Shredding the Gender Straight-Jacket

My heart broke again a few days ago when I saw the news about yet another school shooting. And then I got extremely pissed when I saw a chart showing one of my state’s senators as having accepted over $3 million in money from the NRA. My teeth are clenching right now. I am doubly pissed because the senator is a woman, and for fuck’s sake, bitch, how can you do this to another woman’s children?

And that got me to thinking about how the Patriarchy just needs to die. 

The divisions between men and women are kind of like the boundaries between states or countries. They’re these imaginary lines that people agree on at some point, and somehow those imaginary lines get etched on our internal GPS and we use them to navigate and orient ourselves.

But they’re total bullshit. When we see the Earth from space, or even from an airplane, there aren’t any dotted lines marking where the US ends and Mexico begins. There aren’t any dotted lines between Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, either. We have those two big rivers on either side of the state of Iowa  that we’ve all agreed mark the boundaries between us and our neighbors to the east and west, but there is no dotted line down the middle of the Mississippi telling us this part of the river is Iowa’s and this part is Wisconsin’s.

The typical gender roles we have been stuffed into are exactly like that. They are imaginary conventions that we’ve been brow-beaten into accepting by institutional authorities, and the punishment for stepping outside those boundaries is swift and severe.

Men in our culture are not encouraged to explore and develop their emotional intelligence. That’s not to say there aren’t men who are highly sensitive, brilliantly compassionate, powerfully nurturing and lovingly whole, because there are and I am lucky to know a good number of them. But generally speaking, most boys aren’t shown this way of being as an option, and when they take a step or two in that direction, many of them get smacked down hard for it.

Not only is it not encouraged, it is simply not expected that men are going to have nurturing and emotional skills. We don’t assume, “Hey, he’s a guy, he’ll know how to nurse me through a cold,” or “That human with the penis over there, surely he’ll know everything about how to take care of a parent with dementia.” Most of us don’t get nostalgic for our grandpa’s chicken soup, or our uncle’s chewy chocolate chip cookies.

Women, now, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. We have had to fight tooth and nail for the right to be considered individuals in most countries around the globe and in a heartbreaking number of countries that fight hasn’t even started. Voting, owning property, running a business, being in one of the professions, and especially being a non-married independent woman were impossible for much of Western history–in fact, we’re still fighting for equal rights to this very damn day. But that’s another rant altogether.

Even now, if a woman wants to develop any kind of intelligence other than emotional intelligence, she is expected to master both, or all of them. And then be discriminated against for putting her family first. And then be called a bitch for putting her job first. Or be considered less than a woman for choosing not to have a family. Or be looked down on for choosing to be a full-time mom instead of a “productive member of society.” And so on. You probably know the drill all too well.

Men just get to be good at doing their jobs and who cares if they have emotional intelligence or not?

Emotional intelligence simply isn’t valued enough for the Patriarchy to take it seriously. And I think part of the reason that emotional intelligence isn’t valued is that it’s usually free. The first person to offer us nurturing is (for most of us) our mom. She changed our diapers, gave us baths, fed us, sang to us, cuddled us, taught us to drink from a cup and eat with a spoon and go potty on the potty. When we got sick, she stopped the world and took care of us.

And we never had to pay her dime one for doing any of it. 

Boys are encouraged, if not outright programmed, to make money, be providers. They are offered lots of options for doing that, and for the most part, nobody ever says, “But if you want to be a nurturer and raise a family, that’s a wonderfully rewarding way to spend your life and you should totally go for it.” Those things aren’t valued, because nurturing doesn’t make money.

Our culture expects men to be individualistic, tough, lone-wolf types who take no prisoners and stay on the job until the last dog is hung. When they get depressed, they self-medicate to hide it; lone-wolves do not admit weakness because they fear that they will be torn to shreds by all the other self-medicated lone-wolves around them. We expect men to be survivors, to have all the answers, to deal with it, get ‘er done and do what a man’s gotta do, with no training whatsoever in how to process emotions, or how to handle anxiety, guilt or fear.

And the very thing that is causing men’s suffering is the Patriarchy, which continues to tighten those gender-role straight-jackets even harder now that women are inching toward equality.

We need to pull up and see this from 5 miles high. We need to look down and see that the boundaries between maleness and femaleness are just as imaginary as the boundaries between countries. One size fits one half fits no one. Ever.

