November is For The Boys

This was, believe it or not, the greatest compliment my Pop ever received from a teacher. “You’ve got rat cunning, Hoysted,” he was told, as close to fondness a schoolteacher got in 1940s rural Australia. He took it in his stride, a mischievous and mildly destructive young man who rode gangster motorbikes and left school as soon as he could to run his own business. When we were kids, a key part of our annual holidays to visit my grandparents was to look in the Whitton museum at the old jailhouse book - resting open on the page where Alan Hoysted was charged a three pound fine for getting into a punch up at the pub.

His rebellious streak was a mile wide and he brandished it flamboyantly. His mother - my great-grandmother - he once described as evil, although I suspect this was partly his oedipal imagination talking. Coral her name was, like the skeleton of some great ocean. I’ll never know the truth, but he always felt his upbringing was cruel. In his final years, he told me he had decided as a kid - against everything he had ever known - that he would never hit his children.

When I was a boy we would rush into Mum and Dad’s room and beg for stories. That was what we liked; hearing about our parent’s lives, real or phoney, when the morning was long and it was just us. Dad, being the offspring of Pop, usually ended his stories with some sort of disciplinary measure administered by our loving butsturdy grandmother. Never Pop though. “He was wimp,” said Dad. As the worst misdeeds were always handed to Pop to deal with, sometimes Dad and his brother would do something extra bad just so they would be dealt with by the father rather than the mother.

They knew he couldn’t bring himself to hit them. I’m so glad Pop was a wimp.

I cannot fathom how differently my life would have turned out if my Pop hadn’t made his solemn little promise. It’s probably one of the most heroic things he ever did in his modest life. More importantly, every one of his children and his children’s children will live with the benefit of this single choice. I don’t know what it’s like to have an angry father, because my dad didn’t either. It’s the invisible gift that will bear fruit for generations, and Pop will never know how extraordinary it was.

November is men’s health month. So because November is for the boys, I’ve decided to talk about the tiny, difficult choices men make and the luminous world those choices can make. First, though, we need to understand the backdrop against which men make their lives.

An Entire Month, An Entire History

Men have an entire health month. Even as a guy passionate about men’s health, I often don’t take this month very seriously, beyond growing a moustache and posting on socials a bit (my moustache is scrubby rubbish). Men don’t take it seriously because men aren’t taught to take care of themselves. There’s generations of ancestral whisperings telling every man his life isn’t worthy of examination - go out into the fields to do and accumulate. We look after the world out there, and when we do the world rewards us.

We certainly ought to take it seriously. Men are at greater risk of dying in virtually every non-gender specific way humanity’s capable of. We are at the greatest risk of suicide, addiction, committing homicide, being homicide victims, drug overdose, incarceration and workplace deaths. Richard Reeves, in his book Of Boys and Men, thinks that men across the world are suffering a crisis of meaning; where once men could at least hang their hat on a protector/provider role, the economic empowerment of women has left a void, with fewer male role models living out virtuous ideals and more opportunities these days to distract oneself with expedient pleasures.

According some research, one in four American men have zero close relationships. Zero. For the UK, it’s one in three. One of the paradoxes of progress is that as more possible ways of life emerge, a kind of analysis paralysis can set in. A couple of decades ago, it would have been socially unacceptable for a guy to live with his parents, playing games and trolling in the basement but this is no longer the case. And so, in isolation, young men deal with their aimlessness and loneliness, fueled by generations of alienation to their own emotions. Germaine Greer said that women don’t know how much men hate them. She’s right, but it needs one more turn of the mirror; men hate themselves, and unconsciously pass it on into the world.

Heavy Armor

The good news is that our feminist sisters have shown us that society has spoon-fed men a crock of bullshit about what manhood ought to be. Theoretically, this means us guys could get together and unspool the masculine construct built up over the aeons and figure out something that, you know, actually works for us. Unfortunately, basically every social incentive a man faces orients him toward the same tired story of wealth and women. We’ve conspired to create this monster. In absence of a viable model of masculinity that coheres to the modern world, cretins leap up with a seductive message; things were better for men in the past, you have lost your right to economic and political power, and we should get it back.

This is horseshit, for obvious reasons. Besides how unacceptable the dynamic was for women, it was also awful to be a man in the past. Your life was not your own. Your life was spent working in the service of survival. Your body was sent to fight wars you didn’t understand, for people who didn’t care about you. Violence was a core feature of your life. Love and care was, heartbreakingly, a marginal one. And, above all, if you felt there was something wrong with these arrangements there was no way out, no way to communicate this to someone, no method to access the accumulated frustrations handed down through generations. Being a man meant suffering in darkness. I have talked with male friends who literally have no words to describe the sadness they feel inside. Their illiteracy is not their fault, a tragedy they inherited.

Every man walks around in this heavy, ancestral armor. The burden on every man is to find his own way to shed this armor. It impedes you. In a strange way, the world has rendered these old masculine constructs uncompetitive. It’s too complex now , too interconnected, too brutal for brittle notions of what it means to occupy this narrow strip of identity we call manhood. The new marketplaces of romance and work require genuine emotional resilience and clear-sighted self-awareness, which means we can no longer hide out in the fields. He needs to do what his fathers could not; reckon with the turmoil inside.

That was the amazing thing about my Pop. He saw his childhood, saw the turmoil and chose - without the words to say why - to end it with him.

Our New Legacy

We talk a lot about solutions to the crisis faced by men and boys, but in truth there is only one underlying solution. We have to face, move through, and ultimately raise our collective consciousness about the masculine psyche. Fortunately, we are waking up to this. Many men have made graceful transitions from careers to home dads to teachers and leadership throughout their life’s course. There’s growing awareness, a recognition that on certain critical fronts - like education and emotional health - boys and men are falling behind. Policy matters, but consciousness is the precondition.

The worst response would be to throttle the progress girls and women have made in the past few decades too. And this is the thing: it is not a zero-sum game. Men benefit from autonomous, empowered women, and women benefit from emotionally fit and self-aware men. There really is a virtuous cycle that we glimpse in powerful relationships, where each mirrors in the other a reflection they can learn and grow from. Men have a lot of growing up to do; but so does our conception of what a man can and should be.

That’s the thing about cultural messages; we all receive them. A kinder society seeks to understand what it teaches, and we have much more to learn about who men and women are to themselves and each other. I learned from Pop how minute these changes can be in the person; a fractional shift toward greater awareness, and the whole world can open up. Denial buries the legacy deeper.

So for all my dudes out there; fuck what you’ve been told about what it means to be a man. Go and do what all the best men have done with their lives - made the conscious choice to make it their own. Let’s dig some shit up and bury our armor. You’ve only got yourself to lose. The future is waiting for your silent decisions. This November, I’m thankful for Pop’s.