An open letter to men from a woman: Men are strong but what is strength?

A couple of caveats: First, I write about men and masculinity here in a much more hegemonic way than is currently fashionable, understandably so. Not all men are stereotypically masculine and there are many individuals who are not biologically male who experience and exhibit stereotypical masculine traits. Moreover, all humans possess masculine and feminine energies — this is inherently part of being human. My focus is on archetypal masculinity — wherever it shows up.

My heartfelt thanks to the friends who provided input and support on drafts, particularly Don, Marcia and Denise.

Men are strong, but what is strength?

As a child born in the 60s, I learned early on that boys were strong and girls were sweet and/but emotional. It was a simple message when I was young, as were most. Later I learned that men were regarded as more intelligent and better equipped for pretty much everything that had to do with the outside world: professional work, physical labor, athletics, math and science, system design etc. Women, I was told, were good at caring, attending to the details that helped home and family run smoothly, serving as confidants and background support, patiently teaching people how to do things, and at cleaning up messes (of every sort, I eventually learned!).

Because I was coming of age in the 70s, though, the landscape was changing quickly. My mother and father divorced when I was young, as did a slew of other couples in our early family social network. Pretty much every relationship in my extended family of origin ended as well. Indeed, I can’t think of a single relative who remained married to their original spouse — save one aunt who stayed married to my uncle, despite his history of pedophilia. Can’t say it was a happy marriage.

By the time I was 15, I remember turning to my brother in the kitchen and saying something along the lines of: “I have absolutely no idea how we can think that all men are, on average, smarter than women. Nothing in my experience suggests that’s true. Look at you and me for example!” My brother is plenty intelligent, but I excelled at school, with straight A’s through high school at a highly competitive magnet school for math, science, and computers that emerged as part of the early desegregation movement in California. I was athletic, socially comfortable, and adventurous, too. We also had a number of extraordinarily intelligent women in our family. The old gender-related axioms, carried along for generations, made zero sense to me and I couldn’t understand how they continued to persist.

As I grew into adolescence and young adulthood in the latter 70s and 80s, I was part of a vanguard of youth who wanted something different. We recognized not only the inequity but the absurdities of the assumptions of hierarchy into which we were born. None of us wanted to follow the scripts offered by our elders’ hackneyed and stifling examples, we wanted open opportunity and true partnership. Indeed, I’ll never forget when, at age 16, I overheard one of my mother’s friends say at a gathering, “how nice that your husband is babysitting the children while you’re here.” I immediately thought: “There’s no fucking way I’m going to have a husband who babysits his own children. He’ll parent them!” (And he did that quite well!)

It was not far into adulthood before I and many of my peers realized that our equity-minded intentions would require a lot more effort to uproot than any of us could’ve imagined. My generation has moved the needle on this front although more slowly than we would’ve liked. This experience, though, along with partnering, parenting and over 35 years as a psychologist and scholar has made me attuned to sex and gender dynamics, particularly vis-à-vis power structures and human relationships and especially as it related to capacity for connection and intimacy, since this touched my life directly.

Over time I watched with fascination the many ways these dynamics powerfully shaped and molded the lives of everyone I’ve known, including me, my partners, and my children. One of the most pivotal lessons I’ve learned is recognizing the extent to which equating “strength” with the typical masculine forms of musculature, stature, and stoicism — has damaged and hobbled all of us, especially men. In truth, the kinds of “strength” that all humans most need to succeed and thrive in the modern world are those related to the capacity for sustained attention, capacity to connect and empathize, and flexibility of all kinds, particularly emotionally, socially and spiritually. Unfortunately, it is in precisely these areas that men most struggle, largely because of how they have been socialized. And this, in turn, has had profound and negative impact on everyone else and the beautiful planet we are slowly but surely irrevocably damaging.

What helped men succeed in past generations is no longer working.

Unfortunately, prior definitions of male “strength,” particularly stoicism, has become detrimental to their well-being in every way. Many men live their lives without the support they need, convinced they’re not supposed to need anything or anyone. This is ridiculous and it’s hurting all of us. Indeed, a persistent raft of demographic trends across an array of life domains make it clear that men are failing to thrive because they need support in precisely these areas.

For example, fewer men are enrolling in college; in the spring of 2021 men represented 40.5% of undergraduates — building on a 40 year trend of declining male enrollment in college. These young men are not heading to the workforce either: decreasing numbers of men are working, also continuing a trend of declining male participation in the workforce since 1960.

Male relationships are suffering as well. While young people are marrying far less than their peers and divorcing less because of this, gray divorce — divorce among people currently between 50s and mid 70s — is soaring. Moreover, according to AARP research, 66% of these are initiated by women. This, along with other trends, is exacerbating what has been termed a male “loneliness epidemic.” Three decades ago over half of man reported having at least six close friends but today about one in four do. Fifteen percent of men say they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990. Just a quarter of men have said “I love you” to a friend recently, as opposed to almost half of women.

Because of the loneliness epidemic, the rate of suicide for middle aged men is higher than any other demographic including young people. Indeed, the suicide rate for men in 2020 was four times higher than the rate among females; men make up 49% of the population but 80% of suicides and 75% of substance use disorders cases (see review here). Men remain highly overrepresented in violent crime, both as perpetrators and as victims. And as we all likely know, rates of help seeking are much lower for men than women; only about a third of people who need psychological services receive them for many reasons, but men in need receive professional help far less often, largely because they suffer in silence.

Even male engagement in sex with a partner has precipitously declined among men aged 18–34. That the “sex recession” is driven primarily by young men is striking, particularly because it is accompanied by a sharp increase in the number of young men who identify as “incel” — involuntarily celibate — which has skyrocketed since 2016 when researchers first began tracking misogynist content on the Internet. This is just part of a concerning picture that spells trouble for the male body, heart and mind.

