In recent years we have been effective at telling men what NOT to do, and who not to be. That’s necessary… and insufficient. As George Monbiot reminds us:
“You can’t take away someone’s story without offering them a new one.”1
[W]e have to help white men make sense of their feelings—and provide a story that can enable collective action. We can’t offer them the easy escape of victimhood, because that is an incomplete truth: we must invite them to the more difficult, more complex, and infinitely more rewarding work of solidarity. This is where men’s groups and other solidarity spaces are absolutely essential: to offer men a space of belonging as we reckon with the pain we have suffered and the pain we have caused, and learn to make sense of it.1
What is manhood today?
I found the cultural marketing of manhood very appealing. I saw it as something that allowed you to have robust adventures, fix everyday things, engage in complex cultural conversations and carry yourself with an easy confidence.2
Freedom or limits, son or father
Knausgaard’s conclusion is that a true father is committed to being present for his family, which means above all that he abides by the “limit” that having a family places on him. “You have to be at your post; you have to be at home,” he writes. “Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.”
…
One way to put Knausgaard’s achievement, against this backdrop, is to say that he succeeded in depicting the struggle to become a modern man and father—the kind of non-authoritarian father who assumes the duty of taking their child to Rhythm Time, however reluctantly—without either falsely suppressing or unduly exaggerating that struggle’s costs. Another way to put it is that, by continuously testing his own experience against the prefabricated narratives that were supposed to explain it to him, he dragged our public conversation about men at least a little closer to the conversations that actually existing men are having among ourselves, and with ourselves.3
Acknowledging the suffering
Ironically, this was the very crux of my alienation, the gap between how I feel and how society sees me (or tells me I’m supposed to feel). I’m telling you I’m not fine… and your response is to tell me I’m fine. So my pain, my alienation, my sense of un-belonging… feels unreal.
This is the first step for white men: acknowledging that we are suffering. And here’s the challenge: to be present to our pain requires that we center ourselves and our own experience. For those of us called to lives of service, and particularly those of us who gravitate to social justice work, this feels incredibly hard. I hear from others that I need to de-center myself… but I haven’t yet done enough work to have a “center.” I haven’t yet allowed myself to feel my pain, or to heal from it. 1