Transcriber: Dania Zaccaro Reviewer: Keira White
The Cherokee storyteller, Thomas King says:
“The truth about stories is that, that’s all we are.”
It’s an elegant way of saying that reality is what we make it.
That reality is the stories we tell ourselves.
With this in mind, today I’m going to tell you my story.
The story that was told to me
and the story that I eventually came to tell myself.
My story and what I understand about it.
It’s a story about growing up
and it starts, like all stories, with parents.
My mother,
Patricia McDonald
a strong, proud, resilient,
a survivor.
My mother was, what in those days, used to be called a battered woman.
Eventually she raised four children alone: three girls and a boy.
My father,
Robert Wells:
an alcoholic,
abusive.
By all accounts, a deeply troubled man and someone whom I never really knew.
I only have very few memories of my father,
one of which is indelible.
I was maybe five or six years old.
Seven at the most.
I know this because of where we were living,
and I came to find my parents, late one night in our kitchen,
fighting,
physically fighting.
And my mother, in protecting herself, must have scratched him
because he had claw marks on the side of his face
and blood running down his cheek.
And I looked at him and he looked at me
and we started to cry.
And I looked at him and I asked him why he was crying.
And he looked at me, but he couldn’t speak.
And we just stood there staring at one another.
I remember feeling bad for him,
thinking that he must be crying because he’s hurt and bleeding.
After a few minutes, seconds rather, not minutes,
my mother shuffled me off to bed
and we never, ever spoke about what happened.
Never, ever until the day she died
did we ever have a conversation about what I’d seen.
And I never, ever told anybody what I saw until today.
And there's a reason for this.
My father was, of course, not crying because of physical injury.
He was crying because he was ashamed.
Before me, his son.
Ashamed of being a violent man, prone to fits of rage.
He died not long after that night in a car crash.
Drunk driving.
It was a single vehicle, single fatality accident.
March 1978.
I was nine years old and I just shrugged it off
made light of it to my friends.
I used to laugh about it, even when I would tell people
and I did all of that because even though I was just a boy,
not yet 10,
I had already learned that that’s what men do,
that men are self-reliant,
that men are resilient, that man never show weakness,
never show need,
never show pain.
It’s nonsense but that’s what men do.
And the flip side of this absolute retreat into the shell,
that is to say,
the other side of this man-coin
is the tendency for men to process their emotional needs with aggression.
And that's exactly what I did.
I started fighting in school and out of school at exactly this time.
It’s something I would continue to do for decades.
And honestly, I was admired for it.
The better I got at hiding any kind of pain or need,
the more I would dominate, physically or otherwise,
the more I was presented as a model for other boys
and eventually other men to follow.
I captained most of the sports teams I played on, always violent:
hockey, football, rugby.
In retrospect, it’s clear to me, I played these games
not to compete or win but to have an opportunity to exorcise,
that’s exercise with an “o”,
my pain, through aggression, within a socially acceptable context.
The truth is, I played these games,
always trying to hit other boys as hard as possible,
and believe me,
every time I did it, t was celebrated.
My teammates, coaches, family and friends,
all praised me for this.
And I enjoyed it.
I used to say:
“I can’t believe they let me do this!”
with youthful hubris.
Now I say the same thing.
“I can’t believe they let me do this!” with pensive melancholy.
Melancholy because I see now that my behavior was really symptomatic
of a much broader,
deeply disturbed
social norms and constructs that reward boys and men
for abandoning one of the fundamental qualities that makes us human.
Compassion.
The fighting is something for which I would get in trouble,
but the real message from the grown ups was entirely the opposite.
It was always very clear to me that people were proud of me,
even if they told me that fighting was a bad thing.
All of the adults in my life did this, almost without exception.
I was basically validated and encouraged
to process any emotional need of reticence,
anger, and violence.
So that’s what I did.
I fought all through elementary school and high school and well into my 20s.
There is always some twisted rationalization
attempting to justify that behavior,
according to some moral high ground.
But looking back, I really believe I was really reflecting
an ideal of the man presented to me in popular culture.
My heroes were hockey enforcers:
Chris Nilan, Bob Probert, Dave Schultz.
Is it any wonder?
When they would fight, twenty thousand people in unison
would jump to their feet and cheer wildly.
I wanted to be loved like that.
I felt it was Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Eastwood.
Everywhere I looked it was the same model.
I remember seeing this ad in the back of a comic book for children,
the Charles Atlas Weightlifting Program.
The message here is that a man solves problems through domination,
via physical prowess,
and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of that inequality.
The gist being ‘a real man’ never lets anyone push him around.
I was weightlifting before I turned 10 and that’s something I do to this day.
And if I’m honest, I’ve never done it for health or even vanity.
It’s always been to send a message to other men.
I had my last street fight at 26 years of age.
That’s 26 years ago this year.
And if I’m brutally embarrassingly honest, it matters to me that I won.
