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Helene 1 year, 6 months ago.
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I’ve opined elsewhere, perhaps several times, how our current Western secular society encourages adults to not grow up. In my opinion, this is a complex problem and one I am definitely subject to just as much as the next guy.
The main problem in describing and understanding this is that most people want to find “one root cause” so they can point at it and maybe work out how to fix it. Or at least find someone or something to blame.
Unfortunately, it ain’t that simple. That also makes it hard to pick a starting point.
I have spent a little time involved with The Mankind Project. This is a kind of a self-help movement that is rooted in the teachings of Robert Bly and John Eldredge amongst others, that teach men who haven’t been taught how to be men to be men. There are several ways of looking at this, but I like Eldredge’s the best mostly because that’s the one I am most familiar with. Eldredge has several books about adult males becoming men. Men usually like looking for adventure, they like proving that they Can Do Something, and they want someone to appreciate that they can. Even Hollywood knows this: Men are expected to be fearless adventurers, braving horrible odds to save the girl and rule their little world with justice and honour. Pity real life seems to get in the way.
It was Eldredge who showed me that males (and females, but in a different process) are supposed to be taught how to grow up in a continuous process but not just one older adult, but by a whole series of older boys and men. The point is that there is always people ahead of you in the same path, some further along than others and all for you to see what it looks like to be at that point. Similarly, there are always people behind you learning off those ahead of them. Including you. For all their other faults, the tribal societies of indigenous people generally do this right. Boys go through stages where they are taught about their culture and history and their place in it. And then roughly when they reach puberty, they undergo an Initiation ritual after which they are men.
Initiation sounds scary. In a funny kind of way, it is supposed to be. This is a major life transition. In many tribal societies, this is where start taking up some serious responsibilities based on the training they’ve been receiving all their lives. And the training never stops: it is at initiation that they start learning things that only initiated men know. Initiated men are supposed to be able to take control of their lives and work towards the good of their society.
When a tribal-initiation society works properly, the tribe is also able to take care of genuinely broken people. These are the psychopaths, or the mentally infirm. They can corral them into a safe place without them getting out of control. Our industrialized society doesn’t do that at all well. This is why you get murderers and homicidal maniacs. They usually have no people able to look out for them and to channel these errant urges into safer and less harmless pursuits.
But why are we like that?
Eldredge and Bly say it is because we have forgotten how to turn children into adults.
There are multiple reasons this happened, but in my opinion it is the Industrial Revolution that really broke this. It created the “go to work” structure en-mass. It meant that children no longer saw their fathers actually working, initially because they were often out working themselves and later because they were in school with other children the same age.
Secularism is another major factor. The popular rise of secularism meant that people had a new choice: religion or no religion. But there was a side-effect to many people choosing no religion. And that was that people chose to put their own wishes at the centre of their lives, instead of pleasing a deity or priest. This is hugely, vastly simplified, of course. People have always been selfish and self-centred whatever they “worshipped”. However, the social training was oriented around the society. The concept of self that we know in today’s society was not widespread a few hundred years ago. And so today, we have the Cult of Self.
The Cult of Self is what makes advertising work. It is all about “me me me” – punters are encouraged to get what they want and told they should be able to have what they want. Satisfaction of self is rated above serving the greater good. To do otherwise requires a guilt trip, or remuneration or some other reward. And that is very childish thinking. Little children demand things because they don’t know otherwise. They have to be taught how to moderate their demands and how to think of others in the bigger scheme of the world. This is the goal of turning children into adults.
Eldredge talks about six stages a boy moves through in life. They are Child, Cowboy, Warrior, Lover, King and Sage. They don’t have discreet steps and in many ways they all come into play at various points of our lives. A toddler in the middle of their building blocks is briefly a King, for instance. But there one stage is dominant in our behaviour at most points in our lives. The problem is that they need to be done in sequence. You can’t be an effective King if you’ve never progressed past Cowboy (this was a my problem in my failed marriage). Even becoming a Lover to your wife is difficult if you haven’t been a Warrior to know how to fight for her (also a problem I had).
Another way of looking at the idea of initiation is to advance through these stages. Many westerners naïvely look at initiation and see it as a one-time step. It’s not. It is part of a much longer process and it is the process of moving boys from Cowboy to Warrior to Lover and further. But in our current society, we severely lack structure that does that. So you often end up with boys in adult bodies. Many of then manage to fake it, but not all. The jokes about “there’s no manual to read when becoming a father” are now much less funny and can often be distressingly poignant.
