Article: What Would Non-Toxic Masculinity Look Like?
Published: 3/2/2022
by Nick Oredson
Introduction
In the conversations that I am currently having there are two basic views of masculinity. The first view basically says that everything is fine, there is nothing wrong with how men are behaving and that the current paradigm needs to be maintained regardless of the consequences. In this view, there is nothing wrong with how things currently are and masculinity as it is is a positive thing that is to be embraced and celebrated. The second view basically says that there is definitely something wrong, men are consistently behaving in ways that are harmful to themselves, harmful to women, harmful to the vulnerable and harmful to the planet as a whole in a wide variety of ways. In the second view, something definitely needs to change and the way that masculinity is being expressed is going to need to undergo a complete overhaul or we will continue to experience catastrophic consequences on a global scale.
I agree completely with the second view - that all of the destructive and harmful ways that masculinity is currently manifesting on this planet need to be stopped. I absolutely do not want to continually cause harm to myself, those close to me, those who are vulnerable, and the entire planet with my actions on a daily basis. Many of the men that I talk with agree on this, and we are working diligently on the “do no harm” model of masculinity. However, despite believing strongly in the second view, I see it as incomplete because it fails to present a new paradigm to move towards. Despite accurately acknowledging that things need to change, it sends a troubling message to men that the best thing to do if you identify as a man is to just sit around all day long and try your best to not be bad.
This is a problem. Without some type of positive standard, there will be a tendency to generate groups of deactivated men sitting around spending all of their energy in a kind of fearful paralysis – afraid to do anything in fear of possibly causing harm. In order to move forward in a positive way, it seems important to start answering the question “What is positive in your experience of being a man?” or possibly “If I am actively moving away from the paradigm of toxic masculinity, what am I moving towards?”. The answers to these questions (or some variation of these questions) seem very important at this point because they will start to illuminate a way forward, that both acknowledges that there is a problem with how things are, yet still describes masculinity in terms of a positive standard – defined by action and purpose. Unless we somehow find a positive way forward through this, I think we are going to remain stuck in paradigms that either subscribe to blind denial or the de-energizing experience of simply avoiding bad behavior.
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In response to this, I have put together the below set of reflections. I believe that the question “What is positive in your experience of being a man?” is highly personal and could easily result in widely varying answers between individuals. Everyone who feels the need to consider this question will need to think of it on their own terms - this is not an attempt to create any kind of universal set of ideals that every man should follow. As for my own experience, I quickly realized that I needed to modify the question to fit my own reality. For these reflections, I changed the question from “What is positive in your experience of being a man?” to the question “What feels essential to me in my experience of being a man?”. This is a significant change but still covers the same basic ground as the original question. I encourage anyone considering this to create their own specific version of it as well.
Not about being “good”
It is also important to point out that this is not about creating some kind of definition of what a “good man” should or shouldn’t be. As soon as the word “good” enters into the discussion, things quickly get murky for me and I can easily slide into territory that is aspirational, idealized and something that could easily create an unlivable standard that will only cause trouble in my life. In my experience, anything aspirational or idealized actually causes more problems than it solves. I won’t use the word “good” in this discussion nor is it an implied concept. Words like “integrity” and “wholeness” are far more useful terms for me to use when sorting out what masculinity means to me.
So, without further delay, here are my answers on the question: “What feels essential to me in my experience of being a man?”
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Leadership as Service
Leadership as an act of service feels essential to my experience of being a man. When I am in a leadership role of any kind, whether I am teaching a class, leading a circle or mentoring youth, I look at that role as primarily an act of service to those I am leading. This manifests as making the health and well being of those I am leading my top priority. This frames leadership as primarily a responsibility to those I am leading. Approaching leadership this way feels essential to my experience of being a man.
A great example of this happened relatively early in my career during my first serious job. I was working in journalism for the first time, and my colleagues were all young, idealistic, motivated and very hard working. This was an office climate that could easily slide into a “work late” culture where everyone would slowly slide into working later and later into the evening until it was expected that everyone would stay until until 9 or 10pm every night. However, this didn’t happen - because of some excellent leadership displayed by the executive editor. At 6pm every day, he would walk around the newsroom and ask quite pointedly “Why are you still here?”. Unless you gave a quick and convincing answer, such as “Such and such a story just broke and I feel like I have to file it tonight” or “I have a deadline tonight.” he would say “Get out of here – go home to your family.” At first I found this puzzling - I had never encountered a boss who harassed salaried employees for voluntarily staying late at work. This was new territory for me, and it took several months for me to understand the following things:
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He was genuinely concerned for the health and well-being of those working for him.
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By showing that concern openly, he instantly won the unquestioning trust and loyalty of everyone in the office.
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He created a reservoir of energy and commitment that could be tapped when their was a genuine crisis.
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He created a sense of unity and Esprit de Corps – we felt special and cared for when we talked with our friends and colleagues who worked in other offices where going home at 9pm was the norm.
The Shadow Side
The shadow side of this view of leadership is to view leadership as primarily a role of power. Telling people what to do, getting your way, taking advantage of the vulnerable, profiting from the work of others.
The Connection to Identified Gender
I place myself at about 75% man and 25% woman on the gender spectrum. I am comfortable most of the time in a man’s body and feel connected to the masculine most often in my thoughts an actions. However, this gender identity does not map to a certain set of behaviors or thoughts nor does it dictate whether I express my masculine or feminine traits in any given situation. I feel the masculine and feminine traits operating in a balanced and harmonious way within me, and the fact that I identify as a man on the gender spectrum does not in any way imply that I am repressing or denying my feminine traits. Denying the feminine feels like a key piece in the destructive and unhealthy way that masculinity is currently manifesting on this planet. In my experience, maintaining a healthy and active relationship with my feminine traits is essential to my experience of being a man.