This is a long and sadly partial list which has unfortunately worsened over time. What we need now is honesty and a willingness to confront outdated and damaging ideas of what strength and courage really is; what we have long depended on is immature and damaging.

Why are men suffering and what do we do to shift this?

These are difficult times; many people are struggling in one way or another. Even those who claim to be doing alright know that the world is in a very bizarre and rather scary, uncertain moment. We cannot collectively right our proverbial ship and do what is so needed in this precarious moment without men’s awareness of and willingness to change and grow — individually and together.

There are many explanations for the dismal trends, but I will start here by sharing that decades of investigation and persistent curiosity have led me to believe that limiting men’s access to their vulnerability, emotions, and love-based intuition was a purposeful and effective tool for assuring that humans remain largely asleep to the deeper truths of our spiritual origins and nature. Providing men with reasons to go to war, things to protect, addictions to feed and rewards in the form of sex, advancement, achievement, power and material goods is a strategic path to controlling connection to our collective Divine nature, and all of the power and potency of awareness that comes with it. Being in want, fear, lust, or control are states of mind that restrict access to the heart and to higher knowing. This encourages thought and action out of alignment with integrity and collective support of life in all its forms and provides powerful leverage for diminishing, minimizing, and in many cases fully extinguishing heart-centered intuitive connection to self and the Divine — for men and everyone they govern, parent, marry, or otherwise interact with and shape.

This education starts early. In the process of becoming men, boys and men are taught to constrict the pathway between mind and heart to the narrowest thread possible. They are taught to refrain from expressing any emotion other than anger, that acceptable human touch is largely sexual, to stop being vulnerable with their friends and anyone other than an intimate partner, and to compete and to win, often at all costs. With an active connection to one’s full emotional and intuitive range, it can feel and, in some cases, be impossible to attain the prized alpha status and all that comes with it — the competitive edge, the desire to win wealth, prestige, power, and the capacity to kill when needed, even the need to provide the comfort, money and objects that they are told their family needs from them.

While the damage of this basic mindset to the earth, women, children and the general public is not difficult to recognize, it’s the damage to men that has been the most egregious casualty of this mind-heart restriction. Interfering with boys and men’s connection to their hearts — their emotion centers and their innate empathy and intuition — has left them without critical rudders for navigating the complex emotional and social challenges we now collectively face.

It has also left many of us, irrespective of gender/sex, with fathers, brothers, and partners who can’t comfortably experience or express a full range of emotion and everything that comes with it. Lastly, it has left our planet and the amazing diversity of life it hosts at the mercy of a dominant mentality that regards it as something to be exploited, owned, mastered, conquered — orientations that are literally killing it and us.

Because we are closer to World War III and ecological collapse than any of us would like to admit, I’m going to throw down the gauntlet and say that it is imperative that we get honest — individually and collectively. Because what contemporary men are socialized to be is neither natural nor healthy, not in the least. More men want and need full access to their hearts, more people want healthy emotional intimacy with their male partners, and more people of all ages want to become co-creative and fully supportive parents, partners, friends, and servants of all that is good and right, including responsible stewardship of our precious home planet.

And NO, this isn’t asking men to be women. Connection with one’s heart and with our own Divine nature is our birthright and body parts, natural or acquired, have absolutely nothing to do with it. And, men with strong heart-mind connections do not look or feel like women, to themselves or to others. They look and feel whole, balanced and absolutely beautiful. Seriously — a balanced man is irresistibly attractive and effective.

How to start..

To the beautiful men on this planet at this time, please know that it’s worth it. It may feel scary at first because healing will involve coming face-to-face with the damage that an out of balance masculinity has done to you, your relationships, to women and to the planet which supports life, including yours and those you love. I will devote a future article to concrete steps men can take to heal the connection to their heart, but here are a few places to start:

• Express love and gratitude in ways that leave you feeling a bit uncomfortable or exposed. For example, say “I love you” to a man in your life who has not heard that from you, even if you have felt it.
• Share a secret with somebody, ideally a guy. Your secret does not need to leave you feeling wide open, unless that is an edge you want to work, but it should be a little risky. Sharing with a man is often harder than sharing with a woman, but men benefit from sharing and being shared with so consider taking this risk. If you already have a few men with whom you feel comfortable being honest, then consider using this opportunity to mentor a man you know who may be less comfortable and less connected with this kind of honest sharing.
• Learn to recognize the emotions and situations from which you instinctively move away. Often this is unconscious so just noticing is an important step.
• Next time you notice a feeling or sensation you find uncomfortable see if you can stay there and breathe through it without moving away or engaging the feeling in any way. Take three deep breaths right there next to it before moving your attention elsewhere. It will likely be uncomfortable; this is how you know the technique is working. This grows emotional awareness, enhanced capacity to tolerate hard emotions, and slowly but steadily softens the sharp edges you feel there.
• All of us possess a balance of masculine and feminine energies. See if you can locate your inner feminine and/or softness wherever it currently lives. Just find it and sit next to it. When you are ready, see if you can allow it to enter other areas of your life. Notice how it feels to allow the twinned energies to blend into everyday life.
• When resistance arises, don’t fight it. It is most productive to just open to it and be with it (in other words, say “yes” to your “no”). Resistance is totally normal and even resistance provides you with an opportunity to experience a little softness in response to it. Resistance tends to shift with time and practice.

We stand at a huge and powerful crossroads in which the fate of the planet and everybody on it literally hangs in the balance. We will not make this passage without working together. Men aren’t being left behind, but they are being asked to heal the disconnection for themselves, for each other, and for the planet. Please keep going, we need you.

Thoughts? Reactions?

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In love, respect and hope,

Janis

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