. /17

Male rage is rooted in the collective self-alienation and isolation that is part and parcel of our culture of manhood. /18

In her book “When Boys Become Boys,” Dr. Judy Chu of Stanford University documents how our sons are taught to hide their early capacity for being emotionally perceptive, articulate, and responsive. /19

Boys learn to align their behaviors with “the emotionally disconnected stereotype our culture projects onto them. Boys are taught to hide vulnerable emotions like sadness, fear, and pain, which imply weakness and are stereotypically associated with femininity,” Chu writes. /20

We say “don’t be a sissy” or “be a man” but the message is clear: Don’t be a woman, women are less. 4 year old boys are already being taught to reject the feminine constructing a version of themselves that integrates women’s second-class status into their masculine identities /21

This drumbeat condemnation of the feminine is the perfect trap, cementing in place the interlocking double bind of misogyny and self-alienation that is the man box. /22

The deep irony is that the men don’t feel empowered by male privilege. What they feel is trapped in silos of social and emotional isolation, trapped in an antiquated social contract that systematically cuts men off from deeper, more authentic human connection. /23

The health impact of chronic loneliness is much higher rates of diabetes, cancer, obesity, heart disease, and more. Our culture of masculinity strips away boys and men’s relational capacities, making it a major contributing factor to epidemic levels of loneliness in America. /24

At a time when boys should be expressing and constructing their identities in more diverse, grounded, and authentic ways, they are brutally conditioned to suppress authentic expression and instead cleave closely to the expression of male privilege as identity. /25

The result is men who are bullied and shamed into being half anti-women and half anti-self, suppressing the authentic expression of who they are, even as they compete to parade their male privilege. /26

As men, we are confronted with a choice. We can allow the policing of ourselves and others, driven by the trap of the man box, to continue, or we can start making space for more options, for a much more wide-ranging set of masculinities. /27

Change is happening. The old rules of manhood are giving way to much more fluid expressions of gender. Millions of fathers are choosing to be primary caregivers. Homophobia, long used to enforce the man box, is in decline among the younger generation. /28

But men must push harder for change. In order to end the generational man-box cycle of isolation and abuse, men must take everything we have been taught about gender and flip it on its head. /29

We must call on every relational skill we were taught to deny, previously degraded and wrongly gendered as feminine, including empathy, play, compassion, collaboration, connection, and that greatest of human challenges, bridging across difference. /30

Men, we can no longer cater to our discomfort, avoiding at all costs the challenging conversations required of us. We must do the work of connection and self-reflection, knowing all the while the global trauma we seek to address will not likely be resolved in our lifetimes. /31

We must learn to sit with the uncertainty created by this lack of closure. In a world where men have been trained to fix instead of host, repair instead of engage, we must learn to hold the challenging emotions of others, possibly for years. /32

We must understand the power we have when we listen. We must learn to sit with issues that will not be easily resolved and in doing so, perhaps, some day, resolve them. /33

Our self righteous male anger and rage, which is playing out in our personal lives as well as our national politics is not empowering. It is weak. It is fundamentally immoral. It is our lazy default when we are confronted or challenged by difference or change. /34

We heal in the back and forth of relating/connecting. We don’t heal in isolation, we heal in relationship. It can seem cruelly ironic for men to be asked to learn to connect after being brutally trained, all our lives, to disconnect, but the benefits of doing so are very real /35

When we learn to connect in the back and forth of sharing our stories, something remarkable happens. We’re not alone any more. We become family. We become community, and any of us — regardless of our histories, our challenges, or our past sins — can begin this work. /36

It’s time for all of us, men and women alike, to gather our courage and connect. We must do this work for our children, our partners, our communities, our world, and ourselves.
We must do this before it is too late. /37

If you are a man looking to create more authentic connection in your life, one solution is reach out to @mankindproject There are men there waiting for you, men who are ready to help you do your work. /38

All you have to do, is begin. /39

Want to start a powerful conversation about masculinity with someone you care about? Give them a copy of Mark Greene’s The Little #MeToo Book for Men. Available at Amazon --> amazon.com/Little-MeToo-B…

See this thread in article form on Medium. medium.com/s/man-interrup…

To all. Your RT's are a powerful way to help share our work. And thank you.