Smirking at the death rattles of Howard's failed culture war...

It's hard to miss the welcome return of socially democratic leadership since KRudd's landed. Despite a minor slip-up on the Bill Henson debacle (a debate which might have been a touch ultra vires for our reliably nerdy, Christian diplomat - especially with Killface in the Arts ministry), a questionable approach to the working conditions of his staff, and a mere mismanagement of media when Brendan Nelson thrusted his flimsy foil around FuelWatch (check out that double-headed alliteration!), I've been consistently feeling the relaxation reflex as our lower quadrants get the Rudd treatment.

After all those years of disquiet while Brows ruled the roost, the relative warmfuzziness of our honeymoon's almost daily dish of progressive policy initiatives is just what my doctor ordered... which is a stunning segueway into the point of this post: Today, reading my daily Capital Monitor feed from the Federal Government, I noted Nicola Roxon MP (Federal Minister for Health and Ageing) announcing that the Government is developing Australia's first ever National Men's Health Policy "in recognition of the fact that men often have poorer health than women, are likely to die earlier, and are at greater risk of suicide".

I was chatting about it with my friend Simon at lunch today, and we were both genuinely surprised to read in the press release that:

• Men are expected to live 4.8 years less than women
• Men are three times more likely to commit suicide
• Men experience 70 per cent of the burden of disease related to injury
• Men are over-represented in deaths related to HIV/AIDS.
• The health of Indigenous men is also significantly worse than for any other group in Australia, with an average life expectancy of only 59 years – some 20 years less than non-Indigenous Australian males.

I was a touch turned-off by the narrative of the press release. Notwithstanding my strong support for measures like this, I found it a little disheartening that the Government saw it necessary to explain the "specific health needs and challenges" of Australian men by reference to women. I'd feel far more comfortable with a position that merely recognises discrete gender observances which generate from census data without pitting it against the other.

But, my petty nitpicking on narrative issues aside, the broader import of the initiative is wonderful. To mark the start of International Men’s Health Week, the Minister is launching the paper "Setting the Scene: Developing a Men’s Health Policy for Australia".

As an initial downpayment on a broader approach, the Government will invest:

• $122,000 for the Men's Health Information and Resource Centre Men's Shed, University of Western Sydney;
• $80,000 for the Toowoomba Older Men’s Network (TOMNet);
• $150,000 for OZHelp Tasmania, a workplace program;
• $117,000 for INCOLink in Victoria to undertake suicide prevention with apprentices in the building and construction industry;
• $460,000 to help prevent suicide in men, through the National Suicide Prevention Strategy; and
• $95,000 to encourage men to see their GP.

That last measure rang alarm bells for me. As is well documented on this blog, I'm recovering from terrible bout of illness born largely from a (completely unconscious) macho zero-self care policy I held for many years. I was discussing it only yesterday with a friend of mine who at 30 has just been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He'd been noticing his testicle increasing in size for about a year, but maintained a "she'll be right" mentality while the cancer took hold. It's shocks like these which are bringing me so deeply into my own of late. Shocks which remind me, at this thankfully crucial crossroad of age and development, that I need to take good care of myself.

So why don't we? For me, it's been the recognition that I'm not superman, and don't have to be. The recognition that I can be loved without first performing. That I don’t need to overwork myself. That I don't need to be everything to everyone to receive affection and affiliation. It’s taken years for me to realise that, after being enculturated to cop it on the chin and keep moving. I feel deeply for all those who don’t realise it before they’ve crossed over the point of no return. I see them everyday, broken, alone, overworked, confused, and I’m scared of them – scared of what I could have so easily become.

Simon and I spoke at length today about a core manifestation of this take-no-prisoners approach to living: our respective bouts with work-addiction. It’s cost us both a lot more than we’d bargained (or earned in the process). Like me, he was depressed and anxious for three years while his clumsy pleas went unheard by those he loved most. Busted, broken, forgotten, we weren’t of any use to eachother either. We were both talking about the dismay we’d felt in coming to terms with the way a public sphere dominated by conservative social policy permeated our private spheres so silently. We both lamented the aspirational pressure we’d felt trying to fit a mould we weren’t raised fit in: demanding careers, failing families and financial uncertainty despite hitherto unimaginable incomes. We both buckled to the bemusement of our hypnotised friends and families. He said beautifully: “They didn’t know either, they didn’t have experience with ‘those words’ coming from ‘my voice’”.

But the conversation wasn’t all doom and gloom. He’s got help, like me, and things are on the up. We spoke about the how the promise of our new outlook, our new jobs, our new loves, our new leaders, our new dreams – of the new times – might actually finally bolster us in our new selves.

And then we paused together for a moment, for what seemed like the first time since we were boys (from Bankstown).

Dirty Work

"Keith Thompson, in one of his essays, described himself at twenty as a typical young man "initiated" by women. His parents divorced when Keith was about twelve, and he lived with his mother while his father moved into an apartment nearby.

