Ask A Dude: Episode 5, Part 3

In this podcast, Nick takes questions from our podcast listeners.

Music by Lemon Music Studio by Pixabay

www.sacred-truths.com

Transcript

Welcome to Episode 5 Part 3 of Ask a Dude. Three women, one guy, where we get real answers on subjects most men aren't willing to talk about. This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham. [music] 

Emmy:  Okay Nick, so I have a few questions from some of our podcast listeners. If you're willing to take them. 

Nick:  Fantastic. 

Emmy:  This first one is from Anna. Anna asks if you would comment on how difficult a job it is for boys and men to hold up under all these pressures to coerce a female into his web and prove to themselves, their parents, their co-workers, their friends that they are viable, virile men of conquest who are capable of making an amazing living, procreating, and keeping order in their families. 

Nick:  Well, that question does a really good job of describing the scope of the burden that comes along with this list. So this list is kind of one job after another that you have to do to continually prove yourself. And, this list is all, a lot of it is about display, what you display to your peers and other men, like keeping up a show with the other men and then how you're managing your internal self; like how you're keeping all your feelings suppressed; and how you're making sure that you stay in a dominant relationship with the women in your life; and how you make sure that you maintain that sex doesn't mean anything to you and all these things that you're doing internally to maintain this structure. But then, that question is a description of the overall package. 

This list is one piece, but then there's this overall package of continually having to prove it and that it's a very unnatural position to have to maintain. You know, as human beings, we're inherently emotional creatures, so suppressing emotions takes a lot of energy. It's hard to do. Ignoring how you feel, doing a job that you don't like, maintaining a position or an image with your partner or your wife that isn't authentic or real, or maintaining a dominant position with your partner or your wife. It's not natural. So yeah, I mean, it's a tremendous burden for boys trying to live up to that standard, feeling like they may have to live up to that standard in order to be accepted or to already be viable. 

And then for adult men, it makes for a long day. It makes for a long life. Like, this is it. Like, I'm just going to have to keep this up forever. Meanwhile, not being able to connect really with peers in an authentic way, not being able to reach out for help or support, not really having male peers to really talk things over, being pretty isolated. I don't know how people do it. It's amazing people can do it. To maintain something that unnatural, just ongoing indefinitely. It's amazing to me.  

So yeah, I think that's, like I said, I think that question does a really good job of describing the scope of it. That this is an image that has to be maintained in every facet of an adult life. And in every arena, there's a certain set of standards that have to be maintained that are very unnatural and not nourishing and difficult to maintain. It's amazing thinking. I don't know how people do it. And a lot of people just break under the strain. A lot of people just snap for one reason or another and just kind of give up, go numb, start drinking and just give up. Yeah, I appreciate the question. And I don't know how people do it. I don't know how they can, but people do seem to anyway. So great question. 

Deborah:  I wonder if some people, because they see no other way, no option, they just do. You think about all the things that humans have endured over time that they had to, and so they do. But as soon as there's an alternative, perhaps that's when they start cracking. And I think about all the ways that a life can go horribly wrong, you know, choices we make, you know, give them half a chance. Humans, we will screw up our lives. Not all of us, many of us. You know, you make a bad choice, you spend all the money, you run off with the dental hygienist, you retreat or do something, I don't know, you climb Everest and never come back. You do something dramatic just to get out of the pain. 

Emmy:  Yeah, and I was just going to say, how do men keep living? It sounds like a miserable life. 

Deborah:  Don't men have a shorter life expectancy than women? 

Nick:  They do. Yeah, there was an article in the New York Times that I can't quote very accurately. It was a while ago, and it was just talking about the, or maybe that was a chapter in the Liz Plank book, For the Love of Men. She had a whole chapter talking about all the health problems that are connected to this. And I want to pick the right word. My feeling is not that this list or the entire package is adopted. This does not feel like a choice that people are making. Not to excuse bad behavior, it's just that the installation of this programming starts at a really young age, and it's trauma driven. Like it's a traumatic experience to be told, boys don't cry at age four by an angry adult. That little kid's not making a choice there, but that's when it starts, and that's when it starts getting installed and enforced and all these things. So it does lead to a lot of health problems and a lot of really unhealthy living and misery and all kinds of things. For adults who are caught up in this system, let's say that people get caught up in it from a young age and then just they don't see any other choice. 

