Living With Trauma: The Healers, 28

I have been thinking, Gentle Reader, about toxic masculinity, and the huge havoc this dynamic has wreaked upon our history and our collective wellbeing. Yes, I know, we have largely men (but also not a few women!) to thank for our many advances in our civilization, in culture, the sciences, you name it. Men are largely credited for the development of metallurgy, writing, art, mathematics, astrology, the sciences, religion, languages, architecture, and the science of war (not a good thing, if you must ask), all attributes associated with culture and civilization. The soft sciences and the nurturing, healing arts have long been the province of women, though now these things are employed and applied, shall we say, cross-gender? But men, from prehistory, have always famously abused their testosterone, and war, pillage and murder have drenched our history with our red human blood since the first man killed his brother. This isn't to say that women haven't been equally capable of committing atrocities, but this has long been the dominion of men for the very power and status they have imbued themselves with. This dynamic is changing, though it is still a man's world. Women are making tremendous gains and advances in all avenues of life: politics, the legal and healing and educational professions, business, commerce, sciences and technologies; and men conversely are entering more into traditional women's professions, particularly nursing and early childhood education, though not as many by any stretch. With this growing empowerment of women we are also seeing the disempowerment of men. Not necessarily a bad thing, but, oh, how the mighty are fallen! Men are more likely than women to be unemployed and homeless, now. Instead of rising to the challenge and learning from women, or at least taking cues from women, about changing or modifying some of the more toxic masculine behaviours, we find a lot of men, especially young males, curling up into themselves, isolating, obsessing with the most antisocial activities (online pornography, constant online gaming, online everything), but basically withdrawing and, could I say, pining? Or mourning over their vanishing grip on power? So shameful it is to lose power, position and privilege (sorry about the alliteration but those successive p's can be a delight to pronounce), and so lacking are many young men in healthy male role-modeling and mentoring, they just become depressed, anti-social, nonverbal zombies. They will not emerge out of their parents' basement unless they absolutely have to, even the good-looking ones become complete losers at finding girlfriends, and some of them turn into violent sex-offenders because the suppurating misogyny must be something to write home about it. As a disempowered male myself, I have seen a lot of this around me. First a word about myself: I have managed to avoid almost all of the aforementioned pitfalls, even if I have always been poor and having to deal with some sort of social stigma or other. I owe this partly to my Christian faith, as the sense of God's bolstering and protecting presence benefits me enormously; and also to the fact that I do not identify with conventional masculinity. I have never accepted capitalism, or hierarchy, and I have always identified as androgynous, which is to say neither specifically male or female, but both, and, and neither. However, having made many observations while living and working among other disenfranchised men, I have seen in spades some incredibly self-destructive and antisocial behaviour which can only be ascribed as traditional male dysfunctionality. Men, having been long accustomed to power, are not going to easily relinquish their power, and when it is gradually taken away from them, many are not going to adapt well. Unless they are willing to learn from other disempowered persons. Especially from women. I will explore this idea further tomorrow, Gentle Reader.