Because even though my intellect recognizes the behavior as idiotic,
my ego, on some level, still fears not being regarded a man.
After that last street fight, I carried on the aggressive behavior
in other more subtle but still socially admired ways.
The truth is I made a career of it.
In particular, my approach to my work
at Stanstead College is no nonsense and often confrontational.
Some of you know.
Things are nuanced,
but basically a big part of my job is to ensure order.
And I’ve done it more or less the same way it’s done in society at large
and that is via compliance, internally and externally,
for the masculine archetype.
So that’s my story.
It’s vulgar, I realise.
Common.
Base. Barely human and totally human
There was a quote I heard years ago that says:
“Man differs from animal only slightly, and most men throw that difference away.”
That’s sort of how I feel about myself, that I’ve been subsisting
in this animal side of myself for so long,
unaware.
It’s ironic to me because I consider myself educated.
I studied under Jesuits in high school
and went on to study Science and Philosophy, East Asia.
I have degrees in Mathematics and Comparative Religion and Education.
By all accounts, I should have been enlightened,
but really I consider myself to have been deeply, deeply in the dark.
So, why the change here, now?
Maybe I need to see.
I have to tell you, that I have mainly women to thank.
I’d like to be able to say my mother, but I can’t do so I’m afraid.
I said earlier she was strong but really, she was tough.
She ruled with an iron fist and I don’t blame her.
For her it was about survival in a man’s world.
And so she did the obvious thing.
Adapt herself to and adopt male values.
The bottom line is that my fighting was condoned.
I wanna be clear, I don’t blame my mother for me being aggressive.
I consider us both the product of the same patriarchy
and it’s machinations.
Having children, however, I had two daughters,
certainly was a blessing.
I don’t think I could have raised boys properly.
I just don’t think I could have raised boys in a healthy way.
My children were never disciplined with corporal punishment,
even though it was in-vogue, when they were young, to do so.
And for that decision I must give full credit to their mother.
I would have been very happy to repeat the patterns I knew.
In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions ever taken
for them and me.
Because of their mother, I consider that a cycle was broken
and I think I would have found that much harder to accept had we had boys.
I was also offered insight by a female friend
who said to me one day,
“You seem to process most of your emotions with anger”,
It was just a simple, beautiful, elegant truth
that she was courageous enough to share
and one that I couldn’t deny.
Finally, and maybe mostly,
I give credit and thanks to the makers of the documentary film
called “The Mask You Live In”
by a woman, Jennifer Newsom,
and it exploded into my consciousness,
the concept of which I had been previously unaware of,
that of toxic masculinity.
That was almost four years ago,
and in many respects, I consider it my beginning.
I remember watching the movie, thinking for the first time,
that I had some understanding of myself.
Because learning about social constructs and gender norms
and the difference between sex and gender,
all just in the last little while,
I've really come to see
that behaviors are deeply influenced by categories into which we are placed
and with which we come to identify.
So the question then is: “What is going on with men?”
Here are the facts.
The single biggest predictor for propensity to violence and crime
in every category, is gender.
Men lead the way across the board.
The one exception is prostitution.
But I don’t think it’s difficult to see
the men are the common denominator in this instance as well.
These statistical results are reproduced across age and race,
year after year, in every country for which data are available.
That means that in every country on Earth for which data are available,
masculinity is correlated with violence.
We have a gender problem, not a problem with biological males.
A problem with men and what societies teach it means to be a man.
Because societies all over earth are teaching
that to be a men is to personify aggression.
Now, some will say it’s nature and not nurture, testosterone
and all that, and honestly, it’s not totally absurd to think along these lines.
But at this point, it's overly simplistic
and frankly dishonest, if we don’t acknowledge what is going on.
I can agree that male aggression is natural to some extent
and that societies evolve,
reflecting this precept.
That the framework from which this natural aggression was born,
the physical world, is no longer a dominant influence in our lives.
We exist more and more in the mental world and have for some time.
Social media,
social cues, our systems of education,
the way we work, even our language.
All of the things that influence,
if not determine behavior, are social and cultural.
We are no longer fighting to survive physically each day.
We're fighting to survive mentally.
But our mental constructs are geared to reinforcing strategies
of how to survive phisically.
We have transcended from the physical realm to a mental realm,
wherein that mental realm remains adjusted for serving
the archaic physical one.
We therefore have societies that produce toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity,
and toxic men.
Meant to survive and thrive in different circumstances.
Obviously, this has to change.
We must recognize and reinforce those qualities
that serve our reality as it is,
those qualities that will serve humanity and all Earth.
Compassion, care, nurturing, forgiveness, empathy.
All qualities generally associated with enlightened beings
and all also, you may have guessed it,
traditionally associated with the feminine.
Took me a long time to see, but it’s very clear to me:
the future must be female.
We must embrace this. We must build upon this.
And we must raise our voice to be gentle...men.
It’s the better story.
Thank you