The group discusses the biproducts of toxic masculinity to the LGBT community and women, and ways to help bring about change. Also, how hierarchy and status are enforced in the hyper-masculine paradigm.
www.sacred-truths.com
The group discusses the biproducts of toxic masculinity to the LGBT community and women, and ways to help bring about change. Also, how hierarchy and status are enforced in the hyper-masculine paradigm.
www.sacred-truths.com
Welcome to Episode 4 Part 3 of a new version of “Ask a Dude” where our panel consists of myself and Ken. “Ask a Dude” with Ken: questions from a gay man.
This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham.
Ken: Yeah, I feel like we would be remiss if we don’t talk about some of the, I don’t know, the biproducts of all of this for women and LGBT people and we see
more and more attacks on trans people, and we see more and more bills being passed in Congress about limiting our rights, our civil rights, and people fleeing,
particular conservative states, because they no longer feel safe, um, protests and all kinds of things happening!
Already we have a problem with LGBT+ youth, and homelessness and substance abuse and depression and suicide and suicidal ideations and all of these impacts and I wonder what can be done, I wonder, in what direction we can move
To make things better for women and LGBT folks.
I just wonder if it even merits a discussion whether we would just be having pie in the sky thinking, or whether, I don’t know, I just worry every day that things are not moving in the right direction.
Nick: Yeah, I think about that a lot because it is pretty easy to get overwhelmed with how things are. Some days I wake up and it feels like such an entrenched system and the way that it’s propagated through trauma, you know the way that it starts getting created when people are so young, when boys are so young, it starts to get installed, it’s like a piece of software that gets installed, and a set of behaviors, conditioned behaviors that then propagate and then are carried out.
What helps me to feel hopeful, when I do feel hopeful, which is not always, the most powerful thing I can do as an adult in this environment, is to encourage adult men to talk. Isolation is kind of the outcome of all of this where I see men who have no relationships with other men at all. For whatever reason, there was distrust, either a bad experience with their father growing up, lost a best friend when they were young, whatever it was, a whole series of things, just one trauma after another. They just don’t trust men at all, they don’t have any relationships, connections with adult men, and they don’t talk about what’s actually going on.
I forget the name of the study, but there’s a study about male isolation. There was kind of a list of things: no close male friends, no one they can feel they can trust. Don’t feel like they ever had a mentor.
These kind of list of things.
75% or 80% of men are existing in a very isolated space, by that definition and so
for me, that’s where I feel I can be the most useful, like, direct action in my community that feels like it’s addressing this.
That doesn’t directly work with youth, there’s tons of work to be done in supporting youth, that are outside of these rigid set of parameters and the suffering that results, millions of things…
The work you did, all kinds of things, but that’s where I’m drawn to and that’s where I feel the most effective, and I am, by doing that work, I am actively dismantling the system.
This, like, weird harm machine that’s seems to be operating in a pretty widespread way.
And that isn’t, not that it excuses anybody, no one really is winning at this thing.
I see so much suffering at the top, so much suffering among men once they start talking about what’s actually…. how they’re actually start talking about it, that’s really hard. That’s a little hopeful piece in there.
No one’s really winning, this isn’t actually doing anything for anybody.
Maybe it’ll just blow up on its own. Hopefully. Anyway, that’s my thoughts as far as what I can do immediately to help.
Ken: We need more of you. We need lots more of you. That’s truthfully how I feel.
Nick: Thank you.
Emmy: I agree. I’m going to ask a question and you don’t have to answer Nick, I wonder if you, Nick, can explain or describe what happens when a group of men come together and talk about these things. I know it doesn’t really happen talking to a woman, when talking with men and women, but what really happens when men gather and talk, seriously talk?
Nick: So, what I’ve noticed when I talk to other men about this, is once someone really actually sits for a moment and connects to what they’re actually feeling and
in this hyper masculine paradigm, we are trained day and night, to push our pain away: to manage it, to distract from it, to ignore it, to stuff it, to push it under, to get on with what we have to do, ignore our pain in any way using many, many techniques.
There’s a huge reservoir of pain there.
When I first said, “Oh, how do I actually feel?” It was just nothing but grief and pain. The first ten slots were just grief and pain.
So, if two men are going to have a conversation that is frank about this issue: how do we actually feel, it’s usually really a struggle to understand that they feel anything at all. And that can take some time.
