I was at a country music festival a week ago - Blue Skies, deep in the Canadian bush. Over morning coffee, a woman I hadn't met before told this story.
She’d been traveling in India and stayed with a couple who were in a long-term arranged marriage. The couple were respectful and caring with each other. They were easy with each other in a way Mary (we'll call her) wasn't familiar. While she was there, a number of the women wanted to go together to a dance. But, she was informed, they needed a man to go with them. Mary, who's a modern woman in her 50s - she had a girlfriend and not a husband - had a strong reaction to that. It included disbelief. As it turned out, the women did go and the man too. As Mary told it the man remained nonchalantly in the background and the women did what they did with no interference. The story stuck with her.
For me it was a way to look at our modern, western culture. In both the arranged marriage and the escorted outing, the larger culture was providing a support for the women and the men. This is not to say their way was the right way or the only way or the entire way, only that there was a benefit, the one that Mary noted. There was a reduction of tension between the sexes and a clarity about the roles. The stability of the cultural structure helped the women and men find and inhabit a role that gave them security and meaning.
The idea that an individual's identity can be formed in a social vacuum is like expecting a child raised by wolves to grow up a mature human.
That's different from what we do. We leave men and women - and boys and girls including pre-pubescent ones- to figure it out for themselves. We give no social supporting structure, leaving them on their own to grow up. We call this personal freedom.
Bu contrast, the traditional understanding, very much including the west, is that identity isn't formed in a vacuum. Rather it's connected to and a function of, the social system. The shared cultural understanding of values and how the individual can connect to them is the very definition of social cohesion. It's the glue.
Men and women, their sexual identity and roles, can't be understood within the individual's psyche alone. The structure of the family and the community are needed. The wider culture provides the stable background within which the individual works out his or her identity and place. This is as true for women as for men and for non-heterosexual people as well as heterosexual. We find out who we are, whatever that might be, in the context of others. I'm like this, not like that. The idea that an individual's sexuality, or any other part of identity is formed in a social vacuum is like expecting a child raised by wolves to grow up a mature human. Rather what you get is a pull to mental and emotional confusion. (I strongly believe that all this is workable by the way, just not ideal. We grow through difficulty.)
Growth means learning to connect to the social context in a ways that makes us stronger. We find ourselves when we take our good place in the family system - there always is one even if it’s not close - and later in other social systems we're part of. Helping that happen is the what the Family/Systemic Constellation work I do is about. It’s very good at reconnecting and finding our good place.
Mary's story hints at the truth that identity isn’t only inside us but also around us. Related is Einstein’s observation that you can't solve a problem at the level at which it was created. You need to look one level up, or wider. Men’s issues - lack of self-respect, giving power away in order to be approved of by women, difficulty meeting the world and women with energy - can’t be solved by the individual man, much as we’d like it to be and much as we’re told it’s a personal failing if we can’t do that.
Supportive community is pretty much a must. Men can survive, though many don’t. Few can fully thrive without a strong horizontal connection.
Awesome stuff Andrew!