Ask a Dude with Sam: Conversations with a Young Man, Episode 6, Part 2

A continuation of our conversation with Sam and Nick of what it is to be a real man.

Music by Lemon Music Studio at Pixabay.

www.sacred-truths.com

Transcript

Welcome to Episode 6 Part 2 of Ask a Dude where our panel consists of myself and Sam as we share with our dude, Nick Oredson. Ask a Dude with Sam: Conversations with a Young Man. This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham. [Music] 

Emmy: I like your description of the performance. I think that really nails it. I've witnessed it myself when two straight guys meet. There's a performance happening that never really made sense to me. ([aughs] But I think with Nick's help it's making more sense. 

Sam:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I like what RuPaul says that we're born naked and the rest is drag. [laughing] I think that's so accurate. It's just so obvious when I see that. When I see men smooth talking and putting on this performance and talking about their job or their girlfriend or whatever. It's all just a performance. It's really fascinating. 

Nick:  Yeah, yes it is. When I tune into that it feels like it's all topics of status. So it's like a status check where you try to figure out where is this guy? Am I slumming? Am I trading up or down? Where are we in the status world? But it's all performative. So, it's not really authentically talking about the things you're talking about. You're talking about it only in terms of status. So your job, status, where you live, what neighborhood you live in, what you do, what you drive, all those things are all, “Ahhh, it's all status." And so it's hard for that to be like a connecting conversation because it's not about connecting. It's about figuring out where everyone is in the status pile. 

Emmy:  Nick, you and I have talked about status and you've articulated that there is healthy status in males. Like it's important and it's healthy. And this status, I'm guessing, is not healthy. It derives from the list. Do you want to just differentiate between those two kinds of status and maybe what is a healthy status? 

Nick: That’s a good question. What would a healthy status conversation look like? Wow. Yeah, I might have to give that some thought. What might that look like?

Emmy:  I'm thinking of conversations we've had in the past and maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but it's good to know who the strongest guy is. It's good to know who the fastest runner is. It's good to know who's really smart when it comes to electrical engineering. There's reasons to say, "Oh, you're the wise one in this department. You're the strong one in this department." There's reasons because it will help the family or the community or the people in the job. I'm thinking of those kinds of conversations. I don't know if that helps or is relevant. 

Nick:  Maybe thinking of it in terms of teaching at school, like, if we're putting on a production and I'm coordinating a crew, then I really need to hear from everybody what they have to bring to the situation. What they have experience with, what they know, and figure out where to put everybody based on where they're at in their experience and their knowledge. Ideally, you get people working together who will fit together well. I guess that is status. It's not so much pecking order status. It's more just who do we have here to accomplish this task. Who's here and what do they know and how are we going to fit this group of people together so that we have harmony? That's a leadership thing. Those conversations all need to be honest. People need to be honest about what they know and what they've done. People with less experience, you put together with people with more experience. Ideally, you're bringing out a leadership role in the person with more experience. They have a chance to do some leadership stuff and then the person with less experience gets a chance to learn from a peer. That's a good combination. I guess in that assessment of status, it's not about who gets respect or who can pick on who. It's also not about who's going to lose because the weird shadow masculine status is all who's going to get access to which females. 

Emmy: And, who’s going to lose?

Nick:  Who’s out? Who's below the cut and is just not going to get access to anything, really? Just going to be tossed out. There's definitely losers in that scheme. I think there's more to discover there. I'm going to think about that. I think that has something to do with it. Maybe that's that part. If the conversation about status is a possibility of losers, then it's pretty shadowy. That's a shadow conversation. Or who's shut out or who's not part of the group or whatever. Whereas, if it's just trying to figure out who's going to do what, then that seems non-shadowy. 

Sam:  I think one part that stood out to me of what you're saying, Nick, was that a lot of these discussions of status, there's no room for actual connection in them. I think that's why I feel really disconnected from a lot of my male friends is that I might talk to my friend who I haven't seen for a while, or for a super long time on the phone. I think that's just kind of the check of where you are in your life and all these things. Are you seeing anybody? That's kind of it. Or with friends who I'm pretty close with now, my male friends, we hangout. We always just play a video game or play a sport. I love them to death and I love playing sports and video games. But there's not an actual deeper connection there. That's what's interesting is that I think a lot of men talk about feeling really lonely. I think that this is true that there are higher rates of depression in men. And, I think that's the big reason why, is that men aren't allowed to actually talk about their feelings. They just have to do this kind of status check-in with each other. I think that's the big reason why I've heard my female friends say this, that when they get in a new relationship with a guy, the guy just starts trauma dumping on them and just sees them as an outlet for talking to her about all the stuff that he can't talk with his male friends about. I think that's interesting. There are so many men that complain about being lonely and all this stuff. I think that if men could just see that you can have those connections with male friends, I think that we would be a lot less lonely. 

