I walked away in tears from a recent dinner with my father. He was lit, or so it felt, brandishing his restaurant bravado with loud voices, large gestures, and bottles of wine preemptively ordered without as much as an ear to the staff or the relatives with whom he was dining. I couldn’t handle it that night. We all have rough evenings, yes. His have evoked anger, sadness, pain from me.
I connect such nights to scenes from years ago. Across our tiny kitchen table, my dad and I would sit and pontificate about markets and world politics and other things on which I knew too little to really be commenting. Lips primed, we held forth on whatever verbal morsel came to mind, actual knowledge notwithstanding. To me it felt like getting closer to truth—or something—back when I thought truth was a sense of enforced security, of demanding validation. I talked and talked and felt so smart. Talking with my dad.
My mom and sister ate with us in silence.
That was how it was. The boys talked and the girls listened, or pretended to listen and waited, or tried to participate and every time were intruders. My dad and I awaited their words expecting stale air. What could my mom know about Europe? What could my little sister know about money? On brave evenings my mother’s frustration would rupture. “Here you go! Every night you take over the table conversation.” My sister would look at her plate, having resigned herself to this dinner long before. My dad and I would lock eyes and collude. It only took a glance. There was no problem here.
I’ve learned a lot of things from my father, many golden. My father is beautifully generous. His laughter and love for children are immense and fill entire rooms with good spirits. His kindness and enthusiasm and lust for knowledge are gifts that deeply affect the lives of those around him. He is moved by beauty. He is resilient, optimistic, and tries to do right by everyone he meets.
Then there are things I have been struggling to unlearn. Man-of-the-house mentalities. Dominating spaces. Assuming I am right on topics I know little about. There were times I cried when my father came to mind. For years I harbored pain and anger and blame over realities largely out of his control. I’ve secretly blamed and shamed him for the divorce (as I’ve blamed by mother). I’ve blamed him for my demeaning thoughts toward women. I’ve blamed him for the world’s racism, for the jingoism that rages through the veins of the United States. I’ve blamed him for a conception of manhood tethered to aggression, control, and abuse of power.
I’ve blamed him, and now I am finally letting it go.
To be born with a penis in the 20th century was to inherit a schizophrenic tradition. The masculine as we’ve understood it in the hegemonic West and the masculine that we are now painfully, desperately grasping for could hardly contradict more. The Man—a gender hoisted on infants with the sanctioned genitalia—is upon “his” birth handed a never-ending list of expectations and allowances with which he must contend. This list is a fractal: it extends from the clichéd, supposedly innocuous (“boys like blue and trucks”), to the insidious power-grab (“men take care of business, infrastructure, ‘important’ decisions”), to the barely concealed permit for sexual violence (“men have urges that deserve to be met”). It includes arbitrary rules (“boys don’t cry”), misleading propositions (“vulnerability is weakness is bad”), and false dichotomies (“respect comes before kindness”). For the most part these are unspoken, implicit, assumed.
The list defines how Men can operate in the practical world, the emotional world, the solitary and interpersonal worlds. The extent to which the human within the Man can be themselves is dictated by the lists’s tenets. To transgress them is to meet pushback designed to force renegades back in line.
The list’s justifications are as varied as they are contradictory. Its enforcement ranges from the overt (stereotypical sexism, machismo, violence) to the deeply subtle (encouragement/side-glares from other Men, rape culture, passive-aggressive exclusion from male spaces). The worst, most intractable part is that the enforcement is unconscious and automatic. There is no conscious male conspiracy. We as Men absorb these rules as children and typically uphold them without being able to see nor question them. Most Men are not aware of how their behavior ripples out into the world, and those that do become aware do so in stages. That’s how hard it is to see and change this force.
An accounting of external behavior is only one side of the coin. The other is much harder and much less mentioned: to change thyself you must first know thyself. The dominant culture has left everyone, not just men, pity little in terms of tools and support for this process of self-discovery. As one liberatory example, feminism admonishes us to inspect how we exist as individuals in the world. Often this means looking at painful pieces of our past. Often this means owning ugly behaviors we don’t realize we’re denying. It requires radical honesty, patience, and a willingness to ask for help. It requires belief in our worthiness despite our failings. But none of this is automatic nor encouraged for Men. For along with mandating the list, the culture whispers its secret: to be a Man is to be lonely. He is to be misunderstood, above all by himself.
Hidden behind what we’ve inherited—the beliefs and emotions we bring to this moment—are human beings waiting to be free in these specific ways: free to be at ease, free to relish the marrow of life and endure its suffering with grace, free to feel like themselves. When we are allowed to be ourselves, those around us can be themselves as well.
It is our lot as humans to suffer and to heal. To heal ourselves and to help others along in the process. To dispel dark energies as we encounter them. When I look at my father I see a human of exceptional character, heart, and strength. I also see a Man suffering under the weight of his beliefs and torments. This is a weight I know, too. It is a weight I have learned from him, in part. And it is a weight I have begun to lift from my shoulders. In doing so I stand by my father as he lifts his weight, as well. We heal together. All of us do.
As a culture we have not yet envisioned a liberatory masculinity. But we are getting closer. And I know I will be doing so with my father.