I think there is a lot of truth to this. I think there is a lot of encouragement for women to become their own person and I think this is good. We probably still need more of this type of encouragement.
The “enemy” has often been portrayed as men and I think it has been confusing for many men to try and find out what it means to be a man. I remember when I was going through my angry young man stage. I noticed that I was able to attract more women when I was an asshole than when I was being “nice.” When I went to church I really had a problem with being the “bride” of Christ and looking to Christ for answers. And every time I had to sing “I love you Jesus” it kind of got stuck in my throat. It just didn’t feel authentic to me.
I really like comics and the whole technological toy thing. I like video games and I like to play. It’s a way my sons connect when they come home along with frizbee golf and sailing. I remember talking to a friend who’s wife was critical of his interest in collecting toy figures of Batman, Ironman, and other super heroes. He was in the business of making life size versions of these characters to rent to comic book stores and festivals. She would ask him why he liked this stuff and he was struggling to find a reason. I asked him if anyone was harmed by his like of these things. He said no. I suggested that maybe he could answer, “Because it’s fun.”
For me, I think I have looked inside and discovered what I enjoy and I decided to stop apologizing for it. What’s the point of rating everything we do on some type of arbitrary scale. It’s true that something like video games, playing golf, or watching sports can be an obsession and take time away from other aspects of life to the harm of the individual and their intimate circle, but it’s not video games or sports per se. Anything can be an obsession including a lot of things we might consider “good.” I know people who are involved in all kinds of community projects that they are completely absent from their own families.
I think the direct experience of life is where it’s at. Really being conscious and engaged is something I really enjoy. Even saying that I need to have a “balance” is taking away from the direct experience of life because it still involves some type of rating on some arbitrary “balance scale.” (That’s redundant. LOL)
I think when a person discovers who they are as a man or a woman and allows that aspect to emerge, the wonder of what it means to be fully human and fully alive will uniquely direct one’s life.
Like you mention, I think a lot of this assumption about “boys” becoming “men” is partly a hangover from a rights-of-passage style culture. At one point other people would tell you “You have reached X age/ done X thing. You are now a man.” And would be treated as such, and as you say, they would go through these stages to fit into that role. This has changed in modern society, but the expectation and initiation is still to some extent, there. Like for example, virginity. Losing it is want /really/ makes you a man, right? (As a late virgin I, and others I know, had problems with this.) I think now It’s growing to be more up to the individual to define and is therefore more arbitrary, and I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. Like you said, the working mentality is a good example too. Before teenagers became a thing, people weren’t given the chance to mature into adulthood, adulthood was foisted on them and they were expected to grow into it. It’s just the way it was and it had its advantages and disadvantages.
Really though in the ways you’re speaking about, it seems to be less about maturity and more about expectations of the sexes. I know many people who haven’t grown into “man” or “woman” roles or personalities, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t grow up.
Men are expected to be fearless adventurers, braving horrible odds to save the girl and rule their little world with justice and honour. Pity real life seems to get in the way.
And in that aspect women are expected to be “the girl that needs saving”, which thankfully isn’t so prevalent these days, and you don’t see women aspiring to it. Living up to generalized archetypes is optional. Unfair, unrealistic expectations exist but we have the ability to fight against them. (hey, that’s what feminism’s for! Seriously, it’s not just for women, this is the point of it too.)
Also what you have to say about advertising, that is very much from the perspective of advertisers. They think of people en-masse as stupid, and easy to manipulate, and in this aspect, they’re not wrong. But they use this against the general populous and guilt-tripping charity adds say more about the companies than they do about people.
Advertising is also a very interesting area to get into with regards to the expectations you were talking about. Women are expected to pay intense detail to their bodies so they can be convinced they need these products to make them look/feel better. Equally men are targeted by their supposed need to have a stronger sense of masculinity. They show what people are told they should be for the benefit of the companies pushing these ideas, they’re not exactly a good soundboard for what people are actually like.
Personally, the writings of this Eldredge character doesn’t sound to appealing. I am only going off what you put so y’know I’m incredibly under-informed but it for one seems to target only men (or men-to be), and also targets ideals as expectations rather than a natural outworking of that individual’s personality.
They sound like nice, neat labels for characteristics people will over time exhibit, but for a person to actively seek to attain to those labels? Doesn’t sound too healthy. Again I might be completely misconstruing this, but to me it sounds like if one were to follow this, they would lead an ingenuine life. If it fits with the person, fine, but if not it could really warp someone’s sense of self.