Even knowing what a feeling is a lot of men struggle, or knowing what a feeling is and they can be had. That can take some time. Just getting to THAT! Oh, okay, because the aversion is so strong to just ignore all of it. So that usually starts, usually, there is a lot of struggle to even identify, to even have a feeling or know that they’re there.
There’s usually a lot of grief and a lot of sadness about what happened for all these traumas and all these experiences. Many men have a long list of really bad experiences
with their dad, or with men in the community, who knows, boys on the playground. That’s a big, can feel overwhelming rush of upset about all that and everything that happened and they were getting pounded into this shape that was so unnatural for them.
And ultimately, a real powerful bond happens. There’s a lot of confusion in the beginning, a lot of pain and upset and then where there’s actually a connection, that sincere authentic connection, there’s an amazingly powerful bond that happens then if two men can speak frankly about how they’re feeling and connect in that way, it’s really powerful.
And that’s very hopeful for me, that that’s there and doing any work with this stuff is so hard because there’s so much pain and upset just floating around in this space, trauma, argh.
But when that connection happens, it’s really beautiful. And that can take some time. It doesn’t always happen right away. It’s hard to do.
I noticed that men in general need a lot of structure in order to not just slide into the bragging and lying and ignoring feelings, and all that, it’s hard. That needs to happen with a lot of intention.
Real intention of this is what we’re going to do.
Emmy: Ken, if you’re willing, I would love to hear anything you have to say about your experience with growing up as a boy with your feelings.
Ken: Well, I guess I had issues with both parents, dad and mom, my mother and father both. A completely different kinds of issues though. But I suppose the common denominator was trying to please them in different ways. I was finally able, within the last couple of years, to have a really good talk with my mother about that. “You know, I worked my whole life trying to gain your approval, and I finally have realized I didn’t need to do that.”
And she said, “Yeah, you did. You wasted a lot of time trying to do that.” (laughs). And we’ve been closer ever since. It sort of hit me from left field when she said that, it was like…it wasn’t like a surprise or anything. (laughs)
She knew, dammit. (laughs) It was great, it was a wonderful, a wonderful release of all this stuff because it’s taken me awhile to finally realize what a waste of energy that all was.
She confirmed (laughs) that I certainly did.
There was that when I was young. For sure, and of course the dad piece. I did play football by the time I was 8 years old, and that was all about, 8 through being a sophomore in high school, so seven years at it. And I was really good at it. But my motivation was to please daddy more than anything, I think. It was a lot of work.
a lot of wind sprints, crap I really hated.
I liked bonding with the boys obviously, and playing the game. There was some verbal abuse and not to ever besmirch my dad because he is still alive, he is still a good person, and has good intentions. But it was rough, it was rough going, and he’s gone through a whole arc of his life from going through his stuff and finally coming out the other end of it.
And it was not a pretty situation and I think I so desperately wanted to please him. And so, in terms of confronting my own sexuality, which I confronted very early on. Really, I’d say by age 9 I knew who I was and fought it and fought it and fought it! And you know, God forbid my parents find out about it. So, I didn’t have an easy go with coming out to my parents. Many other people knew before they did because of that fear of losing their love. So, I suppose, for someone like me, at least for me, I dealt with a lot of pain you know, quite overtly through all that.
I’m sure a lot of it was, of course, repressed but, maybe it’s true for a lot of people who are outside the norm is that you deal with pain from early on, and it doesn’t go away because every day you’re deciding whether you’re going to come out or not, whether you’re going to try to fit in or not, whether you’re going to try to play basketball today or wrestle today and be like, “hey dude…”
To fit in that narrow framework.
And I just really couldn’t. (laughs). So, I found choir. I found drama. Eventually, I kind of was able to fit in by, I guess, playing sports, playing football and doing well at it and also doing well academically so that people would think, I suppose better of me than they would if I hadn’t done those things.
I was not just a sissy boy, at least I had something where I could say, ‘see, I can do, this makes me of value over here because I’m doing this.’
I think it lessoned my pain in some ways, but then ultimately, I had to confront it. By the time I was getting out of high school and going into college it was time to let mommy and daddy know who I was, and it’s painful, it’s really difficult to go through that.
I don’t know, I can only say for myself, that maybe I have my emotions on my sleeve more than some people might.
