A Conversation about Guys from a Guy (1)

It seems a trite platitude now to say that men and women are very different, but I would like to explore this a little more. The reason why I want to is to invite you all into this discussion I having with the lovely “MJ” from the Empowered Grace Blog. I will quote from Robert Bly‘s book Iron John and then share some thoughts with all of you :

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching. If the father is working for a corporation, what is there to teach? He is reluctant to tell his son what is really going on. The fragmentation of decision making in corporate life, the massive effort that produces the corporate willingness to destroy the environment for the sake of profit, the prudence , even cowardice that one learns in bureaucracy – who wants to teach that….. but in most families today, the sons and daughters receive, when the father returns home at six, only his disposition, or his temperament, which is usually remote and irritable…. a fathers remoteness may severely damage the daughter’s ability to participate good-heartedly in later relationship with men. Much of the rage that some women direct to the patriarchy stems from a vast disappointment over this lack of teaching of their own fathers. ….. the father as a living force in the home home disappeared when those forces demanding industry sent him on various railroads out of his various villages.

Some thoughts

I want to say that psychologically the process of maturing into adulthood is  very different for men and women. For a woman the coming of her first period is a biological as well as psychological catalyst from what I have witness and studied that sets her on the track towards becoming a woman. For males there is not act which  signals the start of this transition. This is why many so called “primitive” societies would put males between specified ages through an initiation. This initiation was presided over by  elder men inclusive of your father, uncles, grandfather etc. This was very significant. Of course some places were more extreme than others.

I remember my pops telling me that when a boy turned 16 and showed himself a bit capable, he was allowed to wear long pants. Many young guys do not have a father figure at home or if they have one he has been reduced to a sort of clownish figure. Actually what’s interesting when I look back on the many sitcoms I remember watching the father is quite often loud and over bearing and resigned always to a special chair or the corner of the room. he thinks he is running the show but no one tells him how  effete  he has become

Many sons in the US however visualize the father as a simple object of ridicule to made fun of as, in fact he is so often in comic strips and television commercials. One young man summed it up: “A father is a person who rustles newspapers in the living room.”

So many boys look to gangs to get fulfilment and recognition and the initiation into manhood they need. I mean even I, was looking at one point to join a gang. I was filled with rage and wanted to be recognized. I knew some guys in a gangs as does my lady as she is from East Los Angeles. Actually one of her old friends went back to prison recently again for the  4 or 5 time.

I have seen many women do an amazing job as a single mom, but I feel that there is something that one gets from a man from the company of men that helps one along in the maturation process that a woman cannot provide. The point I am getting at is something my male friend and I have noticed is that even as adults we find ourselves lacking in certain departments. The things we are lacking then to show up in a serious way in our relationships with our significant others, there is a kind of attentiveness to detail that isn’t there, an ability to vocalize feelings, and approach intimacy in some settings. There is a kind of escapism too.

The home is a very political space. There is a place for pops and for moms, and the kid adn the dogs. Look at all in the children   fior examples Archie Bunker sat somewhere, Edith sat somewhere else There clearly many invisible lines in the American household, and that household and fragmentation continues in school, it continues in work.

I could go on and on but lemme stop it here

Lemme know what you think

MrMary

SideNote:

Iron John: A Book About Men is a book by American poet Robert Bly published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley, and his best known work to the public at large. An exegesis of Iron John, a parable about a boy maturing into adulthood (monomyth) with help of the wild man, and part of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales published in 1812 by German folklorists Brothers Grimm, it spent 62 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list and went on to become a pioneering work in mythopoetic men’s movement. It uses Jungian psychology, various myths, legends, folklores, and fairy tales  to analyze Iron John in Bruno Bettelheim fashion, to find lessons especially meaningful to men and men’s movement. Bly believes that this fairy tale contains lessons from the past of great importance to modern men.

I have always been a big fan and reader of myth, Carl Jung as well as Jospeh Campbell since elementary school. I thought about being a psychotherapist once and during that time came upon the works in passing of Robert L. Moore. Who approaches and talks about many of the ideas Bly discusses but starting from a more scientific point of views