Lars: Well, Bianca can help you. She's got nurse's training. Gus: No she doesn't. That's because she's a plastic...thing. Lars: That's amazing. Did you hear that? Bianca said God made her to help people.
Lars: Well, Bianca can help you. She's got nurse's training. Gus: No she doesn't. That's because she's a plastic...thing. Lars: That's amazing. Did you hear that? Bianca said God made her to help people.
Masculinity Movies LIVE #4 took place on Friday, November 26. The featured movie of the evening was the award-winning documentary “Beyond the Call,” a dramatic documentary about the three crazy gringos Ed Artis, Jim Laws and Walt Ratterman who travel the world to deliver relief aid to war-torn regions so dangerous that no-one else would venture there.
“These are our rules, we are not into God business, we don’t want to change your politics or your religion. It must be high adventure, it must be humanitarian. And it has to be in an area where few want to go. If it doesn’t hit those criteria, we’re not interested.” – Ed Artis
The discussion revolved for a short while on whether their aid work was motivated by selfish desires for adventure and satisfaction or if there were actual benevolent motives involved. This was somewhat of a meta-perspective on what was an intensely personal story, which is why I directed the conversation into a more intimate and subjective territory after a while. I did that because I find that it is always easy to step out of our personal experience to take the analytical approach, weighing pros and cons. It is perhaps more useful to check in with ourselves about how our own background elicits our responses and judgments in the observance of another’s.
This is always a balance I have to strike when I write about movies – zooming out into the collective, analytical meta-world or staying in an intensely personal space. This evening turned out to be about that and also the importance of speaking truthfully about our own personal experience, no matter if it elicits favourable feedback or not. Our personal truth is too valuable to be held back for fear of negative responses.
I’m grateful to find again and again that the MM LIVE container is strong enough to hold disagreement and provocation in the larger embrace of brotherhood and mutual respect and care. This, it seems to me, is what we need to generate in our relationships with other men in the time ahead.
To the eight of you who came, thank you for making it such an enriching evening. My sense is that next time will be even richer – and with a bigger group too. Interest is growing.
posted by Eivind on November 26, 2010, at 11:34 am
You need to know about this. This is important.
Ah, I’ve been trying to embed their video in this blog post for the last half hour, but can’t make it work, so screw it. Just go to the Getting Her World blog and watch the movie there.
This feels to me to be “the next step” in course material for men who want to have better relationships with women. It’s profound.
Arjuna Ardagh has posted a video blog that continues the important conversation that has been going on on Masculinity Movies for the last couple of weeks based on my criticism of his manifesto (see below).
He mentions me in it, in a way which doesn’t really represent very well what actually happened. I was never outraged, though Arjuna believes I was – which made him angry (which is pretty obvious if you read his comments on my website). He hates David Deida so he decided to hate me for having translated his book. Only for a short while though. And he apologized for that so all is cool. I criticized the manifesto with the wish to open up a dialogue around how it could be improved. I believe I achieved my goal.
Unfortunately, Arjuna has at this point chosen to keep me out of the debate, choosing not to approve a comment in which I acknowledged his heart for the work and how there are points of improvement, but I’m not too bothered by it. What’s important is that this debate is proving very valuable for me as I’m getting closer and closer to the core of what is subtly wrong about his approach, despite any wonderful healing it is currently providing (which is obviously a good thing). And it involves the importance of understanding the path from boy to man fully.
But I’m lead to believe that perhaps the manifesto for conscious men was never primarily about building men’s self esteem and sense of worth, maybe it was more about healing women. Good if any of that happened, even better if healing could become an inclusive process.
Back in September, I had the privilege to sit down and interview Aboriginal Elder Bob Randall about initiation rites in Aboriginal culture. In this half hour, I was granted a privileged insight into what is essentially a secret tradition of transitioning boys into manhood. Some of what I learned surprised me. Some of what I learned confirmed what I have learned by people such as Robert Bly. Everything was interesting and powerful.
This is the first interview I’ve ever done for Masculinity Movies. I was a tad nervous when I did it and not fully embodied after a hard day at work. That had me avoid finishing it for a while. But when I reviewed it, I realized that there is a lot of good stuff in here. So you will just have to enjoy my boyish charms instead of my fully embodied masculine presence and enjoy Bob Randall’s gift.
