SPECIAL SERIES: THE MASCULINE
Hug Your Boys
By Shannissy Catron
My wise woman spoke amidst the chaos my life was enduring at the moment.
“Boys stopped being hugged by their fathers around the age of ten.”
I turned to her, as I have my whole life, to women who have gone down life’s path before me, to impart their collective knowledge onto me. The ones who stepped in to mother me through each stage of life. They guide me to my truth, and to THE truth. The divine truth, a woman’s truth.
This particular conversation was happening at the conjunction of three major events —
A man I had recently been in love with became aggressive and violent upon realizing that our parting of ways would not be fixed by temporary good behavior and waiting for the storm of our severed connection to pass.
A sick man who I’d briefly met in passing, latching onto me in his psychiatrically diagnosable delusion, displaying stalker behaviors that grew in intensity over the following weeks.
Ironically, I was also taking a deeper dive into men’s needs and healing work. I was in the final planning phase of the EveryMan meal, a Pollinate Ritual event that I’d been planning along side another wise woman. We were making a hard pivot in the wake of the male collaborator who would go on to leave us with no adequate explanation, less than three weeks before the event.
All of this was going on in conjunction with a very consistent challenge, from both men and women in our community, that women had no business in men’s healing work. An idea that baffles me, considering the ways I notice men typically stepping into this work — by holding the hand of their female partners.
Oof.
“What the fuck am I doing here?” I asked her, in full unravel regarding my role in men’s healing work.
I was struggling to keep the faith that the divine masculine was real. That there were actually men out there who can value the unseen. Struggling to hold onto the idea that men too, are tired and sick from the brainwashing of our patriarchal society. Struggling to remember that there are men out there who want the space to break free from the chains of the messaging they received as little boys, even though most of what I can see in my real life are men who NEED this deep reprogramming, but are content to remain unchanged.
I lost my breath and began to cry as she told me about how the messaging around age ten isn’t just shown through the diminishing physical affection they receive, but also the time period where they’re no longer dad’s little buddy. Boys start to look more grown up in their prepubescent years and ultimately the messaging changes to forced manhood. My knowledge about the stages of the developing brain collided with this information and I began to see how there is no way for boys to cognitively grasp what’s going on in those moments. I began to see how and where the damage begins as they walk into their adult lives with the baggage and trauma this abandonment of boyhood creates.
I have somewhat of an understanding why dads switch into this mode of thinking — the boy is looking and acting older, it’s time to teach about what it means to be a man. They’re physically stronger and more capable of independence and assistance.
There’s a natural order to much of this. When a person becomes a parent it’s very normal to look at what their parents have done and create a basis for how they’ll parent. The problem is that when men are explicitly told not to make any decision with their feelings involved, they can’t look objectively at how their parents, particularly their fathers, parented in a way that was damaging.
This is where we get this large population of men who “turned out ok” or who are “fine” — but actually deeply hurting inside. They can’t trace where the feeling comes from because they’ve been told to ignore a large part of their humanity for so long. But, since they’re still alive and kicking — dad must have done it right, right? The cycle continues. I do not believe this to be consciously malicious or deliberate on the part of a man. I believe we can lay the blame at the feet of societal programming. If we need something to blame.
Jason Wilson, the author of Cry Like a Man, and founder of Yunion, says it best — the version of masculinity that is thrust onto boys in our society creates what he’s dubbed “emotional incarceration”. Wilson calls it a boxed in masculinity, rather than a comprehensive masculinity.
Boys and men are told over and over that being a man means to disengage with their emotions, with the exception of anger. To be physically strong, to protect. To provide, even if it means that their existing is only in service to making money and dealing with the fallout of not having any time for their family. Men are put in this box of masculinity, and told they’re not men if they don’t fit. This is a forced disengagement from a large part of their humanity. Over time this rejection of self causes men to live in a nearly constant state of fight or flight; a state of being that becomes more difficult to turn off the longer we’re in it — even when we are in safe places or with folks we trust.
My fall down this rabbit hole barely touched the deep issues surrounding boys who grow up without their fathers at all; how their vulnerability leads them to latch onto older males who are aggressive, detached, and lack legitimate caring for these boys. In these situations the violence and drug/ alcohol related tendencies increase dramatically. Is it any wonder then that when I look around, what I often see a hurt little boy in a grown man’s skin.
These things aren’t just hurting men. This reality also hurts families, through increased male suicide, deteriorating health conditions, and verbal, emotional, and physical abuse of their partners and children. It leads them into lifestyle choices like drugs and alcoholism. It leads to violence, it leads to voting for violent men, it leads to massive disconnection, societal suffering and war.
When men can’t even recognize they crave the unseen connection, to themselves, to others, to nature…where are we left?
What I see — as an explorer, not an expert — is a society of men who cannot connect to intimacy, who participate in an unhealthy level of competition, they can’t trust themselves, they’re overly attached to money, and in deep isolation and denial. Men aren’t taught how to nurture or tend to their relationships, they don’t see the importance of this part of our nature.
Generally speaking, it seems to me that men are really struggling, and their unraveling is taking us on a downward spiral in a lot of ways. The inability to have conversation without blanket rage enveloping the deeper truths, the unwillingness to admit and initiate belonging, the lack of identity in the modern man — is impacting EVERYONE.
Patriarchy isn’t a mindset that one person puts onto the rest of us or a system that anyone chose by themselves. Patriarchy is the product of a massive amount of people being touched by individual toxic masculinity. Women are plagued with the programming and psychological warfare of toxic masculinity, internalized misogyny and a bloody history. Women were murdered and silenced for centuries for their power, knowing, and speaking — leading mothers to not always speak up for their boys. Those women don’t always speak up for men either, largely because men have been their perpetrators. We all learn early on that keeping quiet is often what will keep you safe.
So it is not exclusively a man’s problem because we all suffer under this umbrella of fear-based bullshit and thus we will all benefit from ending it.
Which leads me to one conclusion – I do have a place here.
I have a deep sense of responsibility to be an ally in changing the narrative of American men, because I’m raising one. The pressure of being a single mother raising a boy is steep.
I believe in the idea of comprehensive masculinity. A version of masculinity that includes things like physical affection, emotional intelligence, self-control, coping skills that transcend escapist behaviors… Masculinity that doesn’t exist in a box. Because in reality, masculinity, and femininity for that matter, cannot be defined. We lose a portion of our humanity every time we want to assign roles and structure to human beings. Believing in “comprehensive masculinity” really means to believe in well rounded humans. It’s that simple.
Our boys are watching and learning from men who are afraid to admit they need help, that they hurt, that they ache for community and belonging, that they embody what has been defined as feminine. That they crave a change and to drop the lone wolf charade.
For me it is especially difficult to navigate the toxicity in the ideas my son is exposed to about boys and men outside of my home. It is a constant battle between the truth and the legacy of fear that drives toxic masculinity. My beliefs, ideas, and values are constantly confronted. I’m struggling to find exactly the right questions to help my son analyze, process and feel into these ideas and things he experiences in the world. I want him to be able to claim a new way of living from his heart, not from what someone told him a man ought to be. I want him to trust himself because it will be from this source that he will affect change for himself and others.
It’s a continuous search for my feet, raising a boy to be something different than what I see and have experienced. In this searching I found one inalienable truth. We need men, all of us. We need men to show up, do the work of healing and deconstructing what they’ve been taught their whole lives. We need men to grasp their wholeness. We need men to understand that it doesn’t have to be the way it’s always been, and in fact it isn’t and can no longer be the way it’s always been. We need men to keep hugging their boys.
© Shannissy Catron 2022