Power as a Zero Sum Game
My experience of being a man does not include the feeling that increasing my personal power comes at the expense of others. When I was a young man, I remember someone telling me that “Power is not a thing in and of itself, power is a relationship.” This was a revelation at the time, and for a long time I viewed power through this lens and it helped explain many of the phenomena that I was observing in the world. Whenever one person’s power increased, it was at the expense of another – that was a fundamental mechanism of the world – like Newton’s law of conservation of energy. However, as I have matured, I have been experiencing personal power as something that follows a completely opposite set of rules. Whenever I feel in my power, I can feel that power energizing and inspiring everyone around me. Whenever I am around someone who is in their power, I feel my own power increasing – sometimes dramatically. In my experience of being a man, personal power is a complementary resource – the more there is in the environment that I am in – the more I have myself. My personal power does not come at the expense of the power of those around me – it is complemented and amplified by it.
Having a Direction
I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about this topic and when I framed the question “If I am actively moving away from the toxic masculinity paradigm, what am I moving towards?”. He pointed out that the need to “have a direction” could very well be a masculine trait. This resonated with me and so I am including it in this set of reflections. How do people feel about this? Is there an essentially masculine trait embedded in the very way that I am framing this question? Is the need to “have a direction” and essentially masculine trait?
Awareness of, and respect for the emotions and feelings
that I experience in myself and others
Awareness and respect for my feelings and emotions and awareness and respect for the feelings and emotions of others feels essential to my experience as a man. In order for me to function as a man, it is very important that I stay connected with my feelings and emotions, and then fold the reality of those feelings and emotions into my decision making process. It is also very important to be aware of the feelings of emotions in others, and take those feelings and emotions into consideration in my decision making process – especially if I am acting in a leadership role.
Difference between feelings and emotions?
A point of clarity around the difference between emotions and feelings. When I talk about emotions I am talking about the experiences that we have in our bodies that have conventional names and a shared understanding – such as anger, joy, fear, contentment etc. Feelings are similar to emotions in that they are something that we feel in our body, but without the conventional names that emotions have. An example of this would be the experience I sometimes have of feeling tingles go up my spine or feeling a pit in my stomach. These are definitely important, and they are conveying important information, but they don’t have single word names in our language to describe them. I make this distinction so that it is clear that feelings and emotions are equally important.
The Shadow Side
The shadow side of honoring feelings and emotions is to deny both their existence and their importance. The shadow view of feelings and emotions is that they are an unreliable, unscientific, messy distraction from the rational process. They are to be denied completely if possible, but if some feelings or emotions somehow manage to leak through the wall of denial, they are to be disregarded completely.
Inclusivity in my thinking
Inclusivity in my thinking feels essential to my experience as a man. It feels very important to stay open to everyone that I interact with and ask the question “What gifts does this person have to offer” or “What does this person have to teach me?” This requires that I stay very aware of my projections, my snap judgments, and any conditioned responses I might have towards them. The most important concept underlying inclusivity is that everyone is equally human, and everyone is equally worthy of social reward. Anthropology tells us that inclusivity is the basic underlying principal of the egalitarian social models that humans have used to organized themselves for at least the last 300,000 years. The health and well being of the group requires the participation and inclusion of everyone. Wealth and social rewards are distributed equally – or nearly equally - among everyone.
The Shadow Side
The opposite of inclusivity is the concept of “meritocracy” – a system that I think of as “conditional love”. The key concept underlying meritocracy is that everyone is not equally human, and everyone is not equally worthy of social reward. In a meritocracy, social acceptance and rewards are fundamentally conditional and based on performance relative to a set of social standards which then creates a social order that is enforced by violence. In this system, some individuals are deemed worthy and given social rewards and others are deemed unworthy and given minimal social rewards or are discarded. In this model, the health and well-being of the group does not require the participation of everyone, and the wealth and social rewards are distributed unequally.
Protectiveness Towards my Community
The experience of feeling protective towards my family and my community feels essential to my experience as a man. This one has a considerable amount of energy behind it, and whenever I think about being protective I get emotional quickly. This one feels very deep – possibly going back millions of years to my origins as a primate. If there is a leopard loose in the village threatening everyone, the impulse to grab whatever is at hand – spear, club, rock – and go take care of the threat is very strong in me. It is impossible to imagine functioning as a man and not feeling a sense of profound protectiveness towards my family, those close to me, and my community at large.
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The Shadow Side
The Shadow side of this is all of the predatory behavior that men engage in. Many children growing up feel that the most dangerous and frightening person in their life is their father. Many women feel unsafe much of the time because of all of the predatory men roaming around. In the current paradigm, men are by far the top perpetrators of harm to other humans on this planet.
Treating self-knowledge and self-awareness
as topics worthy of serious study
It is essential to my ability to function as a man to regard self-knowledge as an important topic, that is worthy of time, energy and serious study. Without accurate self-knowledge in the form of an awareness of who I am, what is important to me, and what my values are I would be unable to function in the world. Without this information, I would have no map to guide me, and no way to determine if I was living in integrity or not. The pursuit of accurate self-knowledge feels essential to my ability to function as a man.
The Shadow Side
The Shadow if this is the idea that self-knowledge is self-indulgent and a waste of time.
Conclusion
This is my first pass at answering these questions and I hope that it will start a lively conversation. I think that we are going to have to come together as a community to come up with an energizing way forward – I would love to hear your comments and ideas! Feel free to send me a note with your thoughts and ideas to nick@nickoredson.com so we can keep this conversation going.
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