In the US, Individualism is held as one of our most important values, and yet when it comes to people being able to freely express who they truly are and what they truly feel, we’re in the Dark Ages. There are places where being openly gay will get you killed. There are places where being not-White will get you killed. Women are raped and battered and abused and it’s practically considered normal. We put a 12 year-old girl in prison for 40 years because she killed her daily rapist in self-defense–oh wait, she’s a Brown person, never mind. But we allow a White rapist caught red-handed go free because his swim team needs him. Fuck that. Fuck all of that.

This country is sick and broken and those of us who are desperately trying to meet this bullshit with love and hope and healing and patience and light and compassion are being stretched to the limits of our endurance because every god-damn day there’s another outrage and Sweet Baby Jesus Eating Cheerios are we supposed to just drown in it?

Because that’s what this feels like.

Why do we continue to normalize violence? Why do we continue to insist that some humans are more important than other humans? Why is Whiteness considered Bestness?

And if being White and male is such an awesome thing, why are so many White men so terrified of anybody who is not both of those things? So terrified that they can’t walk into their local grocery store without carrying a gun?

White male fear is one of the biggest Elephants in the Room. It’s trumpeting and shitting all over the rug. There are plenty of other Elephants that we could talk about, too, but this one is having a damn panic attack right now.

White male fear comes from generations of men never learning how to handle emotion. Any emotion, good or bad. And they’re acting very much like they have PTSD. This is not a mental health crisis, this is an emotional health crisis. Just as women have been fighting to be allowed to have jobs, own property, become doctors and lawyers and senators and professors and fighter pilots and astronauts and physicists and engineers . . . Men are being smothered by a total lack of instruction and guidance about how to handle their emotions. They either self-destruct or they lash out, or both.

Nobody ever thinks to tell them that peak emotions last about 90 seconds. 90 seconds. A minute and a half. That’s it.

The worst of your anger, fear, grief, hurt, shame or guilt has the energy to last about a minute and a half. If you close your eyes, put one hand on your heart and the other on your belly, breathe slowly, and just sit with the feeling, allowing it, observing it, naming it, it will subside in a couple minutes. I’m not saying you’ll instantly be getting up a conga-line, I’m saying in a couple minutes it will go from awful to bearable. And in a few more minutes it’ll go from bearable to . . . there. And then you say to yourself, “That is what anger feels like. Okay, I can handle that.” And then you start to heal.

We have to start teaching our kids when they are little how to do this. Sit with them, talk to them about their emotions, help them name their emotions so they can know what is happening to them because knowledge is power. When they get angry, don’t get angry back–get curious and most important, get compassionate. Don’t meet force with force. Meet fear with gentleness, and teach that feelings and  emotions are not bad; they are the way our bodies communicate with us. Encourage them to talk about what happened, and help them see a bigger picture, little by little.

And the very next Elephant that we need to start talking about is that gender is anything other than a jagged line with lots of intersections. Female and Male are two points in a constellation. If any of us try to be 100% one or the other we’re bound to get a little unhinged. And if we let gender stop us from doing what we’re best at, or prevent us from experiencing something we long for, or keep us from loving someone we feel deeply drawn to, then we may as well hold out our arms for that gender straight-jacket and ask for the extra padlocks.

Personally, I don’t feel like a woman. Depending on the day, I feel like a guitarist, a songwriter, a writer, a healer, a mother, a friend, a lover, a teacher, a mentor, or an eternal student. Okay, I have boobs, and ovaries, womb, vagina, and clitoris, big deal. Most of the time I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to any of that. Most of the time I am focused on what I am creating, or on my client or my student or whatever the hell I am doing. Woman doesn’t matter to me about 99% of the time. Healer does. Musician does. Teacher does. Human matters a lot.

Opposable thumbs are super handy and I wouldn’t trade ’em for sweet, sweet fins–or even wings. 

I’m grateful that I have a neocortex, and that I have sentience and self-awareness. And opposable thumbs, don’t forget those. I happened to be born with a matched set of chromosomes, whoop-dee-frickin’-doo. What that means is that I have a responsibility to my community to model and teach the things I am good at, which include things like how to develop emotional intelligence and process feelings, in addition to guitaring and songing and writing and cooking and healing and so on. If I was a man, I would have exactly the same responsibility to model and teach by being my best self, whatever my gifts happened to be. In fact, when I imagine myself as a man, I’m pretty much the same person, because I’m within a hair’s breadth of the exact middle of that jagged female — male line.

Humanity needs every bit of strength and compassion and giftedness it can get right now. We need to get out of our own asses and start working together on solutions to the shit storms we have created. We can’t afford to shut some people out because some of us are frightened by their boobs or their lack of boobs, their skin color, who they fall in love with, or how they connect to the Divine. We are One People. Let’s start acting that way.

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