The eternal question, “what makes me a man?” I was hoping my Bar Mitzvah would have done it. Oh, well … maybe getting a driver’s license would? Graduating high school, graduating college, traveling through India on my own, would these be the entrance to understanding what it means to be a man? I think we have lost the cultural rituals to confirm manhood.
And this is probably for the best. There is no real need to posture myself as tough, controlling or “the boss” to understand myself as a man. In fact, the old “tough guy” really covers up a great deal of vulnerability.
So what’s the deal? How did I learn about this manhood stuff? I reflected on my own father. Fortunately for me, he was a kind man. He passed on to me that no matter what the challenge,
There was always a way to work it out. He was loyal and loving to my mom. He did his best to take care of himself. I would say my father was a “good man.” Lucky for me!
On my own journey, careening through life, no real plan believing—as Jackson Brown said,
I am not losing if I am choosing not to plan my life.
I became a father and a husband. And I think I knew I was a man when there was this little baby boy and then a girl who were going to depend on me. There was something outside myself that was more important than me! Fatherhood was an entrance to another world. A whole new deep emotional terrain to explore. To understand yourself as a man you certainly don’t need to be a father and there are many men who are dads and it leads little to their understand of manhood. But that did it for me!
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Are manhood and masculinity the same thing? I think we have developed beyond what both of these words infer. But we still talk about them as if they are true psychological structures that men invest their identity in.
I am proposing that feeling empathy, the ability to care for another is what confirms not just manhood but ones humanity, male or female, “personhood.” As for masculinity if you look around the world and I do mean the world…you should see all the dads in Japan with their babies strapped to their chest or pushing strollers, you would not have seen that 15 years ago. Gender roles are really flexible. A man can be a stay at home parent and a mom can be a combat soldier in the Army. Gender does not define us.
Here I would like to say, that as I see it; being kind, caring for others and be open to whatever emotions may show up on your doorstep is more about masculinity these days. Yes it may be freighting to try and understand what it means to be a man; to consider what masculinity is but in fact it takes more courage to take that challenge and not be afraid about what you find out about yourself!
As I have grown older I can see that for many young men today (meaning 40 and under) it is not a pressing question. I try to appreciate that some of us who became dads about 30 years ago had something to do with this social change. For us fatherhood was the path to a new masculinity, one rooted in empathy, tenderness and keeping an open ear to hear what our children were teaching us about being men.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
You know, Doctor, sometimes I think we ponder too much. Perhaps it is that society had controlled and dominated our souls for so long, and now questions us, our worth as something else, thus causing us to question in kind.
I’ve never done such questioning and simply resolved myself to two certainties. First is that masculinity is simply strength. I’m not talking just physical, but that innate strength that seems to have no measure.
How we employ such strength then defines us as a man.