eMANcipation .. The Movement We All Long For?

Who took the

out of our men??

Wow. TOTALLY unexpected post here.

I DID NOT see this coming and sat down to do a quick 'plan to write about ..' note before cracking on with work and out it poured like the floodwaters from a busted dam.

So, in a slightly off its head move, I'm posting it. On my Blog FFS!

Expletive warning!

But I don't bloody-well care.

I feel liberated! Have fun, enjoy, here it is:

Today, Tuesday 31st July 18, a radio interview I did in a fab group I'm in has gone live.I listened, hardly daring to breathe – thinking all manner of negative and self-judgmental things (as you do!). In pondering, afterward, about how I sound too much in my masculine and something Steve Biddulph alluded to in his fantastic book ‘Manhood’ I think – about always being able to tell when a woman is with a good, supportive (or something along those lines) man – because she is softer somehow .. this has got me thinking ..

About how, as a I grew up and went out into the world as an adult, I’ve always missed a ‘strength’ in the men around me and the vast majority of those I've encountered in my life - personally, socially and professionally. Not only that, but in the wider world. This 'missing' seems endemic among men.

What I'm referring to is an emotional strength. A kind of 'real' that I've rarely come across.

Men in the guns / violence / domination mode – are not strong!

No, quite the opposite, since who needs weapons if they are truly strong, huh?

I contend that seeking power & dominion over others is a sign of weakness, and fear. And isn’t this weakness a result of a man's full masculine character being stripped back as he goes into puberty – to ‘toughen him up’? Isn't this a case of having had stolen away from him the fullness of his masculine experience - the most precious stuff of which is his connection to his beautiful, pure heart?

Isn’t THIS, actually, an act of emasculation!?!

And don’t women .. all of us, in fact .. pay a heavy price for this too?

I realise I have never felt able to fully ‘relax’ into my femininity because I've always felt someone has to be a grown up round here - someone has to know how to deal with difficult situations, how to do FIRM LOVE - and boundaries - so the rest of us can have some sort of steady guidelines to help us learn how to 'be' in the world as we're growing up.

For so long, the men around me, who have been such a huge influence in my life, seem to me to have struggled to 'step-up' into the kind of masculine strength that can deal with life's challenges with resilience, wisdom, warmth, calm authority .. and yet

• maintain the flexibility to ebb and flow with each situation without caving in under the pressure

• remain connected to his heart and his love and not fly into a rage or unreasonable behaviour

• even to be able to acknowledge when he might not know all the answers but for now, he feels guided to x, y, z while he susses it out

• be open and willing to communicate with the wisdom of the feminine so that both can arrive at a balanced, dignified and (firm love) solution!

in other words, model the kind of emotional maturity one feels one can trust and depend on. For as long as this has been my experience (my entire freaking life), I have likewise struggled to relax into my softer feminine side and still feel safe while someone else takes charge. I've had a kind of relentless, usually unconscious, feeling of needing to remain on my guard - sort of 'on call', in case an angry grizzly bear arrives at the cave door and someone has to have the presence of mind to know how to respond to that.

I've rarely felt it safe enough to trust sufficiently well to feel able to fully relax / wind down / switch off - knowing that there is someone with greater (while I was still a child) or equal (in adult relationships of my own) wisdom who can handle it - whatever 'it' may be!

I realise this has been my lifelong story! A primal longing to feel a kind of masculine maturity that I could feel safe with and supported by.

Not only that - but I feel - in the deepest parts of my soul, that this feeling of lack of trust of the masculine by the feminine extends right out into the global picture - because the masculine is just so volatile and unsteady, often seeming to prefer instead to beat down and/or destroy anything that challenges its tenacious grip on its unbalanced theories of how society should work, and bury its head in the sand so it can't hear the ascending roar of the enraged, frustratingly short-changed feminine!

It seems to me that men have been been so severely conditioned by the cultural messages out there not to fully relax into the middle ground of their masculinity, ie: not aggressive and controlling, and not wishy-washy and weak (neither of which appeal to women, nor inspire them to feel safe!) but guided by their inherent internal wisdom to be assertive, responsive, mature, flexible.

As a woman, I have always felt somewhat out there - on my own - wanting so much to feel easy and relaxed in my femininity - supported - with a stable and emotionally resilient masculine right there at my side to be strong when I am weak; and yet to be ok with its own moments of weakness so that my strong doesn't send it into macho bullshit mode!