Deborah:  I think my sense is that just like Emmy's list and your list, Nick, it's not a choice. It's it is the way it is. I think the programming starts at birth. A friend of mine referred to her what, three-month old grandson as 'that little man'. And we're already talking about sort of male based careers for him. Is he going to be a baseball player? Nobody ever said ballerina. And it's that sense of we talked about this earlier. You can't see the air you're breathing. The fish can't see the water it's swimming in. It's just the world. And if all you know is, this is the world. And some people, I think break free accidentally, or because they're wired differently, or because they get a lucky break. There's that nice book, One Trusted Adult, who might say, you know, it doesn't have to be this way. 

I remember saying to my… uh, we were 16 and I was visiting a friend who tended to snap his fingers and say to his little brothers, “Beer me.”And I said to his youngest brother, who was 12 at the time, you know, you don't have to do that. And he looked at me astonished and said, “Yes, I do.” I said, “No, you don't.” And I’d like to think even saying it set up a different dynamic, suggesting that it's not the way of the world. You don't have to get your silly older brother a beer every time he snapped his fingers. But I think to break out of what we believe to be only, is an extraordinary--I don't want to say achievement, because I don't know that sometimes it's deliberate. But again, many make it out.  

Emmy: I was going to say what Nick had already touched on earlier is that sometimes it's a crisis. It makes you fall flat on your face and say, wait a minute. And I would say for me, a lot of my list, just as Nick said, I didn't adopt, but I knew some of them I tried very hard to live by. And others I dropped later in life. And to this day, I'm still afraid in certain circumstances. Am I going to be okay if I do it my way versus the way I'm supposed to do it? And it can be a small thing. And I could be very frightened of the consequence, depending on the situation. 

Deborah:  Because those rules are laid down when we're too little, I think, to even think that a different choice will be just fine. Because it's, I think it's beyond life and death when we're small. There's either this, the security of whatever this is, no matter what situation we're talking about, or the void. And that's unimaginably horrifying. You know, I think about the loneliest, most frightened I was, that I can consciously remember when I was small. And I think, I don't have a word for it, but not following what seemed to be the way of the world was worse than that. And I certainly didn't have a conscious sense of, you know, they'll leave me on the sidewalk and I'll starve to death. It was more horrible than that. 

Emmy:  Yeah, and as Nick has pointed out, these lists are enforced by violence. So if I violate something on my list, there could be someone who actually physically harms me, or throws me in jail, or who knows what, burns me at the stake. Some version of that. 

Deborah:  I think it comes down to being burned at the stake. I think we carry in us, all of us, the terror and perhaps the actuality of being burned at the stake. I mean, we can, I was going to say we can joke about it, but I don't know that I can. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen much now, as far as I know. But that's monstrous.  

Nick:  Yeah, it wasn't that long ago, generation-wise. What, 300 years? Or something? 400 years? So that's only 16 generations or something. They literally actually did burn people at the stake. Women, for example. So it's not, it has kind of a legendary mythical quality to it, but it did actually happen a lot. So it's an actual thing. Ugh. Yeah, so it's not imaginary. And I like what you were saying about the stakes are beyond life and death. Yeah, that resonates. That for a really young person, it is more than that. It's beyond life and death. And so it's just the stakes are as high as they can get for going along with whatever the program is in the environment that you're in. And so I think that is an important part of understanding how this gets propagated and how it lives on, is that it's driven by violence and early trauma. 

Deborah:  And I think we haven't mentioned this, I think much today, but it goes back through time. So, you know, we're not just living with our own experience. We're living with our parents and their parents and their parents and their parents. And you go back any distance in almost anybody's family's past and something horrifying happened. And so there's, I think there's partly the enforcement of the rules, allegedly to keep us safe, also to keep us in our place, whatever that happens to be for that generation. And, you know, there's all those studies that talk about that lives in us physically. Thus, you know, we're reinforced to follow the rules from within our own selves, even if we don't intellectually or emotionally believe in them. So stepping out, stepping away, leaving behind. That is an act of extraordinary -it's different than courage. It's bigger than that.  