I’d be interested to see what you think of this subject for females. Eldredge’s theory can’t be directly attributed to them also without totally re-working society’s idea of the sexes, and since the “warrior” and “lover” aspects seem to be /for/ the woman, it would be interesting to see what the woman is expected to be in these situations.
Yes as a society we have become less God-fearing, more individualistic and possibly more selfish. These are gross generalizations, but their origins can’t really be criticized There will always be pitfalls in life, and in society, which usually come about when society is in a state of change and growth, and that’s what needs to happen. I understand the inclination towards structure, because in recent history, that is what western society is used to, the structure of family roles, gender roles and religious practice, but these things are being broken down and I believe that’s for the better.
Asking questions and rocking the boat naturally puts things in a state of flux, and from what I understand, that’s what creates forums like this one.
@Vic Cooper everything you just said–all of it.
As a parent of two children who definitely do not fit the cultural expectations of their presumed genders, I don’t want either of them being taught “how to be a man” or “how to be a woman.” Quite honestly, as a woman and as a feminist, nearly everything about this pings my radar. I’ve lived for nearly 10 years in an almost constant state of having to explain that yes, my son is a “real” boy even though he is very different from most other boys. What’s sad about it is that this negativity nearly all comes from adults; his classmates at school–both boys and girls–like him just the way he is. I have no worries that he won’t grow up to be a responsible adult just because he isn’t an “adventurer” (whatever that even means). This sounds disturbingly like an article in the fundamentalist magazine Set Apart Girl in which men are referred to as “Christ-build Warrior-Poets.” I also have some concerns about racial bias; I don’t think these principles are universally applicable. The whole thing just seems to me like it fails spectacularly in sensitivity to anyone who isn’t a cis, straight, white man.
@Vic Cooper, it is interesting to read your response.
What I didn’t explore in my original post is when the gender differences break down, because as you have correctly called out, they certainly do. Eldredge’s work comes from years of experience with men struggling to understand their life and to find a position in it. He is quite upfront about the fact that he knows a lot less about how it works with woman. His wife has been more recently involved in developing a similar program for woman and co-authored with him the books about this.
I disagree that it is more about genderised roles than behaviourial maturity. After all, the sexual archetypes exist because they have an element of truth in them. At the very least, we need a starting point. If they’re wrong, individuals can and should change aspects that don’t work for them. I happen know far more about this from the male point-of-view simply because I am a straight male. Abandoning them wholesale is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I also disagree with your comment that “Before teenagers became a thing, people weren’t given the chance to mature into adulthood, adulthood was foisted on them and they were expected to grow into it.” Historians know that to a very large extent throughout history, children grew up watching their own extended family and thus their social group live. And we know that in strongly tribal cultures, initiation rituals never standalone: they are always surrounded by instruction and training both before and afterwards about what it means to be an adult. (Note I’m not holding up any particular time or place as exemplars because there are always problems.)
The fact that adolescents often seek to create their own “rites-of-passage” suggests to me that they want a process at some point. They somehow want someone to affirm that they are “now adults”. They want a step into adulthood that has a before and an after. And our society is failing them. We have things like voting age, your first legal drink of alcohol, your first car, your first sexual encounter…
I find Eldredge’s labels convenient for discussion, but they are not absolutes. He goes to great lengths in several of his works to say this, and to point out that they are most definitely not discrete steps. They are guidelines only. The literature of the Mankind Project has a different (and shorter!) list that I cannot remember right at the moment. (I also dislike how tightly Eldredge ties Christianity to the process; the MKP very deliberately does not do this).
Some links for further research: The Mankind Project. John Eldredge on Wikipedia
Wade.
@Amy, I have obviously failed to make clear that for a number of men and women the gender roles haven’t even been offered to them as valid options.
It is not about forcing people into gender roles. In fact, it is kind of about breaking some assumptions about gender roles.
Maybe I can put it into modern society. What is a married man supposed to be like? Is he supposed to come home from work, eat a gourmet meal his wife has made, grab a beer, sit on the couch and stare at TV until bedtime? Or perhaps disappear to his shed because he doesn’t know how to talk to his wife, only to come back long after she’s gone to bed? This is, in my opinion, a broken gender role. But how many children have that as their role-model and then how many of those are told as they get older that they should not be like that? Can you hear their cry of “well what am I supposed to be like?!?” What, indeed.
It’s fantastic that your children are in a place that accepts them for what they are. It really is. It is a basic human need, after all, and if no-one accepts us for what are, then eventually we stop even accepting ourselves.