I’ll watch some “Will and Grace” episode, rerun and I’ll be boo-hooing at the end of it and I don’t care! I love crying! I love to cry and I love to laugh! (laughs)
So, if that makes me a freak, I really don’t care. I do think, the process of living you finally have to get to a point as someone who doesn’t fit in anyway, you have to get to a point where “Am I going to… should I kill myself? Or am I just going to get on with it and be who I am as often as I can be.”
Emmy had brought up something that I said a couple of days ago, that maneuvering and navigating through the world, it often means: you’re not taking it seriously, you’re not on a par with all the other guys, you know, as soon as they get the drift that you’re a little different, you’re not a member of the club, you may not even make as much money, or be taken as seriously in your judgment or the critical decision you might make, is given an askance, a glance.
But it’s okay. It has to be okay at the end of the day I have to be authentic, I have to be true to myself, I have to be able to come home and be with the man I love. Hopefully forever. And have a life together and be happy. And if I don’t fit in? Oh, well, oh, well. So, that’s been more or less my experience.
Emmy: I’m intrigued by your comment of a straight man will sort of knock you down a notch when they find out, when he finds out you are gay. And I’m curious about that and I’m also curious to what Nick might have to say about that.
Nick: Yeah, well, yeah, that feels like it fits in with that social structure piece that we talked about a little bit before. I never thought about that before. When I watched that hyper masculine paradigm get enforced in that really rigid way, there’s little tiny gradients of hierarchy and status that gets kind of distributed.
Informal group of alphas that’s kind of the top committee.
Sometimes there’ll just be a few of them or one, or be a small group of them at the very top and they’re the ones assigning the status. And so there are all these rules and all of that is based on how many, kind of, demerits you have of slight, slight deviations from the absolute description of the hypermasculine ideal. Just the tiniest little thing.
I was just thinking about this the other day, even how you walk will get a comment, if you’re not doing the dude walk. If you’re shoulders aren’t up, the whole thing, you get a comment. And pretty soon everyone is walking in the same way.
How you hold your body, how you stand there, will get a comment, if it doesn’t fit that exact model. How you run, how you throw, how you, I don’t know, drive, how you stand there. Every little bit of your physicality is being monitored and even the tiniest little thing will get a comment and you’ll just go down the line.
And so that kind of constant status is all based on the expressions of the feminine, what’s perceived as feminine traits, what’s classified as feminine traits. And so, yeah, so I can see how you would talk about something and you get downgraded right there, just whatever, you perceive it, feel it, notice it.
I know I’ve been downgraded; I know that feeling for a different reason. The times I’ve been downgraded it’s when I didn’t support a derogatory comment about women. And 3 guys and somebody says something and I go, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” (Dunk!) (Laughs) Down a notch right there. Anyway, I think those subtle points of status or not so subtle points of status and the constant classifying and sorting is really an important part of it.
Ken: You said it so much better than I could in so many ways. Personally, I can speak to what I’ve received. Everybody picks up on energy. You don’t have to be blatantly out anywhere, you know, but people will pick up on a walk, things you say, even being more overtly emotional, you just broke a rule, you just…
And I’m not…I might not be trying to follow the rules or know that that’s the rule or whatever because maybe I haven’t been a member of that particular club, whatever it is. So, I didn’t know that, oh, I shouldn’t have said it like that, I shouldn’t have gestured like that, (laughs), I shouldn’t have whatever like this.
So, there’s this unspoken acknowledgment of otherness and that’s just not going to receive same kind of benefit as everybody who is part of the same power group, whether that means consideration for a promotion or a leadership position or whatever, fill in the blank. And that’s happened to me on more than one occasion and I’m not trying to play victim, I just noticed it. I just notice it.
Sometimes it’s just something very subtle. Not even an eye roll, but just, an energy you receive from somebody who is in a position of power.
Very, very subtle sometimes. It’s just a reality, it’s just a fact of life for the most part.
Emmy: Ken, I think you had said to me, even if you’re an expert in a field, a particular field, or you have just as much education and experience as that other person, that man will put you down a notch, is that right? In that way, I can totally relate. Because just showing up as female. In many ways, it doesn’t matter, it kind of doesn’t matter how many credentials I have, I’m already showing up female. I’m already being slotted in some category. And chances are, I have to prove myself ten times over more so than any other man would have to.
That’s how it feels to me in those situations.
Ken: I think so, of course there are the artsy things, where (laughs) it’s kind of like, “Oh, get him to decorate your place!” (laughs) the stereotypic, because naturally that’s what you can do. That’s a whole specialized piece of the pie.
