July 3, 2005

Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

Redefining Masculinity in the 21st Century
by Jon Marcy

Good Morning;

First, I would like to thank everyone who woke up this Sunday morning and decided to make their way into church today. Summer mornings can be so inviting for us to stay in bed, or to get a hot beverage and Sunday paper and just sit and read. The good news is that we are all here, and I am here to speak to you about the redefinition of masculinity for the 21st Century.

My journey into this subject began when I became the father of daughters. I was required to look deep into my very being and begin the slow and painful process of redefining what being a man was in my mind and soul, for I knew that what I projected was going to have a very astounding impact on how my daughters would see themselves as well as their relationships with men. This has been important to me on the road to parenting three strong, independent thinking young women. I am here this morning to share with you some of my journey.

Before we can redefine masculinity, we first need to define it. It is hard to redefine anything without a clear understanding of what the original definition is. History clearly shows that "man" has been the ruler of most civilizations for centuries. Reasons why this is so can be traced to the need for power, and economic exploitation exercised through warfare. Due to man's physical characteristics, man was positioned into a place of dominance. But, surrounding that position are many myths of culture that shape and inform the way we live that don't necessarily have relevance in today's society. I am speaking about the myth of gender, and specifically the myth of "male gender".

As men, before we can truly experience our spiritual journey, we have to get over idolizing our gender. Our spiritual journey starts on the other side of gender. Now let me say what I mean by that because I think my perspective is different than that of most people. Let's start with the idea of the myth. The gender myth is like software that is inserted into us by society, and by our family. Nature gives us certain hardware. There's male hardware and there's female hardware. But the moment we're born, people start loading various software disks in, saying, "Here's what a real man is. Here's what it means to be a man. Here's what it means to be an American man". That's what gender is. And those gender divisions, for roughly the last four thousand years, have been largely circulating around warfare. Popular images of John Wayne come to my mind when I think of these labels, as well as famous figures in our history like General Patton, General McArthur, General Robert E. Lee, and General Grant. We also have sports heroes that we idolize for these so called masculine traits. Athletes like Mohammad Ali, Joe Namith, Babe Ruth, and Cal Ripkin. Television characters also portray man in these same images, and have been seen on shows like Home Improvement, The Simpson's and Everyone Loves Ramon.

The division between men and women has been the division between warriors and nurturers. The male has been artificially conditioned to be tough, to be aggressive, to be hostile, and be willing to either kill or die for their society. Sam Keen wrote that a symbol of this can be seen with the act of circumcision, which is a way of saying that being male is to be willing to be wounded, whereas the female has been conditioned to be the servant of the warriors, the bearer of the children, the nurturer of the society, and in that sense to be inferior to the male. So when we're talking about gender, we're largely talking about injuries that have been done to male persons and female persons in the effort to perpetuate a way of life based upon warfare, aggression, domination and control. And all of that, from the point of view of the life of the spirit, is a mistake. It is this perception that we have to rise above in order to begin to have any notion of what the spirit is.

You may ask, "Is the spiritual path then different for men, as compared to women"? I would say the answer is no. We do need to get over different illusions though. The male has got to get over the illusions of manhood, and the woman has to get rid of the illusions of womanhood, to go beyond them, to go beyond the cultural stereotypes that have shaped them and to realize that, at the level of the life of the spirit, there isn't a difference--that it's equally difficult for us to transcend those things, to delve into our unconscious and to transcend our conditioning

I have read advice on how to be a better person, and one of the things said is that men need to get over our pride, because pride is our number one sin. We read that in the bible, self help books and we hear it on Dr. Phil! By and large, men are raised to be more narcissistic.

But it's not true for women. Women, by and large, have a problem of not having enough pride because that's what our culture has done to them; the message our society projects is that you're second class. Your self worth is tied to your physical appearance, and how good of a nurturer you are. So in that sense, there is a different emotional agenda that is attached to a woman freeing herself as compared to a man freeing himself. The liberation is from different stereotypes.

Western spirituality has until recently been almost exclusively male in its metaphors. The metaphor of "God the Father" is perhaps the strongest example. And then Mary Daly came along some twenty-five years ago and said, "This is a big mistake. Talking about God the Father is just a way to smuggle your politics and your sense of male gender superiority into theology." It was like dropping a bombshell into theology because suddenly you realized that these male-biased metaphors really said that "masculine" traits, such as control and reason, were better than "feminine" traits. When I first heard this argument from my radical feminist partner, I resisted this idea and took offense. Then I began to realize she was absolutely right about it. Now, let's talk about God the Mother. Let's talk about the Goddess." Now, I think that Mary Daly should be as critical of that as she has been of the notion of God the Father. We do not begin to get on a spiritual journey until we go beyond the gendered metaphors for God. For instance, tell me what in the world it could possibly mean to say Mother Nature? What's motherly about it as opposed to fatherly or brotherly? It's a metaphor, and it's a metaphor whose time has passed as far as I'm concerned. I say that we need to get beyond that and to get back to the much more basic kinds of metaphors associated with knowledge, compassion, and love.

Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder. The same thing is true about the life of the spirit. The life of the spirit begins in wonder, the wonder that there is anything, the sense of gratitude to be in a world that is filled with all of these marvels. And if the life of the spirit begins in wonder and awe, then what could it possibly mean to say that wonder and/or awe is either male or female? It's irrelevant. Maleness and femaleness are irrelevant to the basic fact that there is this marvelous universe.

