Finding Your Own Pain About Patriarchy
some discoveries from a man
“I’m gonna take a little walk through them fields.
I’m gonna carry me gently for my heart to heal.
I’m gonna find me a demon in a dark, dark wood.
You can’t come with me, I wish you could.”
-Take A Little Walk, Gregory Hoskins
We sat together naked in that bed all those years ago. We stared out the window into the rainy autumn. Soon, evening rolled through and the streetlights came on. In just a few months, the plague would arrive that would shut down the world. For now, our world was us in that bed, wistful yet warm against the autumn cold. From a place I knew nothing about, you spoke:
“I saw a Man just once.”
“Just once?” I asked.
“Yes.”
You told me the story of the native medicine ceremony somewhere in Arizona where you grew up. The people of the village were meeting in circle. There was fire and drums. The ceremony hummed with ritual energies. Who would ever wish to leave such a space of love and communion? Then, piercing it all came the cry of a child from out in the fields. A Man with dark features stood upright. He handed someone the drum in his hand. He turned, and at full speed, he ran toward the cry of the child. You said he ran with one concern, and that concern was not for himself. You said this is the one time you saw a Man. When he returned with the child in his arms, smiling, laughing, he had already softened back into a man. The Man was gone.
“Where are the Men?” you said.
I sat there. I did not know then that I was boiling and reactive. I can only see that in retrospect.
“What do you mean, Men?” I asked. But I asked with accusation and defense. How could you possibly have hoped to reach me? I was committed to unreachability.
A few weeks later, I broke up with you. I told myself you were needy. Let’s be real: I had no idea how to be with you, or with myself, or with anyone, for that matter. Not even autumn rain can wash away that sobering recognition.
I have heard so many women since that time ask the question you asked, in their own words: “Where are all the Men?”
They ask it with it rage. They ask it with grief. How can it be that so many women have the same question?
I have reacted to the question in two ways. The first is that I have been defensive.
“I am a Man. Don’t you see me.” Or even, “I am not like all those Patriarchal men. Look at me. I can feel. I am sensitive. I listen.” Etc.
The other way is that I have pretended to know what the women are talking about. I have also said things like, “Where are the Men?” It’s a way I have had of being a Good Boy. I have wept and raged, but I did so unaware what I was weeping and raging for, and unaware that I was unaware. One positive outcome of, at the very least, not being defensive in the face of the question “Where are the Men?” is that women have gotten to speak their rage and grief unimpeded, and I have gotten to hear over and over again how truly widespread their pain and questions are. So far when I have been with women in a space where the purpose is for them to express and speak about life in Patriarchy, I have not met a single woman who does not carry this pain and the question: “Where are the Men?”
Recently, something inside me loosened up enough to the point where I no longer needed to defend and no longer needed to be a Good Boy pretending I knew what the women were talking about. This loosening allowed me to have my own authentic questions. I did not get these questions from pressuring myself to have these questions or trying to make myself more safe or because I thought women would feel more comfortable with me if I were more conscious. There were no shoulds. I encourage you to also find draw your questions from a source of pressurelessness:
What do the women really mean with “Where are the Men?” I truly do not know what wild potential these women can feel and see, the absence they sense so acutely that when they acknowledge it in its fullness the only expression can be breast-beating and untethered rage and grief. I think maybe seeing the women go first with their aching, a crack opens in me to lower my own numbness bar, just a little bit, but even then, I am borrowing the longing from the women, and even if it is helpful, it is not mine. Said another way: If the women did not ache first, I wouldn’t at all.
Why don’t I feel my own pain about this?
What price am I paying?
Some questions about your Underworld, men: What makes you valuable in Patriarchy? From what sources do you derive your value?
I urge you to go looking for these values and this valuing, and then to ask yourself: Where do these values and valuing really come from? Are they mine at all?
From my own Underworld, with no right/wrong or good/bad attached to my assessment, here are some of my own values and valuing:
Status. Being the best. Being at the top.
Attention and praise, especially from women.
Possessing a woman, especially a high-status woman
Being cool, strong, stoic.
Being confident.
Knowing. Having the answers.
