Masculinity

I wrote this email to send to members of a mens group that I was part of. I realised that my experience as a gay man wasn’t fully understood and it was up to me to make it known.

Hey everyone! In recent weeks I’ve been exploring what masculinity means and thought I would bring you all on the journey. Hopefully it might be of interest and provide some insight or reflection.

Growing up in the closet until I was 18, I found myself wearing the identity of masculinity but not feeling comfortable in it. At it’s worst, to me masculinity meant boisterousness, aggressiveness, competitiveness, bullying, banter/laddishness, racism and misogyny. At it’s best it looked like fraternity, bonding, ruggedness, practicality, physicality but I didn’t share the traditional common interests like sports, cars, women, outdoors, DIY/building so I never felt the sense of belonging that might have fostered these values.

However, masculinity has an interesting additional layer of nuance for me. Despite not identifying with this traditional view of masculinity, in the gay world I was deemed to be ‘straight-acting’ or ‘masc’: I couldn’t be picked out of a crowd for being gay. As a teen and in my early 20s, I would hear this as a compliment. I didn’t want to be the ‘gay friend’. I wanted to be known as someone who happened to be gay. I didn’t identify with the LGBT community and what I saw as pageantry and flamboyance.

But in the gay world, being masc was simultaneously fetishised and ridiculed. In this community, masculinity relates to mannerisms and appearance (which could be considered attractive by some, particularly to role play suppressed fantasies) but it also suggests discomfort with embracing the feminine and therefore not accepting yourself. You can spot mascs because they’ll be wearing ‘straight’ clothes with no flair, be stiff in moving to music, be uncomfortable talking about certain ‘gay’ topics, not want to be judged for how they look or act, and definitely wouldn’t outwardly claim to be a bottom (penetration being gasp a thing that women have to put up with and therefore surely feminine and undesirable).

In other words, despite being gay, these masc men carry a lot of internalized homophobia and shame about themselves, still looking for acceptance from the straight society. This was me. Interestingly, for a long time I belonged to a community on Reddit called Gaybros, for gay men who didn’t feel like they belonged in traditional gay circles. This is where I felt most comfortable exploring my sexuality in the early days. The group used to have the tagline “gear, grub, guns, and guys”. Not once did I see posts about those first 3 subjects for years, and yet that was still how we viewed masculinity.

Ironically it was through this subreddit that I met my boyfriend of 4 years and then a group of gay friends who were more comfortable with themselves, and I began to branch out. My 20s were about healing the feminine and leaning into the qualities of myself I’d denied like sensitivity, intuition, dance/movement, music (as a teen, I had ignored all female vocalists and musicals for fear of being labelled gay!), fashion and other interests.

I’ve spent so long healing the feminine, arriving at a point where now I feel comfortable in it (although I’ve yet to do drag, next step this year), that I feel like have neglected the masculine.

And that’s where I am now.

Over the last 10 years I’ve made many straight male friends, but all of them are sensitive and self-aware and similarly shunned the traditional view of masculine interests. As I’ve made my own life outside of traditional male circles, the topic of masculinity hadn’t really crossed my mind. But then in the RoF session a few weeks ago, being asked to call from deep within me what I would say to the men of the world, I felt a block. I felt like I couldn’t speak for them. How could I, when I thought I shared so little with the traditional male? I know that the male world is calling out for help but I wondered if they would listen to me.

It’s been an interesting few weeks exploring this topic, and thank you to my quad for some amazing insights. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

There seems to be two parts to masculinity: identity and energy.

Culturally and superficially there may be a view of masculinity similar to the one I shared at the start, but when digging in deeper there are some more profound ideas about what masculinity is. Here are some:

• Being direct and honest
• Being decisive and taking action
• Being a protector and a provider
• Responsibility
• Having purpose
• Modelling to other men

Q shared a definition that really resonated with me which was that masculinity is being responsible for people other than yourself. When I look at society today, I see one where we’re all spoon-fed. Entertainment is dished out through technology, any help you need is just a few taps away, wisdom is outsourced to search engines, local community has broken down, honesty and integrity is not rewarded (see the treatment of whistle-blowers or the prevalence of fake news), modelling is a social media affair that presents a distorted view of life, men today are financially dependent on their parents through to their 30s, even the welfare state (which I’m a fan of) and big government has taken over the role of protector and provider.

In this light, it’s no wonder there’s a problem with masculinity. Society has emasculated men. Unfortunately, the scapegoats have become women, trans people, races, political ideologies and so on. I also came across this quote by G. Michael Hopf which I think beautifully illustrates where we’re at:

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

We’re living in good times. And I worry about the hard times to come.

What do we do about it?

Well, some of the great work that you’re all already doing is to redefine masculinity towards the values above and to model it to other men. Since learning about your perspectives, it’s actually shifted my own view of masculinity and made me recognise these qualities within myself and feel much more comfortable with it. I now know what to aspire towards, and through my own coaching practice and community work I’m keen to take on responsibility for people other than myself.

Perhaps one of the most important things for me right now is learning how to tune into and channel anger in the right way. Admittedly, this is where I’m at the very early stages of integrating.

As Ben explained to me, anger is a powerful energy. At it’s core, it’s knowing “I don’t want this”. The unhealthy expression of this is aggression and this is why I’ve denied myself the emotion, having witnessed it in other men in my life and seen its collateral damage. But the sacred word of anger is no. It’s learning how to stand up for yourself but to communicate it in a considerate, compassionate way. The other aspect is to channel this anger into action, making a commitment to do something and not blaming anyone else for the way things are.

Again, looking at the macro lens of society I see a lot of people resenting the direction of our times but not finding a way to vent it, with traditional protest movements dissolving in the face of apathy and anger turned inwards. Helping men to uncover and direct their anger is incredibly important.

On this point, Zac brought up the idea of warrior energy. It’s within men’s nature to need to be savage at times, to be able to turn on the role of the powerful protector. It’s just that we need to bring this out safely. Something I’m keen to explore is tuning into this perhaps through jiujitsu, as I’ve just not been in tune with this emotion. I don’t yet have a safe space to vent my anger, competitiveness, and physicality.

Another interesting dynamic was one that Ben heard from Sean (perhaps you can give more detail on this!), which is that there tends to be a cycle of healing the masculine and feminine energies. The typical journey seems to be from wounded masculine -> wounded feminine -> healed feminine -> healed masculine. Which then repeats as the more subtle wounds emerge in each cycle. I definitely relate to this and feel like I’m in this last stage.

Anyway, sorry for the blog post! Hope it’s been interesting and I’m keen to hear your thoughts and perspectives!