Throughout high school Keith was closer to women than to other men, and that situation continued into college years, when his main friends were feminists whom he described as marvellous, knowledgeable, and generous, and from whom he learned an enormous amount. He then took a job in Ohio state politics, working with women and alert to the concerns of women.

About that time he had a dream. He and a clan of she-wolves were running in the forest. Wolves suggested to him primarily independence and vigour. The clan of wolves moved fast through the forest, in formation, and eventually they all arrived at a riverbank. Each she-wolf looked into the water and saw her own face there. But when Keith looked into the water, he saw no face at all".

In all its requisite partiality, I found a deep resonance with this passage from Robert Bly's Iron John and a few recent stations on my journey, when I was reading it last weekend. He was discussing the absence of old man initiators in contemporary Western society, and the documented effects this has had on the acceptance, ownership and growth of a healthy masculine in young men.

I've felt such absence of support, and therefore a tiring defiance, around this in my life. My Father was a hard-working and loyal wage slave for thirty-five stiff-lipped years. He didn't have the nurturing, social evolution, financial backing, economic climate, access to diverse educational outlets, travel opportunities, and freedom I've been gifted, to know how to claim his golden ball from the Wild Man's cage. My Grandad had also fought that long, lonely battle, alongside the Gentleman's error of play-acting civility and denying the fire in his belly. That left me at the mercy of the well-intentioned, but fatally-flawed maternal therapy culture of the 1970-80's, and its enemy #1: Wild Men's wisdom.

"When women, even women with the best intentions, bring up a boy alone, he may in some way have no male face, or he may have no face at all. The old men initiators, by contrast, conveyed to boys some assurance that is invisible and nonverbal; it helped the boys to see their genuine face or being".

It's been an interesting battle. I've claimed my face, but with a very hard fought theft of the key from under my Mother's pillow. In that defiance, I had to battle many destructive forces on my ego and relationships, which were in addition to the road of trials that the standard birther of wild wisdom faces. I've looked for mentors in the wrong places, I've wound up desperate and listening to false prophets, and I've gone it alone to the edge of annihilation… and I've done it without trust or care. It's been a powerful journey of challenge, but I often wonder whether the battle needed to be as difficult as karma had decided.

Like suffering a simultaneous existential crisis and ego-dissociation/borderline regression without any therapy in the third world for half a year. Like spending $200,000 of savings on trying to mend old wounds and serve the highest ethic I could, and coming out with jack shit beyond knowing I've stayed true to my (longing) centre. Like having a broken jaw, dismantled back muscle structure, inverted spinal problems, and pinched nerves, and continuing to work to pay for my life against all alarm bells and warning signals to pack it in. Like doing fucking furniture removal work with a broken shoulder when I'm a practicing solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW! It's a question I can't seem to answer rationally… it was crazy… but it mended the alienation. I needed to run with my wolves.

"There's no sense in idealising pre-industrial culture, yet we know that today many fathers now work thirty or fifty miles from the house, and by the time they return at night the children are often in bed, and they themselves are too tired to do active fathering.

The industrial revolution, in its need for office and factory workers, pulled father away from their sons and, moreover, placed the sons in compulsory schools where the teachers are mostly women. D.H. Lawrence described what this was like in his essay "Men Must Work And Women As Well". His generation in the coal-mining areas of Britain felt the full force of that change, and the new attitude centred on one idea: that physical labour was bad.

Lawrence recalls his father, who had never heard this theory, worked daily in the mines, enjoyed the camaraderie with the other men, came home in good spirits, and took his bath in the kitchen. But around that time the new schoolteachers arrived from London to teach Lawrence ands his classmates that physical labour is low and unworthy and that men and women hold strive to move upward to a more "spiritual" level – higher work, mental work. The children of his generation deduced that their fathers has been doing something wrong all along, that men's physical work is wrong and that those sensitive mothers who prefer white curtains and an elevated life are right and always have been.

During Lawrence's teenage years, which he described in Sons and Lovers, he clearly believed the new teachers. He wanted the "higher" life and took his mother's side. It wasn't until two years before he died, already ill with tuberculosis in Italy, that Lawrence began to notice the vitality of the Italian workingmen, and to feel a deep longing for his own father. He realise then that his mother's ascensionism had been wrong for him, and had encouraged him to separate from his father and from his body in an unfruitful way."

It's been terribly hard – perversely so – and yet, there's always been the wild man inside who holds the wisdom and knew what needed to be done. My karmic pit was trans-generational, and there's nobody to blame (I still think we should all Fuck the Man for certain, even if I now know there is no Man). I was gifted the circumstances to develop the power of foresight, of the longview, and the strength in many facets of my being to be able to do the deep work of healing my ancestors didn't have the conditions to face. As acutely painful as that has been.

Where to from here? Physical work, mental work, spiritual work. Isn't it obvious?