Being competent so that I look good.
Having a solid identity, or better yet, a career around which my identity shapes itself.
Let’s go back to the claim that none of this is right or wrong or good or bad. If I carry that claim and look honestly at the motives that drive so many of my actions, at the bottom of so much, these are the values I find.
Many women I am connected with lately have been researching sexual energy. Some of them have asked, “If I no longer give my sexual energy away for the Patriarchal purpose of pleasing men, what would I give it to?” An empowering piece of clarity I have heard many of these women say is: “My sexual energy is for me, for my life, for my enjoyment, for my creation, for projects.”
When I look at my journey with own sexual energy, I discover that I have never yet asked the question: “If my sexual energy weren’t just for sex, what would I give it to?” In a recent Sexual Space Cleanout Floor Process, I discovered inside myself a meme that I needed to ejaculate and get rid of my sexual energy. Where the hell did that come from? It wasn’t mine. It did not originate in me. I felt so angry. Since I was a teenager, I have been masturbating, training my body to live with as little sexual energy coursing through it as possible. How could I ever even get to a place where I might ask a question like: “What would I give my sexual energy to?” or stake a claim like, “My sexual energy is for me, my life, my creation.”
I am sitting lately with a new piece of clarity, a possibility really: This meme about getting rid of sexual energy and these values that function seemingly at the base of my every action do not come from me. They come from Patriarchy. I do not need to borrow anything from anyone else to feel pain about this. I have my own.
There is a phrase that goes something like: “Exit the Patriarchy.”
But Patriarchy is not out there. Patriarchy is not a room in a house with a door with a sign that says, “EXIT.”
Patriarchy exists as memes and values inside me, inside my own machinery.
Exiting Patriarchy is more about causing Patriarchy to exit me, or allowing myself to step out beyond the inner machinery, into parts unknown.
What is left without the values and the memes of Patriarchy?
The answer to this question might be the same as the answer to the questions: What have I lost? What price have I paid?
Some people say the price is everything. I urge you (urge urge urge you) to find YOUR OWN answer to this question, to wrestle with it, or let it wrestle you to the ground, and if it does wrestle you to the ground, to let the presence of Gaia pierce on up through that place in your upper-middle back, supporting you so you can do the work of letting yourself be changed.
I’ll level with you: I sit now in a cafe. I weep. I do not have an answer to this question yet. What I have are the vague contours of answers that touch me at my sides, and sometimes make their way through cracks in my defenses to take my breath away.
I have lived my life mostly for myself. I have demanded things from life—comfort, love, healing, to give me what I want when I want it with as little sacrifice or offering from me as possible. I have bought into the fantasy that once I have all my childhood fantasies and needs sufficiently met, I will then be full enough to pay back any debt I have accrued. I have mostly survived. I have had no integrity, and learned to effectively numb myself to the consequences of the weight of my word eventually meaning nothing. I have let many of my dreams idle on shelves, promising I will get to them tomorrow. I said I will be grateful later. Appreciative later. Play full out later. Practice later. Go to my edge later. Now, I need to tend to myself, to fix myself. I have knotted myself around a survival commitment to being a failure, and lived with such deep self-absorption that I could neither see nor hear a world waiting for my contribution.
I do not need to borrow anything from anyone else to feel pain about this. I have my own.
That way of life has nothing to do with the longings in my heart in soul. The longings in my heart and soul, which become bit by bit clearer as the days go by, are to ecstatically and generously and unreservedly give absolutely all of myself to the great project of life. I long to expand. I long to become bigger than my survival and to discover what happens when I walk through the world as an ever-more-clear space through which LOVE-CLARITY-POSSIBILITY-TRANSFORMATION-DIGNITY can freely do their work. I long for what is hard in me to melt and melt so that I become sensitive enough to collaborate with Forces and Resources that want to collaborate with me.
Imagine if I could live in integrity with my heart’s and my soul’s yearnings. I imagine that. I long for that. And that longing is also a kind of pain. And I do not need to borrow anything from anyone else to feel that pain. I have my own.
Resources for further investigation:
“Oh, Man!” by Clinton Callahan