Nick:  That comes up a lot in men's work, for sure. And, I watched a lot of guys come in and they knew that something was wrong. So, they knew that something was wrong and they knew that they weren't going to go to the bar. So, on a Thursday night, they were showing up at the Ashland Library at 7 o'clock from 7 to 10 p.m. They were going to try something other than that. There weren't many choices there. I’m miserable at home and I don’t want to go to the bar and here I am. They were curious and that's like 1% of guys show up in a men's group. That's a very small percentage of the population, but whatever. They got that far. They really didn't know why they were lonely because that feeling was so old. They just always felt disconnected. Disconnected is a better word for it. Lonely has a story behind it. They didn't even know what that feeling was. It didn't feel good. Something was wrong. Because of the structure of a men's group, it facilitates connection. It gives a really quite rigid structure where all the off-ramps where the conversation will just degrade. You can't talk about women and you can't talk about cars and you can't talk about sports and you can't talk about anything. You can't get drunk. You can’t talk about all of that—all of that is off limits, and you’re just sitting there, thinking. It does provide a structure and suggestions of a series of steps to do otherwise. All of those steps are built to create connection. I saw a lot of guys after their first men's group who would say, "I've never felt connected in my life. This is the first time I've felt connected to other men in my life." That would be a 50-year-old person sharing that. Observing that, they don't even know what's wrong. They don't know the first step to take anywhere with that feeling.

Emmy: Speaking to that, I think that's the real loneliness of the heterosexual woman - is really not being able to connect with one's male spouse the way we'd like to. And, there may be connection early on that feels genuine and healthy. I think for many of us we realize, Oh, he only connects to me that way. He feels really vulnerable, so it's very, very special when that happens. It's not a normal everyday thing. It takes some, I don't know, maybe some tragedy or something even to bring us closer. Women tend to connect more with other women, so we have that often built into our community system. But there's a real loss when your partner is not that person that you feel a special connection with because he just can't, won't, all of those things you just named. 

Nick: Have you talked with anyone else? [The list podcast] Has anyone else listened to it that you've talked to? 

Sam:  Ahh…I think my mom listened to it. We've talked through about it, but none of my male friends have listened to it yet. But I have one male friend who I have conversations about this kind of stuff with and he really gets it. And, I also have a lot of male friends that are none of the stuff on the list at all. They just totally reject all that. They hate all that. But I still find it hard to get close to them. I find it hard to make a connection with them. I don't know, it might be for some of the reasons that we just talked about. Even for me, I think that even if I met a man who was really on the level with this stuff and kind of understood the list and this stuff, I think I would still feel that vulnerable and apprehensive to talk to about the things. But that's just because, I think that as men, I think we're always afraid the other men are going to hurt us. Or at least that's how I feel. Because we've had just so much ‘little trauma’ from other men checking us on all this stuff. And I think that that prevents us from being connected with other men who might feel the same way. 

Nick:  That was another men's group observation for me, was just how much structure was needed so that guys could feel safe around each other. Like it was a lot! There was a really defined protocol. A certain set of steps, every meeting was the same. There was a whole list of things you could talk about. And then a whole list of ways that you had to communicate. I had to use ‘I’ statements. This whole, it was this massive structure. And I remember at first, I thought, wow, that's really, that's a lot of structure. And I thought, okay, well, I feel safe. So, okay, fine. And then when I got into a leadership position and was facilitating, I was like, I'm not that uptight guy. I'm not that rigid. You know, it was a self-image thing. Like, I'm a pretty easy going, dude. You're like, I don't want to be too much of a hard ass, whatever. And then, catastrophe! The slightest, slightest deviation from that structure and it would be very bad. And so I learned, like, okay, Nick, just remember that this is what it takes to actually have this be safe because of this history. You know, a lot of guys are carrying that. So even if you meet someone that's still an unstructured interaction, you know, they could be a plant. They could be a spy for the list keepers. [chuckle] You know, they could be testing you to see if you're a sleeper agent or something. You know, whatever story, you know, not safe. And so in an unstructured interaction, it would be hard to feel safe. The other thing was that when people would want to socialize outside of group, and the first few times that happened that caught me off guard, but every time it was a disaster. Whenever anyone, because it feels so good in this group, yay, and everybody's, let's go do something. Yeah, we gotta hang out. Let's go for a hike. Or, you know, then I, the next week, two guys would be missing. I go, “Where's Fred and where's Joe?”…Oh, yeah, they're not coming back. They got into an argument on the..whatever…or, or there was drinking and catastrophe. So, it's hard to feel safe, like, genuinely safe. Lots of, lots of, lots of good reasons. 

Emmy:  Because we're right back to the root where I think, right? -  where you connect with someone. It's very feminine. And that is the problem. 

Sam:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, any connection, any, like, feeling like empathy for another person is labeled as feminine and you're not supposed to do that. Any, yeah, just relating to anybody. Yeah, that's so true. [Music] 

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 six, Part two of Ask a Dude with Sam: Conversations with a Young Man. Please join us for Part three. Please visit our website at sacred-truths.com. Thank you for listening. [Music]