Of course, he can dance, he’s a gay guy, I don’t know (laughs). That doesn’t really include me. There are certain, certain stereotypic situations where I suppose, where none of that counts, none of that matters. But, for the most part, the “guy jobs”, whatever those are, there is this hierarchy.
Nick: I’m thinking back, it’s kind of a new thought, about how much of that sorting goes on. Sorting and resorting and comments and…I mean when I was in middle school, I probably heard 10 comments an hour or more referencing that. Somebody did something that looked kind of feminine. Got a comment. Like just constantly. I’m so interested now thinking about….
If I actually had a little clicker, (laughs) and walked along, you know, my day in junior high, how many would be on that clicker at the end of the day. I just took it for granted that that was life, that was going on, but now with this perspective in terms of status.
Like, this is a social order that is being iterated over and iterated over and iterated over and I’m sure it’s different now, you know, for young people. But I’m just thinking.
My memories, I was just constantly, constantly under surveillance, for being monitored for maintaining the standard. It’s weird thinking about it. I’m suddenly seeing just the extent of that status sorting system and just what a huge impact on a young person being in that environment. Just constantly being surveilled and commented on. An intense experience. That would be very intense for a young person.
Ken: I work currently in an after-school program, part of it is with elementary school kids and part of it is with some middle school kids. I see it all. What’s interesting is you see it all. When they’re in my classes, 3rd, 4th, 5th graders. I don’t know what they think of me.
They seem to think I’m funny, they think I’m weird, whatever they think, I don’t care.
One day, a kid was having a fight, or having an argument and one kid said,
“That’s so gay.”
And I immediately stopped everything, and I addressed it. And I just said, “That will never ever happen again in my classroom, and you will never ever bully somebody…”
A lot of the girls and some of the boys were like, “yeah, yeah, that’s not right, that’s not right.”
And I said, “Because it implies that there’s something wrong with being gay.”
And one kid spoke right out and said, “But there is!” and I said, “No, no,” So we addressed it, in other words, it seems like there’s this culture there of acceptance of growth and that the feminine is okay and the kids that are tending toward living in feminine energy, in a more feminine energy, I guess I don’t know any other way to put it, I don’t know, are accepted, seems to be fine. Same for the middle school and the high school.
In fact, I was told by one of the people there that nobody cares, nobody gives a shit at that school, that whatever you are is whatever you are. And I hope that that it true. I do see it, that is true. And that is my actual hope for change.
The young’uns coming up saying “What is the big deal?” A lot of the time.
I privately have lived in a bubble for all these years because I was at a private school which was very much about embracing the child as the child is. Not imposing all this gender nonsense, or anything about sexual orientation, whatever, let it be.
That I know that can be a bubble so I don’t want to have any illusions that everything is rosy. But it’s good to see it here in a public-school setting. That’s my hope that everything is shifting, slowly but surely.
Emmy: My daughter goes to a public school, and that is my sense of it is that her friends, her peers, her classmates appear to be very comfortable with sexual orientation, gender identity. It’s all very fluid and accepting, and it’s very different from when I was in high school. So that also gives me a lot of hope.
Nick: Yeah, I’m reviewing my experience in middle school or junior high.
I’m 57, so whatever era that was, late ‘70s’ I guess, I was in middle school.
In that environment for me it would have been inconceivable to me for a teacher to or anybody to say, “We’re not going to say that word, we’re not going to say, ‘gay’ as a pejorative”. It would just be inconceivable for someone because it was happening constantly, now that I’m thinking back on that, all the time.
Or some variation of that kind of comment was just constant. That is great, it sounds like that’s happening a lot less. (Laughs) From all the time, maybe 20 times an hour, I don’t know, I’m thinking back, 50 times, I don’t know, a lot, to really much, much, much less often.
And something you can just say, “Hey, wait.” If it comes up in a classroom environment you can say, “Nope. You’re not going to do that.” And 80% of the people or whoever, however many, will say, “Oh, yeah, right, yes, we’re not going to do that.” That is really hopeful.
That is really a good shift of things.
Emmy: This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham with music by Lemon Music Studio from Pixabay and with special thanks to our dude, Nick Oredson.
This concludes Episode 4, Part 3 of “Ask a Dude” with Ken: Questions from a Gay Man. Please join us for Part 4.
Please visit our website www.sacred-truths.com
Thank you for listening.