“Let the secrets of men be told. They are the Lilliputian threads that will bind the giant.”

James Hollis





Forced Laws

I talked earlier about the way the patriarchy insidiously affects everyone, and I feel infinitely more qualified to talk about how it affects men so want to start with that. Men are prescribed laws in society, orders to follow just like women have, laws they must stick to that they also cannot talk about but still must somehow be followed or risk ostracization. Every group in a culture is forced to download and follow laws and not discuss them or they will get kicked out or looked down upon. These are rules of common facts that are inherent in life. James Hollis cogently describes these laws that men are forced into in his book Under Saturn’s Shadow, and I want to pick a few to talk about today.



Talking about these laws and bringing them to light is crucial because the vast majority of men are afraid to show them the light of day. We are told by the world to feel and act powerful, but paradoxically, no one can really sustain that until they feel comfortable admitting that they don’t feel that way. I think no one feels that because everyone has been grievously wounded somehow and somewhere in life. Until this can be made conscious and worked on a bit, everyone will keep on hurting themselves and others in the same ways. The problem is that increasing consciousness requires suffering, and men have been trying to find ways to push suffering away or jump into it and do anything but think about it how it is actually affecting them. I have often tried to impress literally anyone with my toughness, and that prevented me from thinking and realizing how I was actually hurting. If you are hurt, you have to take care of that. People are much stronger than they think and nature and time help more than most things we can do, but we do have to be aware and not resistant to that to get the full benefits. Literally every problem eventually changes into something else and therefore works the original problem out, even if it gets worse. Seeing and accepting these problems instead of pretending to be blind to them allows you to prepare for the changes and make something positive out of it.

“Where power is, love is not”

Carl Jung

Blinded with Power

This blindness keeps men from realizing that they, like women, are caught in role expectations that do not support, confirm, or resonate with them. Men are told to be powerful, but searching for and trying to wield unfeeling, senseless power only twists men with fear and compensatory ambition. This causes them to push their real wants away from even themselves and adopt a superficial way of being. All men (and women) are taught to be silent about the reasons they search for power, as James Hollis puts it that, “the shaming and secrecy have gone on since childhood, so men become accomplices in their own degradation”. The more distant you become with parts of yourself, the harder it is to have true empathy and understanding of others, as they are parts of you that you can’t admit exist.

“Grief is the doorway to the man’s feelings”

Robert Bly

Part of the reason that I am shouting this now is because I was caught in stark blindness, I was trying to be the alpha of every room I walked in for like 15 years. After a lot of fights and ridiculous situations I was in, well, nothing changed. I still was trying to convince people I didn’t know, I was something that I didn’t feel, and I was doing this because I was to consumed with fear to admit and look at it. It continued to run and ruin my life and relationships until I was able to hit that point of self-loathing and self-realization that I not only deserved to change and stop hurting others and myself, I was more than capable.



Slippery Truths

Being unable to hold those slippery truths makes it so easy to attempt to push them down and lash out instead of trying to hold them. Men are taught by other men that anger is the only acceptable emotion; sadness, fear and joy have no place. We are taught to lash out instead of feel, and you know why? Because the men who taught you were taught by men who taught them that the only acceptable emotion is lashing out in violence and anger. It has gone on like that for millennia, and it is doubtless there was a time where holding and sitting with your emotions just got you eaten by a jaguar. Being dinner isn’t at the top of our worries anymore, and just like we evolved away from the threats exterior to ourselves, we now need to evolve to see what problems our interior is dealing with. Without that, we are stuck in the same malignant cycles that we feel we cannot escape from. A battered man will batter others because he cannot hold or speak his pain. An abusive man cannot sit with his emotions and puts them on others, and then attacks the things he is afraid of in himself.

I am not attempting to give them a pass, all people who batter or abuse others should be punished. Punishment without looking at the real reasons why however, just maintains this big dumb cycle and has those punished projecting their reasons why on the ones they abuse. One can never lose the fear until they can admit how insidiously it has infiltrated their life. Every man has intensely shameful experiences where they have been judged as lesser than. We blindly strike against anything that threatens to bring those shameful feelings back up and will continue to do so, as long as we do not feel strong enough to hold and not be consumed by them.



“No man I have ever met, if he is honest enough to admit it, has not felt a great deal of shaming as a man.”

James Hollis



What is Toxic?

Masculinity is not bad and just like femininity it is necessary for life. There is a difference between toxic masculinity and healthy masculinity however, and to say that they are the same ignorantly misses the entire point. Toxic masculinity is governed by fear, and it is just a whole bunch of guys trying to act “tough” like we’re still kids in a sandbox trying to impress the other kids with what we think men are supposed to be, but they’re really just being a dick. The toughest and/or wisest dudes have nothing to prove and no need to impress, as they already know their worth (I am reminded of a Western I used to watch as a child, The Big Country, about this). Even those guys will sometimes slip up and forget they’re not in a sandbox playing sometimes, it’s an automatic reaction that can be triggered in the dumbest of ways. The trick is to notice, forgive yourself, and work on changing it. You can construct an elaborate life overhaul to change it, or just say you will do better next time, whatever, just don’t continue to beat yourself up because then you’re right back where you started. Stop only feeling angry at yourself like anger is the emotion that is going to fix it.



There is a lot here, and there is a lot I missed. My next post will be on how the people that raised us give us our first encounters with people and archetypes. That is a monumental task that we spend the majority of our lives shaking off the misconceptions we were given or took from them and how we must live our own, and not their unlived life. That affects everyone, but I want to go into specifically how it messes with us dudes. This will lead us into also discussing how men are in dire need of positive male experiences and without that, we turn into even dumber and more damaged people who are terrified of anything that reminds us of the inadequacies we are scared to talk about.

Pics by our esteemed Gentleman