In a lot of ways our mass-media culture does a poor job of accepting anyone who is not a young, attractive adult. And it often prefers a woman over a man. The underlying message I see is that men can’t be trusted and therefore need controlling. This is not accepting them as adults. This is trying to keep them as children. I have personally seen men who have so bought into that mindset they do not accept even themselves. For too long, they have heard “it’s wrong to be a man” because there has been little else to hear. They needed people alongside of them to tell that that is so much bullshit and to teach them that is completely okay to be what they are. This is what our society is less than average at just as our adolescents really need it.
I’m sorry for ranting. This subject touches me very closely.
Wade.
AnonymousInside of EVERY man is an eight year old boy just dying to go outside and play. I am speaking as a 49 year old man trying to figure out how to pack a hiking trip into the weekend and Durham Bulls baseball game into this BUSY day.
Gender roles and stereotypes do not exist because they are true, they exist because that’s what has been taught. Not sure how it is where you are, but here, people are dying because they don’t fit those roles. Every damn day, another person commits suicide or is beaten to death because they cannot fit into the roles dictated by culture. Society “prefers” women? Really? Do you have any idea how that looks to women? It looks like our bodies being sold to the highest bidder. It looks like domestic violence not being taken seriously. It looks like TIME Magazine fostering a bizarre stereotype of “feminists” as people who police their children’s toys and deny their daughters the right to wear pink. It looks like homeschooled kids bullying my son for taking ballet classes. It looks like my friends being told that letting their 2-year-old sons play with a pink ball is a “political statement.” And it looks like anyone with a gender or sexuality not considered “normal” being bullied to death. I suggest you read this post, because there’s a lot of insight in here regarding perception.
I really can’t continue this discussion because it triggers me deeply as a result of years of fundamentalism–which basically said exactly the same thing you’ve said here. My former church also taught that men shouldn’t just “come home from work, eat a gourmet meal his wife has made, grab a beer, sit on the couch and stare at TV until bedtime,” but on top of that there were rigid expectations about being a real man because God just made men a certain way.
Anyway, please don’t take this as me having to have the last word; I just can’t continue talking about this because it is so painful for me both as a woman and as a person who doesn’t fit my cultural role as a woman coming out of the fundamentalist mindset.
@ Amy, thanks! I agree with you and I respect your backing out. Subjects like this can be a blatant trigger for a lot of people and I don’t blame you. Also your kids sound great, letting them know staying true to themselves is important is a life lesson most of us didn’t get. Others’ prejudices will always get in the way of that though unfortunately. Also great article that, thanks for the link.
@ Wade, Not to simply echo what Amy said, but I really have to emphasize the point that women are not society’s preferred human. Remember the fact that the people in control of the mass media are, generally speaking, wealthy, white men. The trappings off society and the media are not out to demean manhood, rather they are a result of it. We see women everywhere because men like seeing women in places they understand. On magazine covers for example, preferably less-than-fully-clothed. And no, saying this doesn’t undermine my attraction to the female sex, nor should it any man’s. The sexualisation of females has long been used as grounds to enforce or uplift one’s masculinity. By lowering the position of women, the position of men has been lifted up, and the more women fight to gain equilibrium the more men will feel the grounds their gender stands on shifting beneath their feet. This to me sounds like an example of that. The examples you’ve given of a strong sense of manhood have not been detached from the presence of a woman. In questioning the place of women in your examples, I didn’t infer that there was no understanding, more the fact that women have been used as a soundboard for masculinity. I feel that for men to gain a correct sense of adulthood and maturity it must be able to stand completely independently of women, so that married or not, children or no, any person can feel like an adult. The same should go for women.
Also sexual stereotypes really have not come out of truth. I can cite many people on this and really start a whole new debate over it but suffice to say that understandings of the brain and physical and mental differences between the sexes are no more than scientific leaps of faith on behalf of a sexist society. History is a good testament to this.
Regarding history, the main advantage of studying it is finding out how we came to be where we are, and to learn and grow from our past. Many rituals and customs that were common and beneficial at the time have since died out. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it’s what naturally happens and it’s the way that things work. Nostalgia about “the way things were” has never been helpful, and mostly ends up sitting out of place when brought into the contemporary context. We see things through the 21st century eye because that is our context, that also changes a lot about the way we view past customs, which may make them appear as lighter or more grim than they were.
