Dec 19, 2022 (kaiamaeve.medium.com)
Why needing help from others, and showing vulnerability is coded OUT of our most common understandings of masculinity.
TLDR: If more guys trained in the traditional fighting arts (with good teachers, not that Cobra Kai crap) maybe they’d find out that self- compassion and empathy are attitudes of the strongest men. Not the weakest.
The guys were just watching the football game
My writing friend Ed Frauenheim told me the other day about an incident. From what I gathered, he was watching a game with some old friends.
One of the guys made a snarky comment about an athlete who was out with an ankle injury. The epithet of choice was, of course, to call the guy that most demeaning of all terms.
A pussy.
This manliest of all manly slurs actually stems from the Latin word pusillanimous, defined as “Lacking strength and firmness of mind; wanting in courage and fortitude; being of weak courage; faint-hearted; mean-spirited; cowardly.”
But we all know that most men associate this slur with women, and her most sacred parts. You know, the parts of us that babies are designed to travel thru on their way into the world? This part of a woman rich and famous men might mistakenly think they’re allowed to grab?
Fucking hell.
In case you’re not familiar with his work, Ed is an author and speaker on topics such as mental health, men’s health, and caregiving from a masculine perspective.
He told me when this little moment happened, he just wasn’t sure how to best respond.
The old implicit rules of the #manbox teach men to keep quiet, or be tarred with the same brush
For most modern men in a situation like this — if you step up and object to the dissing of others of presumably “lesser rank,” you will immediately lose face.
You become associated with the demeaned group you had the temerity to speak up for. Your dominance cred suffers tremendously. It’s #manbox enforcement at its finest.
And yeah, it’s awful.
An attitude of judgmental disrespect of the pain and suffering in others clearly lacks empathy & compassion. In its place is the hardened mask of someone so afraid of pain and discomfort that they must demean others who suffer pain — in order to protect themselves from being perceived as weak.
It doesn’t really even make any sense, if you ask me.
When and where can a person in a man’s body get a chance to learn softness and empathy?
I didn’t have a ready reflection for Ed in the moment, so our conversation moved on to other topics.
But later that night, as I sat reflecting on what we’d talked about — I began to wonder.
Hampered by a lack of actual experience
Did the man who called this injured player a pussy know what a painfully injured ankle actually feels like?
Probably not.
Did this man grow up in a home where his caregivers taught him that the appropriate response to pain was to ignore the pain and soldier on?
Chances are good this one is a yes.
Did this man think that playing on an injured ankle would have been good for the overall outcome of the game? As Ed mentioned, it’s highly ineffective to your game plan to put a compromised player on the field. What kind of results would you expect?
Logically, an uninjured second string player would have the advantage over an injured starter. That’s why there is such a thing as the IR. Injured reserve.
While effectiveness is still a flawed metric — you’d at least think it might appeal to a rabid fan. After all winning is always preferable to losing!
Humility is the birthplace of empathy
Speaking to my husband the next day, he had some illuminating reflections when I described to him what had happened, and why I was so curious about it.
My husband is a jujitsu practitioner — so he specializes in the practice of voluntarily subjecting himself to intense discomfort as part of his learning path.
Just look at his ears if you need proof.
Yet interestingly, this practice of learning the art of jujitsu has instilled both a sense of humility as well as a boatload of empathy in him over the years.
As he has gotten hurt, or held down, or smashed into the floor by an opponent who’s more experienced, more technical, or even just far stronger than he was — both humility and compassion have been obvious outcomes.
You have to lose in order to learn
You have to sit with discomfort — both mental and physical — if you want to eventually grow. You have to accept vulnerability as a necessary precursor to growth.
This is just one of the reasons I also love practicing in the martial arts. I’ve just taken on different and more personalized demons than mere human opponents. For me — making time to care for myself despite a busy schedule and a habit of overextending on behalf of those who rely on me — these are the opponents I train both with and against! But I digress…
From the outside observer’s perspective, martial arts training might look like it’s all about flashy skills and physical training. But in reality, this traditional path is just one of many long roads that can lead you back to yourself, over and over again.
Pain, as Paul Chek puts it, is a teacher! Pain can teach us patience, self-belief, the skills of becoming present in the moment, and empathy — if we learn to allow for these lessons.
The hypermasculine man has never taken the time to explore their own vulnerabilities, nor learn their hidden gifts
What I see in the hypermasculine posturing of the previously mentioned patriarchal pussy punk, is a glaring lack of study under the pain teacher.
When you understand that losing the match, getting tapped, or experiencing the pain of injury is a part of the learning process, you lose the societally conditioned knee jerk reaction to the pain of others. You understand that you HAVE to go thru those experiences in order to grow.
Pain, and the lessons you learn while dealing with it, can make you STRONGER. Not weaker.
A winner — eventually. Not a loser.
And good ‘ol couch quarterback dude probably didn’t learn that lesson.
I’m not saying he hasn’t experienced any pain. It just probably wasn’t the opt-in pain training of a martial artist or athlete.
More likely he was a victim of the general, ubiquitous pain of the traumatic experience of being raised inside of a patriarchal culture. Where authenticity, vulnerability, and a full range of personal expression is stunted in an flawed effort to make boys strong. Where you have to pretend to be invulnerable lest anyone else perceive you as being, well… a pussy.
This approach fails miserably. What results is not strong men, but brittle ones. Men who pretend to be above weakness are really covering up the human part of themselves that admits to experiencing pain. And it’s these guys who’ve got zero reference points on how to relate to the pain of others.
The injured football player somehow seems to trigger this, “See, I’m not weak, like him!” reaction. Weakness is seen as a failing. And men are taught that they cannot fail.
But failure is necessary to growth!
Anyone involved in Agile development or CI/CD processes knows this!
They just far too often fail to apply the same logic to themselves.
Fail freely
So Ed, I guess if you want to research the cure for hyper masculinity as you described to me, perhaps there are answers lurking in unexpected places. Like the tatami mats of a local jujitsu school.
Perhaps your search for the humble yet strong, servant-oriented masculine in search of its own self-actualization could be spotted here.
It’s unintuitive, I know. But as a female martial arts practitioner for the last 3.5 decades I can tell you this. Martial arts men have THE IT factor when it comes to self-possessed compassion and humility. It might be counterintuitive, but I’m an expert on this!
One could almost call it, a healed version of the hypermasculine trend that causes so much damage — both to men, and to those around them.
Or maybe, if you want to go with archetypes, it’s the archetype of the king in his fullness. Not the tyrant or the weakling that so many men fear becoming.
When men know and accept their strengths and their weaknesses in equal measure, they’re not likely to call an injured footballer a pussy.
And once the scared little boys that attempt to call out the vulnerabilities of others to make themselves feel big study under the pain teacher just a little bit more — we’re one step closer to healing the world of this crap once and for all.
Perhaps someday, dear reader, you’ll find yourself on a training mat. Learning another aspect of what true strength is. What it looks like, and more importantly what it feels like.
Or forever hide behind that mask that you just HOPE will keep you safe.
But don’t worry. No one I know will ever call you a pussy.
Because the strength it takes to step into the arena is worthy of all the respect in the first place.
You don’t need to be hypermasculine to protect your good name.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite!
Real men DO get vulnerable. Please. Because real, real humans, of any gender, can feel it all.
And that’s what we need right now. As we reconnect, let’s be brave and learn to feel it all!
© Kaia Tingley December 2022