My approach to therapy

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 transcended the narrowness of gender roles. But is that finally possible without some deeper loss? Are we not really gendered beings?

Female therapists who advertise themselves as feminist therapists get no flack for that. What if I advertised myself as a pro-male therapist or even a "masculinist"? How do you think that would go down?

______________________________

Men On Strike Against Marriage

The decreasing numbers of men getting married is a natural response to the changes in the institution. The risks are far higher and the rewards far less reliable than they used to be. Men are not afraid of commitment; they're afraid of being ransacked. Check out this piece. And here's a similar take:

How men grieve

Men, it seems, have ways of grieving a loss that can be quite different from women's ways. I've just started reading this new book about that by Daniel Duggan. Be it over death, loss of employment, a breakup, guys have their own path. One of the complaints of the early feminists was that, like Aristotle or Melvin Udall*, our culture always assumed that the male was the standard human and so women were always treated like strangely defective males. The revolutionary turnabout in our culture in the last 50 years has produced the precisely opposite situation, especially in the world of counseling and therapy: what is wrong with men is that they are not enough like women! This conflict often shows up between husbands and wives who lose a child, where their gender-specific ways of handling such a grievous loss become grounds for the further tragedy of divorce. The author of Men, Grief and Solitude shows that, among other male-specific patterns, some reactions to loss and...

A sign of the times

When I was doing internships in middle schools in San Francisco it became clear to me that the high number of boys under medication was part of a feminist education culture that found incipient maleness unacceptable. I used to call this high-risk condition SWM, Studying While Male. I'm not the only one . Boys are under attack because men are. So frankly, a man who wants to work with a counselor would do well to make sure that it's someone who respects who he is. Not just as a "person," but as a man. ---

AndroTherapy SF

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