Also for the sake of laying out everything plainly here I’ve been talking in very straight, cis (not trans*) terms. If you apply any of this thinking to Gay, bisexual, lesbian, other sexualities or transgendered/sexual/vestite people in any way, it really starts to dissolve. And though I have sympathy for why this means a lot to you, I can’t see it working out on a broarder scale, because there will always be people to whom this does not apply, and in this sense I don’t believe a set of restrictions, or even guidelines are helpful. The reason why youth invent their own rites-of-passage isn’t because that’s what should really happen, but more because they feel they need to be validated in order to progress. They feel they need some sort of certificate of “manhood” to call themselves mature, and that is not helpful, purely because it is false. Like many things, as I think Amy said, this idea has more been constructed by society than anything else, and people often search for validation within institutions, (of which religion is a prime example.) In reality I believe people can work out their own maturity by figuring themselves out, and I think the cause for this not happening is because people aren’t told they’re allowed to.
Amy’s kids are a good example of this in that they’re finding themselves but are being chastised for it. I’d hazard a guess that most of us have the same experience. If we allow others to shape our identity from infancy, then we’ll look to others to form it in adult life, and if the response of most people is to shrug their shoulders and go “I ‘unno do whatever” then that can leave a lot of people in the lurch. If they’d been encouraged to develop a solid sense of self however, I don’t think this would be the case. Instead of an assigned path or guidelines to maturity in life, people might benefit more from being encouraged to respect others, not attack, and, well to be honest the fruits of the spirit make a better list than I can: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Those are to me a far better guideline for life, which apply to any age, gender or race, whether or not they believe in the bible and I think this would better cultivate true maturity and adulthood.
Speaking of this bible thing, I’ve heard a lot of this business about roles spouted from that. When I started deviating from certain gender expectations, my Dad started buying me choice books by christian authors about gender. From what I read, their use of the bible was tenuous, and I couldn’t see anything that didn’t originate from the culture at the time of writing, and them saying “That’s what was then and it’s in this book so that’s what should be now.” Whilst glossing over things they’d rather not transpose from that era. So, as a result I’m extremely critical of any even remotely specific gender expectations written by christians. I don’t see it reflecting the attitude of Jesus, and I’ve seen the extremely damaging results of it so their true motivation for writing books on these things feel somewhat… iffy.
I wrote a post on gender today in response to Metaxas’ ideas that God has an idea of what men SHOULD be like, etc… I found it really disturbing and confusing. I just don’t get why this stuff still gets press: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nakedpastor/2013/05/metaxas-and-male-heroes-only-please/
There seems to be the confusion of “what is” with “what should be”. Frustrating.
Amy… I get what you’re saying. I’ve bowed out of conversations that were just not going to be helpful for me as well.
Where have I gone wrong in what I had to say? Just a quick post over breakfast; perhaps I can return to this topic another time.
Despite what seems to have been read, I am not arguing for a return to gender stereotypes. I am saying that, however flawed they were, there is truth about how to be buried in them all, no matter the sex. I was trying to point out that many times the underlying values are poorly taught to children. But I only have direct experience with myself and other men (straight and not).
I like your blog post, David. It says some of things I had to say much better than I did.
It also shows I think I was trying to cover too much topic area. I got asked about why I though society tries to keep us not grown up and I thought I answered that.
Wade.
P.S. Also, I want to apologise to you, @Amy for making you uncomfortable about this topic.
Have got a lot out of reading everyone’s posts and the Metaxas one, it’s challenging, and something that I need to continue reflecting on before I attempt to write anything. So I continue pondering away…….
It’s totally cool and okay to amicably bow out of difficult conversations. My wife and I do it all the time. We don’t take it personally. I mean… I do examine what I might have said or how, but it isn’t the end of the world, just words… for now.
Thanks, @David. I so rarely get into Internet arguments because the give me stress. I’ll leave it a few days before I consider bringing it up again.
Wade.
@Wade Bowmer, happy if you want to take a break, gender is such a hot button issue when I think you were more trying to discuss delayed adulthood, etc (which unfortunately is related !). However I spotted this in the Guardian today, with over 400 comments already:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/may/14/male-identity-crisis-machismo-abbott
It concluded:
“Far from yesterday’s role models of soldier, miners and farmers, male youths, says Abbott, are part of a “transit generation” left working in services industries they are uncomfortable with, or not working at all.
“Look at many of our young men graduating from university this year,” her speech says. “Faced with mass unemployment and often unable to fly the nest they can find themselves locked into a transitional phase at home, or find themselves voluntarily creating an extended adolescence, sometimes resentful of family life.”
For myself, I’m still trying to get my head around all the theories/issues/concepts relating to gender so I keep well away from commenting. It’s not a push button issue for me and I’m genuinely interested in all comments which I consider and think upon. Thanks again for raising this topic.
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