People who are capable of transitioning past their gender identity and live their lives based on their core self and embrace the wonder and awe of the universe to me are the real heroes. It takes great courage to be your authentic self, and to let go of the gender stereotypes we are programmed with from our childhood.

Some contemporary thinkers have asserted that women are, by nature, predisposed to pursue a path of immanence, involving deeply connecting their bodies to the cycles of nature and finding the sacred in relationships. Men, meanwhile, tend to seek transcendence of all that is grounded, to look beyond themselves for the sacred mystery that lies at the source of all existence. Seemingly in support of this idea are certain religious traditions that adhere to a kind of thinking in which there are strictly defined spheres that are said to be divinely ordained for men and women. In Orthodox Judaism, for example, the men devote themselves to study and prayer and the women are expected to find their spiritual fulfillment in bearing children and maintaining the sanctity of the home. According to this paradigm, it is only by each sex giving themselves wholeheartedly to the fulfillment of these preordained roles and then coming together in their differences that divine union can be achieved and God's will can become manifest on Earth. Is this notion true? Does it take two distinct paths working in concert to create the whole? Is this what a soul mate is about?

No. I think that's sort of like saying it is God-given that women should wear skirts and men should wear pants. I think it's just about as culturally conditioned as that. Give me a break! Women are more immanent than men?! I don't know where people get off making this kind of generalization! Native Americans have connected with nature for centuries without the need to own it or dominate it. I enjoy watching nature and allowing myself to feel the awe of that which is greater than myself, so does that make me like a woman???

As a young boy, I was unusually sensitive and was able to easily empathize. I loved soft things, I loved nature and I was sensuous. And as I grew up it occurred to me that this was something I had to be ashamed of, that being myself was to be a sissy (as it was told to me by my parents and grandparents). So I put that stuff away for a long time. Through my teenage years I played sports like football to toughen myself up so I could be a man. And it wasn't until I began trying to work through some of these ideas that I began to realize, in retrospect, what crap that was, what destructive cultural stereotyping it really was. At first, I was angry at my family for what they did to me, but then I allowed myself to feel compassion, for they were only handing down what they had received from generations before them. If the family cycle of perpetuating these myths were going to be broken, it had to begin with me.

When this first really began to open up for me was actually during the early days of my relationship with my wife, Beth. I was ending a very troubled marriage with an alcoholic at the time. Through my vulnerabilities with Beth, I felt a deep sense of shame that I translated to meaning that I just wasn't manly enough for Beth. It fueled a lot of anger that has taken me a long time to get over. I just could not accept this idea of myself as not being masculine. My therapist told me one day, "You don't get it, do you? You just don't get it. Your manliness is your sensitivity." And I realized I had been misidentifying where my "Jon Marcy" strength was all along, that all these "feminine" parts that I had thought were not worthy of me were really where the juice of my life was, and that I had to learn to be more accepting, more surrendering and softer and more sensuous... while avoiding feeling any shame for having these feelings. Our society today actively teaches men to be ashamed of these attributes. To express them will invite such labels that suggest you are either queer or feminine. In other words... not masculine.

I have heard strong, independent, intelligent women come up and talk about how deeply shamed they are because they're aggressive, and competent. They say, "I have all this competence and everything else but, you know, I just feel like maybe I'm not feminine enough." Every man likes the idea of a strong competent woman until they are in a relationship with one, then it triggers all kinds of shame issues created from the myth of their masculinity. We somehow feel threatened by a woman exercising behaviors we have learned to associate with masculinity, and such women earn labels that also suggest they are not feminine.

It seems to be common practice today to label qualities such as compassion, receptivity, sensitivity and intuition as "feminine" and qualities such as aggressiveness, competitiveness, ambition and reason as "masculine." That's just nonsense. It's time to get rid of that stuff. I have three daughters, and it is hard to teach them the idea of non-gender thinking when the junk culture is constantly hitting them with messages that counter this thinking. But for those of you with children, I encourage you to not reward this gender myth, for all you are doing is robbing your children of connecting with their authentic selves and growing up to be the person the Universe intended them to be.

It has been helpful on my spiritual journey to ask myself the question: How have I been crippled by my effort to become a man or a real man? But there is a far more important question which is far more subtle and that is: Who am I? Who is Jon Marcy and what does he experience and what does he need to do and where are his emotional wounds? We need to go beyond mythology to autobiography, to take my own story and the uniqueness of my own situation, my own gifts and my own injuries, with ultimate seriousness. In other words, to put it metaphorically, God does not issue something to me that states, "To whom it may concern," nor does God say, "To all men" or "To all women" or "For men only." No, that still, small voice addresses me with my name: Jon Marcy, do this. Jon Marcy, experience that. It's individually tailored. And the fact is that my way of being a man is probably different from your way of being a man. And it's my task to find my own path, as it is yours to find your own path.

As men, we need to get over this "gender" thing. There are so many things that become possible in our lives when we do. "What" you may ask? Try learning what it means to be wise and compassionate. After all, this is the basic question put forth in Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

Personally, that's a hard question for me to answer. In my daily life, how do I be wise and compassionate in relationship with my wife when I'm in conflict with her, or with my children or my friends? What do I do about Iraq, the homeless, and my government to be a decent human being? This is an age in which somebody said, you have to become courageous just to be decent! And that isn't a gender question. What's injuring the world here isn't gender. It is our lack of genuine courage and a willingness to continue to embrace the gender myth instead of looking into ourselves and facing the reality of our authentic being.