AndroTherapy SF

A fellow "shrink", one of the few men in the profession who takes a fundamentally positive attitude toward men, reviews a book by a smart and male-friendly woman psychologist on the trouble that men are facing in our post-feminist culture. What he says about the attitude of psychotherapists to men is this: The problem is that members of my profession rarely explore acceptance-based approaches to male mental health problems. The answer is almost always that we must constrain maleness and replace it with the feminine ideal. Bingo. ----

What's the difference between acting out* your masculinity and living out your masculinity? *Acting Out is performing a behavior in order to express thoughts or feelings the person feels incapable of otherwise expressing. It's compulsive, without choice or control. Acting out anger, for instance, usually means breaking something instead of saying something. ---

of the kinds of tactics we all use to cope with daily life. Psychological theory in down to earth language. And pretty funny, too. Worth a look . --

Humorous, but serious, a website for guys to check themselves about depression, stress, anger, anxiety and drinking/drugging. Not bad.

With the addition of the completing fourth item, honor , Jack Donovan's The Way of Men identifies three of the same foundational virtues of manhood that I decided on several years ago: power, courage and skill. (Strength, courage and mastery, in his phrasing. ) I situated the question for myself in terms of the hunter-gatherer society, where to be a man, a male must father children, protect his tribe and family, and provide food by hunting or fishing. (Sex and violence!) Settling down, farming, building cities, etc. is a pattern that's not more than 12,000 years old. For 90% of our existence as a species, homo sapiens lived the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and it is likely that it remains a powerful determinant of what human nature, male and female, is. "Common to many societies, men must 'impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin'." Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity David D. Gilmore, 1991 ...

One of Graham Jackson 's typical pairings of men is the Yellow and the Green men, the men who live with their heads in the clouds and the men who live with their feet on the ground, men of sky and men of earth. Jackson gets most of his examples from art and literature. I see them showing up in less elevated realms. Despite the gay-victim theme in them, I like the Donald Strachey Mysteries largely because Chad Allen plays the title role so well. He and his partner Tim are a good Yellow and Green comrades-in-arms partnership. Tim is the Yellow Man, the idealist, the civilized man of thought and visions, concerned with the Great Issues. He's a senatorial assistant. Don is definitely a Guy, the Green Man, the earthling, practical, dealing in concretes and things-as-they-are. A private eye. Great complementarity. In male-female couples, each partner knows that because of their gender oppositions they are bound to be very different, often in quite predictable ways. A man can sometim...