The Sacred Masculine

What is the antidote to toxic masculinity?

When I saw the prompt from Jean Carfantan to write about the sacred masculine, I was perplexed. What is sacred about masculinity? I’m accustomed to thinking of masculinity as toxic — the source of violence, wars, abuse, disrespect. This despite the fact that most media describe masculinity as heroic. The ubiquitous plot line: one strong man rescues the weak, protects the vulnerable, saves the day. We’ve been fed this same story thousands of times over the life of our media creation and consumption. But what I’ve seen play out in real life is the opposite: one “strong” man (or woman) generally makes life hell for the people around them.

Looking up the definition of “masculine” provides no answers. Merriam-Webster defines it as: having qualities appropriate to or usually associated with a man. But what are those qualities? The dictionary doesn’t say.

A search for toxic masculinity gives more information. That’s a cultural concept of manliness that glorifies stoicism, strength, virility, and dominance, and that is socially maladaptive or harmful to mental health, according to dictionary.com.

Yet only one trait from that list stands out as obviously negative: dominance. There’s nothing wrong with being strong or virile, after all. Those traits are admired in both women and men. And stoicism can be useful in difficult times. But dominance? Unless you’re on a playing field, dominance is always bad.

Because dominance necessarily involves the subjugation of others. If you are dominant, someone else is subservient. If you are controlling, someone else is controlled.

So the sacred masculine, then, could be defined as strength without domination, leadership without force. I’m reminded of the Tao de Ching’s verse 17. The excerpt below was translated by Keith H. Seddon.

The best ruler stays in the background, and his voice is rarely heard. When he accomplishes his tasks, and things go well, The people declare: It was we who did it by ourselves.

The burdens that outdated definitions of masculinity place on human society are both great and small. You could say all wars, all murders, all physical and sexual assaults are the result of efforts to dominate others — to realize a “masculine” ideal.

You could also say they’re the basis of much psychological suffering. Many men of my (Baby Boomer) generation find it difficult to express or develop the one thing that gives life meaning: love. Cultural strictures against male vulnerability convince them to keep their emotions locked up tight.

That’s why I had to laugh when I saw this monologue on Saturday Night Live. Comedian John Mulaney says the men in his father’s generation have no friends. He says that’s the true miracle of Jesus’ life — that he had 13 best friends that he made in his 30s.

Mulaney is talking about an older generation in the skit. And I get the impression that he has friends himself. That gives me hope. As does the movement towards gender fluidity in today’s youth. Because breaking down gender stereotypes, pushing boundaries, breaking gender “rules” is how our toxic human society can be remade.

I’m not sure how old Phil Christman is, but his piece in the Hedgehog Review considers modern masculinity in depth, only to come up with a lot of empty promises and dead ends. What Is It Like to Be a Man? he asks in the title. Then he answers, Sometimes I just feel like a bad joke.

His youthful stoicism was misguided, he writes. Why is it unmanly to be comfortable? His argument for chivalry is debunked. How can I protect you if you won’t obey me? Even his attempt to protect his wife from danger turns sour when he chases a group of purse snatchers into an alley only to have them pull out a gun.

Christman calls out men as “shirkers and slackers” for letting their wives do most of the work. I was reminded of a similar epiphany I had in my youth, when I traveled to Greece. After dark, I’d see the men sitting outside of cafes drinking ouzo while the women were working in open kitchens baking bread. One scene in particular is still fresh: a man rides a burro. His wife walks behind, carrying a suitcase. How is that behavior heroic?

Christman’s story doesn’t provide the answers. But it shows that he’s trying. It shows that he’s thinking deeply about masculinity — that he’s working on redefining it. That’s something not many men are willing to do.

When I was thinking about the prompt for this story, I emailed a question to nine friends and family: what does masculinity mean to you? Only one answered, my cognitively diverse son. Here’s what he wrote back:

i would argue that “sacred” masculine would refer to a sort of anti-masculinity where typically masculine might be reduced to an intellectual bias…so...to harbor deviations in the rational sphere to some extent which is quite an alien view of manhood and i think men are inherently alien on this planet although i believe they participate in what i call the sacred bargain which is a foundational principle of the female .. to offer shelter to another person(womb)

So…to be masculine is to be feminine? Is that what he’s saying? Perhaps. One thing is certain, controlling others is wrong.

I still remember how creepy I felt years ago when a man, a new father, described what he’d do to the boys coming to date his daughter in the future — how he’d meet them at the door with a gun. He imagined he was describing admirable behavior, but it made me queasy. Why was he thinking about his baby daughter’s sexuality? What made him imagine it was his to “protect”?

Isn’t that the same impulse, that assertion of ownership over another human’s body, that allows slavery, that justifies female genital mutilation, that promotes rape, that causes parents or siblings to kill young women in communities where “family honor” and “virginal female behavior” are linked?

It’s dominance, again, that is the corrupt element — the idea that one person has the right to control another, to take the life of another, to decide the rules for another. Dominance is the word that needs to be stripped from our definition of masculine, leaving strong, virile, and stoic to hold up the male flag.

Yet aren’t women strong, aren’t they fertile, aren’t they the most stoic gender, traditionally putting up with more suffering than men?

Maybe the trouble is with the binary system. Maybe we need to throw the whole notion of feminine vs. masculine out.

One hot topic this July is Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith sitting down to discuss her “entanglement” with another man during a period of separation. Their Red Table Talk has generated more than 3 million views. I watched it myself.

But it wasn’t their current talk that stuck with me. It was something Will said about his wife in an Ebony article back in 1996, which is quoted in this story on Buzzfeed News.

“My no. 1 attraction to Jada is intellectual. She’s just someone whom I can talk to about anything. I’ve never been able to step outside of my maleness to share myself with someone. She’s the first person with whom I’ve been able to break that down.”

That’s what Will Smith had to do to share himself with someone else. He had to step out of his “maleness.” He had to break his “maleness” down. And that’s something he was perfectly willing and happy to do — to trade in his “maleness” for love and human connection. Because “maleness,” as currently defined, is a con.

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