Thanks to Pelle Billing, I became aware of Gay Hendricks’s and Arjuna Ardagh’s Manifesto for conscious mentoday. Reading it made me feel queasy, disrespected, shamed and under attack. It is impossible for me to recommend this document as a path to consciousness for men. It has enormous problems and looks to me more like a path of ignorantly taking on a shame that isn’t ours to bear, just because it seems like a noble thing to do. But no man should ever pick up shame. Its energy eats men’s souls for breakfast.
What are the problems of this manifesto? First, it gives an extremely one-sided view of history. It buys into the myth that men are perpetrators and women are victims. Women’s rights movements have been hiding behind this myth for the last several decades and used it as alibi to launch extremely hurtful attacks against men and the masculine psyche. Men as a result are now hiding en-masse from their inner essence – seeking themselves in the world of the Feminine – feeling disempowered and depressed as a result.
History is indeed a place of suffering, but not just for women. And history is also a place of world-building and generativity, and not just by women. Discrediting masculine pain by focusing one-sidedly on feminine pain and discrediting masculine generativity by focusing one-sidedly on feminine generativity is misguided at best, hurtful at worst. I can’t see how it will contribute to anything but further herd the hurting men of today’s world into shame and disempowerment, from which place they will have no potency left to aspire to the worship of the Feminine which Ardagh and Hendricks encourage.
Further, it propagates as healthy the concept that I should accept the responsibility for all the pain that has been caused the Feminine by the men of the past. I see as a subtext that a woman should accept victimhood on behalf of the Feminine for all the attacks on her that were carried out by the men of the past (many of which, especially in the Abrahamic religions, are undeniable). This understanding is extremely one-sided and partial and totally erases from the equation the enormous positive efforts the Masculine has contributed in service and protection of the Feminine throughout history. Does it count for nothing? The millions of men who freely gave their lives to protect their families and build civilization as we know it – so that the supposedly suppressed women of today can enjoy all the trappings of comfortable living, blissfully ignorant of the masculine infrastructure that runs like clockwork in the twilight hours to make it all possible? All of this so readily discarded by the so-called conscious man of today in favour of wallowing only in the misery of having burned women at the stake? I think not! We must see the complete picture!
This worldview fails to recognize that the pain which has been caused the World and the Feminine by the Masculine has been caused by boys (not men) perpetrating their own inner confusion due to a lack of initiation into the mature Masculine. I’m reminded of the story that Robert Bly tells of the man and the woman fighting one evening. The woman is hurt, driven by the energy of a thousand years of pain. The man feels helpless faced with her feminine rage and the having to stand responsible for the suffering of millions of women that he never met. And his woman wants it all resolved by midnight. What is a man to do? Turn numb from the neck down probably.
Perhaps the biggest problem of the manifesto, however, is that the authors fail to recognize that the biggest challenge most men have today is that they are totally mired in the Feminine. The role of the old initiators was to bring us as boys from the feminine world into the masculine world. But since the initiators abdicated or died, boys grow up never knowing the masculine world. So we remain boys. And from the perspective of boys, we are supposed to worship the Feminine as the path to masculinity? This advice is exceedingly ignorant with regards to the nature of the masculine psyche. What men need to serve the Feminine – and we do need to do just that – is initiation into manhood. True initiation into the mysteries of the Masculine can never be given by women. Any such attempts will arise and crumble in an oedipal territory of shame and confusion. The old initiators knew that. And the women who lived with them knew that. I recently talked with an aboriginal elder about this very issue and he confirms my perspective. (I will release an interview with him soon).
And while I agree that we lack respect and admiration for the ever-mysterious feminine forces of our world, this approach is likely to bring us no closer to the intended destination of honoring Her more. My recommendation is to let this one pass you by and to wait for a truly generative manifesto – that honors both men and women, both the Masculine and the Feminine. As I see it, this manifesto fails to deliver the nourishment of the masculine soul that we all need to serve as stewards of the Feminine.
We are men. Personally, I think that is a beautiful thing. Our authentic presence is the truest gift the Feminine will ever know. Don’t buy into the shame.
Register below and I’ll send you this *powerful* and much loved introduction to the masculine Archetypes (complete with exercises). I think you'll love it! – Eivind
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