AndroTherapy SF

Even if you have a friendly attitude toward men and manhood and have not been confused by bad feminism or the post-modern posing of "it's all a performance", it's pretty difficult to come up with one man who embodies manhood completely, or even best. Two thoughts on why. First, masculinity takes different shapes throughout the life-cycle. When a boy transitions to manhood, it is to young manhood, as is proper. But that has to ripen all through life and keep changing. There is a "fit" for manhood that suits a twenty-five year old but that no longer fits when he is sixty. So manhood is a naturally moving archetype. You might choose a man in his prime or at his peak as your model of The Manliest Man, but it would leave out way too much. Second, there is not just one kind of real man needed in nature. A soldier, a farmer, a laborer, an artist, an athlete, a brewery worker...My guess is that all real men have some basic things in common but the context in which t...

One of the ways I think about this questions is to think negatively. What do I mean by that? I try to think of what a man is not in order to reduce the space where clearer images of manhood can appear, images of what a man is. The big negatives: A man is not a woman. A man is not a boy. A man is not God. A man can have something of the feminine in him (and should), something of the boy in him (and should), something of the divine in him (and should)...but a man is not a woman, a boy or God. _______________________________

HT to Jack Malebranche, this piece on manhood in trouble. Which reminds me of the strange role that gay men have played in this process. Due to the huge influence which feminism has had on gay liberation, many gay men --and the dominant public discourses in gay life-- hold a split view of men. While sexual masculinity remains a value, social masculinity is suspect. Some previous thoughts of mine to follow.

Two new books address the problem of male maturation in America. One gets it, the other just repeats the nostrums of most social scientists, who are very ideologically driven. This is not just an issue for the guys I call M&Ms (men with strong psychosexual attractions to other men) but for all of us men. M&Ms are a small subset of men and how the majority fares impacts us all. And women, too. A society without a strong corps of healthily mature men, who are celebrated publicly for being such, is in trouble.

I once asked a new patient, “Tell me what kind of man you are.” He stopped for a minute and asked, "You mean, what kind of person I am?" “No,” I continued, “what kind of man you are.” He said, "Oh." He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. How would you answer it?

I was talking with a friend on the street recently. He had a buddy with him from out of town, someone I had never met. While we three were chatting and passing the time, two other men walked by. Both of them were obviously gay. They were in their late twenties. One was stocky, in jeans and a dark t-shirt, wearing a baseball cap brim-backwards. The other was shorter, slightly built, in a similar but more pastel get-up. His jeans were very low-slung and tight, the cuffs rolled up to show socks with flowers and stars on them. He had no cap; instead, his artificially colored blond hair was jelled up in a faux-hawk. He appeared to have eye shadow on. He was wearing several bracelets and rings, gesticulating broadly as he talked excitedly about a new video of a pop singer he had bought. "She is, like, sooooo fabu. I mean, like, fab-you-LUSS, girlfriend. Leaves them other bitches in bitchdust land!" The out-of-towner looked at this passing duo with a barely hidden scowl and said,...