I see it’s all a dance. For a long time it was a violent tango with Petruchio in tight trousers dominating the spirited but ultimately submissive Kate.
Men built a world, which is increasingly unsustainable. It’s driven by testosterone, barely restrained by feminine ballast, rigidly organised on principles of dissection and analysis, and manifests in tragi-comic inefficiency and often nigh slapstick incompetence. A dance hall of fools.
We men had the misfortune to have our own way (“Doesn’t he lead beautifully?”). And we left a lot of necessary, vital, and essential living human material by the wayside in the process. Looking back, it’s sometimes hard to see the virtue in it. Which is not to say there was no virtue there...
That’s when the glorious feminist age began its ascent, though even then and still for decades the unarguable has had to be argued, the obvious has had to be proven, and justice has had to be justified. The violence of unfettered male dominance was expressed in religion, in art, in education, in hard cash and in bed. The significant residues of this long half-human era are still fettering all of us, women and men. The gravitas of feminism swung into action none too soon.
Seeded by the decades and centuries of male intransigence and blinkered vision, this central issue of the imbalance of masculine and feminine in our existence required an unrelenting and (dare I suggest) neomasculine level of rigid opposition to bring masculinity to heel.
I don’t mean to suggest that this phase of the process is complete, either, or the battle won. But it is established.
In the middle points between the peaks and troughs of waves, it’s hard to know where you are and where you might best make efforts to be going. I think this is where we are at the moment. One example of the strange riptides roaring under the surface: it’s surprising to see pornography and near-pornography so much in the ascendant and so public. And to see so many young women seduced into what appears to be a male-serving sexualisation of their own behaviour and attitudes. We somehow expected that liberated women would at the very least bring a new aesthetic to the common bedroom. (I believe that many contemporary feminists have made this same observation). In fact many young women, the beneficiaries of the feminist’s struggles, now eschew feminism for a self-trivialization so abject it makes their once-subjugated grandmothers wince.
At the same time men have been admonished for years to address their emotional inarticulacy and opacity. Without centuries of pseudo-authority to back them up, this leap in the dark requires some courage. In fact when men begin to expose their inner world, it’s often not what women expect or want to see. Self-censorship and open honesty are uneasy and confusing bedfellows. An honest and honourable man may not (perhaps should not) always wear his heart on his sleeve.
The backspin on all this is interesting. It’s a cliche that feminist women are often to be found with the most macho male partners. And that the ‘New Man’, despite his best efforts, finds himself alone and befuddled as his ‘ex’ and ‘the brute’ walk away arm in arm.
It must surely be time to begin a reassessment of male virtues, at least among those of us who feel such things may exist. There’s no doubt that the re-feminization of human culture is still an urgent necessity. But there are masculine virtues, and we abandon them at our peril.
It’s a very uncomfortable thing to have to live with and accept and value something which is profoundly ‘other’. Men have been demonstrably incapable of this for literally ages, except on their own terms of control. But a significant minority of men have been forced or convinced to engage with this issue, most effectively in their relational/domestic/sexual lives. And to accept the feminine ‘other’ not only externally, but within their own personal repertoire of possible inner dynamics.
In the next while women’s difficulties with this rebalancing could be even worse. Rigid, competitive, combative, unethical, non-negotiating, violent women have the same right as their male counterparts and increasing opportunity to be so. But neither male nor female in this mode offer what is needed.
We need women to lead the way in this evolution, since they are still the regulating gravitational pull against the immense dead weight of the male-dominated world. If they simply take up the agenda of the old regime and enforce it with the same attitudes and goals, the future remains predictable. And the predictions aren’t good.
Men must continue to support and engage in this re-feminization of culture and psyche. But we also need men to rediscover what it might mean to be honorable, dare I say, even to be noble men in this postmodern age. We have some role models in the public domain but they are few and unrepresentative.
If there really are masculine virtues we need to rediscover them, make room for them and acknowledge and encourage them. They are still operating in the world, quietly and steadily, but we may find them surprising and in unexpected places. They most certainly won’t be advertised on the television. The effects of the actions of men without masculine virtues are exploding like land mines everywhere, most obviously in bedrooms, boardrooms and staterooms. Pseudo - feminine virtues won’t help, nor will the familiar old lazy male duplicity.
Of course, all of the above is a very coarse argument at a very low bandwidth of expectation. The real evolution requires that women have access to masculine virtues within themselves as well (not male posturing and arrogance). The hope is that they will recognize and integrate into their own inner landscapes the masculine virtues so long marginalized (by both men and women) in the human psyche. And that these virtues will modulate and converse with, rather than confront and defeat, the feminine virtues so critical to the survival and evolution of humanity.
Men must learn to bring their emotional lives to consciousness and thereby to fruition, without succumbing to emotional reactivity and self-indulgence. Whatever the consequences, we must begin to meet as adults, and not as boys looking for mothers and girls looking for fathers.
And it’s every man and women for their self, I’m afraid. We’re still a long way from a good pas de deux.
The ceramic sculpture above is Courtship by Michael Flynn