I once watched a fabulous discussion between Wayne Dyer and Cesar Millan, where Cesar made the quite brilliant observation that humans are the only species that will follow an unstable leader. My experience is that the cultural message has rendered the masculine emotionally unstable. And as for our 'leaders' .. well doesn't really need any further highlighting than that just now, does it! The trouble is patriarchy! By its very nature, it is unstable - because like the proverbial house of cards - or perhaps the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz - it is built on smoke and mirrors - or more truthfully; the dominant aspects of masculinity and the exclusion of the feminine, which includes emotional intelligence, compassion, empathy etc.

I need, we all need, grown up, mature, reliable, emotionally strong & resilient men! Men who are relaxed in the full range of their masculine capacities.

I mean, how sodding relaxed can a person be when they must act like freaking iron man when they are feeling - well, anything really – but have been trained to cut off these life-enriching parts of their masculine to conform to some brutish, emotionally castrated archetype that leaves a man unable to express (except in some muted, perhaps fake and/or acceptably toned down way) his joys, fears, sorrows; his spiritual loneliness, his disconnection, his self-doubt, his compassion, his pain & struggles & suffering, his love, and the profound softness that beats in his heart in the presence of someone who lights him up inside - without feeling 'unmanlike'; a traitor to some deeply flawed 'accepted norm'?

How can a man feel anything other than unfulfilled and disconnected from everyone – especially one's fellow men, himself .. and in fact ALL of life in these circumstances .. in some fundamentally HUGE and important way?

And women, bless us, have felt compelled to fill the breach and ‘man up’, because men bloodywell aren’t!! Not surprising really, all things considered.

Some, given to fits of 'mad as hell' & spitting like a box of firecrackers that a lighted match fell into; others more gentle souls who slip into passive/aggressive in those moments of emotional short-circuit (man, I've found men can be waaay more bitchy than women!), but all, I ponder, feeling and reacting from a place of some profound sense of incompleteness?

What is a woman to do?

Maybe this has something to do with why certain men resent us – women who have HAD to become 'the strong one' - because somebody had to! We have inherited, by nature of this damned fool emasculation inflicted by a badly off kilter model for human existence, his balls!!

I don’t want his balls!

I want my softness, my womanliness, my ‘feebleness'.

ok. Only sometimes.

Every now and then, like!

Just when I’m feeling all girly an’ shit, ya know?

Truth is, I just LONG FOR a 'masculine' I can LEAN ON at times, knowing that it won't fall over! A man who can be present. Perhaps they're all so goddam preoccupied by the confused hunt for the couple of essential bits they hadn't realised they'd given up as part of the stealthy manoeuvring of the patriarchal control system! (I mean, you know men and their bits - a little obsessive at the best of times, huh!)

I need a man who can grunt as he struggles to understand my hotwired emotions, but who listens, dumbfounded maybe, then smiles a smile full of twinkling eyes and love for this explosion of feminine energy, laughs at my ‘hot-heart’ stuff, hugs me tight and falls with me into face-aching laughter at the absurdity of it all as we do our man/woman dance thing – lovingly, humour-fully, laugh-out-loudly.

No macho bullshit. No ‘I can’t handle my own emotions, let alone hers’ bollocks and a fast, aggressive response to shut me down!

No.

Done with that.

I need, want, long for, a GROWN UP man – who gave this emasculation bullshit the middle finger and got on with the business of reclaiming his soul.

Who says NO MORE to violence

NO MORE to killing one another

NO MORE to war and the manipulation of the global 'elite'

NO MORE to taking his misdirected frustrations out on the woman who loves him

NO MORE to being a bloody slave to the corporate monsters who (yes, ‘who’, because they are granted personhood in the eyes of the law) and their corrupt governments sucked us all in, cut us into pieces they thought ‘suitable’ and shoved us all out the bloody other end – dazed, lost, confused, always searching for the bits we lost at the hands of this shitty model for life that is unfeeling, uncaring, irresponsible, unaccountable, greed-infested capitalism.

When you create a win/lose model – which is absolutely what it is – you better enjoy the ride on the gravy train while you can because it WILL come undone, and not bloody fast enough!

I claim back my mushy feminine.

Man – claim back your balls! Let’s work this shit out together!

With love,

Trish Brennan

❤️