Home sick, and a press release on male anger and pain

I've been fighting a cold since the middle of last week, and have not been doing a good job of taking care of it.  I haven't been sleeping well, and despite feeling awful, got up at 6:00AM yesterday morning to go to boxing training, taught a full day (including my night class) and threw in an academic senate meeting for good measure.  Naturally, I was waiting at baggage claim when my wife's plane landed just before midnight last night at LAX.  I was so excited to have her back I managed to push through until we got home to Pasadena a bit before 2:00AM -- and then just had a complete collapse.  I got up this morning to get ready for school and lasted all of five minutes before crawling back into bed. 

It's just past 2 in the afternoon, I'm -- briefly -- out of bed and feeling somewhat human again.  I've had some soup and some tea and am making strange grunting noises as I move about the house.    As I sit at the computer typing, clad only in my Black Watch flannel pajama bottoms (indispensable), I note that I have the most extraordinary bed hair.

In any event, I am not in a mood to post.  Instead, I'll link to a press release written today by Pat McGann of Men Can Stop Rape.  I've trained with Pat and I love his organization.  He writes today in response to the recent school shootings where adult men have targeted young girls, and it's very powerful.  Here's part of what Pat writes today:

I knew that after tragic incidents like those named earlier, the media wants to present the public with answers, and it seemed probable that none of the answers would clearly identify traditional masculinity as a culprit. But I didn't want to just stay on the surface of manhood; I wanted to burrow underneath to get at its muscle and bone. I wanted to write about how men's pain gets transformed into men's anger, because it seemed to me that some deep-seated anguish was underlying all the bullets, the ropes, the knives. We men typically aren't socialized to handle pain in healthy, constructive ways. Instead we're taught to “suck it up” and “get over it,” which might be useful strategies some of the time but not as everyday practices – especially when it comes to violence.

In many of the violent incidents I was struck by the number of men who committed suicide. At the end of the Pennsylvania and Colorado school shootings both men shot themselves.... And supposedly the Wisconsin shooting took place because the student had been bullied by students and neither teachers nor the principal would act to stop it. In each of these instances, it seems likely to me that some deep-seated, chronic despondency was present and fueled by anger, the likely source of the violence. I don't mean to suggest that the root cause of men's violence is always despair and sadness; everyone can probably clearly point to some examples of brutal acts by men that could be traced back to something other than emotional anguish, but to overlook despondency as a possible cause some of the time misses a revolutionary opportunity.

Yes, revolutionary. I'm making what could be construed as an inflated claim, but I don't think so: men dealing with their pain in responsible, constructive, and healthy ways would make the world shudder and shake, shifting the foundations of our realities. Once the dust settled, we would be in a better place, a less violent place.

Bold emphases are mine.  Read the whole thing.  Pat is one of my heroes in what is loosely called the pro-feminist men's movement, and as usual, he's right on the money.   While some men's rights advocates have also acknowledged that men's anger led to the recent school shootings, the MRA contention is generally that that anger is righteous and justified, even if the violence that followed was unacceptable.  But the pro-feminist movement's contention is that anger is never a primary emotion; it is always a secondary response to deep and profound hurt.  And the source of that pain is not cruel women, or an unfair legal system, but the straitjacket of masculinity that allows men little opportunity to feel and to become fully human.

I think I'll totter back to bed now.

Comments

[Mermade]

Hope you feel better, and that you'll be able to make it to class tomorrow! :-)

[Hugo]

Thanks, Merm. I expect to be back tomorrow. If not, I'll have a post up by 9:00AM announcing otherwise.

[ballgame]

anger is never a primary emotion; it is always a secondary response to deep and profound hurt.

I was taught that the four primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. I agree that the anger is stimulated by some kind of physical or psychic injury, but is that pain an 'emotion'? Wev.

And the source of that pain is not cruel women, or an unfair legal system, but the straitjacket of masculinity that allows men little opportunity to feel and to become fully human.

Taken literally as a blanket statement about reality, of course, your statement is false. In some cases the source of the pain certainly is cruel women; some mothers abuse their children in pretty horrifying ways. And there's no question that people can have their lives destroyed by an all-too-fallible legal system. But if your basic point is that men are societally oppressed in certain ways by gender, then I'd have to agree with you.

There is a lot that's laudible in Pat's article, at least on the surface. But if the notion is some kind of mental-health palliative approach which flips the responsibility of the problem solely back onto the man who's been victimized ("GOSH, I just need to LEARN how to handle my anger better!"*), the chance of this approach making any significant impact on our society's well-being is pretty remote. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that such an approach is worse than useless and is actually potentially quite harmful. I do like that Pat seems to acknowledge this to some extent when he says, "We need the support of the people in our lives, men and women." However, since one of the absolute fundamental prerequisites for men to be able to be fully human is to be fully respected regardless of how 'strong' they are, I have to question whether or not Pat really has a clue given that a third of the bullets on his web page's sidebar are "Strength Campaign," "Strength Mediaworks," "Show Your Strength," and "Men of Strength Club." Yup, no fear of the feminine there, nosireebob.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's just engaged in erudite marketing to a particular demographic. But if we're going to make any headway against oppressive forces that drive men to 'kill themselves but take some people down with them first,' we're going to have to abandon incoherent ideologies that assert that men can't be oppressed by gender by definition. We're going to have to acknowledge the painful and destructive realities that many men are confronted with, and not assign responsibility for that pain to the person upon whom it's been inflicted.

It is 2006. How much headway have we made in America in even the most basic of issues that might fall into this category, the rights of males to their own bodily integrity and the elimination of MGM**? Not much. How many avowed feminists have even the most minimally open minds about understanding the potential gravity of the issue? Not many.

I'm not terribly optimistic.

*To be clear, I absolutely believe that there are individuals — both men and women — who can benefit tremendously by learning better ways of dealing with their anger. Those men who have been driven to violence, however, need more than a technique. They likely need the nurturing and supportive environment of intensive therapy to be able to connect to those traumatized parts of themselves and heal.

**Male Genital Mutilation, i.e. circumcision.

[Hugo]

Ballgame, you inspire me to write a post very soon about male circumcision. You aren't going to like it, I'm afraid.

[Stentor]

I had the opposite reaction to ballgame -- the article seemed to me to let violent men off the hook too much by making them into victims of the patriarchy.

On a lighter note, you had a bit of unfortunate line break placement in my screen resolution:
As I sit at the computer typing, clad only in my Black Watch [.......] flannel pajama bottoms

[Kip Watson]

Christianity distinguishes between anger and wrath, which I think is a useful distinction.

Although I continue to greatly admire the better practitioners of mental healing, I no longer see much insight in contemporary psychological doctrine - for example 'masculinity' and 'management strategies'.

Healing a wounded soul is a task on an entirely different plane from teaching a dog not to poop.

[Toy Soldier]

[T]he MRA contention is generally that that anger is righteous and justified, even if the violence that followed was unacceptable.

No, it is not. There is no need to attack pro-male adovocates to make your point.

And the source of that pain is not cruel women...

Read at face value, you appear to deny women can ever abuse, harm, or hurt males in a manner that would bring them pain. That is quite dismissive of male experiences of female violence.

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