Emmy:  I have another question. This from Terry. Do men who have a more attuned conscience and conscientiousness towards women speak disrespectfully when in the company with other men? And do they call their friends out on it when they hear something that sounds or feels offensive? 

Nick:  I think that's an important question. Good question. It's a little tricky to answer that in general terms. Because it's hard. It's hard to speculate about what any one man will or won't do. But I can say that for someone who is doing pretty well with deprogramming themselves from this list, when they're in the company of their partner or woman, or women in general at a party or something, there's going to be a lot of pressure when they're just around male friends, to revert. And that would be to predict who knows. Everyone's going to respond differently to that situation. But I know if I end up in a situation like that, I feel a lot of pressure to revert. I can feel it. That fear is still there, for sure. And that's all I can say. I can't predict what anyone will do or won't do. But there's going to be a lot of pressure when they're just around male friends. Yeah, for sure. Depending on what that culture is like, who knows. And if it's a supportive culture, they might not feel that pressure, but they could easily be feeling that pressure. And they would be feeling a lot of pressure to not call it out. If you're sitting there with a group of five people, someone makes a crude remark, there's a lot of pressure to go on with it, for sure. So that's a different environment. Even if they're trying and they're working on it and they're having success. 

Deborah: I would imagine. And I've certainly seen it the other way. Two people in my grad program who had boyfriends or husbands, and they would vie with each other to say what a dolt their husband or boyfriend was. Like, oh, he leaves his socks on the floor. Mine leaves his socks and shoes on the floor. And, they wanted me to join in. And I remember even that quality. Like, oh, you know, what does yours do? I thought I'm stepping away. I didn't like these girls. And it's really all they talked about. And, I thought, well, why are you with these people if they're so doltish? So I don't think it's unique to men, but I think Terry's question is a valid one. I've been talking about that for weeks, that quality. 

Emmy:  So Nick, what do you think happens or what is the fear of what happens if say you're maybe even just one on one with a guy, and he says something offensive and you say, hey, I don't want to participate in that. What's the worst that can happen? I'm curious.  

Nick:  So this gets really close to excusing bad behavior. So I just want to restate that any kind of understanding about the forces at play or things that might push someone to make one decision or another is no way of an excuse for bad behavior. So, if anyone is in a situation where someone makes an insulting comment about a gender in general or something is complicit in that if they don't speak up, and that's that. That's the end of that. And that's not a judgment. That's just a fact. So that said, the source of that pressure and that fear is that all those, all those patterns were laid down usually during adolescence, where belonging, if you don't belong, you're dead. I mean, the stakes are very, very high. And so young people's brain at the adolescent brain isn't fully developed. That isn't amazing. It's just not fully developed. A 13-year old or 12-year old is starting to face these social situations where belonging is everything. They don't have access to tools to process what's going on or get supported and understanding that they could make different choices or that this is optional and that they don't have to go along. They're not getting any of those messages. And so there's an incredible amount of fear there to go along with it. And that is what gets referenced in the adult space is a sense of I'm going to die, you know, very, very high stakes that aren't true or unlikely to be true or as dire as they're being perceived as being. But that's that trauma and fear and high stakes is getting referenced by those situations. And so that's why there's so much pressure to go along with it and so much pressure to not say anything and just kind of go along with it. That's how I see it. 

Emmy:  Thank you all for being here today. And Nick, thanks for being our dude and all that you shared today. Thank you. It was great to be here. And thank you, Deborah. 

Deborah:  Thanks, Emmy. It's always valuable work.  

Emmy:  And thank you, Heather, for joining us today.

Heather:  Thanks to all of you so much. 

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 five, part three of Ask A Dude. Please visit our website at sacred-truths.com. Thank you for listening. [Music]