AndroTherapy SF

"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 This much seems to be written, as it were, in the male body as its basic syntax, its classic form, in the primal language of testosterone: To make and raise children with females To protect the group from animal predators and other human males. To hunt and thus provide meat/fish. Sounds like it comes down to...well, sex and violence. Or, more alliteratively and less provocatively: Procreation, protection and protein. A place to start. I assume that the evolutionary theory is basically correct and that the hunter-gatherer society is the primal human organization that still fundamentally shapes us as a species. “Reading” the male physically and socially, I am hypothesizing that the male gender is meant for three fundamental purposes: procreating, protecting the group from anim...

One of the strange downsides of our culture's current fascination with "diversity" is that, instead of actually making us feel more connected, we are not-so-subtly encouraged to identify with our subgroups and to think of everyone else as outsiders. In my practice, I work mostly with men, and mostly with gay men. I treat every guy as an individual and try to get the best sense and feel for his life that I can. If a man is straight and married, with a wife and children, that gives a shape to his life that differs in a lot of important ways from a single gay man who is having issues with his boyfriend. But they are both men. For a host of reasons, they may think they have little in common, but I don't. Plus, I like straight men: I was raised by one, have a great group of straight brothers, and my oldest friend is straight, etc. These are regular guys, the standard model. Too many gay men get signals from gay culture that their sexual orientation almost makes them anoth...

It is the conventional wisdom that therapists ought to have a specialty. Counter-intuitively, we are told that folks outside your specialty will be attracted to working with you thereby. A trainer at my gym, a bright and funny guy who likes to flirt with me, asked about my practice today. He included that "specialty" question. Here was my answer: I like to work with gay men who've learned how to be gay and now need to learn how to be men. To my surprise, he agreed at once that this was important and that it was a concern of his as well. Too many men who are gay spend so much energy on the gay thing that they forget that they are also men and that manhood is both their task and their rightful inheritance. ___________________

I had the whimsical notion the other day of placing an ad for my practice in local newspapers. "Work with me in therapy and I will not respect you as a person... but I will respect you as a man." Catchy? Intriguing? Offensive? Culture critic Jack Malebranche makes this observation: Our culture’s strategy for integrating women into the workforce has unfortunately been to strip men of any distinct virtues, qualities, social roles or responsibilities. This is one of the great tragedies of our time, and time will tell if this gender neutral society thing is really sustainable, practical or even truly desirable. He's got an interesting point. In order to make room for women over the last 40 years, in realms where men had either dominated or held exclusive sway, the approach has been to make men genderless....which usually means making them less male. I hear it when men say that they want to be or are "a good person." This is supposed to show that they have transc...