It was a fine synchronicity to receive an email from Trevor Grey this evening calling Men who've been through his Trusting the Masculine to farewell our "initiation ground" at Thump Boxing on June 18. See you there.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

"The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Lacking adequate models of mature men, and lacking the societal cohesion and institutional structures for actualising ritual process, its "every man for himself". And most of us fall by the wayside, with no idea what it was that was the goal of our gender-drive or what went wrong in our strivings. We just know we are anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent, helpless, frustrated, put down, unloved and unappreciated, often ashamed of being masculine. We just know that our creativity was attacked, that our initiative was met with hostility, that we were ignored, belittled, and left holing the empty bag of our lost self-esteem. We cave in to a dog-eat-dog world, trying to keep our work and out relationships afloat, losing energy, or missing the mark. Many of us seek the generative, affirming, and empowering father (though most of us don't know it), the father who, for most of us, never existed in our actual lives and won't appear, no matter how hard we try to make him appear".

Robert L Moore & Douglas Gillette

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover:
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

Trusting the Masculine

My friend Jeremy recently did the Trusting the Masculine course I did last year with Sydney teacher Trevor Grey. We caught up on Sunday night to chat about his experience, and over the last few days I’ve been reflecting on how different he seemed, how different we seemed and, mostly, how different I am, both since I did the course, and simply “these days”.

I’ve been thinking today about David Deida’s ‘three stages of masculine’ distinction, and the ways that conceptual framework speaks to my experience over the years*.

For the uninitiated, it seems to me that Deida’s stages chart his observations of the genealogical unfolding of affect and spirit in the (possibly western) human male. I consider Deida’s first stage (traditional) Man to be a cultural role defined by stoicism, denial/suppression of affect and the maintenance an illusory omniscience in the I-Thou relationship designed to intimate power, protection, performance and perfectibility (think John Wayne/Clint Eastwood). I’d describe his second stage as the post-modern fella where the socio-cultural expectations of gender are loosened and gender roles are toyed with, men opening themselves to emotion, affect, authentic relationship and other domains traditionally protected by Woman (think a pony-tailed me circa first year uni, with a goateed mouth singing protest songs on my acoustic guitar). Deida’s third stage is where it gets interesting. My exposure to his work suggests that in response to the limitations of the pluralistic second stage, we enter a space where authenticity of heart and mind become one’s predominant experience through a complex process involving a loosening of the ego, the emergence of aperspectival cognition and a deepening of present self-perception as an emergent open-system, among other things. In that new consciousness, gender needs not be narrowly defined, denied nor politicised, but rather, the complexity of its many faces is experienced as another aspect of the arising of forms. In response to that perception, we openly experience the various aspects of gender which arise in our first person experience, we surrender in devotion to the limitless gender relationships inside our sub-personalities and between those of others, and hold lightly, yet still hold, the evident faces of gender observable in our nature (from gross through all subtle realms available).

In this space, a sexual wonderland has emerged for me. I’ve been able to inhabit the fullness more completely, feeling self-preserving sexuality, self-adapting sexuality, transcendent sexuality, compassion, force, passion, commitment, care, fire, intimacy, sensuality, frivolity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, fantasy, longing, denial, trust, dismay, lust… in a ceaseless tangle of legs, sweat, breath, hearts, souls and God.

Given the transcendent opening I’ve been experiencing through sexuality, I’ve been unsteady with Deida’s notion that we have a pre-given ‘essence’ which we can locate and use as the grounding for a permanent polarisation. That hasn’t been my experience. My experience of life discloses a kosmos far more enacted than pre-given. For one, I’ve never been able to locate a stable, permanent and divinely granted basis for my existence that hasn’t been utterly ineffable. Despite all the illusory promises my perceptions provide from moment to moment, the shifting sands of the groundless ground of existence is the only promise, and a promise which can never be grasped… such is the torment of incarnation. Given the depth of realisation evidenced in his prose, I wonder if pressed, Deida would yield on this position? Given my perception of enacted realities, my experience has been deeply diverse (and correspondingly deeply confusing to a sense of self that seems to require the absence of dissonance in a naively congruent self-sense). I’ve simultaneously felt sensual and powerful, compassionate and directed, certain and submissive, dominant and emotionally intimate. I’ve felt hetero, homo and trans attraction and curiosity. I’ve felt identified as a man, and often identified much happier as one of the girls. I’ve sensed assertion and denial of my male sex…

… and yet, I’ve made a choice to enact a polarised self sense in sexual congress to dig a karma that feels trusting, rewarding and beautiful. That self sense identifies as a trustable heterosexual male interested in a deep, committed relationship. It’s limited to my sexuality, and not to the way I show up in the relationship (I’m not keen on any relationship that requires me to express the fullness of masculine tosspottery in every given moment). The basis of this choice hasn’t been pre-ordained. No ontological given. Not even close. I’ve searched high and low for the holy grail in regards to my gender/sex/sexual identity… fuck me, in regards to everything in my life… and the only thing that remained at the end of the painful journey was an exhausted self laying bare in the reality that I Am Agency in the choices about my identity and the mental/emotional/spiritual criteria for those choices. Karma is made.

I’m very different “these days”.

* Of course, as with all conceptions, there’s gradations between, around, and within these ‘stages’, but for conversational purposes around type distinctions, I find it a handy metric.