When I launched Dude, Let’s Talk!, I was looking to bring awareness, conversation and discovery to being a man. I recognized that there is no prescribed answer, yet so many people I saw operated as if there is an answer – and they have it! But yet, while the old ways are familiar, they leave many men wanting for something better, more whole, more happy and fulfilled.
When I say “What it means to be a man today”, that’s not to say that it can’t or doesn’t apply to women. I have read and heard places where people say, for example, “Being a man means being a leader.” Very often, at least in my experience, that sounds like it’s therefore NOT what it means to be a woman. Or just as insidious – if you’re not a leader, you’re not a man. But in these conversations here, neither of those scenarios are the case.
Frankly, we all could use a little more rounding out of our experiences. As a white man, that’s my experience. If I want to know what the experience of a black woman is like, I need to LISTEN to a black woman – not to know definitively “what it means to be a black woman”, but learn her individual experience.
No matter what I DO, I will never experience the world as a black woman. But when I listen, I can incorporate that experience into my understanding the world, giving me a perspective I never could have gotten on my own.
Ultimately, finding our true humanity comes in our pursuit of freedom. Not in “doing whatever the fuck I want to do” freedom, but “freedom from my own, limiting thoughts on who I am.” In our culture, so much of our identity is wrapped around our gender. It starts from the way strangers talked to us when we were four weeks old – their intonation totally different based on whether you were wearing a pink hat or a blue hat.
As we grew older, we would hear things like “boys on this side and girls on that side.” Dad might come home from work (that already puts gender definition in our heads) and greets the boys with a deep-voiced “Hey buddy!”and then, “Hi, sweetheart!” in the upper register of his voice when his daughter rushes toward him with a hug and kiss.
Then the toys we got for Christmas, the movies our grandparents plopped us down in front of, etc, all told us the story of who we were, what we would like, how we were supposed to act and what we were supposed to do.
If you’re a woman reading this, or a man who is turned off by all the gender stratification we see around us, know this: what it means to be a man is, underneath it all, not much different from what it means to be a woman. But how we get to our truest humanity is recognizing our unique challenges, strengths and weaknesses in our gender, and then using the tools we have to get to our higher humanity.
I am sure that in a few years (and the sooner the better), everything here will be dated and/or useless. That men have the admirable attributes usually attributed to women and vice versa. Men will be considered great communicators and listeners, women recognized as daring and courageous. Boys will be protected from the social pressures that lead them to lash out violently, and girls will be safe and will never be told “Don’t wear that outfit and be home before dark.”
Finding our true humanity means that, as men, we have to understand “what it means to be a man today” in freedom, separate from the socialized gender norms as defined by society (and now us, ourselves). We will likely never transcend gender, nor should we, but we can throw off the definition of what society has said gender means – and come to an understanding in freedom.
To get there, we all have a lot of work to do. As a man, I can offer my best to other men. I have heard men complain that women are just as full of shortcomings as men. That’s true, I’m sure. But I’m not a woman and I can’t change myself AS a woman. Women’s faults and shortcomings are for them to deal with. I am here to grow and change myself as a MAN. I hope that by sharing of my man-self, I can support those who want to improve themselves as men.